Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/31

Rh enthusiastic lover of his country. Yet I am not prepared to say that his statement was untrue till I have seen more of the American people. And if my credulity is thought absurd, I must appeal from those travellers who have lived in American hotels and steamboats to those, much fewer I suspect in number, who have lived in American homes.

It is often asserted that family relations are bad in the United States, that there is a want of filial affection and a want of attachment to home. That this is not always the case my own eyes are witnesses. No English home can be better or more beloved than some in which I have passed happy days in that country. That it is often the case in America, as well as in Europe, I can easily believe. I can easily believe, too, that in this case again, the excess of the democratic spirit is partly the cause of the evil, by enfeebling domestic authority and disparaging that modesty in youth which is the only portal to dignity of character in later years. But the independent manners of children arise, in some measure at least, from their being really independent of their parents, by beginning to earn their own bread so young. In our own colonies the same thing is seen, and the same complaints are made. And, if affection does not centre so much in the old hearth of the family, it is because in a new country, where the people are still half-emigrant, old hearths are not so common. Even here, our pictures of Christmas gatherings are drawn more from the mansions of the upper class than from the cottages of poorer families who have once dispersed in quest of bread. Besides, our sentiment on these points is a little too absolute. Some change must inevitably take place in these, among other relations, as the world moves on. The domestic tie must to some extent