smile at his speculations,) if rightly
taken, may do us infinite service. Did he tell us anything about the
shameful rout of Bull Run which could not have been predicted beforehand
of raw troops, or which, indeed, General Scott himself had not
foreboded? That was not an especially American disgrace. Every
nationality under heaven was represented there, and an alarm among the
workmen on the Plains of Shinar that the foundations of the Tower
of Babel were settling could not have set in motion a more polyglot
_stampede_. The way to blot out Bull Run is as our brave Massachusetts
and Pennsylvania men did at Ball's Bluff, with their own blood, poured
only too lavishly. To our minds, the finest and most characteristic
piece of English literature, more inspiring even than Henry's speech
to his soldiers on the eve of Agincourt, is Nelson's signal, "England
expects every man to do his duty." When we have risen to that level and
are content to stand there, with no thought of self, but only of our
country and what we owe her, we need wince at no hostile sneer nor dread
any foreign combination. Granted that we have been a little boyish and
braggart, as was perhaps not unnatural in a nation hardly out of its
teens, our present trial is likely to make men of us, and to leave us,
like our British cousins, content with the pleasing consciousness
that we are the supreme of creation and under no necessity of forever
proclaiming it. Our present experience, also, of the unsoundness of
English judgment and the narrowness of English views concerning our
policy and character may have the good result of making our independence
in matters of thought and criticism as complete as our political
emancipation.

Those who have watched the tendencies of opinion among educated
Englishmen during the last ten or fifteen years could hardly be
surprised, that, when the question was presented to them as being
between aristocratic and democratic ideas, between a race of gentlemen
and a mob of shopkeepers and snobs, they should have been inclined to
sympathize with the South. There have been unmistakable symptoms of
a reaction in England, since 1848 especially, against liberalism in
politics and in favor of things as they are. We are not to wonder that
Englishmen did not stop to examine too closely the escutcheon and
pedigree of this self-patented nobility. With one or two not very
striking exceptions, like Lord Fairfax and Washington, (who was of kin
to on