The Press. — London, England, 1855-08-04 00:00:00

Au°. 4, 1855. and, though extremely able pens have re corded the results of the campaigns, we are convinced that the talents of Mr. Duncan, judging by these volumes, would have ap peared to much advantage as one of the Crimean historians. But, fatigued with his exertions, he felt it right to return to England. Incidentally he gives us his opinion on some vexed subjects. Amongst other• observations, Mr. Duncan pays the following tribute to the memory of Admiral Boxer : Much has been written and spoken of the roughness of manner and language of the gallant old sailor who now re poses under the sod of Balaklava, and many are the capital stories related of his conversations with the amiable ama teurs who at times interfered with his business arrange ments. For my own part I met with the greatest civility from Admiral Boxer, notwithstanding the unsuitable hour at which I called upon him in order to ascertain the name of the steamer that was to leave for the Crimea. On arriving at the residence of the admiral, he was at dinner, and I fully expected to be stormed at for interrupting him at so unses sonable a moment; but, with a politeness that I for one could not have imitated, he rose from the table without a frown, gave me a letter for the captain of the Banshee, and wished me a pleasant voyage. And elsewhere Mr. Duncan corroborates all our previous knowledge of the extreme vacil lation which marked the conduct of our Cabi not in devising the expedition against Sebas topol:— The Turkish pashas had not despaired of peace being concluded; and in this infatuation they resembled the allied commanders; for up to the very last moment the British generals and admirals commanding the expedition to the Crimea appear to have considered the reestablish ment of peace as inevitable. On the night that the allied expedition had commenced landing in Kalamita Bay, the despatch-steamer Banshee arrived from Constantinople with despatches. The first words of Admiral Dundaii to to the commander of the Banshee, were, "You have brought us peace : " and great was the surprise of the British admiral on learning, on the contrary, that the war was to be pushed with vigour. Our extracts sufficiently attest the varied qualities of Mr. Duncan's well-timed volumes. Their matter is highly useful, and deserves careful attention ; while his popular manner and lively anecdotes will be certain to secure for him a wide circle of readers. Lands of the Slave and the Free; or, Cuba, the United States, and Canada. By the Hon. H. A. Murray. London: J. W. Parker and Son. Jr is only a week or two ago that we noticed no less than four books of travels in America. The fifth, to which we then briefly alluded, now comes before us for consideration. We took up these volumes with some misgiving. How frequently, as we closed the many books we have read about America, have we been compelled to say—Captain Blank, or Mr. Dash, or Mrs. Asterisk, as the case may be, has written what our Republican friends would call a very smart book, but the authors' own peculiar crotchets and prejudices have given such a colour to all they saw and heard in that strange country that we no more recog nise the portraits or landscapes which they have drawn for our amusement than we can identify a friend's face in the hideous phen tasmagolia of a daguerreotype. Captain Murray has adopted none of the convention alisms of former writers of American travels. None of the stereotyped Yankees whom nearly every tourist since Marryatt and Trol loppe has depicted with a gradually decreasing resemblance are here presented to us. The great charm of our present author's book (as of Sullivan's excellent " Rambles and Scram bles in America") lies in the reality and truth of his descriptions, which all brother travellers to the country ho describes will so readily recognise. His views, too, on the terrible question of slavery, on the state of things in Canada, and on some other important sub jects, are so manly and honest, so free from what the Americans humorously call isms, so untiuged with dogmatism, and expressed with so much modesty, that the most sensitive of our transatlantic friends can hardly feel angry at the good-natured criticisms which he passes upon them . Captain Murray chose New York for his port of disembarkation, and gives a capital description of a New York hotel. One of the latest novelties in these curious establishments is the bridal chamber : The worming peculiarity of the new hotels is " The Baia ()limber;" the want of delicacy that suggested the THE PRESS. idea is only equalled by the want of taste with which it is carried out. Fancy a modest girl, having said " Yes," and sealed the assertion in the solemn services of the Church, retiring to the bridal chamber of the St. Nicholas I In the first place, retiring to an hotel would appear to her a con tradiction in terms ; but what would be her feelings, when she found the walls of her apartment furnished with fluted white silk and satin, and in the centre of the room a matri monial couch, hung with white silk curtains, and blazing with a bright jet of gas from each bed-post. We must be content with referring our readers to Captain Murray's