Book Description

Excerpt from The Manifest Destiny of the American Union The Empress of the French amused herself, a few months since, with pretending to represent the alarms of the ladies of Europe about the comet which was to strike the earth in the course of June, 1857. She played ofi'a man of science at one of her evening receptions, by an afl'ectation of panic about the comet, trying to make him ridiculous between his eager ness to show how absurd her idea was, and his deference for the person to whom he was speaking. What he endeavored to convey was the same com fort that has been administered to timid English women - that, in the first place, the comet would not come near us and, in the next, that if it did strike the earth, ' we should not find it out, but simply complain of misty weather. The Americans and their revolutions are illustrated by such cometary facts and fancies. An American, like an English man or a German, starts at the word revolution, dep recates it, prays to heaven against it, disavows and denies it when it begins to envelope him, and, while he is in the very midst of it, insists that, however gloomy the political times are, he sees nothing like chaos and destruction, and cannot therefore be pass ing through a revolution. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.