New York, June 30, 1865. THE terms of the arrangement
announced as having been entered into between the British Government and the Canadian Delegation have elicited no little comment here this week—more in private than in public —and the comment has not been favourable. You know what those terms are. The people here who know Canada and the Canadians best, say the conditions of the proposed agree- ment, co-operating with the abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty, will, if insisted upon, surely bring the ocean provinces and the eastern counties south of the St. Lawrence to the door of the Union knocking loudly for admittance. The business men who trade with Canada say that the undertaking of the proposed fortifica- tions by the people of that country, even if the Reciprocity Treaty continued in force, would be preposterous, foolish, wild ; and that now that the treaty, which though called reciprocal, benefited Canada largely and us not at all, is to be done away, the Provinces will have more than they can do to keep their heads above water with their present burden on their shoulders. The proposed railway along the northern boundary of New Brunswick they pronounce worth- less for business purposes, and say that no one of those who should be interested snit—the Eastern people—will take shares, and that if it were built by others it would surely be a financial failure from lack of freight and passengers, owing to the nature of the country through which it would pass. As to the fortifications and a mili- tary railway to protect Canada against us, they are as much needed as to protect them against the Esquimau. I have not once heard the prospect of the addition of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Eastern Counties to the Union spoken of with pleasure. You may respect people much and like them very well as neigh- bours, and yet not long to have them of your household. And besides, Uncle Sam has quite as large and various a family and as much landed estate as he can well take care of. Yet if they asked to come in we should hardly say no ; and with the present prospects you must not be surprised to hear of a movement on their part hitherward.
As it would defeat the purpose of these letters if they were seriously misunderstood upon any important point, I revert to one of them, published June 3, as to which two esteemed friends in London write to me what is fully expressed in these words of one of them. The writer is speaking of himself and a circle of edu- cated Liberals, and says :—" You hurt our feelings sadly at times. That letter about America's being entirely independent of its statesmen, and able to go on by the mere might of the people, whether good, bad, or indifferent men are at the head, annoyed us sadly. You speak sometimes as if Buchanan were as helpless to injure as Lincoln to aid the nation, as if whether you have a Washington or a Polk makes no difference. This seems like saying that the demos is greater than its highest elements. And I cannot understand this worshipping of mere numbers, as higher than or independent of the noblest component individuals." Thus far my correspondent ; and I give the whole of this passage because it seems to me to put his case very clearly and strongly. First let me express sincerest sorrow that, right or wrong, with reason or without, I hurt the feelings of any of my readers. And it does not diminish my regret that I should do this by telling, what I always strive to tell, the simple truth, uncoloured by prejudice and unsupported by argument. I do not expect my readers to find all that is told them in these letters admirable ; and I fear that, as I have confessed before, my tone may sometimes be to them even less agreeable than my matter. But if they can generally hold me guiltless of unkindness and discourtesy, as to other matters is it not better that I should paint my picture to the best of my ability faithfully in fact, in spirit, and in tone, even although it may disappoint and perhaps annoy, and sometimes be very far from seeming, even to me, the representation of a poli-
tical paradise, than that I should smooth things over, and give you an " idealized" portrait of Uncle Sam, serene, beatified- like, indeed, but that sort of portrait of one of which an ac- quaintance of mine said, " That's the way Harriet will look when she goes to Heaven ?" What I have said about the comparative unimportance of our statesmen, however eminent, and whatever their position, is true. I do not say it is best ; that time must show. But, good or bad for us as it may be, it is difficult for us to divine why the statement of the fact should annoy many persons as it seems to do, unless on ac- count of some strange misunderstanding. Mr. Marsh, our Minister at Turin, wrote in a letter of his which has been recently published, speaking of Mr. Lincoln's death, "I have seen most unmis- takable signs of disappointment, and even rage, at my assurances that it would produce no disturbance whatever in the movement of our political machine.” Mr. Marsh, a man of great sobriety, of judgment, and of high culture, seems to have said very much what my letter principally in question said, the pith of which is contained in the following sentence, which I repeat. " The char- acter of the President has much to do with the efficiency with which our Government is administered, but little or nothing with the ends which that Government seeks to attain. Here a states- man or a soldier may acquire distinction and great influence, but never, never, power." Possibly my gentle censors did not suffi- ciently weigh the words I now emphasize. Let me illustrate this by a somewhat well known case in point. The strongest willed President that we have ever had was Jackson ; and he was the man most liked and trusted by the great majority North and South, East and West, who put him in power. He could take more liberties, assume with impunity more responsibility, than any of our Presidents since the first. Well, when the Legislature of South Carolina, in 1832, was about passing its resolution nullifying an Act of Congress in that State, a gentleman was talking in private with the President upon the affairs of the country, and Jackson asked him, " Do you think those South Carolinians will pass their ordinance of nullification?" " Plainly, General, I fear, I am sure, they will." " Then, see here," said Jackson, and he stepped to a cabinet, and opening a drawer, showed it full of letters ; "there are letters from men in all parts of the country whom I know I can trust ; and if South Carolina attempts her nullification, I'll go down