body.  “However various may be the tribes of inhabitants in those states, whatever part of the world may have been their birthplace, or that of their fathers, however broken may be their language, however servile or noble their employments, however exalted or despised their state, all are declared to be bound together by equal political obligations....  In that self-governing country all are held to have an equal interest in the principles of its institutions and to be bound in equal duty to watch their workings.”  Miss Martineau was also impressed with the passion of Americans for land ownership and contrasted the United States favorably with England where the tillers of the soil were either tenants or laborers for wages.

=Adverse Criticism.=—­By no means all observers and writers were convinced that America was a success.  The fastidious traveler, Mrs. Trollope, who thought the English system of church and state was ideal, saw in the United States only roughness and ignorance.  She lamented the “total and universal want of manners both in males and females,” adding that while “they appear to have clear heads and active intellects,” there was “no charm, no grace in their conversation.”  She found everywhere a lack of reverence for kings, learning, and rank.  Other critics were even more savage.  The editor of the Foreign Quarterly petulantly exclaimed that the United States was “a brigand confederation.”  Charles Dickens declared the country to be “so maimed and lame, so full of sores and ulcers that her best friends turn from the loathsome creature in disgust.”  Sydney Smith, editor of the Edinburgh Review, was never tired of trying his caustic wit at the expense of America.  “Their Franklins and Washingtons and all the other sages and heroes of their revolution were born and bred subjects of the king of England,” he observed in 1820.  “During the thirty or forty years of their independence they have done absolutely nothing for the sciences, for the arts, for literature, or even for the statesmanlike studies of politics or political economy....  In the four quarters of the globe who reads an American book?  Or goes to an American play?  Or looks at an American picture or statue?” To put a sharp sting into his taunt he added, forgetting by whose authority slavery was introduced and fostered:  “Under which of the old tyrannical governments of Europe is every sixth man a slave whom his fellow creatures may buy and sell?”

Some Americans, while resenting the hasty and often superficial judgments of European writers, winced under their satire and took thought about certain particulars in the indictments brought against them.  The mass of the people, however, bent on the great experiment, gave little heed to carping critics who saw the flaws and not the achievements of our country—­critics who were in fact less interested in America than in preventing the rise and growth of democracy in Europe.

=References=