knowledge of our public men I could not meet.  Webster had been heard of everywhere.  They assured me that our really great men were known, our really great deeds appreciated; but this is not true.  They make mistakes in their measure of our men; second-rate men who have travelled are of course known to the men whom they have met; these travellers have not perhaps thought it necessary to mention that they represent a secondary class of people, and they are considered our ‘first men.’  The English forget that all Americans travel.

“I was vexed when I saw some of our most miserable novels, bound in showy yellow and red, exposed for sale.  A friend told me that they had copied from the cheap publications of America.  It may be so, but they have outdone us in the cheapness of the material and the showy covers.  I never saw yellow and red together on any American book.

“The English are far beyond us in their highest scholarship, but why should they be ignorant of our scholars?  The Englishman is proud, and not without reason; but he may well be proud of the American offshoot.  It is not strange that England produces fine scholars, when we consider that her colleges confer fellowships on the best undergraduates.

“England differs from America in the fact that it has a past.  Well may the great men of the present be proud of those who have gone before them; it is scarcely to be hoped that the like can come after them; and yet I suppose we must admit that even now the strong minds are born across the water.

“At the same time England has a class to which we have happily no parallel in our country—­a class to which even English gentlemen liken the Sepoys, and who would, they admit, under like circumstances be guilty of like enormities.  But the true Englishman shuts his eyes for a great part of the time to the steps in the social scale down which his race descends, and looks only at the upper walks.  He has therefore a glance of patronizing kindness for the people of the United States, and regards us of New England as we regard our rich brethren of the West.

“I wondered what was to become of the English people!  Their island is already crowded with people, the large towns are numerous and are very large.  Suppose for an instant that her commerce is cut off, will they starve?  It is an illustration of moral power that, little island as that of Great Britain is, its power is the great power of the world.

“Crowded as the people are, they are healthy.  I never saw, I thought, so many ruddy faces as met me at once in Liverpool.  Dirty children in the street have red cheeks and good teeth.  Nowhere did I see little children whose minds had outgrown their bodies.  They do not live in the school-room, but in the streets.  One continually meets little children carrying smaller ones in their arms; little girls hand in hand walk the streets of London all day.  There are no free schools, and they have nothing to do.  Beggars are everywhere, and as importunate as in Italy.  For a well-behaved common people I should go to Paris; for clean working-women I should look in Paris.