there with 50,000 men—I'll go myself—and by the Eternal I'll hang John Catiline Calhoun and William McDuffie higher than Haman " The incident has been made public, but the speech, I believe, only in part hitherto. But the man to whom it was made repeated it to a member of my family, who repeated it to me only two days ago. The essential point was that which has been omitted, the exhibi- tion of, and the reference to, the drawer full of letters from men whom the President could trust. Without these, General Jackson, strong-willed and even arbitrary as he was, and the idol of a party overwhelmingly dominant the country over, would not have ventured to take the position that he took. His strong will was effective then, and all through his eight years of adminis- tration, only because it was the exponent and the agent of the vast majority of the people—in the particular case in question of the whole nation, the South Carolina " fire-eaters " excepted. He could have marched an army from Washington straight through Virginia and North Carolina, and even around through Kentucky and Tennessee gathering force as he advanced, and could have hanged not only his "Catiline" but every man who offered resist- ance to the laws and the forces of the Republic by drum-head court-martial. South Carolina was too soon with her nullification. It took thirty years more of teaching of the doctrine of State- sovereignty and the right of secession to bring about the great slave-holders' rebellion. And it must in fairness be confessed that Mr. Buchanan, although a poor, weak, shuffling, double-faced creature, was not able to take, even if he would have taken, a posi- tion like Jackson's in a somewhat similar emergency. He had, no doubt, his drawer full of letters, but they told him of a country bewildered, uncertain of itself, doubting whether a generation of compromising with the propagandists of slavery had left it virtue enough to dare a noble death in fighting for an honourable life. Outside the ranks of the professional politicians of the Democratic party every man knew how he felt himself, but he distrusted the people generally, and sometimes even them of his own household. It needed the shame of that six months of inaction, and of that blow at Sumter, to rouse the nation from its lethargy, and give it what the slaveholders had from the formation of the Government, a single, all-absorbing interest. Mr. Russell wrote to the Times only a few weeks before the bombardment of Sumter that he saw in New York only " a divine calm." He was right. Nothing is calmer or more innocent seeming on the outside than a powder magazine, but the ignorant man who puts fire to it makes a dis- covery. There can be no doubt that Mr. Lincoln issued his first war proclamation calling for 75,000 men—only, remember, to repossess the forts and public property seized by the insurgents— with sonic uncertanty as to the response he would receive ; and throughout the war his sagacity was chiefly shown in so shaping his policy that he took no step until the people had been brought to the point of willingness to give it their support. This may not be
the best way in the abstract for the management of nation's
affairs, but it was his only way under the circumstances. hat I have now written may be a mere telling the old story over ain, but one point is that, neither in my telling it, nor in the actin of President Lincoln and President Jackson, is there any " worship- ping of mere numbers." These are the facts. This is the way in which our Government is conducted in regard to all great, all vital questions. It is open to criticism, and subject to condemna- tion by those who prefer other systems of government. Compared with others it is slow and clumsy in such a great crisis as that through which we have just passed, But our Government is not framed with an eye chiefly to great emergencies and sore trials, rather to the ensuring of the material prosperity and the every-day happiness of the whole people. And, to go a step farther, these we think are perilled, if not sacrificed, by any system yet discovered which places them in the hands of a comparatively few individuals, no matter what their culture or their intellectual eminence. We may be altogether wrong, but we think that experience has shown that the instincts of the whole mass of a moderately educated people are better guides to the welfare of that people than the plans and schemes of even the ablest men among them. At the same time we appreciate—no people more highly—the value to the mass of the instruction and the guidance of great intellects. This, however, we prize chiefly in the evolution and the exposition of great principles. We should not expect much from a great philosophical historian in the Cabinet or a great political economist in Congress, but would not be surprised that in the direction of the practial working of government either of them should be beaten by scores of men of merely sound judgment and very moderate cultivation. In this conclusion we are confirmed by our recent experience. If our affairs during the last five years had been in the hands of philosophers and philanthropists we should have gone to ruin. But philosophers and philanthropists had their aVi wielded a vast influence, and produced a marked effect upon the grand result. Our Government is not based upon the fair and proportionate representation of various classes, conditions, or interests, but on that of the whole people in mass, in which men of eminent ability and culture work as mere leaven. It is a government of the whole by a majority of the whole. And in this Government, restrained as it is by a written Constitution, we think that we suffer no tyranny from a class majority, because practically it is found that in both majority and minority all classes (as far as we have classes), conditions, and interests are, in the long run, proportionately represented. This being the case, we do not feel it oppressive to submit upon a question of Govern- mental policy to the majority. The system is not perfect, but looking back into history and around us in the present we find none which seems to us so well adapted to secure liberty, pros- perity, and happiness for all, and to give to every man the oppor- tunity of developing himself to the highest point of his capacity. Whatever its merits or its defects, it is not a Government, I venture to say, which is suited to a people among whom a certain degree of education is not very widely diffused, and in which political responsibility is not both an inheritance and a habit.
A YANKEE.
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