A very little humouring of their prejudices, and some
courtesy of language and demeanour on the part of Englishmen, would work
wonders, even as it is, with the public mind of the Americans.
* * * * *
Captain Basil Hall's book is certainly very entertaining and instructive;
but, in my judgment, his sentiments upon many points, and more especially
his mode of expression, are unwise and uncharitable. After all, are not
most of the things shown up with so much bitterness by him mere national
foibles, parallels to which every people has and must of necessity have?
* * * * *
What you say about the quarrel in the United States is sophistical. No
doubt, taxation may, and perhaps in some cases must, press unequally, or
apparently so, on different classes of people in a state. In such cases
there is a hardship; but, in the long run, the matter is fully compensated
to the over-taxed class. For example, take the householders of London, who
complain so bitterly of the house and window taxes. Is it not pretty clear
that, whether such householder be a tradesman, who indemnifies himself in
the price of his goods,--or a letter of lodgings, who does so in his rent,
--or a stockholder, who receives it back again in his dividends,--or a
country gentleman, who has saved so much fresh levy on his land or his
other property,--one way or other, it comes at last pretty nearly to the
same thing, though the pressure for the time may be unjust and vexatious,
and fit to be removed? But when New England, which may be considered a
state in itself, taxes the admission of foreign manufactures in order to
cherish manufactures of its own, and thereby forces the Carolinians,
another state of itself, with which there is little intercommunion, which
has no such desire or interest to serve, to buy worse articles at a higher
price, it is altogether a different question, and is, in fact, downright
tyranny of the worst, because of the most sordid, kind.
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