ART. II.

- ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

1. London Times. April, May, June, 1861.

E. E Pare

2. The Message of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES to the Thirty-Seventh Congress at the Opening of the Extra Session. July, 1861.

3. Letter of the SECRETARY OF STATE, transmitting a Report of the Commercial Relations of the United States with Foreign Nations for the Year ending September 30, 1860. Washington. 1861. 4to. pp. 730.

THE government of England from the time of William the Third to that of William the Fourth was in the hands of an hereditary aristocracy. This aristocracy held all the seats in the House of Lords, and named the majority in the House of Commons. It gave the inspiration to the policy of the nation. The political contests of the nation were contests between its great divisions.

That gradual growth of wealth in the hands of the mercantile and manufacturing interests of England, of which the war with Napoleon marks well enough the beginning, destroyed, in the end, this system of oligarchy. Different movements, in the first half of this century, of which the Reform Bill of William the Fourth and the Corn Laws of Victoria are good symbols, showed that the old landed aristocracy of England no longer held the power of the English empire. That power was passing, through the first half of this century, into the hands of those who are called the third estate when people want to compliment them, but are called shop-keepers or Bourgeois when people want to insult them. They are not the people of England, any more than dukes and marquises and earls are the people. They are the men whose enterprise, pertinacity, and skill—with the wealth created by enterprise, pertinacity, and skill-saved England from destruction by Napoleon the First. They are the men who make England now the richest, and, so far as material resource goes, the strongest nation in the world. They are the merchants and manufacturers of England.

These men now hold in their hands the power of the British VOL. LXXI. 5TH S. VOL. IX. NO. II.

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government. But, for different reasons, not difficult to discern, they have not yet undertaken its administration. And at the present moment, therefore, the Constitution of the British empire may be thus described.

Its administration is in the hands of an hereditary aristocracy, some of whose members administer it in very humble, even abject subjection to a great mercantile aristocracy.

There is no want of analogies in history to this division between the real government of a country and its administration. For some centuries the Roman Consuls administered the Roman empire under the direction and inspiration of the Augustus or Imperator of the day. The Rois faineans did so, for a while, under the direction of Mayors of Palace. Here, at home, cabinets administer government under very humble obedience to the inspiration of a great popular sentiment. In England, at present, the system has some conveniences. The hereditary aristocracy always has enough men well trained for administration; and, excepting the duty of shooting partridges, which only occupies a few weeks every autumn, they have nothing but the administration of government to attend to. On the other hand, the real government of the country, the mercantile and manufacturing aristocracy, has vast enterprises on hand. It is running railroads through India, caravans through Australia, steamboat lines through Africa, and is sending on all seas the conductas of its wealth. At home, it is clothing, arming, amusing, and making comfortable the world, by the various processes of its workshops. With no want of able men, therefore, well fit for administration, it is quite willing to leave that bit of side business in the old hands, on the simple condition that they do just what it chooses.

To insure their obedience, it has the old machinery which has changed ministries all through the century and a half of the Whig and Tory dynasties. The hereditary aristocracy still affects to govern England. Members of it do administer the government. They govern England in just the sense that bricklayers and stone-masons built St. Peter's, of which the credit, however, generally attaches to Michel Angelo. They make believe, however, very hard, that the inspirations are their own. And about once in five years an incautious

prime-minister tries the experiment of kicking in the traces. He announces some bit of policy which is his own. This is generally foreign policy, because there is a tradition that the merchants and manufacturers do not care so much about this. But the independence is always fatal to him. Be he Lord Palmerston encouraging the struggling Italians, or Lord Malmesbury encouraging their oppressors, be he never so mild or so canny in offering his advice, never so ambiguous in his promises, the great sleeping sea-turtle, which has been holding him above the water so steadily that the poor fellow fancied he was on an island, gives one little toss of his back, and the agile prime-minister tumbles into the sea. "Do what you please," says the great sea-turtle, "but do not make fires on my back." As soon as the offending prime-minister is tumbled over, the governing class says to some other people in the hereditary class, that this man has been naughty, but that if they will be good, and mind what they are told, they shall be the ministry. And they, having nothing else to do indeed, take it on those terms.

