hats and feathers; that all classes drink beer, and that men are often seen rolling drunk in the streets.  Nor would the American traveller in Great Britain fail to observe, with the scorn of a moralist, the political corruption of the time; he would hold up to the contempt of the world the statesman who with the utmost vehemence condemns a movement one day which, on the following day, in order to gain votes and recover power, he adopts, and with equal vehemence advocates; he would ask what can be the moral standards of a country where a great party turns right round, at the bidding of their leader, and follows him like a flock of sheep, applauding, voting, advocating as he bids them, to-day, this—­to-morrow, its opposite.

These things and more will be found in that book of the American in England when it appears.  You see how small and worthless and prejudiced would be such a volume.  Well, it is precisely such a volume that the ordinary traveller is capable of writing.  All the things that I have mentioned are accidentals; they are differences which mean nothing; they are not essentials; what I wish to show is that he who would think rightly of a country must disregard the accidentals and get at the essentials.  What follows is my own attempt—­which I am well aware must be of the smallest account—­to feel my way to two or three essentials.

First and foremost, one essential is that the country is full of youth.  I have discovered this for myself, and I have learned what the fact means and how it affects the country.  I had heard this said over and over again.  It used to irritate me to hear a monotonous repetition of the words, ‘Sir, we are a young county.’  Young?  At least, it is three hundred years old; nor was it till I had passed through New England, and seen Buffalo and Chicago—­those cities which stand between the east and time west—­and was able to think and compare, that I began to understand the reality and the meaning of those words, which have now become so real and mean so much.  It is not that the cities are new and the buildings put up yesterday; it is in the atmosphere of buoyancy, elation, self-reliance, and energy, which one drinks in everywhere, that this sense of youth is apprehended.  It is youth full of confidence.  Is there such a thing anywhere in America as poverty or the fear of poverty?  I do not think so.  Men may be hard up or even stone-broke; there are slums; there are hard-worked women; but there is no general fear of poverty.  In the old countries the fear of poverty lies on all hearts like lead.  To be sure, such a fear is a survival in England.  In the last century the strokes of fate were sudden and heavy, and a merchant sitting to-day in a place of great honour and repute, an authority on ’Change, would find himself on the morrow in the Marshalsea or the Fleet, a prisoner for life; once down a man could not recover; he spent the rest of his life in captivity; he and his descendants, to the third and fourth generations—­for it was as unlucky to be the son of a bankrupt as the son of a convict—­grovelled in the gutter.  There is no longer a Marshalsea or a Fleet prison; but the dread of failure survives.  In the States that dread seems practically absent.