“...  When I found the institutions and experiences of the United States deliberately quoted in the reformed parliament, as affording safe precedent for British legislation, and learned that the drivellers who uttered such nonsense, instead of encountering merited derision, were listened to with patience and approbation by men as ignorant as themselves, I certainly did feel that another work on America was yet wanted, and at once determined to undertake a task which inferior considerations would probably have induced me to decline.”

Harriet Martineau, ardent advocate of political reform at home, found in the United States proofs for her faith in democracy[16].  Captain Marryat belittled Miss Martineau, but in his six volumes proved himself less a critic of America than an enemy of democracy.  Answering a review of his earlier volumes, published separately, he wrote in his concluding volume:  “I candidly acknowledge that the reviewer is right in his supposition; my great object has been to do serious injury to the cause of democracy[17].”

The fact was that British governing and intellectual classes were suffering a recoil from the enthusiasms leading up to the step toward democracy in the Reform of 1832.  The electoral franchise was still limited to a small minority of the population.  Britain was still ruled by her “wise men” of wealth and position.  Meanwhile, however, just at the moment when dominant Whig influence in England carried through that step forward toward democratic institutions which Whigs had long lauded in America, the latter country had progressed to manhood suffrage, or as nearly all leading Englishmen, whether Whig or Tory, regarded it, had plunged into the rule of the mob.  The result was a rapid lessening in Whig ruling-class expression of admiration for America, even before long to the complete cessation of such admiration, and to assertions in Great Britain that the Reform of 1832 was “final,” the last step toward democracy which Britain could safely take.  It is not strange that the books and reviews of the period from 1830 to 1840, heavily stress the dangers and crudity of American democracy.  They were written for what was now a nearly unanimous British reading public, fearful lest Radical pressure for still further electoral reform should preach the example of the United States.

Thus after 1832 the previous sympathy for America of one section of the British governing class disappears.  More—­it is replaced by a critical, if not openly hostile attitude.  Soon, with the rapid development of the power and wealth of the United States, governing-class England, of all factions save the Radical, came to view America just as it would have viewed any other rising nation, that is, as a problem to be studied for its influence on British prosperity and power.  Again, expressions in print reflect the changes of British view—­nowhere more clearly than in travellers’ books.  After 1840, for nearly a decade, these are devoted, not to American political institutions, but to studies, many of them very careful ones, of American industry and governmental policy.