The Homes of the New World/Letter XXIX.

by Fredrika Bremer

LETTER XXIX.

TO THE REV P. J. BÖKLIN.

Cincinnati, Nov. 27th. 

I have now spent more than a year in the New World without having fulfilled my promise of writing to you, my friend and teacher; without having told you what I think of it, and what I hope from it. And yet, at the same time, I knew that you wished to know it.

My good friend, I have not hitherto been able to write to you. I wished not to give you my crude thoughts and descriptions, and it was long before I could give other than such. The effect produced upon me, and the daily occurrences of my life in this country, were in the first instance overpowering, as well for soul as for body; and, to a certain degree, I was really borne down by them. The violent torrent of new, and for the most part, rapturous impressions, the incessant labour with new objects, new people, together with the effects of a hot climate, and food to which I was unaccustomed, reduced me to that state of feverish, nervous excitement, that for months I was unable to read, or even to think on any subject which required the slightest exertion of mind.

The mercy of God, however, the care of good people, and the healing powers of nature and art, raised me, by degrees, above this state of weakness. I was able once more to live and learn.

But during that daily labour to make myself master of those subjects which pressed upon me on all sides, during my wanderings, and the endeavour to arrange my thoughts, it became more and more clear to me, that in order to arrive at any just conclusion with regard to the moral, intellectual, and religious culture, as it existed in the States of North America, I must see more of its various forms and developments; I must become acquainted with life, not only in the North-Eastern, but in the Southern and the Western States of the Union also; I must see the life of America, both where it had established and perfected itself, and where it was yet endeavouring to break the clod of the earth's surface, to build new homes, to conquer new life and new lands.

“When I shall have seen the great West, the valley of the Mississippi, Cincinnati, the Queen of the West, I will write to Böklin. Then I shall better understand, shall be better able to speak of the New World, and of that future for humanity, which it bears in its bosom!” Thus said I to myself.

Now I am at Cincinnati. I have seen and I see before me the great West, the central region of North America. I have travelled through the valley of the Mississippi, the future home of more than two hundred and seventy-five millions of population; on the great river, the banks of which already swarm with multitudes of European people; from Minnesota, still the wild abode of the Indian tribes; from the Falls of St. Anthony, where commences the career of the river in the north, to its midmost region by the Missouri and the Ohio; and am now about to follow its course to its outlet into the Mexican Gulf, the realm of the sugar-cane and perpetual summer.

And whilst I am resting here on the banks of the beautiful river, Ohio, like the wearied dove on the olive-branch, in one of those beautiful, peaceful homes, which everywhere on my journeyings through America, have opened themselves to me and afforded me the repose of a mother's home, repose, peace, love, cheerfulness, and renewed strength—I will converse with you, you my spirit's and my mind's best friend, found late but for eternity. Ah! but even now I can merely speak a few words to you, give you a few fragments of that which I have experienced and learned, and which I still experience and learn in this New World. But you will understand what I can merely imperfectly indicate; you will follow still farther through the labyrinth the thread which I lay in your hand.

You know that I did not come to America to seek for a new object, but to establish a new hope. Whilst one portion of the people of Europe, after a struggle for light and freedom, which, in part mistook its own purpose, and not clearly knowing that which it desired, seemed (perhaps merely seemed) to sink back again under a despotism which knew better what it aimed at, obtaining for a time the power of might; in that gloomy season my soul raised itself in deep faith and love towards that distant land, where the people erected the banner of human freedom, declared the human right and ability to govern themselves, and on this right founded a monarchy of states—the commencement of the world's greatest governmental culture.

That which I sought for there was the New Man and his world; the new humanity and the sight of its future on the soil of the New World.

I will tell you what I have so far seen and found.

I spent the last autumn and winter in the north-eastern States of the Union, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut;—the mother States from which the swarm of people have gone forth, and still go forth to populate the American Continent, and to give it laws and manners. That which is most admirable in these mother-States is the number of great institutions for the education of youth and in aid of the unfortunate, schools and asylums. These are the offspring of a large heart, and they have a broad basis. It is a joy to see and hear the children taught in these public schools, which are all free-schools, in large and airy halls. One can see that they are all awake and full of life; one can hear that they understand that which they read and learn. The great reformation which has taken place in the conduct of schools, and the impulse which has been given towards an universal popular education in America, are the result, in great neasure, of the enthusiasm, perseverance, and determined resolution of a single individual, Horace Mann; and this fact is, without question, one of the most beautiful and the most significant phenomena of this national cultivation, especially as it embraces woman as well as man, and places her side by side with him as the teacher of the rising generation.^[1]

I have traced this from the East to the West, from those magnificent academies where five hundred students, boys or girls, study and take degrees preparatory to public life, as teachers and teacheresses, to the log huts of the Western Wilderness, where school-books lie open before the ragged children, which convey the mind over the whole world, and where the noblest pearls of American and English literature are to be found. I have talked with Horace Mann—the man of immeasurable hope, and I have thence derived great hope for the intellectual and moral perfecting of the human race, and for its future in this portion of the world. For that which is in the north-eastern States, in the oldest homes of the Pilgrims, the same will be sooner or later in the South and the West. A great and living intelligence in the popular mind mixes itself up more and more in the great question of popular education, and goes onward conquering like a subtle power of nature, a stream of spiritual life forcing a way for itself through all impediment. Would you hear how it speaks through its most powerful representative in the New World?

Thus writes Horace Mann in his invitation to the National Convention of the friends of Education, in August, 1850.

“A few considerations will serve to show that there never has been a period in the history of man when universal education was so imperative a duty as at the present moment. I mean education in its most comprehensive and philosophic sense, as including the education of the body, the education of the mind, and the education of the heart.

“In regard to the first topic, it is well known that physical qualities are hereditary. Disease and weakness descend from parent to offspring by a law of nature, as names descend by a law of custom. God still ordains that the bodily iniquities of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. When we look backward and see how the numbers of our ancestors are doubled at each remove in the ascending scale, it affrights us to reflect how many confluent streams from vicious fountains may have been poured into the physical system of a single individual. Where, for many generations, this horrid entailment of maladies has not been broken by a single obedient and virtuous life, who can conceive of the animal debasements and depravities that may centre in a single person? At every descent, the bad may become worse; and the possible series of deterioration is infinite. Before the human race, or any part of it, becomes more diseased, or physically more vile, is it not time to arrest and to restore? This can be done through education or through miracles, and it would require more than three hundred and sixty five miracles every year to preserve health and strength under our present vicious social habits. Those who do not expect the intervention of miracles, are false to their families, to the community, and to God, if they do not urge forward the work of physical education as the only means of rescuing the race from an infinity of sicknesses, weaknesses, and pains. Public schools are the only instrumentality for inculcating upon the community at large, a knowledge of the great laws of health and life.

“There never was such a necessity for imparting power to the human intellect, and of replenishing it with knowledge as at the present time; and in no country is this necessity so imperative as in our own. The common affairs of life require a hundred times more knowledge now than they did a century ago. New forms, and kinds of business too, are daily emerging into practice, which must be conducted with intelligence and skill, or they will ruin their conductors. How much more knowledge and art are requisite to make a cotton or woollen factory, with all its nice and numerous appendages, than to manage a spinning-wheel or a distaff; to manage a locomotive on a railroad, than to drive a team on a highway; to manage a telegraph, than to send a courier, &c. The profoundest sciences are working their way into the every-day business of life, and carrying power and beauty, and multiplication of products wherever they go, and whosoever cannot rise upon the benefits they confer, will be left in poverty, misery and contempt.

“Not only in all the departments of business are there everywhere more life, energy and compass, but the masses of the people are investing themselves, or are becoming invested, with new social and political prerogatives. The free man who may go where he pleases, and select whatever occupation he pleases, needs vastly more judgment and intelligence than the subject of a despotism who is born in some niche of labour, and must stay where he is born. The citizen, who manages not only his own personal affairs, but those of his municipality; who governs himself in all his political relations, through representatives chosen by himself; whose vote may determine not only who shall be the rulers, but what measures of national or international policy shall be established or annulled, on whose will peace or war, national honour or national infamy, may depend—such a citizen in capacity, in knowledge, and in wisdom, should be as a god in comparison with a Russian serf or a Hindoo pariah. At this time I say, there is vastly more for the mind of man to do and to understand than there ever was before; and, therefore, that mind must be proportionably strengthened and illumined.

“There never was a time when the moral nature of man needed culture and purification more than it needs them at the present hour. What we call civilisation and progress have increased temptations a thousand fold—in this country ten thousand fold. The race for wealth, luxury, ambition, and pride, is open to all. With our multiplied privileges have come, not only multiplied obligations, which we may contemn, but multiplied dangers, into which we may fall. Where oppression and despotism reign, all the nobler faculties of man are dwarfed, stunted, and shorn of their power. But oppression and despotism dwarf, and stunt, and despoil of their power all the evil passions of men, no less than their nobler impulses. In this country all that is base and depraved in the human heart has such full liberty and wide compass, and hot stimulus of action, as has never been known before. Wickedness no less than virtue: diabolism no less than utilitarianism, has its steam engines, and its power-presses and its lightning telegraphs. Those external restraints of blind reverence for authority, and superstitious dread of religious guides, and fiery penal codes, which once repressed the passions of man, and paralysed all energy, are now lifted off. If internal and moral restraints be not substituted for the external and arbitrary ones that are removed, the people instead of being conquerors and sovereigns over their passions, will be their victims and their slaves. Even the clearest revelations from heaven, and the sanctifying influences from God, unless vouchsafed to us so daily and momently as to supersede all volition and conscience of ours, would not preclude a virtuous training as an indispensable prerequisite to a happy and honourable life. He takes but a limited view of the influences and the efficacy of Christian Ethics, who does not strive to incorporate and mould them into the habits and sentiments of youth; who as fast as the juvenile mind opens to the perception of wonder and beauty, and of truth, has not exhaustless store of moral wonders and beauties, and truths, ready for transfusion into it.”

