THAT IS, TO NEW HAVEN.

1. Why, my dear sir, they have nothing old there. state itself is young, recent, modern.

2. And was it not in Kentucky that Dwight lived?

57

Their

1. Excellent, doctor! You mean Connecticut, in New England, bordering on Massachusetts; and the old university is none other than venerable YALE, over which the Rev. Dr. Dwight presided with such celebrity, and for so many years. He died in February, 1817.

2. Ay, so it is. I never can recollect your new-fangled, outlandish Indian names. I mean Connecticut then, and not Kentucky. But to me they seem much alike, after all.

1. Well, dear sir, why do you not learn, at least in general outline, more of our geography? What would your critical acrimony say to us, were we, on your soil, to make similar mistakes about your geography?

2. That were hard to say. But this you deserve-you Americans know more of our geography, our history, and our literature, than we of yours; whatever the cause be.

1. Many causes, I grant you, may combine. But one is this-we pay more attention to yours than you to ours.

2. It is true-so I drop my beau ideal for the present. Kentucky is a slave state, I think?

1. It is; and slavery seems always one of your favorite topics about America. Some British gentlemen and ladies seem to think and speak to us almost of nothing else. Hence, as the original sin of it is your own; as we have the consequences and the actual results of it; as talking against us never helps the matter, nor gives us any true or useful information; were it not wiser in you if slavery were less a topic? Every American in England-so shamefully annoyed-gets sick and disgusted with it.

2. So I think. With many it is the theme interminable. They are monomaniacs about it. In it alone is all they know or care about ethics, politics, jurisprudence, or religion. I am all awry with them myself, because I can not get up be

58

BAD MANNERS OF THE ENGLISH.

hind them and see their zeal for the Lord; while they drive like JEHU, but without his commission, in their work of reform; and also because, on one occasion, I proposed a plan of gradual melioration and improvement for the colored people; the only one that I could judge neither utopian, nor unscriptural, nor impracticable in the case, they were all alienated, if not positively inimical.

1. I am glad to hear such sound sense from Dr. Chalmers. Like most others who visit you, I have no slaves; not one of my personal or pastoral relations owns one, so far as I know and believe; the Empire State, where I live, is a free state, and so are a majority of the others; nor love I the system at all, nor cease to pray for its discontinuance, with all other sorts, and degrees, and modes of oppression, in all the world; but I am nauseated with the arrogant ill manners of the English, and their obstreperousness of assault, on all occasions, and at all hazards, indiscriminate and vociferating, about slavery. Some of them seem only to know of America, that it is a great place, far over the ocean, with slavery thereand besides that, the cataract of Niagara! I was rudely assailed lately in Exeter Hall, at a missionary meeting, after I had spoken there, by importunate request, on the mode of conducting missions in America. A perfect stranger to me, after two or three others had followed, arose, with a loud voice, and began to pour ominous eulogy on my address-with just one exception, one great fault, he said; and this not what was in it, but wholly what was not in it—no light on the subject of slavery! He then proceeded-and when he sat down, I claimed the right to answer him, and I did answer him. I am commonly roused a little on such occasions.

2. Just like them, and just like him! I know the man,* and can comprehend it all. He remarkably pleased himself! 1. I heard afterward, whether by way of apology or not, I can not say, that he was put up to it by some near him, who * As I have no personal feelings, I withhold his name. S. H. C.

AN OLD SERMON WAS HIS SPEECH.

59

heard him preach on the subject a few days before; and so, complying, he re-enacted his memoriter sermon on that occasion, made me his target, and leveled all that he could bring to bear at me, an entire stranger, who had landed only a day or so previous, and thus I had to take from his batteries a raking fire on that topic, before a London audience of about three or four thousand persons-so gratifying to his own feelings, his national vanity, and his own pragmatical arrogance. But I had rather despise than speak of the abomination. It is not a rare instance, not the exception to the rule, but the impudent character, the good-for-nothing habit of the En

