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to popular intelligence: the greater part of their insane ill will and perverse misrepresentation being accredited to political jealousy and prejudice, and therefore of no moral value; while the evidence of bribery and corruption robs another large amount of vituperation and false statement of all rational significance; while the more prominent and powerful expositors, as far as position, capacity, and integrity are concerned, are, to say the least, not so unequally divided as to cause any fear that truth and justice lack able and illustrious defenders in the political arena, Roebuck's vulgar anathemas were more than counterbalanced by the sound and honest reasoning of Cobden and the logical eloquence of Bright; while we could afford to bear the superficial sneers of Carlyle, more of an artist than a philosopher in letters, and the unworthy misrepresentations of Lord Brougham, senilely aristocratic and unsympathetic, while the vigorous thinker and humanely scientific reformer John Stuart Mill so clearly, consistently, and effectively pleaded the claims of our free nationality. And in France, how vain in the retrospect seem the venal lucubrations of pamphleteers and newspaper contributors arrayed against the Government and people of the United States when fighting for national existence and against the perpetuity and canonization of the greatest of human wrongs-when, in the lecture room of the College of France, the gifted and erudite Edouard Laboulaye expounds the grand and rightful basis of our Constitution, and in the salons of the same metropolis scatters his wit-kindled pages in vindication of our social privileges and civic growth; and, at the French Academy, Montalembert thus opens his discourse:

"Gentlemen, eighty years have elapsed since M. Montyon confided to the French Academy the mission of crowning not only literary works useful to morals, but virtuous deeds. It was in the year 1782; at the moment when the peace of America commenced to recompense the glorious coöperation which France had lent to the emancipation of the United States and to the birth of a great free people, whose greatness and whose liberty shall never perish, if it please God, in the formidable trials which it is passing through to-day. Louis XVI.

showed himself still animated by the wisdom which had called Malesherbes and Turgot to his counsels. The Queen Marie Antoinette had given birth to her firstborn; Madame Elizabeth of France was in her eighteenth year, illuminating Versailles with her virginal graces and her angelic piety-that Elizabeth whose bust you see before you, presented by M. Montyon himself, with the inscription 'To Virtue,' of which she seemed the most perfect and touching type. Liberty then seemed to rise up pure and fruitful in Europe as in America, and our ancient royalty to be steeped in a new fountain of youth, popularity, and virtue.`

"How many miscalculations, ruins, and disasters, above all, how many crimes and humiliating failures, since these days of generous illusion, of legitimate enthusiasm and blind confidence! How many cruel lessons inflicted upon the noblest aspirations of the human heart! How many motives for not surrendering themselves to the most reasonable hopes except with a salutary humility, but however, without ever abdicating the indissoluble rights of human liberty or banishing to the land of chimeras the noble ambition of governing men by honor and conscience!"

The new comments on America elicited by the war are threefold: first, political speeches; second, newspaper commentaries; and third, treatises deliberately written and published. Of the first, the greater part are unavoidably ephemeral in their influence, and usually called forth by a special phase of the war in its international relations; the second, especially as regards the leading journal in Great Britain and most famous in the world, have sunk to the lowest conceivable level as a medium of authentic information and a mercenary agency; in the third department alone has anything of a complete and permanent interest been introduced; and there are pages of De Gasparin, Laboulaye, Mill, Cairnes, Newman, Cochin, and Martin, which deserve to be enshrined as literary illustrations of Christian liberalism and eloquent loyalty to truth and humanity in the defence and illustration of American liberty, law, and life, in their magnanimous conflict with injustice, degradation, and cruel sacrilege. When Lafayette, nearly half a century ago, received at the hands of the nation in whose behalf he had fought in his youth, the greatest popular ovation ever granted to a hero, he thus alluded to the

Union in one of his replies to the municipal welcomes that greeted his entrance into every city of the land :

“A Union, so essential, not only to the fate of each member of the confederacy, but also to the general fate of mankind, that the least breach of it would be hailed with barbarian joy by a universal warwhoop of European aristocracy and despotism."

It was in reply to this base "war whoop" that the writers we have mentioned, so eloquently and seasonably advocated the cause and character of our nation.