Thus speaks the President of the National Convention of the Friends of Education, the man of Education par excellence in North America. He is a Massachusetts man, and is, at the present time, Representative of the Pilgrim State in Congress.

You see the ground that he takes. The enlightenment of the moral and intellectual being by means of a school education, common to all, such is the foundation upon which the New World would erect its dominion, such the means by which the New Man is to be brought forth. Thus far has the popular consciousness advanced in the New World, no farther, at least, with a perfect consciousness.

The consciousness has arisen most clearly and with most strength in the States of New England, the oldest home of the Pilgrims. Unwearied and fearless endeavours for the development of the life of the State and the elevation of the more indigent classes of society, the endeavour to produce a perfectly harmonious human community, characterise the life of these States. The idea of a Christian State, a Christian community, evidently forms the basis of all this. The doctrines of Christ; the honour of labour; the right of all, and the well-being of all; everything for all! are the battle-cries which one hears. The harps of the poets have called forth the moral ideal of man and of society!

From these States I proceeded in the month of March, whilst frost and snow covered the ground, to the Southern States of North America, and spent about three months in the Palmetto States, South Carolina, and Georgia. There the sun was warm. And though I found slavery there, and saw its dark shadow on the sun-bright earth, saw its fetters contract the moral and political development of these States, I still enjoyed my life, as I had not done in those intellectual, upward-striving, restlessly-labouring Northern States. I had more repose, and I was better in health. The soft beauty of the air and the climate at this season, the luxuriance of the vegetation, the beautiful new flowers, the odours, the fruits, the magnificence of the primeval forest along the banks of the Red river; the glow of the fire-flies in the dusk, warm nights; my rambles beneath the gothic arcades of the live-oaks, hung with their long, swaying, masses of moss, a spectacle at once novel and enchanting to an European eye; a certain romantic picturesqueness of life, caused by the contact of the black and the white races on this beautiful, fragrant soil; the peculiar life and temperament of the negroes, their songs, and religious festivals—will you forgive me for being enchanted with these, and for allowing myself, to forget, or to see less strongly the darkness of slavery than these images of light, which the beauty of the South called forth in natural objects and individual man. No poet here has sung the moral ideal of society, but the hundred-tongued bird (Turdus polyglottos), the nightingale of North America, sings in those fragrant forests, and earth with its human beings and its flowers seem bathed in light. Yet, that I was not blinded to the night side, and to the great lie in the life of the South, is proved by my letters home.

The most beautiful moral phenomenon which I saw, however, was the inbreaking light of Christianity among the children of Africa, the endeavours which true Christians, especially in Georgia, are making for the religious instruction of the slaves, and their emancipation and colonisation in Liberia, on the African coast. A vessel goes annually from Savannah to Liberia, laden with emancipated slaves, together with the means for their establishment in that, the original mother-country. But this phenomenon is no more than a little point of light in the gloomy picture of slavery in these States. It is a work of private individuals. The laws of the States are deficient in light and justice, as regards the slave, and are unworthy of a free country and people!

In the month of May I hastened from the glowing South and travelled northward to Pennsylvania, and afterwards to Delaware.

Amid the greatest heats of summer I found myself in the hot cities of Philadelphia and Washington. I interested myself in Philadelphia by becoming acquainted with the Quakers, and the life of the inward light, in good and benevolent institutions. I read the Declaration of Independence, the great charter of liberty of the American people, in the hall where it was signed, and proceeded onward to Washington, to watch the combat in Congress on the subject of the great contested question between the free and the slave States, between the North and the South, relative to the admission of California and New Mexico as free States into the Union. It was carried on with great violence, and the stability of the Union was threatened every day. You know already, through the newspapers, the compromise which was made, and which pacified the strife for a time; for the strife and the danger still exist, secretly or openly, so long as slavery and slaves are to be found within the American Union, and the stronger grows the human and the political consciousness of this country, the more keen will become the struggle to concentrate itself on this point, the fiercer will become the warfare.

I saw great statesmen and heard great speeches in Washington, and I believe that no country on earth can, at this time, present an assembly of greater talent or of more remarkable men than may be met with in the Senate of the United States. Political injustice and political bitterness I found here, as everywhere, on the political battle-field.

That which struck me most in the Congress of the United States, was the mode of representation. You know something of it from books and newspapers; each state, small or large in the Union, sends two senators to Congress. These constitute the Senate, or upper house. The representatives who constitute the second chamber, or lower house, are sent by each separate state, according to the number of its population; the larger the population the more representatives to Congress. Each individual state of the Union governs itself in the same manner by two chambers, a senate and house of representatives, the numbers of which are elected in the state by the citizens of the state; and each state has its own capitol.

This mode of representation brings forth much nationality and much that is picturesque in the living, peculiar life of each State. The Granite State and the Palmetto State, “Old Virginny” and new Wisconsin, Minnesota and Louisiana, each so separate and so peculiar in situation, scenery, climate, products, population, stand forth in Congress as individuals, and take part in the treatment of public questions, which are interesting to the whole human race, according to characteristics which are peculiar to themselves and common to all.

I could not help thinking, during all this, of the representation of Sweden, and its much talked of construction. It occurred to me that there could not be any form more suitable or more calculated to awaken national life and consciousness than one resembling this of the United States. I saw Norrland and Scania, Dalecarlia and Bleking, East Göthland and West Göthland, and all our provinces, peculiar in people, scenery, products, stand forth in the Diet of Sweden, and by means of its senators cast new light upon the condition of the country, its wants, and its hitherto hidden or unavailing sources of prosperity. I saw the north, the south, and the central parts of Sweden, its east and its west, illumined by rays of light which till then had not penetrated them; and the popular consciousness and popular life guided by representatives, worthy through their knowledge and their personal character to represent each individual province in its peculiarities and its life, as a portion of a great whole, of a country, a people with an inheritance as large as the former history of Sweden; with a future which may emulate in human greatness that of the greatest people on the earth.

In the oldest times of Sweden, when the judge of each province appeared at the General Assembly and there, as the wisest and best of the land, conveyed the speech of the common people to the King of Sweden, the most ancient representation of our country, was in idea similar to that now existing in North America.

Such a representation of country and of people seems to me in a high degree conformable to nature and nationality. And what a field is hereby opened to talent and to the orator!

President Taylor died during my stay at Washington, and I was present at the installation of his legal successor, President Fillmore, into his office—the highest in the United States. Nothing could be simpler or more destitute of pomp and show, or more unlike our royal coronations. But—I have nothing to say against these. They present beautiful and picturesque spectacle; and without spectacle people cannot very well live, not even in this country, as is seen by the eagerness with which they everywhere rush to see anything new. What beautiful spectacle did we not behold in Sweden on the coronations of King Carl Johan and King Oscar! I remember in particular at the latter, those young princes, the three sons of Oscar, in their princely attire, when they came forward to take the oath of allegiance to their royal father—no one could have seen more beautiful forms, hardly a more lovely sight!

After having bathed in the foaming sea on the eastern coast, I betook myself into the West. I had seen the North and the South of the Union, now I would see the Great West. I longed for it greatly. I had heard much in the Eastern States, and in the North and in the South also, of that Great West, of its wonderful growth and progress. In what did these consist? I had a great desire to know.

On my journey westward I made acquaintance with the giants of nature, Trenton and Niagara, sailed across the great lakes Ontario, Erie, Michigan, to visit the Swedish and Norwegian settlements on the Mississippi, partook of Swedish hospitality, and saw Swedish roses bloom freshly in the new soil, and beheld a new Scandinavia arising in the wilderness of the West. After that I advanced up the Mississippi, to the region where lie the sources of the Great River; saw glorious mountainous scenery, ruin-like crags, ascending above oak-crowded hills, ruins of the primeval ages when the first-born Titans of nature, the Megatherium, the Mastodon, the Icthyosaurian, wandered alone over the earth, and man as yet did not exist. And he is still an unfrequent guest in these immense wildernesses, where it is yet silent and desolate. It is true that here and there a little log-hut is erected at the foot of the hills on the banks of the Mississippi, and that beside it is seen a little field of Indian corn; that is the first trace of civilisation in these regions. But it is like the print of the one human foot on Robinson Crusoe's uninhabited island. Close beside it are the primeval forests of the wilderness, where only the wild beasts, and Indians in perpetual warfare with each other, have their dwelling. Close beside it are those immense prairies, the flowery deserts of the Mississippi valley, where the grass waves like heavy billows, far, far away towards the distant horizon, untouched by human hands, because here there are no human hands to mow, not one thousandth part. And that which made a deeper impression upon me than Niagara, than anything which I have seen in this hemisphere, or in Europe, are these immeasurable prairie views which belong to the valley of the Mississippi, and which increase in extent the nearer they approach the Great River. It is glorious to behold these ocean-like views, with their waves of sunflowers and their lofty heaving billows of grass beneath the heaven of America, clear and resplendent with sunshine, or through bright expanses of which float masses of cloud. The soul expands itself, and, as it were, opens itself to the gentle, free wind which soughs over the plain, sounding melodiously, as it passes by the wires of the electric telegraph which are stretched across it. Each day of my journey westward was a festival, as I sped along, on wings of steam over the plain, ever and ever towards the golden setting sun, as if speeding into his realms of light!

