y, at which I thought that
English readers might perhaps stumble. When the proposal was first made
to me, indeed, I thought of trying my hand at a sketch of American
politics of thirteen years ago, the date of the Mexican war and of the
first appearance of the "Biglow Papers." But I soon found out, first,
that I was not, and had no ready means of making myself, competent for
such a task; secondly, that the book did not need it. The very slight
knowledge which every educated Englishman has of Transatlantic politics
will be quite enough to make him enjoy the racy smack of the American
soil, which is one of their great charms; and, as to the particular
characters, they are most truly citizens of the world as well as
Americans. If an Englishman cannot find 'Bird-o'-freedom Sawins,' 'John
P. Robinson's,' 'pious editors,' and candidates "facin' south-by-north"
at home--ay, and if he is not conscious of his own individual propensity
to the meannesses and duplicities of such, which come under the lash of
Hosea--he knows little of the land we live in, or of his own heart, and
is not worthy to read the "Biglow Papers."

Instead, therefore, of any attempt of my own, I will give Mr. Lowell's
own account of how and why he came to write this book. "All I can say
is," he writes, "the book was _thar_. How it came is more than I can
tell. I cannot, like the great Goethe, deliberately imagine what would
have been a proper 'Entstehungsweise' for my book, and then assume it as
fact. I only know that I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as
just ground for it as a strong nation ever had against a weak one) to be
essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in
widening the boundaries, and so prolonging the life of slavery.
Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy
this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding
in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given
such proofs of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope
evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues.
Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed, and still believe, that
slavery is the Achilles-heel of our own polity, that it is a temporary
and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy
at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more
enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social