Greater Britain. Charles Wentworth Dilke
this, from the “hating hatred” of our culture class in England.
In 1863 and 1864 there came the reckoning. When America was first brought to see the things that had been done in her name, and at her cost, and, rising in her hitherto unknown strength, struck the noblest blow for freedom that the world has seen, the men who had been urging on the movement from without at once re-entered the national ranks, and marched to victory. Of the men who sat beneath Longfellow, and Agassiz, and Emerson, whole battalions went forth to war. From Oberlin almost every male student and professor marched, and the university teaching was left in the women‘s hands. Out of 8000 school-teachers in Pennsylvania, of whom 300 alone were drafted, 3000 volunteered for the war. Everywhere the teachers and their students were foremost among the Volunteers, and from that time forward America and her thinkers were at one.
The fierce passions of this day of wakening have not been suffered to disturb the quiet of the academic town. Our English universities have not about them the classic repose, the air of study, that belong to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Those who have seen the lanes of Leyden, and compared them with the noisy Oxford High Street, will understand what I mean when I say that our Cambridge comes nearest to her daughter-town; but even the English Cambridge has a bustling street or two, and a weekly market-day, while Cambridge in New England is one great academic grove, buried in a philosophic calm which our university towns can never rival so long as men resort to them for other purposes than work.
It is not only in the Harvard precincts that the oldness of New England is to be remarked. Although her people are everywhere in the vanguard of all progress, their country has a look of gable-ends and steeple-hats, while their laws seem fresh from the hands of Alfred. In all England there is no city which has suburbs so gray and venerable as are the elm-shaded towns round Boston: Dorchester, Chelsea, Nahant, and Salem, each seems more ancient than its fellow; the people speak the English of Elizabeth, and joke about us, ” – speaks good English for an Englishman.”
In the country districts, the winsome villages that nestle in the dells seem to have been there for ten centuries at least; and it gives one a shock to light on such a spot as Bloody Brook, and to be told that only one hundred and ninety years ago Captain Lathrop was slain there by Red Indians, with eighty youths, “the flower of Essex County,” as the Puritan history says.
The warnings of Dr. Hedges, in reference to the strides of Michigan, have taken the New Englanders by surprise. Secure, as they believed, in their intellectual supremacy, they forgot that in a Federal Union the moral and physical primacy will generally both reside in the same State. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, at one time the foremost upholder of the doctrine of State rights, will soon be seen once more acting as its champion – this time on behalf of herself and her five sister States.
Were the six New England Commonwealths grouped together in a single State, it would still have only three-fourths of the population of New York, and about an equal number of inhabitants with Pennsylvania. The State of Rhode Island is one-fourth the size of many a single Californian county. Such facts as these will not be long lost sight of in the West, and when a divergence of interests springs up, Ohio will not suffer her voice in the Senate to continue to be neutralized by that of Connecticut or Rhode Island. Even if the Senate be allowed to remain untouched, it is certain that the redistribution of seats consequent upon the census of 1870 will completely transfer political power to the central States. That New England will by this change inevitably lose her hold upon the destinies of the whole Union is not so clear. The influence for good of New England upon the West has been chiefly seminal; but not for that the less enormous. Go into a State such as Michigan, where half the people are immigrants – where, of the remaining moiety, the greater part are born Westerners, and apparently in no way of New England – and you will find that the inhabitants are for the most part earnest, God-fearing men, with a New England tone of profound manliness and conviction running through everything they say and do. The colleges in which they have been reared are directed, you will find, by New England professors, men trained in the classic schools of Harvard, Yale, or Amherst; the ministers under whom they sit are, for the most part, Boston men; the books they read are of New England, or old English of the class from which the writers of the Puritan States themselves have drawn their inspiration. To New England is chiefly due, in short, the making of America a godly nation.
It is something in this age to come across a people who believe strongly in anything, and consistently act upon their beliefs: the New Englanders are such a race. Thoroughly God-fearing States are not so common that we can afford to despise them when found; and nowhere does religion enter more into daily life than in Vermont or Massachusetts.
The States of the Union owe so huge a debt of gratitude to New England, that on this score alone they may refrain from touching her with sacrilegious hands. Not to name her previous sacrifices, the single little State of Massachusetts – one-fourth the size of Scotland, and but half as populous as Paris – sent during the rebellion a hundred and fifty regiments to the field.
It was to Boston that Lincoln telegraphed when, in 1861, at a minute‘s notice, he needed men for the defense of Washington. So entirely were Southerners of the opinion that the New Englanders were the true supporters of the old flag, that “Yankee” became a general term for loyalists of any State. America can never forget the steady heroism of New England during the great struggle for national existence.
The unity that has been the chief cause of the strength of the New England influence is in some measure sprung from the fact that these six States are completely shut off from all America by the single State of New York, alien from them in political and moral life. Every Yankee feels his country bounded by the British, the Irish, and the sea.
In addition to the homogeneousness of isolation, the New Englanders, like the Northern Scotch, have the advantages of a bad climate and a miserable soil. These have been the true agents in the development of the energy, the skill, and fortitude of the Yankee people. In the war, for instance, it was plain that the children of the poor and rugged Northeastern States were not the men to be beaten by the lotus-eaters of Louisiana when they were doing battle for what they believed to be a righteous cause.
One effect of the poverty of soil with which New England is afflicted has been that her sons have wandered from end to end of the known world, engaging in every trade, and succeeding in all. Sometimes there is in their migrations a religious side. Mormonism, although it now draws its forces from Great Britain, was founded in New England. At Brindisi, on my way home, I met three Yankees returning from a Maine colony lately founded at Jaffa, in expectation of the fulfillment of prophecy, and destruction of the Mohammedan rule. For the moment they are intriguing for a firman from the very government upon the coming fall of which all their expectations have been based; and these fierce fanatics are making money by managing a hotel. One of them told me that the Jaffa colony is a “religio-commercial speculation.”
New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the “Yankee spawn” in a Maine man – a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. He was sitting next me at the ordinary, and asked me to take a glass of his champagne. I declined, but chatted, and let out that I was a Britisher.
“I was subject to your government once for sixteen months,” my neighbor said.
“Really! Where?”
“Sierra Leone. I was a prisoner there. And very lucky, too.”
“Why so?” I asked.
“Because, if the American government had caught me, they would have hanged me for a pirate. But I wasn‘t a pirate.”
With over-great energy I struck in, “Of course not.”
My Neighbor. – “No; I was a slaver.”
Idling among the hills of New Hampshire and the lakes of Maine, it is impossible for a stranger, starting free from prejudice, not to end by loving the pious people of New England, for he will see that there could be no severer blow to the cause of freedom throughout the world than the loss by them of an influence upon American life and thought, which has been one of unmixed good. Still, New England