SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE ECCLESIASTICAL SYSTEM OF TO WHICH ARE ADDED STATISTICAL TABLES, &c. BY WILLIAM G. QUSELEY, ESQ. ATTACHE TO HIS MAJESTY'S LEGATION AT WASHINGTON. Philadelphia : CAREY & LEA-CHESTNUT STREET. 1832. E165 .08 "Elles (les lois) doivent etre tellement propres au peuple pour lequel elles sont faites, que c'est un tres-grand hasard si celles d'une nation peuvent convenir a une autre. "Il faut qu'elles se rapportent a la nature et au principe du gouvernement qui est etabli, ou qu'on veut etablir."-MONTESQUIEU, Esprit des Lois-Liv. I. chap. iii. Philadelphia: James Kay, Jun. & Co., Printers, No. 4, Minor Street. Library Or Callforty: INTRODUCTION. ENGLISHMEN are accused by the Americans of viewing their country only through a medium of strong and generally hostile prejudice, or of describing it with intentional misrepresentation. Those who are obnoxious to such imputations are little likely to allow their justice; men do not readily confess their prejudices, and bad faith is still less easy of conviction. In either case, a tu-quoque of mutual recrimination is generally the only result of unmeasured censure. Of any intention to mislead the reader of the following remarks, on the subject of the United States, I need hardly say that I am utterly unconscious. The statements now published are, almost without exception, supported by the authorities of able writers. Whether I am liable to the accusation of prejudice must be decided by the judgment of others. It is allowable, however, to state, that if my coun trymen are justly chargeable with suffering their opinions to be biassed by the peculiar feelings and prepossessions of England, on leaving it for the first time, I am less likely than many others to have been influenced by such a circumstance. From early youth the far greater part of my life has been passed out of England, and in the diplomatic service of my country; and before my visit to America I had seen most of the countries of Europe. Yet still it must be confessed that I did not arrive in the United States without having imbibed some of those preconceptions on the subject of the American political system that are so generally current in Europe. Judging from what had been witnessed in this hemisphere, it appeared to me that whatever might be said of the theory of the political system of America, yet in practice it could not succeed for any length of time, and that in Europe its imitation would be fraught with mischief and anarchy. Those impressions of the practical inapplicability of the institutions of the United States to European nations have not been removed by a resi |