But as I have said, it is not specially interesting to the eye; what new town, or even what simply adult town, can be so?  There is an Atheneum, and a State Hall, and a fashionable street,—­Beacon Street, very like Piccadilly as it runs along the Green Park,—­and there is the Green Park opposite to this Piccadilly, called Boston Common.  Beacon Street and Boston Common are very pleasant.  Excellent houses there are, and large churches, and enormous hotels; but of such things as these a man can write nothing that is worth the reading.  The traveler who desires to tell his experience of North America must write of people rather than of things.

As I have said, I found myself instantly involved in discussions on American politics and the bearing of England upon those politics.  “What do you think, you in England—­what do you believe will be the upshot of this war?” That was the question always asked in those or other words.  “Secession, certainly,” I always said, but not speaking quite with that abruptness.  “And you believe, then, that the South will beat the North?” I explained that I personally had never so thought, and that I did not believe that to be the general idea.  Men’s opinions in England, however, were too divided to enable me to say that there was any prevailing conviction on the matter.  My own impression was, and is, that the North will, in a military point of view, have the best of the contest—­will beat the South; but that the Northerners will not prevent secession, let their success be what it may.  Should the North prevail after a two years’ conflict, the North will not admit the South to an equal participation of good things with themselves, even though each separate rebellious State should return suppliant, like a prodigal son, kneeling on the floor of Congress, each with a separate rope of humiliation round its neck.  Such was my idea as expressed then, and I do not know that I have since had much cause to change it.

“We will never give it up,” one gentleman said to me—­and, indeed, many have said the same—­“till the whole territory is again united from the Bay to the Gulf.  It is impossible that we should allow of two nationalities within those limits.”  “And do you think it possible,” I asked, “that you should receive back into your bosom this people which you now hate with so deep a hatred, and receive them again into your arms as brothers on equal terms?  Is it in accordance with experience that a conquered people should be so treated, and that, too, a people whose every habit of life is at variance with the habits of their presumed conquerors?  When you have flogged them into a return of fraternal affection, are they to keep their slaves or are they to abolish them?” “No,” said my friend, “it may not be practicable to put those rebellious States at once on an equality with ourselves.  For a time they will probably be treated as the Territories are now treated.” (The Territories are vast