One cannot read the history of the working classes in England, for the last fifty years, without feeling sensibly the difference between oppressions under a free government and slavery.  So long as the working class of England produces orators and writers, such as it undoubtedly has produced; so long as it has in it that spirit of independence and resistance of wrong, which has shown itself more and more during the agitations of the last fifty years; and so as long as the law allows them to meet and debate, to form associations and committees, to send up remonstrances and petitions to government,—­one can see that their case is essentially different from that of plantation slaves.

I must say, I was struck this night with the resemblance between the Scotchman and the New Englander.  One sees the distinctive nationality of a country more in the middle and laboring classes than in the higher, and accordingly at this meeting there was more nationality, I thought, than at the other.

The highest class of mind in all countries loses nationality, and becomes universal; it is a great pity, too, because nationality is picturesque always.  One of the greatest miracles to my mind about Kossuth was, that with so universal an education, and such an extensive range of language and thought, he was yet so distinctively a Magyar.

One thing has surprised and rather disappointed us.  Our enthusiasm for Walter Scott does not apparently meet a response in the popular breast.  Allusions to Bannockburn and Drumclog bring down the house, but enthusiasm for Scott was met with comparative silence.  We discussed this matter among ourselves, and rather wondered at it.

The fact is, Scott belonged to a past, and not to the coming age.  He beautified and adorned that which is waxing old and passing away.  He loved and worshipped in his very soul institutions which the majority of the common people have felt as a restraint and a burden.  One might naturally get a very different idea of a feudal castle by starving to death in the dungeon of it, than by writing sonnets on it at a picturesque distance.  Now, we in America are so far removed from feudalism,—­it has been a thing so much of mere song and story with us, and our sympathies are so unchecked by any experience of inconvenience or injustice in its consequences,—­that we are at full liberty to appreciate the picturesque of it, and sometimes, when we stand overlooking our own beautiful scenery, to wish that we could see,

  “On yon bold brow, a lordly tower;
  In that soft vale, a lady’s bower;
  In yonder meadow, far away,
  The turrets of a cloister gray;”

when those who know by experience all the accompaniments of these ornaments, would have quite another impression.