CHARACTERS. 29 



husky voiced. He is a stone-cutter by trade, and returns to 

 England because, as he says, there is no demand for so fine 

 work as he is able to do, in America, and he will be better 

 paid in London. These two men are always together, and 

 always quarrelling. Indeed, the Englishman has, with his 

 slowness and obstinate deafness to reason on any matter that 

 he has once stated his views of, an endless battery of logic 

 and bante rings to reply to, for he is the only defender of an 

 aristocratic form of government amongst us, every other man, 

 Irish, Scotch, or English, being a thorough-going, violent, 

 radical democrat. Most of them, indeed, claim the name of 

 red republican, and carry their ideas of &quot; liberty&quot; far beyond 

 any native American I have known. What is more remark 

 able and painful, nearly all of them, except the Irish, are pro 

 fessedly Deists or Atheists, or something of the sort, for all 

 their ideas are evidently most crude and confused upon the 

 subject, and amount to nothing but pity, hatred, or contempt 

 for all religious people, as either fools or hypocrites, impos 

 tors or imposed upon. There is only one of them that seems 

 to have ever thought upon the matter at all carefully, or to 

 be able to argue upon it, and he is so self-satisfied (precisely 

 what he says, by the way, of every one that argues against 

 him), that he never stops arguing. Of him I will speak again. 

 A remark of one of the farmers, an Englishman, and a 

 very sensible fellow, upon these sentiments so generally held 

 among our company, seemed to me true and well expressed. 

 I think my observation of the lower class of Englishmen in 

 the United States generally confirms it. &quot; I have often no 

 ticed of my countrymen,&quot; said he, &quot; that when they cease to 

 honour the king, they no longer fear God.&quot; That is, as I un 

 derstand it, when they are led to change the political theory 

 in which they have been instructed, they must lose confi 

 dence in a religious creed which they owe about equally to 



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