The Valley of the Mississippi, from Minnesota in the North to Louisiana in the South, between the Alleghany Mountains on the East and the Rocky Mountains on the West, is throughout an immense “Rolling Prairie,” with ridgy heights and hollows of the most fertile soil, richly watered by rivers and lakes. This meadow-land, occupying a high level in the north, and producing northern pines and birches, gradually sinks lower and lower as it approaches the South, until in Louisiana it becomes a swampy morass, where the alligator paddles in the mud, but where also the sugar-cane and the palmetto spring up in the warm air, and orange-groves shed their perfume around. It embraces much variety in soil, climate, and production. But you shall hear what a resident in this great valley, and one well acquainted with it, says of—

“That great central valley of the continent of North America. A valley extending through twenty-one degrees of latitude, and fifteen degrees of longitude, a valley just beginning to smile under the hand of cultivation, and which already invites to its large bosom those masses of people who are pouring out from the overstocked communities of the Old World, and which promises to requite the hand of cultivation by a provision for yet uncounted millions of the human race.

“Nature has gifted the soil in a remarkable degree with vegetable and mineral wealth, has bestowed upon it an exterior suited to every taste, and to the requirements of all, and has intersected it with rivers which are available to every species of industry, and for unlimited commercial transactions, embracing every production of the temperate zone within its northern and southern boundaries.

“This vast meadow, this rich and fertile valley, lying between the sources of the Mississippi on the North and the Gulf of Mexico on the South, the Rocky Mountains on the West, and the Alleghany chain on the east, although but a short time since a wilderness, embraces already eleven entire States, portions of two others, as well as two territories; it is full of the active spirit of labour, and is capable of sustaining half the population of the United States. Embracing within its limits 1,200,000 square miles, or 768,000,000 of acres, its importance and its power can as little be estimated as that of the Union itself. Its influence must become co-extensive with that of the habitable globe, the garden and corn-magazine of which it will become; it must extend its dominion beyond that of the United States, and become the kernel of its empire, the source of its vital power, the diadem of its pride, the basis of the pyramid of its greatness. The Creator of the world has no-where on the face of the earth diffused more affluent elements of human prosperity, nor more visibly made a beautiful and suitable provision for the requirements of humanity. Visit it not with the curse of a feeble government; do not throw impediments in the way of its improvement; keep not back the tide of emigration which is pouring into its bosom; let its broad arms receive the over-population which oppresses the fields of Europe, and the All-good Giver of every good gift will smile from his heaven upon a happy family of more than 275,000,000 of human beings.”

If you should be tempted to smile at this specimen of the great views of the great West, as regards this great Mississippi valley and its great future, still you will not fail to recognise in all a great mind,—a great heart; and for the rest, that here the subject is not exactly a——small thing.

Mr. Allen, the Senator of Missouri, from whose writings on the Trade and Navigation of the Mississippi-valley in the year 1850, I have extracted the above, proceeds to give the statistics of the various Mississippi States, and the trade and increase of their cities, a perfectly practical and statistical treatise, but which produces a certain poetical impression, not only by the wealth of the products which he enumerates, but also by the almost fairy-tale-like increase of cultivation and population of cities, and traffic on the rivers, the wealth of the whole of this region.

The senator sent to Congress by Missouri, Colonel Benton, as well as Mr. Allen, who is eminently a practical man, becomes a poet when he glances at this subject, and exclaims,—“The river-navigation in the Great West is the most wonderful in the world, and possesses, by means of steam, all the properties of ocean-navigation—rapidity, immense distance, low prices, and large freightage, all is there. The steamboat is the ship of the river, and finds on the Mississippi and its tributaries the most perfect theatre for its application and its powers. Wonderful river! United to vast seas at its source, and at its mouth—extending its arms towards the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans—flowing through a stretch of valley which extends from the Mexican Gulf to Hudson's Bay, deriving its earliest waters, not from sterile mountains, but from a plateau of lakes in the centre of the continent, and in connection with the sources of the St. Lawrence, and those rivers which take their course northward to Hudson's Bay; flowing the greater part of its way through the richest meadow-land, conveying on its bosom the productions of every climate, even ice from the frigid zone, which it transports to the great market of the sunny south! Hither are brought the products of the whole world. Such is the Mississippi! And who can calculate the total of its advantages, and the greatness of its future commercial engagements!” But enough of Mississippi eloquence.

And now I must tell you of the growth and progress of the Great West, as they have appeared to me. This growth is principally material as yet, but the spiritual growth follows in its footsteps. Wherever Americans establish themselves the first buildings that they erect, after their dwelling-houses and places of business, are schools and churches; then follow hotels and asylums. The West repeats the cities, the institutions, and the cultivation of the East, and their course is rapid and safe. First you see in the wilderness some loghouses, then neat frame and small stone houses, then elegant villas and cottages, and before many years are over, there stands, as if by magic, a city with its capitol or state's-house, its handsome churches, splendid hotels, academies, and institutions of all kinds; and lectures are delivered, large newspapers printed, government-men are elected, public meetings are convened and resolutions passed on the subject of popular education or intercourse with the whole world; their railroads are made, canals dug, ships built; rivers are traversed, forests are penetrated, mountains are levelled, and amid all this, husbands build beautiful homes for their wives, plant trees and flowers around them, and woman rules as a monarch in the sacred world of home;—thus does the country increase, thus is society arranged, and thus is a state prepared to take its place as an independent member of the great family-group of states. And although two-thirds of the population of the Mississippi-valley consists of Scandinavians, Germans, Irish, and French, yet are they governed by the legislative and formative spirit of the Anglo-Norman.

In certain respects the character of the Western States is different to that of the Eastern. It has more breadth and cosmopolitanism; its people are a people of many nations, and it is asserted that this character betrays itself in a more liberal form of state's-government, as well as by more unprejudiced views, and an easier mode of social life. The various religious sects become more and more amalgamated; the clergy prophesy the advent of a Millennium church, which shall gather all sects into its embrace, and maintain the necessity of secular education, of science, and of polite literature, for the full development of the religious life.

The cities of the West are all of them pre-eminently cosmopolitan cities. The Germans have their quarters there, sometimes half the city, their newspapers and their clubs; the Irish have theirs; and the French theirs. The Mississippi river is the great cosmopolitan which unites all people, which gives a definite purpose to their activity, and determines their abode, and which enables the life of every zone, the inhabitants themselves and their products, to circulate from the one end to the other of this great central valley.

But here ends my admiration and my oration about greatness and growth, for the cities of the West appear to me in no respect larger or better than those of the East. St. Louis is only another New York placed on the western bank of the Mississippi; and San Francisco, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, is merely a third repetition of the first city. The western state which glances forth beautifully in Wisconsin, sinks again in Missouri and Arkansas. The Western portion of the American continent is no better than the Eastern. Will it ever become so?

Will there be anything different in development, in character? will it become higher and nobler? will it approach somewhat nearer to perfection? That kingdom of the Millennium where the lion shall lie down with the lamb, where every man shall sit in the shadow of his own vine and fig-tree, where all people shall meet together in peace, and heaven shall smile over a happy family of 275,000,000 of human beings? is that kingdom of peace, and love, and prosperity to have its place here?

Ah! it has been very painful to me to give up that beautiful dream which gladdened me as I travelled westward and saw the golden sun advance before me onward into that promised land of the West, into whose realms I seemed to be journeying. I no longer have any faith in it. It is gone!

The western land of the New World will not produce anything essentially different from the Eastern. The New Paradise is nowhere to be met with on earth. It will probably never be obtained in this world, and upon this earth!

There will, however, be no deficiency of enlightenment among the people of North America. But it will be merely obtained through the diffusion of general popular education, that great diffusion among all classes of cheap newspapers, in which all subjects are discussed, and which present every vital question of life fully investigated, and all human thoughts to the mind of every man. Life itself in this country, with its States' institutions, constitutes a great public educational establishment, demanding light and knowledge, and in the combat between light and darkness, between God and Mammon, which is going forward here, as well as in the great world's battle, the combat becomes more profound, and more inward than it ever has been before on the earth; it concentrates itself more than ever upon the innermost ground of the will and the conscience, for no one can here henceforth excuse himself by saying:—

“I did not know!”

Hence it becomes to me more and more evident that that which we have to expect from this world's cultivation is not a Utopia, but—a judgment-day, that is to say, a more determined separation between the children of light and the children of darkness, between good and evil; a more rapid approach toward the last crisis.

The new man of the New World stands anew upon the line of separation between the powers of this world, but upon a higher platform, and with increased knowledge; and with a clearer consciousness he is again called upon to choose between them.

The wheel of life rolls with accelerated speed; all the powers of nature and of matter are made subservient to a mighty will. The roads to hell as well as those to heaven are now travelled with the speed of the rail-road and steam. The business of earthly life is hastening on to its close, and I seem to hear those prophetic words on the last page of the Book of Life;—

“The time is at hand.

“He who is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still.

“And behold, I come quickly, and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be.”

What can give preponderance to the scale of the good, and double the number of the righteous and the holy?

In the salutation of that New Year which the hosts of heaven conveyed to earth, upon that great New Year's day, from which the earth dates her centuries, it was sung:—

“Good-will to man!”

