lunders
in her predictions about America, was owing to the fact that she sought
her information in sources ill qualified, and, perhaps, ill disposed to
impart it. Most of the information of this nature that either entered or
left America, came, like her goods, through two or three great channels,
or sea-ports, and these were thronged with the natives of half the
countries of Europe; commercial adventurers, of whom not one in five
ever got to feel or think like Americans. These men, in some places,
possess even a direct influence over a portion of the press, and by
these means, as well as by their extended correspondence, they
disseminate erroneous notions of the country abroad. The cities
themselves, as a rule, or rather the prominent actors in the towns, do
not represent the tone of the nation, as is proved on nearly every
distinctive political question that arises, by the towns almost
uniformly being found in the minority, simply because they are purely
trading communities, follow the instinct of their varying interests, and
are ready to shout in the rear of any leader who may espouse them. Now
these foreign merchants, as a class, are always found on the side which
is the most estranged from the regular action of the institutions of the
country. In America, intelligence is not confined to the towns; but, as
a rule, there is less of it there than among the rural population. As a
proof of the errors which obtain on the subject of America in Europe, I
instanced the opinion which betrayed itself in England, the nation
which ought to know us best, during the war of 1812. Feeling a
commercial jealousy itself, its government naturally supposed her
enemies were among the merchants, and that her friends were to be found
in the interior. The fact would have exactly reversed this opinion, an
opinion whose existence is betrayed in a hundred ways, and especially in
the publications of the day. It was under this notion that our invaders
made an appeal to the Kentuckians for support! Now, there was not,
probably, a portion of the earth where less sympathy was to be found for
England than in Kentucky, or, in short, along the whole western frontier
of America, where, right or wrong, the people attribute most of their
Indian wars to the instigation of that power. Few foreigners took
sufficient interest in the country to probe such a feeling; and England,
being left to her crude conjectures, and to theories of her own, had
probably been