The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, August, 1864 | Page 5

read of a war carried on by our fathers to secure that boon.
They paid a large price for it, and they got it, and got all nations to
acknowledge they deserved it, including the great nation they fought
with. It was their political independence only. It secured nothing
beyond that. Morally we were not independent. Socially, we were not
independent. There was a time, we can all remember it, when we
literally trembled before every cockney that strangled innocent

aspirates at their birth. We had not secured our moral independence of
Europe, and particularly not of our own kindred and people. We
literally crouched at the feet of England, and begged for recognition
like a poor, disowned relation. We scarcely knew what was right till
England told us. We dare not accept a thing as wise, proper, or
becoming till we had heard her verdict. What will England say? How
will they think of this across the water? In all emergencies these were
the questions thought, at least, if not spoken. We lived in perpetual
terror of transatlantic opinion. Some cockney came to visit us. He
might be a fool, a puppy, an intolerably bore, an infinite ass. It made no
difference. He rode our consciousness like a nightmare. He and his note
book dominated free America. 'What does he think of us? What will he
say of us?' We actually grovelled before the creature, more than once
begging for his good word, his kindly forbearance, his pity for our
faults and failures. 'We know we are wicked, for we are republicans, O
serene John! We are sinful, for we have no parish beadle. We are no
better than the publicans, for we have no workhouse. We are altogether
sinners, for we have no lord. It is also a sad truth that there are people
among us who have been seen to eat with a knife, and but very few that
could say, 'Hold Hingland,' with the true London aspiration. But be
merciful notwithstanding. We beg pardon for all our faults. We
recognize thy great kindness in coming among such barbarians. We
will treat thee kindly as we can, and copy thy manners as closely as we
can, and so try to improve ourselves. Do not, therefore, for the present,
annihilate us with the indignation of thy outraged virtue. Have a touch
of pity for us unfortunate and degenerate Americans!'
That supplication is hardly an exaggeration. It was utterly shameful, the
position we took in this matter of deference to English opinion. No
people ever more grossly imposed upon themselves. We had an ideal
England, which we almost worshipped, whose good opinion we
coveted like the praise of a good conscience. We bowed before her
word, as the child bows to the rebuke of a mother he reverences. She
was Shakspeare's England, Raleigh's England, Sidney's England, the
England of heroes and bards and sages, our grand old Mother, who had
sat crowned among the nations for a thousand years. We were proud to
claim even remote relationship with the Island Queen. We were proud

to speak her tongue, to reënact her laws, to read her sages, to sing her
songs, to claim her ancient glory as partly our own. England, the
stormy cradle of our nation, the sullen mistress of the angry western
seas, our hearts went out to her, across the ocean, across the years,
across war, across injustice, and went out still in love and reverence.
We never dreamed that our ideal England was dead and buried, that the
actual England was not the marble goddess of our idolatry, but a poor
Brummagem image, coarse lacquer-ware and tawdry paint! We never
dreamed that the queenly mother of heroes was nursing 'shopkeepers'
now, with only shopkeepers' ethics, 'pawnbrokers' morality'!
At last our eyes are opened. To-day we stand a self-centred nation. We
have seen so much of English consistency, of English nobleness, we
have so learned to prize English honor and English generosity, that
there is not a living American, North or South, who values English
opinion, on any point of national right, duty, or manliness, above the
idle whistling of the wind. Who considers it of the slightest
consequence now what England may think on any matter American?
Who has the curiosity to ask after an English opinion?
This much the war has done for us. We are at last a nation. We have
found a conscience of our own. We have been forced to stand on our
own national sense of right and wrong. We are independent morally as
well as politically, in opinion as well as in government. We shall never
turn our eyes again across the sea to ask what any there may say or
think of us. We have found that perhaps we do not