ese are the consequences of a cheap and simple form of
government, having a rural attorney for Sovereign and a city
attorney for Prime Minister. We have already said that if
such a terrible exposure of incapacity had happened in
England we should at the earliest moment possible have sent
the incapables about their business, and put ourselves in the
hands of better men...."
"This Republic has been so often proposed to us as a model
for imitation that we should be unpardonable not to mark how
it works now, when for the first time it has some work to do.
We believe that if the English system of Parliamentary action
had existed in America, the war could not have occurred, but
we are quite sure that such Ministers would have long since
been changed[1358]."
In addition to a Conservative ringing the changes upon the failure of
democracy, the open friends of the South dilated also upon the
"gentlemanly" characteristics of Southern leaders and society. This was
the frequent burden of articles in _The Index_ in the early weeks of its
publication. To this was soon added a picture of Northern democracy as
composed of and controlled by the "immigrant element" which was the
source of "the enormous increase of population in the last thirty years"
from revolutionary areas in Europe. "Germans, Hungarians, Irish carried
with them more than their strong arms, they imported also their theories
of equality.... The revolutionary party which represents them is at this
moment master in the States of the North, where it is indulging in all
its customary licence[1359]." This fact, complained _The Index_, was not
sufficiently brought out in the English press. Very different was the
picture painted by Anthony Trollope after a tour of the Western states:
"... this man has his romance, his high poetic feeling, and
above all his manly dignity. Visit him, and you will find him
without coat or waistcoat, unshorn, in ragged blue trousers
and old flannel shirt, too often bearing on his lantern jaws
the signs of ague and sickness; but he will stand upright
before you and speak to you with all the ease of a lettered
gentleman in his own library. All the odious incivility of
the republican servant has been banished. He is his own
master, standing on his own threshold, and finds no need to
assert his equality by rudeness. He is delighted t
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