1815.] of North-America. 91
with us, that excepting the whalers, fishing is an idle employment, requiring neither courage nor skill, that the fishermen do not venture more than two leagues from the coast, that the fisheries do not furnish a nursery for seamen, that our fishermen have no attachment to their homes, that they are cosmopolites, and a few cod-fish more or less determine their country. If an inhabitant of either of the Capes of Massachusetts, were to answer the French Minister, and be permitted a little warmth in repelling his account of them, might they not boast of their attachment to their homes, where generation after generation had clung to a barren soil and liberty; and where a life of hardship and enterprise had procured them support and competence, from the stormy regions of Newfoundland? Might they not tell him to inquire of the merchant vessels in the Pacifick and the Mediterranean, the Baltick and the Bay of Biscay, or to walk the decks of the Constitution, and ask whether they furnished a nursery for seamen? Might they not, in denying that they were cosmopolites, say to him, that during the period in which he had been transmuted from a Catholick Bishop into a plain republican, from that to an Imperial Prince with an Italian principality, and then subsided into a French Prince under a royal dynasty; they had remained unchanged and unbroken, though they had been visited by war, and seen their prosperity withered year after year by a sickening, deleterious policy, that drove them from the ocean, but net to despair; and, after embargoes and war had passed over them like pestilence and a hurricane, they were ready on the return of peace and freedom to launch their barks on the sea, and, borne on its mountainous waves, to gather all the spoils of the deep, and return with them to the dwellings of their forefathers?
There are some keen and accurate remarks in this work, blended with many that are jejune and puerile. If we happen to take up the book, and open a passage where he is talking about 'the corruption of the cities,” and the virtues of 'villagers embosomed in the woods,' we think that we have by accident taken up the wrong volume, and turn to the title, to see if it be not a pastoral, instead of a political treatise. When he asks who would believe that 'bank'ruptcy would be the surest road to fortune?’ the qui vult, non ego, will be ready in every one’s mouth. When he
