Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/22

16 wigwams stood. There the English yeoman has found his home again. There he once more tills his own land, often broad lands, and once more lives frank and free among his peers. The dry American air has made his once burly frame more spare and sinewy: enterprise and education have developed his forehead, and lent keenness to his eye. But he still retains his solid English virtues, his kindliness, his good sense, his reverence for the law, and to judge by the Sunday aspect of his villages, his fear of God. He is still formidable to his foes under Grant and Sherman, as he was when he drew the bow with Edward and the Black Prince. Still, too, he loves his country, restless and ever moving westward though he be. Boys did the work of men in Illinois while her brave husbandmen were gone by thousands and tens of thousands to the war: and by the side of her villages is many a grave tenanted by the slain, brought from distant battle fields to protest against the calumny that hirelings only fought for the government of the people. It is a good thing to go to Greece and Italy and to look with grateful reverence on the monuments of the illustrious past: and it is a good thing also to go to Illinois and see the blessing of heaven resting on the future. No doubt this prosperity depends on the abundance of unoccupied and fertile land; and even that exhaustless store must some day be exhausted: but by that time perhaps great problems will have been solved.

A popular novelist, from whose unauthentic page Englishmen I suspect draw many of their notions of America, has represented the Americans as not honouring labour. If they do not, they are not good Christians; for Christianity bids all its professors work if they would eat, forbidding any man to live in mere uselessness by the