and worse than that nation
to which the world, by universal consent, has yielded the palm of
superiority in all the arts and in all the sciences of modern
acquirement.

Wherein do the Americans exceed the sons of Britain? In history, in
policy, in poetry, in mathematics, in music, in painting, or in any of
the gifts of the Muses? Are they more renowned in the dreadful art of
war? or in the mild virtues of peace? Is the fame of America a wonder
and a terror to the four quarters of the globe?--We may fearlessly reply
in the negative. The outer barbarian knows the American but as another
kind of Englishman. It will yet take him some centuries to distinguish
between the original and the offspring.

It is, in short, as untenable as an axiom in policy or history, that the
American exceeds the Briton in the development of mind, as it is that
the American exceeds the Briton in the development of the baser
qualities of our nature.

When the insatiate thirst for dollars, dollars, dollars, has subsided,
then the American may justly rear his head as an aspirant for historic
fame. His land has never yet produced a Shakespeare, a Johnson, a
Milton, a Spenser, a Newton, a Bacon, a Locke, a Coke, or a Rennie. The
utmost America has yet achieved is a very faint imitation of the least
renowned of our great writers, Walter Scott.

In diplomacy I deny also the palm. For although India is a case in
point, like as Texas, yet even there we have never first planted a
population with the express purpose of ejecting the lawful government,
but have conquered where conquest was not only hailed by the enslaved
people but was a positive benefit, by the introduction of mild and
equitable laws instead of brutal and bloody despotisms. We have not
snatched from a weak republic, whose principles had been expressly
formed on our own model, that which poverty alone obliged it to
relinquish. If the writer, who appears to be an excellent man and a good
christian, had lived for several years on the borders of the eagerly
desired Canada, I very much doubt whether he would have seen such a
_couleur de rose_ in the transactions of the mighty commonwealth, where
the rulers are the ruled, and where education, intellect, integrity,
innocence, and wealth must all alike bow before the Juggernaut of an
unattainable perfection of equality.

If Bill Johnson, the mail robber and smuggler, is as good as William
Pitt or any other William of superior mind, why then th