JOHN BULL'S OPINION OF HIS COUSINS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3157, 10 August 1881, Page 3

JOHN BULL'S OPINION OF HIS COUSINS.

" I am given to understand that the great charm of America and things American is a charm of newness. Tho natural features of the country are as old as those of Europe or of Asia—mother of religions and grandmother of races; but everything else is of yesterday and looks its age to an hour. In America nothing is ancient of days but the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi, and the

Yosemite Valley ; everything else — the people, the whisky, the Constitution, the poet-iy of Walt Whitman, the Declaration of Independence itself —is obsfcrusively juvenile. We Easterns saunter along composedly under the shadow of immemorial oaks and elms; tho Westerns, ' the youthful, sinewy races, are shot about in cars, along avenues of gigantic fungi. Their traditions smell of paint, and their glories are odorous with gilding ; their blazon reminds you of a transparency; they have advertised themselves into notoriety, and their fortune, colossal as ifc is, has a twang of patent medicines and domestic machinery. They arc a great, a mighty, a magnificunt people ; but they are the parvenu, the nativeau-riche, in the society of nations, and the fact is evident in all they do. In course of time they will have lived themselves into bluebloodedness, and will be middle-aged and venerable. At present they are but the ancient Brifcions of their own history, and though tliey do nob paint themselves with woad, nor clothe themselves in the skins of beasts, nov worship the mistletoe, nor offer human sacrifices, they are, in several important particulars, as savage and barbarous as need be."—London Truth.