judicious remarks on Canada and Cuba. It was at the latter place that news reached him of the formation of the Coalition Ministry, and ho humorously describes the effect which the intelligence produced at Havana and on his own mina :-- On my return to the hotel, I found the Press—if the slavish tcol of a Government can justly be designated by such a term—full of remarks upon the new British Ministry, many of which were amusing enough; they showed a cer tain knowledge of political parties in England, and laughed good-humouredly at the bundling together in one faggot of such differently•seasoned sticks. Even the name of the Secretary of the Admiralty was honoured by them with a notice, in which they seemed to look upon him as a wild democrat. They criticised the great Peet's tail going over in a body to the enemy's camp and placing themselves at the head of the troops ; but what puzzled them most was, how aquellos Grey's tan Almost's por el nepotism° had not formed part of the Ministry. I confessed they were not more puzzled than I was to account for the mysterious combination ; the only solution whereof which presented itself to my mind, was the supposition that power has the same influence on public men that lollipops have on the juvenile population, and that the one and the other are ready to sacrifice a good deal to obtain possession of the luscious morsel. However,as we live in an age of miracles, we may yet see even a rope of sand, mud, and steel-filings, hold together. The rope did not hold together long. The sand and the steel-filings have given way; nothing but the mud remains. The miserable police regulations of Wash ington would appear to have annoyed our gallant sea captain almost as much as they inconvenienced ourselves. Many a time have we come home from a ball or party on foot, our cab having been appropriated by some straggling senator, and have been thankful to reach our hotel with no greater damage than soaked boots and broken shins as we have gone on staggering through the dark night over heaps of half-thawed snow, and occasion ally falling upon mounds of building rubbish from uhich no friendly gas-lamp nor humble lantern warns the benighted stranger : The cabmen here, as in every other place 1 ever visited, made strenuous efforts to d 3 the new comers. They tried it on me ; so to show them how knowing I was, I quoted their legitimate fares. " Ah, sir," says Cabby, " that's very well, but you see, we charges more at times like these." I replied, " You 've no right to raise your charges ; by what authority do you do it ?" " Oh, sir, we meet together and agree what is the proper thing." " But," says I, " the authorities are the people to settle those things." " The authorities don't know nothing at all about it; we can manage our own matters better than they." And they all stoutly stuck to their own charges, the effect of which was that I scarcely saw a dozen cabs employed during the ten days I was there. Nothing could exceed the crowd in the streets, in the hotels, and everywhere; the whole atmosphere was alive with the smoke of the fragrant weed, and all the hotels were afloat with the juice thereof. The city has repeatedly been called the City of Magnificent Distancts ; but any thing so far behind its fellow-cities cannot well be ima• gined. It sounds incredible—nevertheless, it is a fact — that, except from the Capitol to the " White-house," there is not a street-light of any kind, or a watchman. I lost my way one evening, and wandered all over the town for two hours, without seeing light or guardian of any kind. suppose this is intended as a proof of the honest and orderly conduct of the inhabitants, but 1 fear it must also be taken as a proof of their poverty or want of energy. Whatever the reason may be, it certainly is a reflection on the liberality of the Government, that the capital of this great Union should be the worst paved, worst lit, and worst guarded in the whole Republic. Few persons who have made any sojourn in the United States can have failed to notice ' the rhyming notices of deaths inserted in the newspapers. We remember that the Balti more Sun was in our day the journal which most distinguished itself for its flights of necrological poetry. We have formed a col lection of elegant extracts from its pages, but few of our excerpts are better than the speci men quoted by Captain Murray : On April 4, of congestion of the brain, F— E—, son of J— and M— C. D—, aged fourteen months. His remains were taken to G— for interment yeater• day. List' heard you that angel say, As he waved his little wing, " Coma, Freddy, come away, Learn of me a song to sing'? Captain Murray's views on the subject of slavery are those of a sound thinker They 741 are the result of wide observation and much thought, and tourists who have seen slavery in the south and the nominal freedom of the negro in the north will be disposed to agree with them cordially hope I have impressed my own countrymen with some idea of the gigantic obstacles that present themselves, of which I will but recapitulate three :—the enormous pecu niary interests involved; the social difficulty arising from the amount of negro population; and, though last not least, the perplexing