As one who in a lonely road doth walk in fear and dread.

We have created cities upon her havens, Parliaments in her capitals, and stronger hearts and quicker hands in her villages.  No community on her varied surface but is the better for America.  That our people and their labors have done it all it would be absurd to say; but the Old World’s progress in the period under review can be but very partially accounted for by any internal force of its own.  None of its rulers or peoples adventure a reform of any kind without a preliminary, if often only a half-conscious, glance of inquiry westward.  Collectively as members of a European republic of nations, and internally each within itself, they have in this way learned, after many recalcitrant struggles, to recognize and respect local independence.  Municipal law has gained new life.  The commune has become an entity everywhere, and the nations which it informs have established the right to readjust or recast their constitutions without being hounded down as disturbers of the peace.  The contribution of the American Union to such results would earn it honor at the hands of history were it to sink into nothing to-morrow.  Had no such tangible fruits hitherto ripened, some portion of such honor would still accrue to it for having shown that a people may grow from a handful to an empire without hereditary rulers, without a privileged class, without a state Church, without a standing army, without tumult in the largest cities and without stagnant savagery in the remotest wilds.

UP THE THAMES.

Concluding paper.

[Illustration:  Windsor castle, from Eton.]

Let our demonstration to-day be on the monarchical citadel of England, the core and nucleus of her kingly associations, her architectural eikon basilike, Windsor.  To reach the famous castle it will not do to lounge along the river.  We must cut loose from the suburbs of the suburbs, and launch into a more extended flight.  Our destination is nearly an hour distant by rail; and though it does not take us altogether out of sight of the city, it leads us among real farms and genuine villages, tilled and inhabited as they have been since the Plantagenets, instead of market-gardens and villas.

We go to Paddington and try the Great Western, the parent of the broad gauges with no very numerous family, Erie being one of its unfortunate children.  That six-foot infant is not up to the horizontal stature of its seven-foot progenitor, but has still sixteen inches too many to fare well in the contest with its little, active, and above all numerous, foes of the four-feet-eight-and-a-half-inch “persuasion.”  The English and the American giants can sympathize with each other.  Both have drained the bitter cup that is tendered by a strong majority to a weak minority.  Neither the American nor the British constitution, with their whole admirable array of checks and balances, has shielded them from this evil.  In the battle of the gauges both have gone to the wall, and will stay there until they can muster strength enough to reel over into the ranks of their enemies.