MY DIARY IN AMERICA IN THE

MIDST OF WAR.

CHAPTER I.

JUSTIFICATORY.

To an Intelligent American.

You are aware, dear Sir, that the great majority of your countrymen are born public speakers. You are regularly educated to oratory; you imbibe, almost with your mother's milk, a capacity for expressing yourselves coherently; you appear in public, and speak in public, at an age when young Englishmen, if they presumed to state their opinions in the presence of their elders, would be peremptorily requested to hold their tongues; and so easy (as a rule) is the flow of your rhetoric, and so well-balanced are your sentences, that I have often thought that in your nonage you lisp in well-formed periods for the periods come-and point your thoughts with mental semicolons. You are always ready to rise, address an audience large or small, move resolutions or respond to "sentiments." I never yet met with an American who stammered or "tried back" in an after-dinner speech-who dug a hole in the table-cloth with his fork, or twiddled a

VOL. I.

B

wine-glass, or distorted in any other idiotic manner the Demosthenic principle of action. And I am free to confess that an American barrister can address a jury without thrusting his hands beneath his coat-tails, and an American clergyman proceeds to his "seventeenthly" without wiping his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief or thumping the pulpit cushion.

On the other hand, dear Sir, you must, as an intelligent, cultivated, and travelled person, be equally aware that Englishmen are the worst public speakers in the world. The delivery of our statesmen is often marred by modesty, by nervousness, by the conventional reticence of polite society, and by an innate shrinking-however 'exalted in rank they may be from addressing a mixed audience in anything approaching an overbearing or dictatorial tone. It is only when men are all free and equal that they can bully one another without reserve. A hundred circumstances intervene to dam the stream of an Englishman's eloquence. In Parliament complicated forms and by-laws of etiquette cover the most polished harangues with excrescent references to the 'Noble Lord," and the "Honourable Member," and the "Right Honourable Gentleman in the chair," and "this house," and "another place." The system of verbatim reporting was, you may have heard, tried many years ago in a publication called "The Mirror of Parliament;" but the experiment was a lamentable failure. When honourable members saw their speeches in print, precisely as they had spoken them, they were horrified; and they have since been content to have their orations revised and settled by those

gentlemen in the gallery who submit to toil on an intellectual treadmill for three hundred pounds a-year. Out of Parliament there are quite as many obstacles to our attaining proficiency in fluent speech. You may talk about every subject, human or divine-from Nebuchadnezzar King of the Jews to Pepple Ex-King of Bonny. There are dozens of topics on which we dare not touch, at the risk of being thought irreverent or of being hissed. You, from Chicago to Cape Cod, from Nevada to Nantucket, speak very nearly the same language, and have pretty nearly the same pronunciation. We speak fifty different dialects-Northumbrian, Lancastrian, Cambrian, Phoenician, Erse, Cockney-que saisje? Some of us lisp and some of us drawl, and some of us stutter, and many of us hem and haw, and a great many of us clap on H's where there should be none, and take away H's whence they should be left. We are always speaking, and yet we speak badly. Our philological doctors disagree. We have no Academy (thank Heaven) and no Dictionary; that is to say we have a hundred, but do not accept any as a final authority. In pronunciation, Oxford is at war with Cambridge, Dublin with both, and Edinburgh with all. The forum and the bar, the pulpit and the stage, are in virulent antagonism; one paper calls a bishop's domain a "diocess," and another a "diocese;" and between Alford and Moonthe Queen's English and the Dean's English-it is difficult to choose. You have made up your minds that national shall be pronounced "naytional," and advertisement "advertyzement"; ; that defence shall be "defense," and theatre "theater," and you are, I hope, happy.

Dear Sir, you may be anxious to know what on earth this can have to do with the justificatory remarks prefixed to my Diary in America in the Midst of War." I will tell you. I have a little story to relate, and this is the introduction to it. When I first set foot on board the "Arabia," bound. for Boston, and with the intent of remaining eight months in the United States, I made two solemn resolves the first, to

:

tell the truth so far as my lights would permit me; the next, to hold my tongue. A dumb dog I did not intend to be; and during the eight months, and their extension to twelve, I took a fair share in very many pleasant and edifying parleys with your countrymen and countrywomen; but I determined never to speak in public. Of old and aforetime I knew, from meeting you in Europe, what ready speakers you were; and I was painfully aware of the oratorical deficiencies of that nation of which I was to be, in a foreign and hostile land, the humblest representative. Yes, dear Sir, you are very fond of us, but you are always looking out for the joints in our armour, and you would like to smite us under the fifth rib if you could. You know you would. So I said to myself, "I speak neither better nor worse than the general run of my compatriots; I know how well the Americans can speak, and therefore I will not speak at all." With respect to the manner in which I kept my first resolve, I leave the decision to candid and impartial men on both sides the Atlantic. If the verdict be that I have Lied, I will never set my foot in America again; still I hope to walk up Broadway once more before I am grey.

From the end, then, of December, 1863, to the middle of

September, 1864, I never once rose on my hind legs to make a speech. I had scores of opportunities, but I cautiously evaded them. Even when my letters to England had made me most unpopular, a Courteous Committee at Milwaukee to whom I hereby render my best thanks-wrote to me, asking me to lecture throughout the Great West, and offering me a pocket full of greenbacks. I humbly declined. It was my business to hold my tongue. But, in this same month of September it came about that I was invited to a most hospitable gathering at a beautiful place called Glencove, about thirty miles up the East River. There was to be a fête champêtre in the grounds of a châlet, very closely resembling that which poor Albert Smith had painted as a proscenium to his show at the Egyptian Hall; and in the evening there was to be a grand banquet at the close of which the promoter of a certain railway to the Great West was to present the Engineer-in-Chief thereof, in commemoration of the successful consummation of the work, with a magnificent service of gold plate. The proceedings were to wind up with a concert and a grand display of fireworks. We ascended the East River, some fifty or sixty strong, in a tug, and had a "magnolious" day. You know, dear sir, what Americans and Anglo-Americans can do in the way of hospitality. It is emphatically with them a "big thing." We dined in a manner that would have made Lucullus envious, abased Barras, and given Cambacèrés " fits." I think that if any guest had hinted a wish to have the biggest pearl at Tiffany's dissolved in vinegar by way of a hors d'oeuvre, our kind host would have despatched an express to New York for it. Not a