Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in our own.  To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption.  The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be tinged by one’s personal experiences, that their validity can at best have but an approximate and tentative character.  In making this comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on the extreme frontiers of the British Empire.  From a similar cause we may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States, where we do not find a homogeneous mass of white civilisation, but a state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an inferior race.  To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African colonies.  Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in political morality distinctly behind.

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American more good-tempered and good-natured than the Englishman.  Women, children, and animals are treated with considerably more kindness.  The American translation of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant.  Horses are driven by the voice rather than by the whip.  The superior does not thrust his superiority on his inferior so brutally as we are apt to do.  There is a general intention to make things pleasant—­at any rate so long as it does not involve the doer in loss.  There is less gratuitous insolence.  Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least sturdy and manly.  In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we suspect to be in some way our superior.  Man is regarded by man rather as an object of interest than as an object of suspicion.  Charity is very widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act immediately on his purse-strings.  In that which popular language usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications point to the greater purity of the American.  The conversation of the smoking-room is a little less apt to be risque; the possibility of masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on the streets is