SOCIETY IN AMERICA
BY
HARRIET MARTINEAU,
AUTHOR OF "ILLUSTRATIONS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY."
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I. (of II)
NEW YORK
SAUNDERS AND OTLEY, ANN STREET,
AND CONDUIT STREET, LONDON.
1837.
INTRODUCTION.
"To seize a character, even that of one man, in its life and secretmechanism, requires a philosopher; to delineate it with truth andimpressiveness is work for a poet. How then shall one or two sleekclerical tutors, with here and there a tedium-stricken esquire, orspeculative half-pay captain, give us views on such a subject? How shalla man, to whom all characters of individual men are like sealed books,of which he sees only the title and the covers, decipher from hisfour-wheeled vehicle, and depict to us, the character of a nation? Hecourageously depicts his own optical delusions; notes this to beincomprehensible, that other to be insignificant; much to be good, muchto be bad, and most of all indifferent; and so, with a few flowingstrokes, completes a picture, which, though it may not resemble anypossible object, his countrymen are to take for a national portrait. Noris the[Pg ii] fraud so readily detected: for the character of a people hassuch a complexity of aspect, that even the honest observer knows notalways, not perhaps after long inspection, what to determine regardingit. From his, only accidental, point of view, the figure stands beforehim like the tracings on veined marble,—a mass of mere random lines,and tints, and entangled strokes, out of which a lively fancy may shapealmost any image. But the image he brings with him is always thereadiest; this is tried; it answers as well as another; and a secondvoucher now testifies its correctness. Thus each, in confident tones,though it be with a secret misgiving, repeats his precursor; thehundred-times-repeated comes in the end to be believed; the foreignnation is now once for all understood, decided on, and registeredaccordingly; and dunce the thousandth writes of it like dunce thefirst."—Edinburgh Review, No. xlvi. p. 309.
This passage cannot but strike upon the heart of any traveller whomeditates giving to the world an account of the foreign country he hasvisited. It is the mirror held up before his face; and he inevitablyfeels himself, for the moment, "dunce the thousandth." For my own part,I felt the truth contained in this picture so strongly, before I wasacquainted with the passage itself, that I had again and again put awaythe idea of saying one word in print on the condition of society in theUnited States. Whenever I encountered [Pg iii]half-a-dozen irreconcilable, butrespectable opinions on a single point of political doctrine; wheneverhalf-a-dozen fair-seeming versions of a single fact were offered to me;whenever the glow of pleasure at obtaining, by some trivial accident, apiece of important knowledge passed into a throb of pain at the thoughtof how much must remain concealed where a casual glimpse disclosed somuch; whenever I felt how I, with my pittance of knowledge and amidst myglimmerings of conviction, was at the mercy of unmanageablecircumstances, wafted now here and now there, by the currents ofopinion, like one surveying a continent from a balloon, with onlystarlight above him,—I was tempted to decline the task of generalisin