y so?
because in Switzerland, Germany, and other nations in the heart of the
Continent, they have no interest about a nation so widely separated from
them, and from intercourse with which they receive neither profit nor
loss. Neither do they think about the millions in South America, and
not caring or hearing about them they can have formed no ideas of their
character as a nation. If, then, the Americans are shunned (which I do
not believe they are, for they are generally supposed to be a variety of
Englishmen), it must be from the conduct of those individuals of the
American nation who have travelled there, and not because, as Mr Cooper
would imply, they have a democratic form of government. Have not the
Swiss something similar, and are they shunned? Who cares what may be
the form of government of a country divided from them by three or four
thousand miles of water, and of whom they have only read? Every nation,
as well as every individual, makes its own character; but Mr Cooper
would prove that the dislike shewn to the Americans abroad is owing to
the slander of them by the English, and he points out that in the books
containing the names of travellers, he no less than twenty-five times
observed offensive remarks written beneath the names of those who
acknowledged themselves Americans. These books were at different
places, places to which all tourists in Switzerland naturally repair.
Did it never occur to Mr Cooper that one young fool of an Englishman,
during his tour, might have been the author of all these obnoxious
remarks, and is the folly of one insignificant individual to be gravely
commented upon in a widely disseminated work, so as to occasion or
increase the national ill-will? Surely there is little wisdom and much
captiousness in this feeling.

How blinded by his ill-will must Mr Cooper be, to enter into a long
discussion in the work I refer to, to prove that England deserves the
title, among other national characteristics, of a _blackguarding
nation_! founding his assertion upon the language of our daily press.
If the English, judged by the _press_, are a blackguarding nation, what
are the Americans, if they are to be judged by the same standard? we
must be indebted to the Americans themselves for an epithet. To wind
up, he more than once pronounced the English to be _parvenus_. There is
an old proverb which says, "A man whose house is built of glass should
not be the first to throw stones;" and th