What is it that can give force to this good-will to man?

The statesman of America has answered:—

“The Constitution of the State; free political institutions.”

But the Constitution of the United States has received Slavery as a “domestic institution,” and defends it on the ground of the right of these free states.

The learned men and the teachers of America have replied,—

“Schools, and the education of the people in these schools.”

But the popular education of schools speaks merely to the understanding, and cannot do otherwise.

Both constitution and schools are alike perfect in their insufficiency.

They cannot give new life to this good-will. They cannot bring the kingdom of God into the innermost life of every human being.

The power to do this lies in an institution anterior on earth, and in human life, to constitutions or to schools.

Behold there on the banks of the river, amid that open field, or on that green hill, a small human habitation. It is neither large or splendid; but its style of architecture is ornamental, it speaks of taste and convenience; a verandah or piazza formed of lovely trellis-work, up which clamber vines and the fragrant clematis; roses and honeysuckle surround the house, beautiful trees, the natives of all zones are planted around; you see the maple, the elm, and the linden-tree, the oak and the chesnut, the walnut and the robinia, the ailanthus and the sycamore, the cedar and the magnolia, the cypress and the myrtle, and a great number of beautiful, odoriferous flowers; these are so grouped around the house as to give it a sheltered appearance, without impeding the views which are always kept open to allow the inhabitants to behold a beautiful or extensive landscape.

You see the home of North America; the home with its characteristic features, as it is found in all the States, as well on the heights of Massachusetts and Minnesota, as in the fragrant forest-meadows of South Carolina, and on the prairie-land of the far West. And that home frequently deserves the appellation which the home obtained in our old north, the appellation of a sacred room. The fire of the domestic hearth burns in no country brighter, or is tended by purer hands than in the home of the United States. It is a pleasure to me to be able to say this with knowledge and conviction. Nor have I in any country seen the home so generally beautiful in its exterior, so guarded as the apple of the human eye. Neither have I ever seen people who know better how to follow the hint which the Creator gave, when he, having created Adam, placed him, not in a city, but in a garden. Even the American cities seem to have uneasy consciences when they begin to cluster themselves into closely-built masses of houses, and one might say that the houses there hastened to get apart from each other, and though they stand in rows forming streets and markets, they soon make open spaces, and surround themselves with a green sward, and trees and flowers. And the larger this verdant, shady, flowery plot, the more cheerful seems the American home. This is what it enjoys, but it likes to enjoy it in company, and wishes others to be as well off as itself. Order, comfort, embellishment, and an actual luxury of trees and flowers distinguish the home of the New World. And this home is the earliest world of the child, of the new man.

It is to the home, it is to the heart of the home, to the guardian of the sacred fire upon its hearth, that I look for the entrance of the new man upon the theatre of the world, for the obtaining of victory in the combat, which is going on between the two powers of the world. The important thing is to obtain many and brave champions for the good cause: to win the heart, and to give the will a right and strong bias towards the good, that is the chief thing.

I have set my hope upon the weak, upon them who in their weakness are strong. I am certain that it depends upon them. And if they hesitate, or if they are not equal to the greatness of their vocation, then all is lost; for never was their influence of so much importance as in this land of free-will. See what Horace Mann says of the power of any impulse whatever on the unlimited development of the United States.

Can the home, can the American mother give the life, the power which is required?

I must answer the question with No, they cannot do so in their present state of cultivation. And whatever value we may give to exceptional cases, still it is certain that the Home in the New World, as well as in the Old, has not yet come up to its capabilities, and that woman still stands as hitherto, almost isolated in the home and in social life, with no place in the life of fellow-citizenship, without any higher consciousness of the connection which exists between this and the life of home, or of the connection between moral and religious (or the higher political) questions and social questions and political life; without consciousness of her own vocation, of her responsibility as a citizen of the great Christian Commonwealth. How then can she educate citizens; how can she kindle in the heart of the child a sacred zeal for the well-being of the native land; how so enlighten it that it may bring into exercise the same conscientious integrity, the same lofty piety for the conduct of worldly business and political questions, as within the sacred world of home?

The women of the community of Quakers are the only women who are more generally alive to the consciousness of citizenship; but they are merely a small number.

How the great mass may ascend, and by that means enlighten the whole rising generation; how the home may become the greatest and the most beautiful school of society—life's high-school; of all this I have my own thoughts, but I shall not now give them utterance.

It is a joy to me to hear and to see that a presentiment of this is beginning to find its way into the universal mind of this country, both among men and women; and I expect that this higher development will be accomplished on American soil; and I will now conclude this subject with the words of an American author, “The darkness of the mothers casts its shadow over their children; and cloud and darkness must rest upon their descendants until their day begins to dawn over the hills.”

And now let me speak of the American people. The traveller who finds in the United States a great uniformity and resemblance among the people there, has looked merely on the exterior. There is really a great, a too great uniformity in speech, manners, and dress (for a little costume, delicately expressive of individuality belongs to a fully developed character); one travels from one end of the Union to the other and hears the same questions about Jenny Lind; the same phraseology at the commencement of conversation; the same “last thoughts of Weber” on the piano. After this, however, an attentive observer soon remarks that there is no lack of character and individuality; and I have nowhere felt, as here, the distance between one human being and another, nor have seen anywhere so great a difference between man and man, wholly irrespective of caste, rank, uniform, outward circumstances. Here is the Transcendentalist, who treads the earth as though he were a god, who calls upon men to become gods, and from the beauty of his demeanour and his character, we are induced to think more highly of human nature; and here is the Clay-eater, who lives in the forest, without school or church, sometimes without a home, and who impelled by a morbid appetite, eats clay until demoniacally dragged downward by its oppressive power, he finds in it his grave; here is the Spiritualist, who lives on bread and water and fruit, who is nourished by the light, that he may preserve himself pure from the taint of anything earthly, and who not finding Christianity pure enough for his diluted moral atmosphere, adopts that noble socialism which exists merely to communicate benefits and blessings; and beside him is the worshipper of Mammon, who tramples everything spiritual under his feet, and who acknowledges nothing holy, nothing which he cannot and will not sacrifice to his idol—self. Every contrast of temperament, character, disposition, endeavour, which can be imagined to exist in human nature, may here be met with, and may here express itself with a more decided spiritual life.

I have frequently in the New World, and that in very various classes of society, heard it remarked of people, that they belonged to “the best men,” or “the best women;” and it has struck me how well people in general seem to understand the phrase, and how much they are agreed upon it. I have found also that these best men and women are commonly distinguished by intelligence, kindness, and active human-love; and I do not believe that so much is done in any country by private individuals for the public as in this, in particular in the Free States. The feeling for the public weal, for the improvement of the country and the people at large, for the elevation of humanity, can scarcely be more living and active anywhere than it is here. The people of the United States have a warm heart, and that which gives this people their eternal prerogative of progress is their imitation of Christ;—I say the people of the United States, and I maintain the assertion. Remove slavery from its southern States (and it will be removed one of these days; already it is undermined by Christianity and by migration from the North), and you will find there the same heart and the same spirit.

The right of the people of North America to be considered as one people, and as a peculiar people among the nations of the earth, is founded upon the character of its first emigrant-colonies, they who were peculiarly the creators of the society of the New World, and who infused their spirit into it. They were in part heroes of the faith, as Puritans, Huguenots, and Herrnhuters, in part warm-hearted souls, such as Fox, Penn, Oglethorpe, who had found their places in the Old World too circumscribed for them, and who passed over to the New World, there to establish their fraternal associations, and to create a more beautiful humanity. The first settlers of America belonged to the strongest and the best portions of the European population.

I will now tell you something about those best men and women of America with whom I have become acquainted during my pilgrimage through the land; about those men so simple, so gentle, but yet so strong without any pretension, so manly in their activity as citizens, husbands, fathers, friends; of those women, so kind, so motherly, so gentle in manner, so stedfast in principle, resting in the truth like flowers in the sunshine; of those homes, those happy, beautiful homes, in which I have been a happy guest, for days, and weeks, and months. For my life in America has been, and is a journey of familiar visits, to homes which have opened themselves to me in every State throughout America, and where I have lived, not as a stranger, but as a sister with brothers and sisters, conversing openly with them on all subjects, as people may converse in heaven. I there met with more than I have words to tell, of true Christian life, of the love of truth, of kindness, of minds earnest for and receptive of everything which is great and good in humanity. And my acquaintance with some beautiful, peculiar characters will serve as a guide to my soul for ever. Nor have I anywhere met with more hospitality, or with a more abounding cordiality. And if I were to seek for one expression which would portray the peculiar character of the people of the New World, I could not find any other than that of beautiful human beings.

When I imagine to myself a Millennium in the valley of the Mississippi, a resting point in the history of the earth, when Satan is bound, and love, beauty, and joy, and the fulness of love become the portion of all, I then behold there men and women, such as my friends; homes such as their homes; and see these mighty rivers bearing from these flowery prairies, with their ocean-like views, and from these golden fields of maize, all the treasures of earth to all mankind, and mild, fresh winds blow over it, and the clear sun shines! Such was the glorious home of the Hesperides!

It is not at all difficult to predict that the valley of the Mississippi, in consequence of the variety of nations by which it is populated, and from the variety in its scenery and climate, will at a future time produce a popular life of a totally new kind, with infinite varieties of life and temperament, a wholly new aspect of human society on earth. But what appearance will the apex of the pyramid present, the basis of which is now being formed? One thing appears to me certain; the inhabitants of the Mississippi Valley must become citizens of the world—the universal mankind, par excellence.

