who will tell you that I ever evaded a lesson.  I was greedy of gain.  I spared neither time nor toil.  I lost no opportunity, and here I am, just as good as you made me.  So, if there is any one to blame, it is you, for not giving me better facilities.  The Children’s Aid Society warned New York a dozen years ago that a “dangerous class of untaught” pagans was growing up in her streets; but she did not think it worth while to arouse herself and educate them, and one morning she found them burning her house over her head.  You too, my country, have been repeatedly warned of your dangerous class, a class whom, with malice aforethought, you leave half educated, and, from ignorance, idle,—­and now comes Nemesis!  New York had a mob, and you have—­me.

The real ogre was those terrible Englishmen.  I was brought up on the British Quarterlies.  Their high and mighty ways entered into my soul.  I never did have any courage or independence, to begin with; and when they condescended to tread our shores with such lordly airs, I should have been only too glad to burn incense for a propitiation.  So impressive was their loftiness, their haughty patronage, that their supercilious sneers at our provincialism were heart-rending, I came to look at everything with an eye to English judgment.  It was not so much whether a book or a custom were good as whether it would be likely to meet with English approval.  To be the object of their displeasure was a calamity, and at even a growl from their dreadful throats I was ready to die of terror.  And this slavish subservience lasted beyond the school-room.

But it so happened that by the time my book was set afloat, the Reviewers had lost their fangs.  The war came, and they went over to the enemy, every one:  “North British,” “London Quarterly,” “Edinburgh,” and even the liberal “Westminster,” had but one tone.  “Blackwood” was seized with an evil spirit, and wallowed foaming.  The English people may be all right at the heart.  Their slow, but sure and sturdy sense may bring them at length within hailing distance of the truth.  Noble men among them, Mill and Cairnes and Smith and their kind, made their voices heard in the midst of opposing din, even through the very pages which had rung with Southern cheers:  but it is not the English people who make up the Quarterly Reviews.  It was not the voice of Mill or Cairnes that answered first across the waters to the boom of Liberty’s guns.  When our blood was hot and our hearts high, and sneers were ten thousand times harder to bear than blows, we found sneers in plenty where we looked for God-speed.  It may not have been the English heart, only the English head.  But we could not get at the English heart, and the English head was continually thrust against ours.  The fires may have burned warmly on many a hearth, but we could not see them.  The only light that shot athwart the waters was from the high watch-towers, and it was lurid.  This wrought a change.  The English