Throughout the pamphlet the author wantons in dogmatism and impertinence, and has an especial love for a phrase representing the British people as “twenty-seven millions mostly fools.” The United States comes in as usual for a rap. The rumor is, that we are indebted for all Carlyle’s sarcasms against our people to the American tourists who have bored him; persons whom he always treated with roughness, but whom he now receives with almost savage insolence. We have heard a story of an American lady, who visited him—under the impression that he was a great philanthropist, and immediately opened the conversation with some remarks in favor of the abolition of slavery. He growled out a bitter rejoinder, in which he took strong grounds in favor of that institution, and denounced all abolitionists as sentimental fools and flunkies. The lady, irritated and surprised, hit instantly on the true woman’s method, the _argumentum ad hominum_, and put the startling question, “How, Mr. Carlyle, should you like to be a slave?” He dilated his person to its full dimensions, and in his broad Scotch brogue exclaimed, “Well, I should be glad to be a great bull-necked nigger, and have somebody to take care of me!” We must confess to a sympathy with his wish, as far as it relates to somebody’s taking care of him, we think good might be done to his head in an asylum.
There is, however, an allusion in the pamphlet to our Congress, which is not without its wisdom just at this time, and which may be safely commended to the attention of those honorable members who consume time and money, precious to the public, in speeches which rarely rise in thought to the level of party newspaper leaders, and which, in style, are often below the rhetoric of romances in yellow covers. He says, “Only perhaps in the United States, which alone of all countries can do without governing—every man being at least able to live, and move off into the wilderness, let Congress jargon as it will—can such a form of so-called ‘Government’ continue for any length of time to torment men with the semblance, when the indispensable substance is not there. For America, _as the citizens well know_, is an ‘unparalelled country’—with mud soil enough, and fierce sun enough in the Mississippi valley alone to grow Indian corn for the extant Posterity of Adam at this time; what other country ever stood in such a case? ‘Speeches to Bunkum,’ and a constitutional battle of the Kilkenny cats, which in other countries are becoming tragical and unendurable, may there still fall under the comical category.”