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when this freedom of manners is offensive or intrusive; an Englishman will generally have to open the conversation, if he wishes to converse with a stranger. He may confine himself to his own society from one end of America to the other if he wishes; but if after promenading from one end of the railway cars to the other he has selected a promising fellow-passenger, he will find no difficulty in getting into conversation with him. It is very probable that when that fellow-passenger has discovered that he is an Englishman on his travels, he will ask him to come and stay a day with him; and if their further acquaintance is pleasant, will press him to stop a week; and when he goes on his way, will volunteer introductions to half a dozen friends in different parts of the States; and there he will be received with a welcome, and entertained with a hospitality, which will make him ashamed for the rest of his life of the courtesies of his own land, whenever he thinks of a lonely American in a British coffee-room.

This openness and hospitality make it very difficult to write about America; it is impossible to distinguish between what is private and what is public. In the land of Freedom there are no company manners; yet the traveller would be in error, if he concluded that his host would be gratified at finding the conversation at his dinner-table retailed as public gossip. The trouble I have taken to eliminate

personalities from the following pages has been very great; and has resulted in the omission of a large part of the Journal, and I fear has somewhat injured the interest of what remains. Wherever a statement has been retained coupled with a name, it has been done in the belief that my informant would gladly and without injury to himself maintain in public that which he had stated in private.

To know oneself is not always the best of knowledge, nor ever the whole of it. There is a great deal to be gained by knowing one's neighbours. One great benefit to be derived from a visit to America is its tonic effect upon the mind. Hope may spring eternal in the human breast in Europe, but the yield, the number of gallons per minute at which it springs in every breast in America, cannot be realised without living in the atmosphere, surrounded by the people. To an American nothing appears impossible, nothing chimerical. Every man is going to make a fortune before he dies. He does not believe in luck, he believes in himself; he knows by a thousand examples that a fortune is to be made by the poorest man in the States, if he can find out the way to get at it. He cannot realise the mental condition of the agricultural labourer in England whose highest dream of possible affluence is £1 a-week. He has no sympathy with pastoral poetry; and has a suspicion that contentment is a spurious

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kind of virtue invented by the British aristocracy. The idea of earning a competency and resting has no charm for him. His pleasure is in the work itself, in the calculation and the combination and the triumph over difficulty. The young men begin work before ours go to college, the old men end it at the grave. If your son is frivolous, and finds a difficulty in selecting that profession which will give most scope to his talents, send him to America, and he will find that an American will undertake to do any work, and will try and do it, and will in the end succeed in doing it.

Geography accounts for a great deal of this elasticity of temperament; when you have travelled two or three thousand miles by rail through a country two-thirds of which are uninclosed, you begin to realise the sense of freedom from pressure, of abundance of elbow-room, the capacity for going out into the middle of a prairie and crowing with that abundant boastfulness and prodigality of statement for which the less cultivated American is sometimes conspicuous. When you find that most of the States are larger than European Empires, you begin to understand the feeling of those who occasionally tell you that America is a great country.

I do not pretend to understand American politics. Three years' close study might enable an Englishman to give a correct definition of a straight line

Tammany Hall Democrat' or any other of the everchanging combinations in which politicians group themselves; my three months were spent in wandering, looking upon the surface of things rather than beneath it. The following Journal was written while travelling, as the panorama of America was passing before my eyes. It was cut off in lengths as written, and sent home in the shape of letters. Sitting at home, and reading my letters through again, I find they suggest a supplemental chapter or two.

Alabama claims.

15 UPPER WESTBOURNE TERRACE, LONDON,
Sept. 30, 1867.

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