It is necessary to make this succinct statement of the distinction between the English government and the English administration, before we can discuss with accuracy what is called the policy of the English government, or the English people, towards America at the present time. For the doubleheaded arrangement which we have described is so new, that its results are not always estimated with sufficient discrimination. In former times England has had systems of policy, to some of which, indeed, she has held with true English vigor. The policy of Walpole was an intelligible system, adhered to through the better part of a generation. The policy of the wars with which the last century ended and this century began was that of interference in Continental affairs to protect legitimate kings. The policy of the ten years which followed the treaty of Vienna was a mild imitation of that of the Holy Alliance. The England of the present time is trying to form a system of policy equally distinct. It is not yet thoroughly adjusted, however, and hence a certain crudeness and inconsistency in the movements of its machinery. The central aim, however, is to increase as largely as possible the

productions and the markets of her merchants and manufacturers. In internal administration this policy works by throwing taxation as largely as possible upon property, and relieving as much as possible the movements of trade and manufacture; in external administration it shows itself in submission to any state which will offer to it facilities for trade. In both it shows itself by making no sacrifices, either at home or abroad, for anything so intangible as "an idea." "Certainly," says a great English economist, in ridicule of Napoleon III., " England will never make war for an idea."

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This is a frank statement, which has the advantage of being epigrammatic. It is probably true so far as it expresses the feeling of the aristocracy which governs England, and the other aristocracy which administers the government. It states no new system, but one which the world has tried a great many times, with one definite lesson of immediate success and eventual ruin always attendant upon it. This inevitable lesson comes because God is. He chooses to govern the world by ideas. In his empire, which is certainly coming, principles are omnipotent. But men are very apt to feel that perhaps his empire will never come at all, and that probably it will not come in their lifetime. They are very apt, therefore, to try the experiment — indicated by this great economist and attempted by the English policy of late years — of living for material interests alone, and letting ideas go.

Whenever the great mercantile and manufacturing aristocracy of England shall itself take in its own hands the business of administering the government, it will wield enormous power. There has, perhaps, never been such material power in the world as it will have at command. It will have more capital in hand than any Xerxes or Cambyses has had, and more faculty for administration. When it shall choose to say that it is tired of circumlocution offices and white staves and red tape and orders of precedence, possibly that it is tired of first, second, and third readings, of warrants for elections and of Chiltern Hundreds, of the Alphas of Parliaments and their Omegas, perhaps, indeed, tired of Parliament altogether; when it shall choose to say that it will build the English navy as it built its Atlantic and Mediterranean mail

squadrons, and will thus get for its fleet the best ships in the world, instead of certain A. No. 2's; when it shall choose to say that it will build its Parliament-House as it built its Crystal Palace, and govern India as it governed it in the days of Clive; it will exhibit the same nervous activity, the same promptness, resource, and rapidity, the same elasticity under defeat, and the same pitiless energy for conquest, which have been shown by all mercantile aristocracies when they were . intrusted with government. There are pieces of the history of Carthage, Florence, and Venice which will very well illustrate the method. If it should still be grovelling in the hope that it can do all this without making any sacrifice for ideas, the world will have a sad time of it for a while, and this English government will have a very bitter overthrow in the end.

Let us hope better things for England and the future, and meanwhile let us observe that the merchants and manufacturers have as yet taken no such business into their own hands. They occupy themselves with their own individual affairs, and tell the noblemen and their nephews and the second cousins of their nephews' wives, and all such people, to administer the government for them. The consequence is, that from year to year England gets along as well as she can, in an effort of the officials to do things much as they have been done before. If a new casualty insists on taking place, (as in a finite world untoward casualties will,) we will tide over it as we can.' If it is absolutely necessary to write anything, why "something must be written." If it is absolutely necessary to say anything, why "something must be said." But in saying it, it will be best to say that it is with regret that we say anything at all, that, in fact, all England has to do on any occasion, is to do nothing, that her policy, indeed, is to have no policy, as is by this time generally understood,-a policy, in short, of non-intervention.

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So soon as the administration clerks, the secretaries, ministers, and the rest, have learned their lesson completely in the modern system, they will pursue this policy, simply and without parade, as any well-trained clerk attends to his master's affairs. When that time comes, there will be great advantage to the world at large in this determination of England not to