The yankees
(as the New Englanders are called) will avow these qualities
themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on
the earth can match them at over reaching in a bargain. I have
heard them unblushingly relate stories of their cronies and
friends, which, if believed among us, would banish the heroes
from the fellowship of honest men for ever; and all this is
uttered with a simplicity which sometimes led me to doubt if the
speakers knew what honour and honesty meant. Yet the Americans
declare that "they are the most moral people upon earth." Again
and again I have heard this asserted, not only in conversation,
and by their writings, but even from the pulpit. Such broad
assumption of superior virtue demands examination, and after four
years of attentive and earnest observation and enquiry, my honest
conviction is, that the standard of moral character in the United
States is very greatly lower than in Europe. Of their religion,
as it appears outwardly, I have had occasion to speak frequently;
I pretend not to judge the heart, but, without any uncharitable
presumption, I must take permission to say, that both Protestant
England and Catholic France show an infinitely superior religious
and moral aspect to mortal observation, both as to reverend
decency of external observance, and as to the inward fruit of
honest dealing between man and man.
In other respects I think no one will be disappointed who visits
the country, expecting to find no more than common sense might
teach him to look for, namely, a vast continent, by far the
greater part of which is still in the state in which nature left
it, and a busy, bustling, industrious population, hacking and
hewing their way through it.
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