problem—if Washington's opinion, that " Slavery can only cease by legislative authority," is received—how Congress can legislate for independent and sovereign States beyond the limits of the Constitution by which they are mutually bound to each other. I fret sure that much of the rabid outcry, the ovation of Mrs. B. Stowe, and other similar exhibitions, have arisen from an all but total ignorance of the true facts of the case, and I unhesitatingly declare that the emancipation of the negroes throughout the Southern States, if it took place to-morrow, would be the greatest curse the white man could inflict upon them. I also trust that I may have shadowed forth some useful idea, to assist my Southern friends in over taking a gangrene which lies at their heart's core, and which every reflecting mind must see is eating into their vitals with fearful rapidity. My last and not my least sincere hope is, that some one among the many suggestions I have offered for the negro's present benefit way be found available to mitigate the undoubted sufferings and cruel in justice of which those with bad masters must frequently be tt• victims. Should 1 succeed in even one solitary instance, I shall feel more than repaid fur the many bouts of thought and trouble I have spent over the intricate problem—the best road from slavery to emancipation. Since writing the foregoing, 20,000,000 freemen, by the decision of their representatives at Washington, have hung another negro's shackle on their pole of Liberty (?). Nebraska is enslaved--freedom is dishonoured. As a proof how easily those who are brought up under the in stitution of slavery blind themselves to the most simple facts, Mr. Badger, the senator for North Carolina, after eulogising the treatment of slaves, and enlarging upon the affection existing between them and their masters, stated that, if Nebraska was not declared a Slave State, it would preclude him, should he wish to settle there, from taking with him his " old msmtny,"—the negro woman who had nursed him in infancy. Mr. Wade, from Ohio, replied, " that the senator was labouring under a mistake ; there was nothing to prevent his taking his beloved mammy with him, though Nebraska remained free, except it were that he could not sell her when he got there." All our author's remarks on the political institutions of the States deserve attention, and we particularly commend to the atten tion of our Radical friends the following passages on voting by ballot : A friend of mine, who took considerable interest in this question, was present at the elections for the State of Massachusetts, and when, at the same time, a popular vote was to he taken on the proposed revision of the Constitu• tion ; this latter was by special enactment made compel. sorily secret. How tar this object was attained, the fol lowing statement will show. As the voters came ep to the polling•place, tickets were offered them by the agents of the opposite parties, in a large room full of people. The voters selected whichever ticket they preferred, in the presence of the whole room, and then, in compliance with the terms of the enactment, they sealed it up in an envelope before depositing it in the voting-box. So much for com pulsory secrecy. Of course on this occasion, as on all electioneering occasions, the voters might have concealed their votes had they chosen so to do. • • • • • Let us now turn for a moment to that most witty and amusing writer, Sydney Smith. In speaking of Mr. Grrote's proposal for the ballot, the author says, " He tells us that the bold cannot be free, and bids us seek for liberty by clothing ourselves in the mask of falsehood, and trampling on the cross of truth" ;—and further on, towards the end of the pamphlet, he quotes an authority that Americans must respect—" Old John Randolph, the American orator, was asked one day, at a dinner party in London, whether the ballot prevailed in his State of 'Vir ginia ? I scarcely believe , he said, 'we have each a fool in all Virginia as to mention even the vote by ballot and I do not hesitate to say that the adoption of the ballot; would make any nation a set of scoundrels if it did not find them so.'—John Randolph was right ; he felt that it was not necessary that a people should be false in order to be free. Universal hypocrisy would be the consequence of ballot. We should soon say, on deliberation, what David only asserted in his haste, that' all men are liars' " —How strangely prophetic the opinion of John Randolph appears when read by the light of the New York Herald of 1832. Again, we would draw special notice to the appendix to vol. i. on emigration to Canada. How long those who leave our soil to seek fortune in a new world will continue to emi grate to the United States instead of to Canada we are not sufficiently skilled in the philosophy of human folly to surmise If any thing will convert them to common sense, surely this appendix and Captain Murray's • judicious remarks on Lord Elgin's adminis tration of our North American colonies (chap. 3. vol ii.) ought to do so. In Canada they will find real liberty instead of the miserable ignis fatuus of freedom which in the United States leads the luckless emi grant to wretchedness and to despair. In