Let me attempt to delineate some features of that common theatre of the great drama of which the performance has now commenced, (a drama which embraces a thousand years in one act) and of the dramatis personæ, the groups of which fill the stage: for they who in the life of the United States have seen merely uniformity or confusion have not looked into it, or have seen it merely with a dull vision. Nothing strikes me so much in this world's and these States' formation, as a broad, dramatic character.

First behold its theatre! You see two immense stretches of valley between three chains of mountains, running from the snowy north to the glowing south, the Alleghany, the Rocky Mountains, and Sierra Nevada, or the Snowy Mountains, which last chain is continued into central America, and into the Cordilleras and Andes of South America; east and west of these the land descends towards the two great seas of the world.

The country lying between the mountains and towards the seas is everywhere remarkable for its fertility, and is intersected by navigable rivers and lakes. No country is so well watered as North America, or affords more available opportunity for the circulation of life; nor does any country afford such free access to the beauties, the climates, and productions of every zone.

I behold advancing on this great stage various distinct groups of States, of various temperaments and conditions of life, united by community of customs, language and States'-government, as well as by outward and inward vital circulation. Here are the States of New England, with their Puritan descendants, legislating, educating, restless Vikings and heroes of peace. The natural scenery of these States reminds me of our Scandinavian north. Massachusetts has the romantic lakes and broken landscape of Sweden. New Hampshire the rocky valleys and white mountains of Norway.

New York and Pensylvania, the Emperor and the Quaker States, with a milder climate, emulate each other in wealth of population and in beauties of nature. Rivers and valleys become wider; commercial life grows like a giant.

Virginia and the Carolinas, as well as Georgia and Florida, form in the South another group of States, peopled by the sons of the Cavaliers, with their planters and slaves, with a strong conservative life, and much peculiar beauty, but devoid of higher social aspiration. These Northern and Southern States lie between the Alleghany mountains, which are contained within them, and the ocean on the east. On the other side of the mountains you find the Valley of the Mississippi and the Mississippi States; to the north the young and free, with free institutions, and an increasing population of Germans and Scandinavians, increasing still more in light and the life of freedom; to the south the Slave States, with two large cities, and in these a showy civilisation, but for the rest much wilderness and much rudeness still, which all their cotton and all their sugar are not able to conceal. West of the Mississippi the distinction between the Northern and Southern States is still continued. The labour of the cultivator has here just commenced. You still meet with the fires and the wigwams of the Indians, around the sources of the Mississippi in the North; and along the Red River in Arkansas and Louisiana, morasses and heathenism.

Westward of these Mississippi States is Texas, with Rio Grande or Rio Bravo as its boundary on the west, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south, an immense territory, upon the fertile banks of whose rivers the flood of emigration is now beginning to settle. The upper portion of Texas elevates itself by degrees into a mountain-range, and unites itself on the north-east, to the latest conquest of the United States, New Mexico, which has beautiful terminal valleys on the east, but which extends itself westward into the Rocky Mountains, and becomes petrified in their arms.

Between these States and the Mississippi States lies the great hunting-ground of the Indians, that mystic Nebraska, a great portion of which, according to what I have heard, is a monotonous stepp-land, which extends northward as far as Canada. The wild Missouri whirls through it with a thousand angular windings; there are also great prairies and great rivers, herds of buffaloes, and tribes of warlike Indians. In one portion of this immense region, between Missouri and Texas has sprung up a peaceful, flourishing, Indian community, which ought, at some future time, to be admitted into the Great Union as an independent Christian Indian State. This would be a more beautiful conquest for the people of North America than their acquisition of New Mexico!

We have now reached the Rocky Mountains, an irregular, bold rock-formation, more remarkable for their fantastic shapes and masses, than for their height. Westward of these extend the so-called Pacific States, Oregon, as yet merely an immense territory; and California, in the highest boundaries of which, or the Upper California, the Mormon State, Deseret or Utah, flourishes upon the fertile banks of the Great Salt Lake, Christian in faith and confession, hierarchical in their form of government, and in certain respects a mystery to their contemporaries.

These States, lying along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, and broken up by the Sierra Nevada Mountains, are possessed of every climate, and of every natural production which can be found from the region of snow to the heat of the tropics. Oregon, in particular, abounds in salmon and forests; California, as all the world knows, in gold.

And now we are on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and here let us rest awhile, for I confess to being weary with our long ramble. The North Americans will not rest till they have possessed themselves of the Southern portion of their hemisphere; already have they reached Panama with their railroads, canals, warehouses, homes, churches, and schools. And they say quite calmly, when speaking of the country between Panama and the Rio Grande, that is to say, the whole of Central Mexico, “When this is ours, then, &c.”

I shall not tell you anything about the Constitution of these States, nor of their institutions as individual, independent States; nor of their relation to one Federal government. You have long known much better than I can describe it, that wonderful States'-government, which affords such a boundless field and so strong an impulse to free competition and development, not merely for individuals, but for society and states. This constitutional form of government seems to me, more than anything else, to prove that the destiny of a people is pre-ordained by the hand of Providence before they themselves comprehend it. They must accomplish His plans, and the question as regards them is merely the doing it well or ill.

It is evident that the founders of the American republic, Washington and his men, did not take a philosophical review of the work which they had accomplished in it; that they had no presentiment of the future of which they had laid the foundation; they followed the beckoning hand of necessity; they did that which they must do; but they did not know what it was which they had done: and for a long time the States grew, as the lilies of the field in God's sunshine, without knowing how or for what purpose!

It was not until long afterwards that a portion of them awoke to a consciousness of the sublime mission which they are called upon to perform,—the emancipation of humanity socially and politically.

The violent movement and rotation in public life, the perpetual appointment of officers to every department of government, and their deposition again in a short time, at most in four years, has made all Europe shake its head; and I suppose that all Asia would, if it could, shrug its shoulders in such a way as to cause the wall of China to quake. And it is not without reason that many wise men in this country have shaken their heads thoughtfully, at some application of the rotation-principle which has occurred here and there: thus, for example, I heard serious complaints made in the young Mississippi States, of the facility with which a right to vote was obtained by the emigrants who came there, even though they may be from the rudest and most ignorant population of Europe. A year's residence in a State gives a right to vote at the election of the officers of that State, which occurs annually,—hence the election of low, and truthless agitators, men everyway unfit for their office; hence the difficulty for the best men to get into the government, because the best men scorn to avail themselves of the means which men of low principles will condescend to, in order to become the popular candidate, or to maintain themselves in a post which they have once obtained.

It is, however, difficult for me to regard this otherwise than as a transition-point in the great popular education which is now going on; and Wisconsin in particular, seems to have clearly and strongly comprehended the right mode of meeting the danger, and by means of large and excellent educational institutions, both for boys and girls, to be preparing a bright future for the State.

I was travelling in the North-Western Mississippi States, just at the time when the annual election of State's-officers was going on. These elections, and the scenes to which they gave rise, struck me as a sort of political game or race; and the spirit which impels these gamblers and wrestlers on this scene of action, is often little better than that of the ordinary gambling-houses. The gambling and rival parties, Whigs and Democrats, are very little ashamed of puffing their candidate, or depreciating that of the opposite party. Newspapers are full of abuse and lies; outcries of treachery and of danger to the father-land; flags are displayed, and great placards are posted in the streets with words of warning or exhortation, “Beware of the Whigs!” “The Democrats are Incendiaries!” “Vote for the Whigs, the true friends of our country!” “Vote for the Democrats the preservers of popular rights!” and so on. The nearer the day of election approaches the stronger becomes the agitation, the more violent the cry, the personal abuse, and the threats. One might imagine that the torch of discord was about to be lighted in every city, that the Union was at the point of being torn to shreds, and that every citizen was in danger of being attacked by his neighbour. During all this I could not but think of two men whom I had seen on the banks of the Hudson, each enlisting passengers for his steam-boat, and abusing that of his rival, hurling angry words and threatening glances at each other, whilst their lips often seemed to curl into a smile when they had said anything magnificently bad of the other. I remember my asking Mr. Downing as I witnessed this scene, what was the meaning of it? and he replied with a smile, “It means nothing. Here is an opposition between two steamers, and these men act this part every day.”

Much of the great political agitation here during the time of the elections has about the same degree of meaning; the candidates and their soldiers fix bayonets in their glances and their words; the ballot-box is put in motion; everything becomes silent; the votes are thrown in amid the utmost order; a pause ensues; the ballot-box is emptied, the votes are read aloud and counted; the election is declared. The men of office are elected for one year or for two; the Governor of some States is elected for four years, as is the case with the President of the United States; in others merely for two, in others again for one, and all is at an end; nobody makes any objection, and all go quietly to their own homes, ready to obey the new magistracy, and to console themselves as Jacob Faithful did, with “better luck another time!” Rockets ascend in the quiet evening in honour of the successful candidate, and the whole city goes to bed and sleeps soundly.

It has occurred to me that this electioneering agitation in which people exercise their minds and their oratorical powers—or at all events their ability to talk, and to write, is like a safety-valve in the steamboat, by which any excess of steam may escape to fill the air with vapour; there is not a doubt in the meantime but that the steam-power within the States'-machine, might be applied to a better purpose; and it is difficult for me to believe that the people of the United States will not henceforth endeavour to obtain a little more stability in their mode of government, will not give their rulers a longer period, in which each can attend to his own business more thoroughly, and thus afford an ampler sphere for real talent and less for demagogues.

