The Sun.
London, England, 1866-09-17 00:00:00

TO THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY YEWS.

Sir,—The Enlightened American of the Times—that
American Daniel who is always coming to judgment in
favour of Conservatism—is a person very familiar to every
ono who knows anything of America. I have crossed the
Atlantic with him myself. He was a wealthy man, com-
ing, at a time when his country, struggling for her exist-
ence, demanded the loyal support of her citizens, to spend
his money in the great pleasure cities of Europe, and make
himself popular among the rich and privileged by descrying
republican institutions and predicting the total failure of
the war.

The habitat of these mon, for the most part, is not New
England, by New York, and.the great cities of We Border
States Lich have been a good deal under the social influence
of the South. They aro not men of sufficient cultivation to
keep their hearts above their wealth. They find oalth
not sufficiently honoured, and oven deprived of the greatest
luxury that it can buy—the luxury of ostentation—by a
society of which equality is the rule. Not a few of them
also have been commercially bound up with slavery, and
of course are hostile to the principles before which slavery
has fallon. Those griefs they pour into sympathising-
bosoms here under colour of bearing their reluctant testi-
mony against free institutions.

These men, strange as it may sound, are the mob leaders
of the United States. They subsidise and organise the
Irishry of Now York. They were the "most respectable
citizens" who lod tho anti-slavery riots at Boston. The
Conservatives in a republic of equal rights are the great
mass of the people. The revolutionists are the uneducated
rich and the slaveowners, with an Irish following at their
heels.

Yes, thorn are many enemies of Republicanism in the
American Republic. They are enemies of republicanism,
not of universal suffrage—imperialists at heart, and friends
of slavery. If the South could have male itself an empire
or an oligarchy by itself, and set up a standing army, we
should soon have seen this party stretching out a baud to
it from the North.

That the condition of society in ono of the free States of
America is happier and sounder, though less highly culti-
vated, than it is here, is a fact as to which I can scarcely
imagine the existence of two opinions among those who
have been accustomed to study society in the interest of all
its members, and not in the interest of a class. There is
abundance of evil in those communities, which, as well as
the good, has been stirred up and brought to the surface by
the struggle through which they have just passed; but on
the whole, in a social point of view, they are the leading
shootl of humanity, and show the direction in which
human society generally will advance.

Our eyes are also fixed on Washington. But Washing-
ton is the worst, not the best, part of the American Re-
public. I should think the prospects of the Republic very
gloomy at this moment 1f its destinies were in the hands
of the professional politicians; but they are in the
hands of the American people. The framers of the consti-
tion made, as I am convinced, a great mistake in attempt-
ing to superadd a national legislature to a Federal union.
Not in the central but in the local institutions of America
you must look for that which is at once truly American and
pro-eminently sound. If the issue of tho struggle which is
now commencing should be a return from the mixed fede-
rative and legislative union to ono purely federative, my
belief is that this would be a most happy result.

With regard to the special question of the suffrage, how-
ever, we ought to be very cautious in reasoning from the
case of America to our own. That which makes universal
suffrage at once salutary and inevitable in America is the
general diffusion of property, or the hope of property and
of education. .The Irishry, whom we pour from a misgo-
verned Ireland into the seaboard cities, are in every way a
hideous exception. The best and most highly cultivated
men with whom I conversed in America were firm believers
in universal suffrage and resolute against disfranchising-,
even if it wore possible, the Irish emigrants or any other
class of men, however unfitted in their actual condition,
for the exercise of political power. They held that the
principle of equal right on which the Republic wasn founded
was too vital to be compromised by exceptions,ta ake him
only way of makings mama good citizen w
• was
o mdthat
a citizen. Probably they are right in refusing
forward other
sing to attempt a
o the
retrograde step ; but in taking a great s
considerations come to.
On the other hand, an extended suffrage in America
labours under some special difficulties owing to the loose-
ness of the social tissue,
e of natural leaders
and rallying points in a cornm
and tulineiasotyb,wnictich
s not only re-
ceiving annual crowds of emigrants, but is internally in a
migration. This makes the American
constituencies to
state of
too like
nliik:
those of our metropolitan boroughs,
constant
where "
there is little unity of feeling and few obvious can-
didates, and where consequently wire-pullore exercise a
very noxious power. In most English constituencies so-
ciety is very settled, men know each other well, and there
are natural leaders and natural rallying points in abund-
ance.

Nor must it be forgotten that, if free political institutions
in America are based upon social equity, they also generate
the social equity on which they are bawd. 'Our only path
to popular education and a more equal diffusion of proper-
ties is through the political reforms which would take go-
vernment out of the hands of a class and make it truly the
'government of the nation.

So far as my very limited observations of American po-
litics influenced my opinions about our own, I was con-
firmed in the conviction that an English statesman, acting
in the highest interest of the whole community, would ex-
tend the suffrage by gradual steps, keeping the ultimate
mark steadily in view, and at the same taking measures to
extend popular education, to open the way for a more
equal distribution of property, and, above all, to release re-
ligion by degrees from its present state of strangling con-
finement and degrading **litigation, and enable it to exert
14 Power in making good citizens 84 well as good men.