FEELING TOWARDS THE UNITED STATES. 189 



mass of the educated classes regard us quite differently; not with 

 unqualified respect and unalloyed admiration, but much as we of 

 the Atlantic States regard our own California a wild, dare-devil, 

 younger brother, with some dangerous and reprehensible habits, 

 and some noble qualities ; a capital fellow, in fact, if he would 

 but have done sowing his wild oats. 



This may be well enough understood in the United States ; but 

 further, there is not in the English people, so far as I have seen 

 them, rich or poor, learned or ignorant, high or low, the slightest 

 soreness or rancorous feeling on account of our separation from 

 them, or our war of separation. No doubt there are still a few 

 "aged women of both sexes" who worship the ghost of that old 

 fool, " the good King George," who look upon us with unaffected 

 horror, as they do equally upon their own dissenters and liberals. 

 Yet it never happened to me, though I met and conversed freely 

 with all classes except the noble, while I was in England, to en- 

 counter the first man who did not think that we did exactly right, 

 or who was sorry that we succeeded as we did in declaring and 

 maintaining our independence.* 



The truth is, I suspect, that, at that time, the great mass of 

 thinking men in England were much of that opinion. Our war 

 was with George and his cabinet, not with the people of England, 

 and if they did reluctantly sustain the foolish measures of the 

 king, it was precisely as our Whigs, who were opposed to the 

 measures that led to the war with Mexico, sustained, with money 

 and with blood, that war when it was inevitable. It is a remark- 

 able thing, I have noticed, that there are many men in England 

 who were born at the time of, or shortly subsequent to, our Rev- 

 olutionary War, who are named after the American heroes of that 

 war Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. 



* I have lived nine months in England since I wrote this sentence, and it still remains 

 literally true (1858). 



