REMARKS ON THE STATISTICS -33 AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVENUE, &c. TO WHICH ARE ADDED STATISTICAL TABLES, &c. BY WILLIAM GORE OUSELEY, ESQ. ATTACHÉ TO HIS MAJESTY'S LEGATION AT WASHINGTON. "Elles (les lois) doivent être tellement propres au peuple pour lequel elles sont faites, que c'est un très-grand hasard si celles d'une nation peuvent convenir à une autre. "Il faut qu'elles se rapportent à la nature et au principe du gouvernement qui est établi, ou qu'on veut établir."-MONTESQUIEU, Esprit des Lois-Liv. I. chap. iii. LONDON: J. RODWELL, NEW BOND-STREET. 1832. 633. TOTHEC INTRODUCTION. ENGLISHMEN are accused by the Americans of viewing their country only through a medium of strong and generally hostile prejudice, or of describing it with intentional misrepresentation. Those who are obnoxious to such imputations are little likely to allow their justice; men do not readily confess their prejudices, and bad faith is still less easy of conviction. In either case, a tu-quoque of mutual recrimination is generally the only result of unmeasured censure. Of any intention to mislead the reader of the following remarks, on the subject of the United States, I need hardly say that I am utterly unconscious. The statements now published are, almost without exception, supported by the authorities of able writers. Whether I am liable to the accusation of prejudice must be decided by the judgment of others. It is allowable however to state, that if my countrymen are justly chargeable with suffering their opinions to be biassed by the peculiar feelings and prepossessions of England, on leaving it for the first time, I am less likely than many others to have been influenced by such a circumstance. From early youth the far greater part of my life has been passed out of England, and in the diplomatic service of my country; and before my visit to America I had seen most of the countries of Europe. Yet still it must be confessed that I did not arrive in the United States without having imbibed some of those preconceptions on the subject of the American political system that are so generally current in Europe. Judging from what had been witnessed in this hemisphere, it appeared to me that whatever might be said of the theory of the political system of America, yet in practice that it could not succeed for any length of time, and that in Europe its imitation would be fraught with mischief and anarchy. Those impressions of the practical inapplicability of the institutions of the United States to European nations have not been removed by a residence in that country; at least, the total unfitness of a republican government for adoption in England still appears to me incontrovertible. America, by her political system, are very different from those which one is led to expect by the representations of many, and some distinguished, writers; and it has been my endeavour to point out a few of the reasons and facts which, in my mind, produced a conviction that the probabilities of success to the "great experiment" now in progress in the Trans-atlantic Republic were not to be measured by a scale formed from the circumstances of our own country. But the results produced in It is not possible in the limits of a small volume like this, to give more than an outline of the various points touched upon in the following pages; many of the subjects mentioned are but incidentally and remotely connected with the nature of my profession; but the notice of them may serve to direct better qualified observers, in future publications on the affairs of America. The communication with the United States is now so rapid and easy (the voyage often not occupying more than seventeen or eighteen days), that travellers may visit the principal cities of the Union and return to Europe within the space usually allotted |