Contrary Mary
CONTRARY MARY by TEMPLE BAILEY Author of Glory of Youth Illustrations by Charles S. Corson [Frontispiece: She flashed a quick glance at him.]
factions save the Radical, came to view America just as it would have
viewed any other rising nation, that is, as a problem to be studied for
its influence on British prosperity and power. Again, expressions in
print reflect the changes of British view--nowhere more clearly than in
travellers' books. After 1840, for nearly a decade, these are devoted,
not to American political institutions, but to studies, many of them
very careful ones, of American industry and governmental policy.
Buckingham, one-time member of Parliament, wrote nine volumes of such
description. His work is a storehouse of fact, useful to this day to the
American historical student[18]. George Combe, philosopher and
phrenologist, studied especially social institutions[19]. Joseph Sturge,
philanthropist and abolitionist, made a tour, under the guidance of the
poet Whittier, through the Northern and Eastern States[20].
Featherstonaugh, a scientist and civil engineer, described the Southern
slave states, in terms completely at variance with those of Sturge[21].
Kennedy, traveller in Texas, and later British consul at Galveston, and
Warburton, a traveller who came to the United States by way of Canada,
an unusual approach, were both frankly startled, the latter professedly
alarmed, at the evidences of power in America[22]. Amazed at the energy,
growth and prosperity of the country and alarmed at the anti-British
feeling he found in New York City, Warburton wrote that "they
[Americans] only wait for matured power to apply the incendiary torch of
Republicanism to the nations of Europe[23]." Soon after this was written
there began, in 1848, that great tide of Irish emigration to America
which heavily reinforced the anti-British attitude of the City of New
CONTRARY MARY by TEMPLE BAILEY Author of Glory of Youth Illustrations by Charles S. Corson [Frontispiece: She flashed a quick glance at him.]