THE AMERICAN TARIFF. 251 



nations to judge how such a comparison should affect 

 Americans ; but most Englishmen would have very 

 little hesitation in deciding how it would affect us. 

 The lesson is for us also a valuable one, though even 

 we, who have not had to pay for the experiment one 

 -tithe of what it has cost the Americans, regard it 

 nevertheless as too dearly bought. 



Echo, 1877. 



NOTE. Since the above was written, I have received, among a 

 number of American newspapers, the Baltimore Bulletin for February 3, 

 1877, in which is a leading article comparing the recuperative energies 

 shown by America and France. It opens as follows : 



' The United States is in the twelfth year after a great war. The 

 pressure of the debt growing out of that war is felt by all the people to 

 be heavier and heavier every day. Our industries are prostrate. There 

 is no profit to be made out of any business. There seems to be no 

 power of recuperation in the people. With the best soil in the world 

 with a population more industrious, more vivacious, more enterprising 

 than any other upon the face of the globe we sit as if spell-bound by 

 some fatal magic charm, incapable of making any use of any of our 

 powers. 



' Compare for a moment our present incapacity and inaction with 

 the bounding recuperative energies which France has shown since the 

 Germans left her soil in 1871. No nation was ever overwhelmed by 

 such total defeat and disaster as France in that war with Germany ; 

 no nation ever recovered so rapidly and so completely in so short a 

 time as the French.' 



