ACTUAL VALUE OF ENGLISH NOBILITY. 373 



close, to add a little in extenuation of the bad manners which we are 

 sure must prevail in America at present. This little will serve our 

 purpose the better; because its tendency will be to diminish the 

 amount of American responsibility, by taking part of the burden upon 

 our own shoulders as Englishman. 



Whenever we have heard travellers talk of the bad manners of the 

 Americans, we have been in the habit of inquiring, whether this coarse- 

 ness was observable amongst the members of the Union, without dis- 

 tinction of national origin? whether French, German, and other nation- 

 alized citizens exhibited the same peculiarities, which made those of 

 English origin such disagreeable company ? The result of our inquiries 

 is, as we suspected, and hoped it would be, to this effect namely, that 

 the bad manners are confined to the Anglo-Americans. We hoped to 

 find this the case, because, being ardently desirous of as much popular 

 interference in the conduct of government, as is compatible with the 

 utmost enjoyment of social life, we should have been very sorry to meet 

 with evidence to the fact, that republicanism and refinement of manners 

 cannot exist together. Not that we are desirous of trying the expe- 

 riment of formal republicanism in our own country, till all means have 

 been tried to bring our constitutional freedom into full practice ; but 

 that the fact of a general deterioration of manners in a formal republic, 

 would have induced us to be more afraid, than we now are, of popular 

 controul over government in general. We are confirmed in this view 

 by the cursory glance we took at Mrs. Troll ope's work ; and are pre- 

 pared to give it as our deliberate opinion, that, amidst the other various 

 circumstances obviously obstructive of American refinement up to the 

 present time, perhaps the main cause of their personal, anti-social 

 offensiveness is the ill-mannered English blood that flows in their veins. 

 We English have only of late emerged, through protracted peaceful 

 intercourse with the continent, from manners, of which all other Euro- 

 peans were wont to complain grievously ; and, as brother Jonathan 

 sprung from sires of this bluff and surly English temperament, and his 

 being placed in circumstances generally very unfavourable to refine- 

 ment, we deem him less in fault for his ill manners as an American, 

 than as the son or grandson of an Englishman. 



The other circumstances of America being then amply sufficient to 

 account for its ill manners, the onus probandi rests in all fairness with 

 those who assert republicanism to be the cause of ill manners : they are 

 bound to afford us ample reasons for their opinion. This has not, we 

 believe, hitherto been done. Captain Basil Hall's gallant assertion, as 

 Mrs. Trollope terms it, that " the great difference between England and 

 America, is Ike absence of loyalty in the latter," does not prove the Ame- 

 ricans to be ill-mannered, because they are republicans ; neither does any 

 thing advanced by Mrs. Trollope herself. Indeed it is satisfactory to 

 us to be able to quote this lady's own words in diminution of the very 

 impression she evidently wished to produce by her book. She says in 

 the 65th page of vol. 1st. " I am in no way competent to judge of the 

 political institutions of America ; and, if I should occasionally make an 

 observation on their effects as they meet my superficial glance, they will 

 be made in the spirit and with the feeling of a woman, who is apt to tell, 

 what her first impressions may be ; but unapt to reason bade from effects 

 to their causes" Now we maintain, that this, Mrs. Trollope' s confession, 

 disqualifies her at once from all pretension to be, what the conservatives 



