which are not democracies.  In fact, we suspect that the reason why English “flunkeys” hate American “flunkeyism,” with its laced coachmen, etc., is because mere money, by aping the insignia of rank, its gewgaws and trumpery, shows too plainly how much of the rank itself depends upon the fabrics and demonstrations through which it sets itself forth.  We can conceive that an English nobleman travelling in this country, who might chance in one of our cities to see a turn-out with its outriders, tassels, and crests, almost or quite as fine as his own, if he were informed that it belonged to a plebeian who had grown vastly rich through some coarse traffic, might resolve to reduce all the display of his own equipage the moment he reached home.  The labored and mean-spirited purpose of the writer of the aforesaid article in the Quarterly, and of other writers of like essays, is to find in our democracy the material and occasion of everything of a discreditable sort which occurs in our land.  Now we apprehend, not without some means of observation and inquiry, that the state and features of society in Great Britain and in all our Northern regions are almost identically the same, or run in parallelisms, by which we might match every phenomenon, incident, prejudice, and folly, every good and every bad trait and manifestation in the one place with something exactly like it in the other.  During a whole score of years, as we have read the English journals and our own, the thought has over and over again suggested itself to us that any one who had leisure and taste for the task might cut out from each series of papers respectively, for a huge commonplace book, matters of a precisely parallel nature in both countries.  A simple difference in the names of men and of places would be all that would appear or exist.  Every noble and every mean and every mixed exhibition of character,—­every act of munificence and of baseness,—­every narrative of thrilling or romantic interest,—­every instance and example of popular delusion, humbug, man-worship, breach of trust, domestic infelicity, and of cunning or astounding depravity and hypocrisy,—­every religious, social, and political excitement,—­every panic,—­and every accident even, from carelessness or want of skill,—­each and all these have their exact parallels, generally within the same year of time in Great Britain and in our own country.  The crimes and the catastrophes, in each locality, have seemed almost repetitions of the same things on either continent.  Munificent endowments of charitable institutions, zeal in reformatory enterprises and in the correction of abuses, have shown that the people of both regions stand upon the same plane of humanity and practical Christian culture.  The same great frauds have indicated in each the same amount of rottenness in men occupying places of trust.  Both regions have had the same sort of unprincipled “railway kings” and bankers, similar railroad disasters, similar cases of the tumbling down of insecure walls,