Many intelligent British travellers have seemed
to wish to do so, and to have tried to do so. But the study bothers
them, the secret baffles them. They give it up with a gruff impatience
which writes on their features the sentence, "You have no right to have
such complicated and unintelligible arrangements in your governments,
State and Federal: they are quite un-English." Our foreign kinsfolk seem
unwilling to realize the extent of our domain, and the size of some
of our States as compared with their own island, and incapable of
understanding how different institutions, forms, limitations, and
governmental arrangements may exist in the several States, independently
of, or in subordination to, the province and administration of the
Federal Government. Nearly every English journal which undertakes
to refer to our affairs will make ludicrous or serious blunders,
if venturing to enter into details. The "Edinburgh Review" kindly
volunteered to be the champion of American institutions and products in
opposition to the extreme Toryism of the "Quarterly." Sydney Smith took
us, our authors and early enterprises, under his special patronage,
and he wrote many favorable articles of that character. One would have
supposed, that, in the necessary preparation for such labors, he would
have acquired some geographical, statistical, and other rudimentary
knowledge about us, enough to have kept him from gross blunders.
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