One of the most curious and interesting of the countless subjects which the history of our memorable conflict will yield to future philosophical investigation, will be its literary fruit and record-the bibliography of the war-and of this the foreign contributions will afford some remarkable and brilliant specimens. If to ourselves, as a nation, the war for the Union has been a test of extraordinary scope and intensity --developing a military and scientific genius, a sanitary enterprise, an extent of financial resources, a capacity for self-sacrifice and self-reliance undreamed of in our prior experience; if it has tested personal character and modified social estimates, and tried absolutely the comparative worth and latent force of our institutions and national sentiment, not less has it tested the political magnanimity, the press, the prejudices, the social philosophy, and humane instincts of Europe; and if the crisis has evoked much that is mean and mortifying in the spirit of those old communities in their feelings toward our young republic in the bitter hour when the pangs of a second birth are rending her vitals, so also has it called forth memorable, benign, noble words of cheer and challenge from volunteer champions of America abroad, in the foremost ranks of her best and most honest thinkers, lovers of truth, and representatives of humanity.

CHAPTER I.

EARLY DISCOVERERS AND EXPLORERS.

FROM the time when the existence of this continent was but conjectural to the European mind, and recognized as a fact of nature only in the brain of a poor Genoese mariner, it was looked to, thought of, imagined chiefly in its relation to the Old World, as the completion and resource of her civilization-a new opportunity, a fresh arena. Gold seekers,* indeed, were prompted to gaze hither by mere cupidity, and Columbus nearly lost his long-solicited aid from the Spanish sovereigns by insisting on hereditary privileges of rule and possession in case of success; but the idea that warmed the generous purpose of Isabella was the conversion to Christianity of the heathen tribes of America, and the extension of Catholic rule in the world. No candid thinker can look back upon the period of the discovery without tracing a wonderful combination of events and tendencies of humanity, whereof this land seems the foreordained and inevitable goal and consequence. It cannot appear to the least imaginative and philosophical mind as an accident, that the zeal for maritime discovery should have awakened in Europe simultaneously with the access of new social truth, the sudden progress of

* "Les chercheurs d'or ont commencé, ni voulant qu'or, rien de plus brisant l'homme, Colomb, le meilleur de tous, dans son propre journal, montre cela avec une naïveté terrible, qui d'avance, fait fremir de ce que feront ses successeurs." -MICHELET.

" 'over

ideas, and the triumph of mechanical genius. With the fifteenth century the "civilization of the sanctuary leaped its long exclusive boundaries, and, with the invention of printing, became a normal need and law of humanity; feudalism waned; the Reformation awoke and set free the instinct of faith and moral freedom; and just at this crisis a new world was opened, a fresh sphere afforded. As the idea of “geographical unity"—the conviction that "the globe wanted one of its hemispheres "-was the inspiration of Columbus, so to the eye of the thoughtful observer, an equilibrium of the moral world-a balance to the human universe-was as obvious and imperative a necessity; for the new ideas and the conflict of opinions and interests, and especially the new and absolute self-assertion, incident to the decay of error and the escape from traditional degradation, made it indispensable to the safety of the innovator, the freedom of the thinker, the scope of the dissenter and reformer, to find refuge and audience in a land whose destinies yet lay undeveloped in the wild freedom of nature, and where prowess of mind as well as of animal courage could work into "victorious clearness " the confused problems of an aspiring civilization, and lay the foundation of an eclectic, liberal, and free community of men a wider theatre and a new life.”

Accordingly, with the progress of time and the accumulation of historical details, with the profound analysis thereof that characterizes modern research-the decline of feudal and ecclesiastical sway in Europe, the Reformation, and the invention of printing are seen to have an intimate relation to and affinity with the discovery of America, in the series of historical events which have resulted in the civilization of the nineteenth century. Nor is this original association of the New and Old World without a vague physical parallel; for it has been a favorite scientific speculation that there was an ancient union or proximity of the two continents-suggested by the fact that the eastern shore of America advances where the opposite shore of Europe recedes. "Firstborn among the continents," says Agassiz, "though so much later in culture and civiliza

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