But even as it is, it will be seen that no talent or character of eminence runs any risk in the United States of not finding an opportunity for the exercise of all its powers. The best proof of this is indeed the number of distinguished statesmen, judges or clergymen, who year after year continue to adorn the Senate of the country, the judge's seat and the pulpit, and of whom the people are as proud as monarchical realms of their kings and heroes. It is generally mediocre, or talent of an imperfect kind, which rushes into this violent rotation, and which goes up and down, until it has acquired sufficient strength and completeness to remain stable at some one point.

There is one principle of movement in the United States which seems to me like a creative, or at all events a power of organisation; this is the movement of association. The association, founded already in the Federal Government of the States—an association of States, governed by a general principle or constitution—exists as a fundamental feature of popular life. This people associate as easily as they breathe.

Whenever any subject or question of interest arises in society which demands public sympathy or co-operation, a “convention” is immediately called to take it into consideration. And immediately, from all ends of the city or the State, or from every State in the Union, all who feel an interest in the subject or question fly upon the wings of steam to the appointed place of meeting and at the appointed hour. The hotels and boarding-houses of the city are rapidly filled; they come together in the great hall of assembly, they shake hands, they become acquainted with one another, they make speeches, they vote, they carry their resolutions. And forth, upon the wings of a thousand daily papers, flies that which the meeting or the convention has resolved. These resolutions may, sometimes also, be merely the expression of opinion,—as, for example, they hold “Indignation meetings,” on occasions when they wish to express their strong disapprobation either of public men, or of public transactions. It is always admirable with what readiness, with what savoir faire, this people advances onward in self-government, and how determinedly and rapidly it proceeds from “proposed” to “resolved.”^[2]

In the populous Free States, the meetings of the members of different trades and professions, as well as of agriculture, belong to the ordinary occurrences of the day. Thus one now hears of Industrial Congresses in New York State, where the trades-brethren of certain kindred occupations meet every month; and “agricultural fairs” are already held in the young States of Michigan and Illinois, where the agriculturists of the State exhibit the rich products of the country. Cincinnati as well as New York and the great trading towns which lie between them, Pittsburg, Harrisburg, and many others, have their mechanical and mercantile associations, their meeting-houses, libraries, assembly-rooms, and guilds on a large scale. And these kindred associations are all in connection with each other. As, for instance, an artisan who cannot get work in the Eastern States is passed on by means of these associations to their members in the Western States, where there is abundance of work for all hands.

Life in this country need never stand still nor stagnate. The dangers lie in another direction. But this free association is evidently an organising and conservative principle of life called forth to give law and centralisation to the floating atoms, to the disintegrated elements.

Among the various dramatic assemblies and scenes in which human-nature and popular life exhibit themselves on the soil of the New World, I may mention those small communities of socialists, who aim at producing a regenerated world (but who are all in a dwindling condition, excepting the Shaker-community, which has no children); those dancing Shakers; those silent Quaker meetings; those many-tongued anti-slavery meetings; those religious festivals, camp-meetings at night in the woods, and scenes of baptism by the rivers, beautiful and affecting, especially where they have reference to the children of Africa. At the Conventions for the Rights of Women, in which women as well as men stand forth and speak for the civil rights of woman, I have not as yet been present, but I intend to embrace the first opportunity of being so. These first originated in Ohio, but are just now being held in the States of New England—abused and calumniated by many, attended and supported by many also. These furnish and afford a striking scene in the great drama which is now being performed. For all that lives fettered in Europe is brought forward in America, acquires form, builds a church, combines in union, takes a name, speaks out, and obtains a hearing, a time of trial, an examination, and—judgment is passed, that is to say, time and opportunity to rise or to fall, according to its measure and its power.

Scenes also of the life of the Indians and the negroes in this country belong to the dramatic and picturesque life of America. The wild dances of the former on the prairies of the West, the gentle songs of the latter in the fragrant forests, belong to the theatre of the New World.

The government of America has not a little to reproach herself with as regards her treatment of the Indians. Latterly, however, this treatment has become more just and mild. The land is purchased from the Indians; they are subjected by gentle means and by money; prohibitions are made against the introduction of intoxicating liquors among them, and the missionary is encouraged in his labour of introducing Christianity and civilisation. But this does not do much. The Red men, who consider themselves the most successful creation of the Great Spirit, retire backward into the desert and die. Merely a small number of them have passed over to the faith, the manners, and the mode of government of the whites.

The progress of Christianity is much more considerable among the negro race. The doctrine of the Saviour comes to the negro slaves as their most inward need, and as the accomplishment of the wishes of their souls. They themselves enunciate it with the purest joy. Their ardent, sensitive being, obtains from this its most beautiful transfiguration. The ability of these people for prayer is something peculiar and quite unusual. Their prayers burst forth into flame as they ascend to heaven. The children of the warm sun will yet teach us, by their prayers, the might of prayer.

During the conflict which is going forward in the Free States for the abolition of slavery, the friends of the slave have divided themselves into two camps. The one demands immediate emancipation and their general education; the other, gradual emancipation and the colonisation of the Free Negroes on the coast of Africa. The State of Ohio has adopted this latter mode, and has lately made an important purchase of land on the coast of Africa, in order to colonise there an African Ohio of free negroes.

Not a little is done in the free states for the instruction and elevation of the negroes; but still I cannot convince myself that the Americans are doing this in the best way. They endeavour to form this human race so different to themselves, according to their own methods and institutions. When I see those frolicsome negro children set down in their schools like white children on benches and before desks, I am quite distressed. I am convinced that these children ought to learn their lessons standing, or dancing, and amid games and songs, and that their divine worship ought to be conducted with singing and dancing: and I will answer for it, that their songs and dances would have more life, beauty, and intelligence in them than those of the Shaker-community. But who shall teach them thus? None but a negro can teach the negroes, and only one of their own people can become the deliverer of the people in the highest sense.

But this captive Israel yet waits for its Moses.

That however which very much prevents the redemption of this people from captivity, is their own want of national spirit. Already split into tribes in Africa, where they were at war, and where they enslaved one another, it is difficult to take hold of any more widely extended interests than those of family and local society. I have spoken with many free men of this people in good circumstances here, also with some young mulattoes who have studied and taken degrees at the Oberlin Institution in this State, and I have found them particularly luke-warm towards the interests of their captive brethren, and especially so as regards colonisation in Liberia. Frederick Douglas is as yet the only strong champion among them for their own people.

But if anything can awake within them a more comprehensive feeling for the whole people, it is assuredly that common slavery on the soil of America, and perhaps more than anything else at this moment, the bill which allows the recapture of fugitive slaves. I awoke to this thought to-day during a visit to a free negro church, where I had no occasion to lament any want of interest in the national affairs, either in the negro preacher or the congregation.

I had in the forenoon visited a negro Baptist church belonging to the Episcopal creed. There were but few present, and they of the negro aristocracy of the city. The mode of conducting the divine service was quiet, very proper, and a little tedious. The hymns were beautifully and exquisitely sung. The sermon, which treated of “Love without dissimulation; how hard to win, how impossible without the influence of God and the communication of his power,” was excellent. The preacher was a fair Mulatto, with the features and demeanour of the white race, a man of very good intellect and conversational power, with whom I had become already acquainted in my Cincinnati home.

In the afternoon I went to the African Methodist Church in Cincinnati, which is situated in the African quarter. In this district live the greater number of the free-coloured people of the city; and the quarter bears the traces thereof. The streets and the houses have, it is true, the Anglo-American regularity, but broken windows and rags hanging from them, a certain neglected, disorderly aspect, both of houses and streets, testified of negro management. I found in the African church African ardour and African life. The church was full to overflowing, and the congregation sang their own hymns. The singing ascended and poured forth like a melodious torrent; and the heads, feet, and elbows of the congregation moved all in unison with it, amid evident enchantment and delight in the singing, which was in itself exquisitely pure and full of melodious life.

The hymns and psalms which the negroes have themselves composed, have a peculiar, naïve character, child-like, full of imagery and life. Here is a specimen of one of their popular church hymns.

“	What ship is this that's landed at the shore?
	Oh, glory hallelujah!
	It's the old ship of Zion, hallelujah,
	It's the old ship of Zion, hallelujah.
	Is the mast all sure, and the timber all sound?
	Oh, glory hallelujah!
	She's built of gospel timber, hallelujah,
	She's built, &c.
“	What kind of men does she have on board?
	Oh, glory hallelujah!
	They're all true-hearted soldiers, hallelujah.
	They're all, &c.
“	What kind of Captain does she have on board?
	Oh, glory hallelujah!
	King Jesus is the Captain, hallelujah,
	King Jesus, &c.
“	Do you think she will be able to land us on the shore?
	Oh, glory hallelujah!
	I think she will be able, hallelujah!
	I think, &c.
“	She has landed over thousands, and can land as many more.
	Oh, glory hallelujah! &c., &c.”

After the singing of the hymns, which was not led by any organ or musical instrument whatever, but which arose like burning melodious sighs from the breasts of the congregation, the preacher mounted the pulpit. He was a very black negro, young, with a very retreating forehead, and the lower portion of the countenance protruding; upon the whole not at all good-looking. But when he began to speak, the congregation hung upon his words, and I could not but admire his flowing eloquence. He admonished the assembly to reflect on the present need of their brethren, to pray for the fugitive slaves who must now in great multitudes leave their acquired homes, and seek a shelter out of the country against legal violence and legal injustice. He exhorted them also to pray for that nation which, in its blindness, could pass such laws and thus oppress the innocent! This exhortation was received with deep groans and lamenting cries.

