But it is very hard to write about any country a book that does not represent the country described in a more or less ridiculous point of view.  It is hard at least to do so in such a book as I must write.  A de Tocqueville may do it.  It may be done by any philosophico-political or politico-statistical, or statistico-scientific writer; but it can hardly be done by a man who professes to use a light pen, and to manufacture his article for the use of general readers.  Such a writer may tell all that he sees of the beautiful; but he must also tell, if not all that he sees of the ludicrous, at any rate the most piquant part of it.  How to do this without being offensive is the problem which a man with such a task before him has to solve.  His first duty is owed to his readers, and consists mainly in this:  that he shall tell the truth, and shall so tell that truth that what he has written may be readable.  But a second duty is due to those of whom he writes; and he does not perform that duty well if he gives offense to those as to whom, on the summing up of the whole evidence for and against them in his own mind, he intends to give a favorable verdict.  There are of course those against whom a writer does not intend to give a favorable verdict; people and places whom he desires to describe, on the peril of his own judgment, as bad, ill educated, ugly, and odious.  In such cases his course is straightforward enough.  His judgment may be in great peril, but his volume or chapter will be easily written.  Ridicule and censure run glibly from the pen, and form themselves into sharp paragraphs which are pleasant to the reader.  Whereas eulogy is commonly dull, and too frequently sounds as though it were false.  There is much difficulty in expressing a verdict which is intended to be favorable; but which, though favorable, shall not be falsely eulogistic; and though true, not offensive.

Who has ever traveled in foreign countries without meeting excellent stories against the citizens of such countries?  And how few can travel without hearing such stories against themselves!  It is impossible for me to avoid telling of a very excellent gentleman whom I met before I had been in the United States a week, and who asked me whether lords in England ever spoke to men who were not lords.  Nor can I omit the opening address of another gentleman to my wife.  “You like our institutions, ma’am?” “Yes, indeed,” said my wife, not with all that eagerness of assent which the occasion perhaps required.  “Ah,” said he, “I never yet met the down-trodden subject of a despot who did not hug his chains.”  The first gentleman was certainly somewhat ignorant of our customs, and the second was rather abrupt in his condemnation of the political principles of a person whom he only first saw at that moment.  It comes to me in the way of my trade to repeat such incidents; but I can tell stories which are quite as good against Englishmen.  As, for instance, when I was tapped on the back in