FRANCIS J. GRUND.
AUTHOR OF “THE AMERICANS IN THEIR MORAL, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL RELATIONS.”
“Why should the poor be flatter’d? No: let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee, Where thrift may follow fawning.”
SHAKSPEARE’S Hamlet, Act iii. Scene 2.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET. Publisher in Ordinary to Her Majesty.
1839.
TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.
I dedicate to you the following pages, written by one of your fellow-citizens, who, though a European by birth, is firmly and devotedly attached to his adopted country.
If their contents should in any way offend you,--if the serious or ironical arguments contained in them should meet with your displeasure,--I entreat you to consider the purity of the Author’s intention, who, even where he employs personal satire, wishes but to expose error for the purpose of reform, not of ridicule.
Neither must you look upon them as containing aught against the laws and institutions of your country. Not those glorious monuments of the virtue and wisdom of your fathers, but the men who would turn them to vicious and selfish purposes are justly upheld to derision.
A people like yourselves, great, powerful, and magnanimous, is as much beyond the reach of personal satire as it is proof against the weapons of its foes: not so the men who, claiming for themselves a specific distinction, cannot properly be considered as identified with your principles and character.
Against these then, and against these alone, is the following work--of which I am but the Editor--directed, in the hope of thereby rendering a service to the Public, which, both in the capacity of a writer and a citizen of the United States, I readily acknowledge as my Lord and Sovereign. What other object, indeed, could he have, whose wishes, hopes, and expectations are identified with your own, and who considers no earthly honour equal to that of being
Your humblest servant and Fellow-citizen, FRANCIS J. GRUND.
London, May 10th, 1839.
PREFACE.
I herewith submit to the British Public a work principally intended for the benefit of the American. Both people, however, are so intimately connected by the ties of friendship and consanguinity, and so many errors and faults of the Americans--as, indeed, most of their virtues--are so clearly and distinctly to be traced to their British origin, that the perusal of the following pages may, perhaps, be not altogether uninteresting to the readers of both countries.
As individuals may study their own character by carefully examining and observing that of their fellow-creatures,--for it is only in comparing ourselves with others that we become acquainted with ourselves,--so may a correct knowledge of one nation, and the tendencies of its institutions, enable another to form a proper estimate of itself, and to set a right value on its own laws and government.
Such is the object of the following publication; the Public must decide whether it has been attained.
THE EDITOR.
London, May 10th, 1839.
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