and this conviction has already exerted a disturbing influence over the affairs of Europe. Historians affirm that the French Revolution was partly caused by the successful revolution which founded the United States. If that could be at a time when nothing had been achieved but independence, and their Constitution was only beginning the career it has so grandly run, it is easy to estimate how much their influence would be increased by the permanence of their success. Accordingly America exercised a power of attraction over Europe of which the great migration is only a subordinate sign. Beyond the millions who have crossed the ocean, who shall reckon the millions whose hearts and hopes are in the United States, to whom the rising sun is in the West, and whose movements are controlled by the distant magnet, though it has not drawn them away?
The time has come for all men to perceive that these judgments were premature. Five years have wrought so vast a change, that the picture which I have faithfully given of the United States as I found them under President Pierce could not be realised in the awful realities of the present day. Their debt now imposes a heavier charge than that which England contracted in the great war, and it has been incurred, not to repel invasion or defeat a national enemy, but to slaughter fellow-citizens, and carry fire and sword over the cornfields and the homesteads of a country which is their own. The armies they have raised and lost were larger in proportion to the population than those of the Emperor Napoleon or the Emperor Alexander. Their prisons have been peopled with disaffected citizens. Part of their territory has become desolate, because those who should have tilled the soil were taken by the war; part because the armies laid it waste. The Union which was founded and sustained by the attachment of the people has been restored by force, and the Constitution which was the idol of Americans is obeyed by millions of humbled and indignant men, whose families it has decimated, whose property it has ravaged, and whose prospects it has ruined for ever.
