On Wed, 25 Dec 2002, Michael Pollak wrote:
> In a wonderful letter from the 19th century heaping calumny on American
> heads for the disgraceful levity with which we disregard our debts,
Actually some of this is too priceless not to share. The writer is the Reverend Sydney Smith and this letter to the London Times was widely noticed at the time. A choice excerpt:
<quote>
I am no enemy to America. I loved and admired honest America when she respected the laws of pounds, shillings, and pence; and I thought the United State the most magnificent picture of human happiness. I meddle now in these matters because I hate fraud -- because I pity the misery it has occasioned -- because I mourn over the hatred it has excited against free institutions . . .I never meet a Pennsylvanian at a London dinner without feeling a disposition to seize and divide him; to allot his beaver to one sufferer and his coat to another; to appropriate his pocket handkerchief to the orphan and to comfort the widow with his silver watch, Broadway rings and the London guide which he always carried in his pocket. How such a man can set himself down at an English table without feeling that he owes two or three pounds to every man in the company, I am at a loss to concede; he has no more right to eat with honest men than a leper has to eat with clean men . . .
Figure to yourself a Pennsylvanian receiving foreigners in his own country, walking over the public works with them, and showing them Larcenous Lake, Swindling Swamp, Crafty Canal, and Rogues Railway, and other dishonest works. This swamp we gained (says the patriotic borrower) by the repudiated loans of 1828. Our canal robbery was in 1830; we pocketed your good people's money for the railroad only last year. All this may seem very smart to the Americans; but if I had the misfortune to be born among such a people, the land of my fathers should not retain me a single moment after the act of repudiation. I would appeal from my fathers to my forefathers. I would fly to Newgate for great purity of thought, and seek in the prisons of England for better rules of life.
...
And now, drab-coloured men of Pennsylvania, there is yet a moment left: the eyes of all Europe are anchored upon you . . . Start up from that trances of dishonesty into which you are plunged: don't think of the flesh which walls about your life, but of that sin which has hurled you from the heaven of character, which hangs over you like a devouring pestilence, and makes good men sad, and ruffians dance and sing. It is not by Gin Sling along and Sherry Cobbler that man is to live; but for those great principles against which no argument can be listened to -- principles which give to every power a double power above their functions and their offices, which are the books, the arts, the academies that teach, lift up and nourish the world -- principles above cash, superior to cotton, higher than currency -- principles, without which it is better to die than to live, which every servant of God, over every sea and in all lands, should cherish . . .
<end quote>
The IMF couldn't put it better.
Michael