It is, indeed, a melancholy fact, that nations partake much more
frequently of the bad than the good features of the individuals
composing them, and it requires no small amount of virtue to flavour
the great caldron of a people, and make its incense rise gratefully to
heaven. For this reason, we are ever ready to accept with enthusiasm
anything like a national tribute to high principle and honour. Such
glorious bursts are a source of pride to human nature itself, and we
hail with acclamation these evidences of exalted feeling, which make
men "come nearer to the gods." The greater the sacrifice to selfish
interests and prejudices, the more do we prize the effort. Think for a
moment what a sensation of surprise and admiration, wonderment, awe,
and approbation it would excite throughout Europe, if, by the next
arrival from Boston, came the news that "the Americans had determined
to pay their debts!" That at some great congress of the States,
resolutions were carried to the effect, "that roguery and cheating
will occasionally lower a people in the estimation of others, and that
the indulgences of such national practices may be, in the end,
prejudicial to national honour;" "that honesty, if not the best, may
be good policy, even in a go-a-head state of society;" "that smart
men, however a source of well-founded pride to a people, are now and
then inconvenient from the very excess of their smartness;" "that
seeing these things, and feeling all the unhappy results which
mistrust and suspicion by foreign countries must bring upon their
commerce, they have determined to pay something in the pound, and go
a-head once more." I am sure that such an announcement would be hailed
with illuminations from Hamburg to Leghorn. American citizens would be
cheered wherever they were found; pumpkin pie would figure at royal
tables, and twist and cocktail be handed round with the coffee; our
exquisites would take to chewing and its consequences; and our belles,
banishing Rossini and Donizetti, would make the air vocal with the
sweet sounds of Yankee Doodle. One cannot at a moment contemplate what
excesses our enthusiasm might not carry us to; and I should not wonder
in the least if some great publisher of respectable standing might not
start a pirated reprint of the _New York Herald_.

Let me now go back and explain, if my excitement will permit me, how
I have been led into such extravagant imaginings. I have already
remarked, that nations