After this the preacher drew a picture of the death of “Sister Bryant,” and related the history of her beautiful Christian devotion, and applied to her the words of the Book of Revelations, of those “who come out of great afflictions.” The intention of suffering on earth, the glorious group of the children of suffering in their release and with a song of thanksgiving as represented in so divine and grand a manner in the pages of Scripture, were placed by the negro-preacher in the light as of noonday, and as I had never before heard from the lips of any ordinary minister. After this the preacher nearly lost himself in the prayer for the sorrowing widower and his children, and their “little blossoming souls.” Then came the sermon proper.

The preacher proposed to the congregation the question, “Is God with us?”—“I speak of our nation, my brethren,” said he, “I regard our nationality. Let us examine the matter.” And with this he drew a very ingenious parallel between the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt, and the negroes in America, and those trials by which Providence evinced His especial solicitude about the chosen people. After having represented the fate of the Israelites under Pharoah and Moses he went on to contemplate the fate of the negro-people.

“How shall we know that God is with us? Let us look at the question thus.”

He then boldly sketched out a picture of an enslaved people, as oppressed in every way, but not the less “increasing in numbers and improving themselves, purchasing their own freedom from slavery (cries of yes! yes! Oh, glory! throughout the church); purchasing land (shouts of joy); ever more and more land (increasing shouts); buying houses, large houses, larger and still larger houses (increasing jubilation and stamping of feet); building churches (still louder cries); still more and larger churches (louder and still louder cries, movement, stamping of feet and clapping of hands); the people increasing still in number, in property, in prosperity, and in understanding, so that the rulers of the land began to be terrified, and to say, ‘They are becoming too strong for us; let us send them over to Liberia!’ (Violent fermentation and excitement.) This then will show us, my brethren, that God is with us. Let us not forsake Him; for He will lead us out of captivity, and make of us a great people!” (extreme delight and joy with the cry of Amen! yes, yes! oh, glory! and so on.) The whole congregation was for several minutes like a stormy sea. The preacher's address had been a rushing tempest of natural eloquence. I doubt, however, whether his patriotism extended much beyond the moment of inspiration and of his pulpit; he was not a new Moses. Old Moses was slow of speech; he was a man of action.

This preacher was, however, the first negro from whom I had heard any distinct sentiment of nationality. The bill against fugitive slaves must mind what it is about, and what it may lead to!

With regard to the negro-preacher's last outbreak against Liberia, it may be remarked that the negroes of Ohio are in general opposed to colonisation in Africa, and look with suspicion upon the endeavours of the whites in this direction. Unfortunately the climate of Liberia is said to be so unhealthy from the constant rains that there seems to be some ground for the suspicion. It is a real misfortune for the youthful colony, which otherwise is favoured by the unbounded fertility of the country around, and by its affluence in valuable tropical growth. The colony of Liberia however increases, although not rapidly, in population and trade, governed by rulers of its own election, and with churches, school-houses, printing-presses, warehouses, and shops. Three cities are already founded there.

Commodore Perry in his account of the condition of the American-African colony, describes the settlement at Monovia as especially promising for trade, and that at Cape Palms for agriculture. For the rest, he describes the negroes of the colony as devoted to small trade rather than to agriculture. And this seems to be the bias of the negroes in all the native colonies along the coast. “Some of the colonists,” says he, “have become wealthy through this small trade, whilst others again obtain merely a sufficient maintenance.”

“But,” adds the Commodore, “it is pleasant to see the comforts with which a great number of these people have surrounded themselves; many of them enjoy conveniences of life which were unknown to the first settlers in North America. Want seems not to exist among them. If some of them suffer, it must be in consequence of their own laziness.

“I had at Cape Palms an opportunity of seeing the small farms or clearings of the colonists. These exhibited considerable labour, and were beginning by degrees to assume the appearance of well cultivated fields. The roads through the whole of this settlement were remarkably good when the youth of the colony and its small means were taken into consideration.

“At all the various settlements the laws were faithfully observed; the morals of the people were good, and the community seemed to be animated by a strong religious sentiment.

“Governor Roberts of Liberia, a fair Mulatto, and Russwurm of Cape Palms, are clever and estimable men; and we have in these two individuals unanswerable proofs of the capacity of the coloured people for self-government.

“The climate of Western Africa cannot be considered as unwholesome to coloured colonists. Every one must pass through the acclimating fever, but now that more convenient dwellings are erected, so that the sick may be properly attended to, the mortality has considerably decreased. Once well through this sickness the colonist finds the climate and the air suitable to his constitution; not so the white man. The residence of a few years on this coast is certain death to him.

“The experiment of the United States to found a colony upon this coast for the free coloured people has succeeded beyond expectation, and I venture to predict that the descendants of the present colonists are destined to become a wise and powerful people.”

A white American physician who spent six years in Liberia, states that the imports of the young Negro State amount to 120,000 dollars annually, and their exports to nearly the same sum. “The trade of our country with Africa,” writes an American this year (1850), “is becoming daily of more importance.”

The Colony of Liberia is said to number at the present time upwards of 10,000 persons. The English colony at Sierra Leone, older and more important, upwards of 40,000.

It thus appears as if Liberia and Sierra Leone would become the nurseries from which the new civilisation and the more beautiful future of Africa would proceed: I cannot believe but that these plants from a foreign land must before that time undergo a metamorphosis—must become more African.

If I had time and money enough, I would go over to Liberia for twelve months. But where would I not go to, and what would I not see, which is significant in nature or in popular life over the whole world? I would make the whole earth my own. Why is life so short!

Cincinnati, Nov. 29th. 

I yesterday celebrated here Thanksgiving Day, one of the few national festivals of the New World,—a festival whick ought to be observed by all nations as one of the most worthy of a noble and clear-eyed humanity. The festival was celebrated on a week-day, and converted it into a sabbath. I attended in the forenoon in a Baptist Church. The minister, a man of talent, took as the subject of his discourse, after thanksgiving for both public and private benefits which were enumerated, the subject of slavery in the United States. He had been upbraided as timid in expressing himself on this subject, he now therefore wished to clear himself from suspicion, and to show that he had no fear. He condemned slavery and lamented its introduction into America, but he condemned also the proceedings of the abolitionists. They had involved the affair, they had rendered emancipation impossible in America. The preacher considered that slavery in America had never less prospect of abolition than at the present time. “Never had the Southern States grasped the chain of slavery with a firmer hand. Threats and defiance have been the offspring of threats and defiance.” The hope of the speaker lay in the devotion of the African people to America, and in the colonisation of Christianised Negro Slaves on the coast of Africa, and these he considered to be the only available means for the gradual abolition of slavery. After some interesting statements regarding the products of Africa and the advantage which free African labour must have over slave-labour, together with the increasing resources of Liberia, he presented a poetically beautiful view of the possible future of the Ethiopic race in its mother country, this hot, mystic, Africa.

I had followed the preacher with the deepest interest. His concluding remarks awoke a vision within my soul.

I beheld that “hot, mystic Africa,” with its Mountains of the Moon, its Nile, its pyramids, and its tropical forests swarming with animal life and the luxuriance of the vegetable kingdom, awake to a new existence. I beheld Asia, with its old, primeval wisdom, its old, half-petrified kingdoms; Europe with its manifold kingdoms and people stamped with their living peculiarities of character; I beheld America, the youngest, but ere long the most powerful, of earth's grown up daughters, with her new men born from the morning dew of a new life; I beheld Australia, with its colonies of prodigal but forgiven sons again received into the father's house. I beheld them all raise themselves anew, in the name of the Prince of Peace, and all unite, as never before on the face of the earth, in songs of praise at the Divine Nativity, “Glory to God in the Highest; on earth peace and good-will to man!”

A stream of melodious sound burst through the church, bearing with it the words of the song of praise. I recognised that mighty, magnificent chorus. I had heard it before, but I knew not where. It seemed to me that it was the soul of every song of praise on earth.

It was that Swedish Mass, “Praise and thank the Lord,” &c., which was sung by the choir of the church. I had to thank a countryman of mine, the director of the choir of this church, for this pleasure. When the congregation arose and sang Hallelujah in the song of my native land, sang it for my people, and for all people on earth, it was glorious!—But I then could not sing.

I can never celebrate a more beautiful thanksgiving festival. And never shall I forget this moment.

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I must yet add a few words about the State and the city in which I am a happy guest. The wealthy, beautiful Ohio is placed like the heart in that great group of States between the Eastern Ocean and the Mississippi. And although this State is one of the youngest in the Union, I feel that a more central life stirs here than in any of the States which I have hitherto visited. It seems to me as if people here wished with unprejudiced minds to do justice to all powers and tendencies of humanity, and to allow every one his proper share of the heart's life and blood. Among the facts of this class I place the Medical College here, under the direction of an intellectual young man, Dr. J. Buchanan, and in which Alloeopathy and Homœopathy, Hydropathy, and the so-called Botanical Medicine, are admitted and studied as natural methods in nature's sanitary-code, and all as serviceable in certain diseases and circumstances; all as necessary in a comprehensive system of study of health and disease. Buchanan makes man the measure of the universe and its centre. He sees the centre of man in the human brain, and from that point strikes out an infinite, glorious future, in which all those infinite possibilities now slumbering within it, will develope themselves into life and harmony on earth and in the universe. Amid severe daily labour and many anxieties he reposes in this view, as in the sabbath-festival of his spirit.