* At the meetings of the Evangelical Alliance in London, August, 1846, we Americans were very badly and very injuriously treated on the topic of slavery-as if every one of near a hundred of us, cleric and laic, and from all parts of the Union, but chiefly, or almost all, from the free states, were himself the impersonation, the principium et fons, of all the evils and of all the crimes in any way connected with it, by reality or imagination. They first invited the whole world of Christendom to be there, for the holy and the ecumenical jubilation, and then, just before we Americans arrived, their hospitality, in its bowels of mercies and in its catholic impartiality, took a sudden cachexy against the possibility of any American being admitted who might possibly have some relative connection with slavery. They hence insulted us with an ex post facto rider on the bill, with a special quarantine regulation, or rather impeachment, or exclusion, or probation, as the case might require. Some excellent brethren refused to join the Alliance at all, and returned without it on that account, righteously indignant. Some were pertinaciously excluded to the last-one, especially, from a slave state, an excellent brother, whom I well knew, and whose claims I advocated with constancy and a good conscience, and so did others; all in vain!! He sustained in law the relation, or his wife did, of master or mistress, to their house servants, six or seven in all. And he more eminently sustained the character of kind, beneficent, and even affectionate consideration of them and theirs. Thus, while engaged in the deliberations of the Alliance, heart and soul, having traveled three or four thousands of miles at our own expenses to attend it, as freely and equally invited, they, many of those excellent Englishmen, insisted on some appropriate tests, of their own devising, in the American

60

CHURCH AND STATE-HIS THEORY.

glish; we could well retaliate in either or both countries on due occasions offering, were we so destitute of wisdom and good manners; but enough of this. There are more profitable subjects, especially for our present conference.

2. I think the same. Let us talk of the expediency of establishments as, on the whole, the best ecclesiastical economy as related to the state. Mind-we suffer not Cæsar to govern us. Our government is our own, under Christ. We preserve those three normal qualities of the Church intact, apostolicity, catholicity, and autonomy. Christ is our HEAD, not Cæsar. But in the worldly circle of Cæsar's jurisdiction, we radiate an influence highly and incomparably useful to Cæsar, as conservative of public order and rational liberty, and in this way our function is beneficent and incomparable, making men good subjects of Cæsar, because they are true disciples of Christ. For this, Cæsar, conscious of the good service rendered him, and feeling also how indispensable it is to his throne, is admitted to show at once his gratitude and his justice, by Branch, to exclude slaveholders! Against this, without all concert, all the Americans rose and protested, uno ore, una sponte; with one exception only, and hardly that! But all in vain. They knew more, and better about America, than all the Americans! Their holy and hardy arrogance rejected and overruled all our remonstrances, and just as we faithfully told them, with tears in our eyes-at last, and as it is badly at this day, they crippled and killed the Alliance in this country!! The Rev. Dr. Baird lately told them, nobly and luminously, the truth about it, and I cordially re-echo and endorse his masterly performance. I am myself descended from the venerated grandsire of my father, whose name I bear, old SAMUEL HANSON, of Dover, Kent county, Delaware, who set all his slaves free spontaneously; and since then no one of his descendants, known to me, ever owned a slave-except when I bought a woman and eight children with money contributed and collected by myself, and set them free, according to my plan, immediately. I have never loved it—any more than I love the way of the English, fanatical, and offensive, and short-sighted, in dealing with it. They have only disgusted this nation with their manners, and done evil, and not good, to the cause-precisely as we knew, and as we vainly warned them more than thrice!

WATERLOO HALL AND CHALMERS.

61

assisting in the support of the organization, which to him is found so serviceable, so indispensable. Here are two grand interests at once distinct and united, mutually helpful and beneficent; each stronger, and better, and more permanent, because of the other. This is what we mean by establishment; this our Christian expediency; this is not, indeed, sanctioned expressly in Scripture, neither is it forbidden; nay, many things seem to favor it. It coincides, at least indirectly, with all that is there. Its utility is founded in experience.

1. Our experience is very contradictory to yours, though of yours the accounts greatly vary. Many of your good and true ministers of the Gospel, you know, doctor, differ from you toto calo in your estimate of establishments. They think them corruptive, embarrassing, and bad in the main. I never heard in America such tirades of crimination and severity against them as in Scotland here, and that by clever and responsible men, official and non-official.

2. You would be likely to hear all that, in concentrated volume, among the dissenters just now, as several recent occurrences have exasperated the controversy to an alarming degree. We are all, unhappily, belligerent, and armed on one side or the other.

1. Yes; I saw it all the other day at the public breakfast in Waterloo Hall, and greatly regretted the excesses I witnessed there. But I wish you, dear sir, to understand that I went there almost passively, and was both qualified in my words on the occasion, and told them, also, that, as a stranger, I thought it not decent or proper for me to intermeddle in their local policy or contentions; and particularly assured them of my regret and grief to hear such language in connection with the name of Chalmers.

2. Oh! I am quite the theme of their severities and their denunciations; but I will hope to be humble under the copious honors with which they load me. Now what detriment to Church or State in America, if both were united