Yet with all our material and intellectual progress, we have hardly a right to be proud. For we have enjoyed peculiar advantages. The _Mayflower_ did not land her pilgrims on a narrow island, but on the edge of a great continent. Of that continent we have the most productive zone, stretching from ocean to ocean, and a thousand miles in breadth; while within that zone our Government has given us, for the support of educational institutions, as much land as the entire area of Great Britain and Ireland. At the same time, we have not been loaded down with a standing army, an established church, a vast landed aristocracy, and all the rubbish of royalty. In America labor receives its highest wages, and pauperism finds its least excuse. It will be no special credit to us if we become in the next half century the most powerful and prosperous and generous of nations; but it will be a great shame to us if we do not.
As we read the history of our country's early struggles, it may help us to avoid any unworthy feeling of resentment if we bear in mind the fact { 353}that there is a wide and peculiar discrepancy of character between the English people and the English Government. That people perhaps at present the most enlightened on earth, are justly noted for their innate love of fair play; for their continual struggles toward liberty, and their development of the great principles of jurisprudence; but that Government, in its dealings with other powers, has been for centuries arbitrary, selfish, barbarous, and inconsistent to the last degree. Priding itself upon legitimacy, it has befriended a bloody usurpation in France, because it hated the alternative of French republicanism. It has opened the ports of China with its cannon, for the purpose of selling there a narcotic drug of which it holds the monopoly. It boasted its abolition of the slave trade; yet when our country was at war over the slavery question, its sympathies were all with the slaveholders. Seventy years ago, as we have seen, its cruisers cared nothing for the neutrality of any harbor in which a hostile ship of fewer guns was riding at anchor; but twenty years ago it could not offer its neutral hospitalities too lavishly to privateers that had not a port of their own to hail from or sail to, and were burning all their prizes at sea without adjudication. It witnessed the dismemberment of Denmark with scarcely a protest, but has { 354}sacrificed thousands of English lives to maintain the Turk in Europe. It has stood for years at the head of a great conspiracy to keep Russia shut up in the centre of a continent long after her industrial growth and commercial importance have entitled her to a broad and unobstructed outlet to the highway of nations. It has eaten India into famine, and is now laying its kleptic fingers on the great island of Borneo, and apparently making ready to consume the continent of Africa.