Among the facts of this class I place Oberlin College, where the youth of coloured as well as white people, both boys and girls, study, and take degrees in all those branches of knowledge which are taught in the American academies.

Among these I place the works and opinions of many distinguished men, who are occupied in organising a more complete and comprehensive scheme of education for women as well as for men.

Cincinnati, the Queen of the West, which has her throne upon the banks of the beautiful river (Ohio), with a background of encircling hills, like a queen surrounded by her court ladies, is a cosmopolitan city, and embraces in her bosom people of all nations, and of all religious sects. Germans constitute a considerable portion of the population of the city, which now amounts to 120,000 souls. The Germans live here as in their old Germany. They are gemüthlich, drink beer, practise music, and still ponder here “über die Weltgeschichte.” I have lately read a little book with this title by a Dr. Pulte, who resides here. The Queen of the West allows all her subjects to ponder, talk, and write as best pleases them. She is the most liberal queen in the world.

Schools, however, in Ohio are not equal to those of the North-Eastern States; but there is an earnest endeavour at work for their improvement. When I visited one of the district boys' schools of Cincinnati, it was said to me, as I entered one of the halls of the school, “this is our best-regulated room; here it is never necessary to use corporal punishment.”

I entered, and found a pale young woman, of a mild aspect, standing in the teacher's seat, controlling with gentle power from thirty to forty wild young republicans. The elementary schools for boys, as well as for girls, are under the management of women. They are considered as more skilful than men in the training of early youth. They receive a salary of from three to five hundred dollars annually, according to the ability which they show for this employment. It was with great pleasure that I heard a lesson by which these lesser children were taught to treat animals with justice and kindness. They repeated from memory stories in which cruelty to animals had been punished in some striking manner. I am not aware whether we have such lessons in our schools; but I know well enough that they are needed.

Among the scientific institutions of Cincinnati, I perceive that the observatory owes its existence to the genius and zeal of a private man, Professor O. M. Mitchell. The history of the origin of this beautiful observatory, which is one of the highest class, deserves to be known, in order to show in its true light what the determination and enthusiasm of an individual may achieve in the New World, and in what way he can interest the mass of the people for a science which he desires to make popular. It is the triumph of genius, and, at the same time, of patience and of persevering determination. It is a great commendation of the man, and of the masses also. But the history of all this would be too long.

The arts have also begun to reveal themselves in Cincinnati; but, as yet, it is only a beginning.—The city itself is hardly sixty years old. There is an Art-union here, the exhibition of which I visited twice. There were some good pictures. None, however, took so much hold on my memory as a humorous little painting representing three huge swine very naturally. They were sitting upon their hams, below a rock, on which was inscribed “lard-oil;” and they were gazing very attentively at one of their brethren, who was attacking a dead whale, which had been cast upon the shore hard by. Beyond lay the great ocean. This little humorously-conceived and well-painted piece hung between two pictures, the subjects of which were the “Loves of the Angels;”—etherial figures floating forth over clear lakes, and meeting each other on verdant flowery shores. A greater contrast than between those poetical pictures and the prose of the former could scarcely have been imagined. Pity only that the execution of these did not equal that of the other. Our Södermark would have given the prize to the latter. So should I; but yet I would not have had the picture in my room, nor yet the angel-poems, with all their bright anticipations.

The fine arts have hitherto received but little attention in the United States; it may be that there is but little distinguished talent, or, which I suspect is the case, that the people in general are deficient in artistic feeling. I have heard a deal said of an American painter, named Alston, who is considered one of the greatest painters, and I have heard his works very highly praised and admired; yet, nevertheless, I read in one of the letters of the noble old Channing these words: “As long as I see such men as Alston in want of the necessaries of life, I feel that I have no right to possess its superfluities.”

And I have heard my friends, the S.'s, of New York, speak of a young landscape painter of that city, a man of estimable character, and possessed of unmistakeable talent, who not long since, consulting with his young wife as to the best mode of managing for themselves and their two little ones, came to the agreement that the best mode of all would be for them—to die! Good God! And that in this young, wealthy New World! And yet the pictures of this young artist are of the class which I would gladly see in every American home. And thus encouraged, he would soon become for America what our Fahlkranz is to us, a poet in colours of the peculiar natural scenery of his country!

Sculpture has, in the United States, a much greater hope of successful progress; and in Hiram Powers they have produced an artist of the highest class, not so much as a creative genius, as for feeling and execution. His Proserpine, his listening Fisher-Boy, his Greek Slave, have been admired in old Italy. The expression so refined, and so full of soul, is as admirable in his works as the perfected beauty of the form. His creations seem to live.

Hiram Powers was born in Cincinnati, and worked there as a poor boy in the shop of a watchmaker. Here he even then showed his peculiar genius. Some of the affluent men of the city took charge of the promising boy, and furnished him with the means of studying and of travelling. Foremost among these was Mr. Longworth, and to him Powers sent, as a token of gratitude, his first original creation in marble. I say creation, because there is nothing in this work which speaks of labour. It is a figure so complete, so living and beautiful, that it is—not to be described. It is the bust of a woman the size of life. They have called it Genevra, but why I know not. It ought to be called Galathea, because Pygmalion Powers has infused into her a vitality which requires only a divine intimation to breathe; or rather it ought to be called the American, because the peculiar beauty of the features, the form and action of the head and neck, are those of the American woman. There is none of the Greek stiffness in it; there is a regularity of beauty full of life and grace, and the expression—yes, thus ought she to look, the woman of the New World, she who, sustained by a public spirit full of benevolence, may, without struggle and without protest, develop the fulness and the earnestness of her being: thus ought she to smile, to glance, to move, reposing in this as in a world of truth, goodness, and beauty; thus ought she to be firm, and yet pleasing; thus divinely wise; thus angelically harmonious and kind; thus ought she to work! And then, then, shall arise the new day of the New World.

Mr. Longworth had jocularly prepared me, before he conducted me into his cabinet of art, where his bust stands, “for the rudeness of the first work of a young artist,” and requested me to overlook this. I gazed at the figure, and contemplated it till my heart swelled with emotion, and my eyes overflowed with tears. I wept before the ideal of the new beauty, not because I was myself so far removed from it; no, but in admiration, in joy, in hope, in the consciousness that I here beheld that woman of the New World, that Galathea, which now slumbers in marble, but who will one day receive life from the Divine touch. And have I not already seen her features, her life, among some of the young women of this beautiful country? I see them, and I mention beloved names!

From this time forth I shall look for these features, this expression in the countenance of every young woman; she will become dear or indifferent to me, according as she more or less resembles the image of the Galathea of the New World.

Casts of this bust ought to be in the possession of every American home, and every young girl should grow up under its observation, even as Hawthorn's youth grew up gazing upon that “great stone countenance,” until his countenance acquired its beauty.

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Have I told you that I here live in the vine-district of North America? The vine which grows luxuriantly wild throughout the whole of North America, has been cultivated on the heights which border the Ohio river, with great attention, principally by Mr. Longworth; and here is made American sherry and champagne. The Catharoba and Isabella grapes are the kinds generally cultivated in this country, but they do not ripen here as regularly as on the Rhine and the Seine; the inequality of the climate is the cause of this.

Farewell! I must make an end. When I shall next converse with you I know not; but have we not commenced an intercourse and formed a friendship, which esteems but lightly time and space, and the visible sign? Our place of communion is—Eternity. Yet, nevertheless, a visible sign is precious; and if, you would give me one in this distant land, how welcome it would be!

Your words are ever with me like a silent communion; “I believe in a sun, an organising power, of which every bright thought, all suggestive life, is an outpouring!”—That was one of the first observations you made to me.

This sun has become my sun. In this light I go forth seeking and reflecting; and that which I see in this light, you also shall see; for that which is mine is yours.

I embrace your wife, and kiss the little ones around her, and expect to be embraced and kissed by them again—in Sweden!

P. S.—My letter terrifies me; it has grown to such a length and breadth, that my friends in Cincinnati must regard it as one of the shapeless giant productions of the Great West, a sort of Rhimthurse from the Mississippi Utgård. It strikes me like some sort of witch with many feet, and many eyes peeping out on all sides. And now it shall run off to Sweden! Off with it!—and what the thing has of head and heart I will trust you for finding out.

In a few days I shall set off for New Orleans, and from thence to Cuba for the winter months. I wish to see the face of earth under a tropical sun, and under the dominion of the Spaniard. I wish to see the southern cross, and the great star Argo in the, heavens. Then I will turn back towards the Pole-star and our silent North, my dear, quiet home!

1. Young girls learn, in the high schools, Latin, Greek, mathematics, algebra, the physical sciences, and it is said evince the greatest facility in acquiring a knowledge of these subjects, which are considered with us so difficult, if not incomprehensible, to the female intellect.
2. A splendid proof of this savoir faire in self-government is given at this moment in the States' organisation of California. During a couple of years have the wildest adventurers from all nations of the earth rushed thither in the delirium of the gold-fever. But the best of the people have banded together, organised, and maintained the observance of law and civil order, and California, rapidly advanced to a population of 200,000 souls, now takes its place as a fully competent State in the great circle of the Free States of the Union. Even the Chinese, who hastened to California by thousands, settle themselves down and live in peaceful communion, under the powerful hand of the Anglo-American.