or the hackmen of Jersey City.  We are not finding fault with this insularity as a feature of national character,—­on the contrary, we rather like it, for the first business of an Englishman is to be an Englishman, and we wish that Americanism were as common among Americans,—­but, since no man can see more than is in his own mind, it is a somewhat dangerous quality in a traveller.  Moreover, the Englishman in America is at a double disadvantage; for his understanding the language leads him to think that everything is easy to understand, while at the same time he cannot help looking on every divergence of manners or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself.  Worse then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called “political sociability,” and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels upward,—­of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most comfortable in the world for any one who belongs to the class which has only to enjoy and not to endure them.  The travels of an average Englishman are generally little more than a “Why, bless me, you don’t say so! how very extraordinary!” in two volumes octavo.

Mr. Russell is only an Irishman with an English veneer, and, to borrow the Kalewala formula, is neither the best nor the worst of tourists.  In range of mind and breadth of culture he is not to be compared with Mr. Dicey, who was in America at the same time, and whose letters we hope soon to see published in a collected form; but he had opportunities, especially in the Seceding States, such as did not fall, and indeed could not have fallen, to the lot of any other man.  As the representative of an English journal, he was welcomed by the South, eager to show him its best side; as a foreigner, his impressions were fresh and vivid; and his report of the condition of things there is the only even presumably trustworthy one we have had since the beginning of the Rebellion.  The New England States, he tells us, he did not visit; but that does not prevent his speaking glibly of their “bloody-minded and serious people,” and of the “frigid intellectuality” of Boston, about both of which he knows as little as of Juvenal.  This should serve to put us on our guard against some of his other generalizations, which may be based on premises as purely theoretic.  But it is not in generalizations that Mr. Russell is strong, nor, to do him justice, does he often indulge in them,—­always excepting, of course, the ex officio one which he owes his employers, and which he was sent out to find arguments for, that the Union is irrevocably split asunder.  It is as a reporter that he has had his training, and it is as a reporter that he is valuable.  Quick to catch impressions, and from among them to single out the taking parts, his sketches of what he saw and heard, if without any high artistic merit, have a coarse truth that will make them of worth to the future student of these times.  They are all the better that Mr. Russell was unable, from the nature of the case, to elaborate and Timesify them.