to make something better of.  It is an excess and not a perversion.  It is not man fallen, but man undeveloped.  Beware, rather, that refined, subsidized brutality; that thin, depleted, moral consciousness; or that contemptuous, cankerous, euphemistic brutality, of which, I believe, we can show vastly more samples than Great Britain.  Indeed, I believe, for the most part, that the brutality of the English people is only the excess and plethora of that healthful, muscular robustness and full-bloodedness for which the nation has always been famous, and which it should prize beyond almost anything else.  But for our brutality, our recklessness of life and property, the brazen ruffianism in our great cities, the hellish greed and robbery and plunder in high places, I should have to look a long time to find so plausible an excuse.

[But I notice with pleasure that English travelers are beginning to find more to admire than to condemn in this country, and that they accredit us with some virtues they do not find at home in the same measure.  They are charmed with the independence, the self-respect, the good-nature, and the obliging dispositions shown by the mass of our people; while American travelers seem to be more and more ready to acknowledge the charm and the substantial qualities of the mother country.  It is a good omen.  One principal source of the pleasure which each takes in the other is no doubt to be found in the novelty of the impressions.  It is like a change of cookery.  The flavor of the dish is fresh and uncloying to each.  The English probably tire of their own snobbishness and flunkeyism, and we of our own smartness and puppyism.  After the American has got done bragging about his independence, and his “free and equal” prerogatives, he begins to see how these things run into impertinence and forwardness; and the Englishman, in visiting us, escapes from his social bonds and prejudices, to see for a moment how absurd they all are.]

A London crowd I thought the most normal and unsophisticated I had ever seen, with the least admixture of rowdyism and ruffianism.  No doubt it is there, but this scum is not upon the surface, as with us.  I went about very freely in the hundred and one places of amusement where the average working classes assemble, with their wives and daughters and sweethearts, and smoke villainous cigars and drink ale and stout.  There was to me something notably fresh and canny about them, as if they had only yesterday ceased to be shepherds and shepherdesses.  They certainly were less developed in certain directions, or shall I say less depraved, than similar crowds in our great cities.  They are easily pleased, and laugh at the simple and childlike, but there is little that hints of an impure taste, or of abnormal appetites.  I often smiled at the tameness and simplicity of the amusements, but my sense of fitness, or proportion, or decency was never once outraged.  They always stop short of a certain point,—­the point