hat God
would require an account of them. If Thurnall were right, was he himself
too truly the typical American? And bitterly enough he accused at once
himself and his people.

"Noble? Marie is right! We boast of our nobleness: better to take the
only opportunity of showing it which we have had since we have become a
nation! Heaped with every blessing which God could give; beyond the
reach of sorrow, a check, even an interference; shut out from all the
world in God's new Eden, that we might freely eat of all the trees of
the garden, and grow and spread, and enjoy ourselves like the birds of
heaven--God only laid on us one duty, one command, to right one simple,
confessed, conscious wrong....

"And what have we done?--what have even I done? We have steadily,
deliberately cringed at the feet of the wrong-doer, even while we
boasted our superiority to him at every point, and at last, for the sake
of our own selfish ease, helped him to forge new chains for his victims,
and received as our only reward fresh insults. White slaves! We,
perhaps, and not the English peasant, are the white slaves! At least, if
the Irishman emigrates to England, or the Englishman to Canada, he is
not hunted out with blood-hounds, and delivered back to his landlord to
be scourged and chained. He is not practically out of the pale of law,
unrepresented, forbidden even the use of books; and even if he were,
there is an excuse for the old country; for she was founded on no
political principles, but discovered what she knows step by step, a sort
of political Topsy, as Claude Mellot calls her, who has 'kinder growed,'
doing from hand to mouth what seemed best. But that we, who profess to
start as an ideal nation, on fixed ideas of justice, freedom, and
equality--that we should have been stultifying ever since every great
principle of which we so loudly boast!--"

* * * * *

"The old Jew used to say of his nation, 'It is God that hath made us,
and not we ourselves.' We say, 'It is we that have made ourselves, while
God--?'--Ah, yes; I recollect. God's work is to save a soul here and a
soul there, and to leave America to be saved by the Americans who made
it. We must have a broader and deeper creed than that if we are to work
out our destiny. The battle against Middle Age slavery was fought by the
old Catholic Church, which held the Jewish notion, and looked on the
Deity as the actual King of Christendom, and every man i