y probable. We acknowledge
most gratefully the cheer and the inspiration which have come to us from
every word, wish, and act from abroad that has recognized the stake of
our conflict; and we will take for granted the real existence and the
glowing heartiness of much of the same which has not been expressed, or
has not reached us. Farther even than this we will go in tempering or
qualifying the utterance of our grievances. We will take for granted
that very much of the coldness, or antipathy, or contemptuousness, or
misrepresentation which we have recognized in the general treatment of
us and our cause by Englishmen is to be accounted to actual ignorance
or a very partial understanding of our real circumstances and of the
conditions of the conflict, and of the relations of parties to it. De
Tocqueville is universally regarded among us as the only foreigner
who ever divined the theoretical and the practical method of our
institutions. Englishmen, English statesmen even, have never penetrated
to the mystery of them. Many intelligent British travellers have seemed
to wish to do so, and to have tried to do so. But the study bothers
them, the secret baffles them. They give it up with a gruff impatience
which writes on their features the sentence, "You have no right to have
such complicated and unintelligible arrangements in your governments,
State and Federal: they are quite un-English." Our foreign kinsfolk seem
unwilling to realize the extent of our domain, and the size of some
of our States as compared with their own island, and incapable of
understanding how different institutions, forms, limitations, and
governmental arrangements may exist in the several States, independently
of, or in subordination to, the province and administration of the
Federal Government. Nearly every English journal which undertakes
to refer to our affairs will make ludicrous or serious blunders,
if venturing to enter into details. The "Edinburgh Review" kindly
volunteered to be the champion of American institutions and products in
opposition to the extreme Toryism of the "Quarterly." Sydney Smith took
us, our authors and early enterprises, under his special patronage,
and he wrote many favorable articles of that character. One would have
supposed, that, in the necessary preparation for such labors, he would
have acquired some geographical, statistical, and other rudimentary
knowledge about us, enough to have kept him from gross blunders.
Unluckil