fying influences of equality," which Mr. Carnegie declares is the panacea of all disorders, even a constitutional monarchy. If he would only visit Boss Kelly, surrounded by the gang of Irish thieves who rule and rob New York, and explain to them that he was in every sense their equal, I cannot but think that, during his hurried exit from the presence of the municipal gods, he would modify his somewhat simple political beliefs.

If, then, there be those, like myself, who believe that no greater curse could befall England than for her to borrow political methods, dogmas and institutions from America, there seems every reason why such should explain the grounds, good or bad, for their belief, with which American travel may have furnished them. The good in American institutions is of English origin and descent; what is bad is indigenous, and this she now desires to teach to us. But Britannia, who, since her daughter has become independent and carried her affections elsewhere, has escaped the dreary role of chaperone, may surely refuse invitations to see Columbia dance, in fancy dress, to the tune of Yankee Doodle, and may plead her age and figure when asked to learn the new step. There are doubtless in English politics and society many evils and anomalies-privileges which cannot be defended, wrongs and injustice and misery which must be redressed and relieved; but, nevertheless, the English constitution, with its ordered and balanced society from the throne to the cottage, is the symbol and expression of liberty in the world. Republican institutions have had a trial for a hundred years, and, so far as outsiders can judge, their failure is complete. France under a Republic has become a by-word in Europe for weakness and truculence abroad, and financial imbecility and corruption at home; while America, which boasts of equality and freedom, does not understand that, with the single exception of Russia, there is no country where private right and public interests are more systematically outraged than in the United States. The ideal aristocracy, or government of the best, has in America been degraded into an actual government of the worst, in which the educated, the cultured, the honest, and even the wealthy, weigh as nothing in the balance against the scum of Europe which the Atlantic has washed up on the shores of the New World.

A sketch of contemporary American politics will form the subject of a later paper, and I only desire here to notice a few American characteristics, and, especially, to record the impression which the many distinguished Englishmen who have recently visited the States such as Lord Coleridge, Mr. Irving, and Mr. Matthew Arnold-seem to have made on American society. Never before have so many Englishmen of note-authors, artists, and members of both Houses of Parliament-been at one time in the States: they

have naturally attracted a great deal of attention, and much criticism, friendly and hostile, has been expended upon them.

But international social criticism, which rests on a basis altogether different from political, is very apt, between England and America, to be prejudiced and unjust. Both races are strangely provincial for people who travel so much, and create grievances out of mere differences in habits and manners, while they are so near of kin as to be acutely sensible of departures from their own standard of taste or morals. English travellers are apt to expect too much; and men who travel uncomplainingly in Spain, where night is chiefly distinguished from day by its change of annoyance, or in Bulgaria, where the only procurable bath is a stable bucket, complain bitterly at not finding in the rude hostelries of the Western States of America the conveniences and the cuisine of Bignon or the Bristol. But, apart from unreasonable claims, which, throughout life, make up so large a part of our unhappiness, there exists a fruitful source of irritation to Englishmen travelling in America in the depreciatory attitude to all things English that is taken by the vast majority of Americans. It is a new and doubtless a wholesome experience for Englishmen, for on the continent of Europe, however much we may be disliked, we are regarded with a hostile respect and consideration which is flattering to the national vanity. Our habits and prejudices are indulged and consulted. The splendid hotels of the Rhine, of Switzerland and Italy were built for English travellers and in deference to English tastes and requirements, although of late years our American cousins have shared with us the venal attention of Continental landlords. But in America all this is changed. English tourists are few in number, and are lost in the vast society of travelling Americans. Their habits, when they differ from those of the natives, are considered antiquated or objectionable; and every American usage or institution is held up to admiration, not only as good in itself, but as better than anything to be found in "the old country." The stranger would be far more disposed to accord an ungrudging admiration to the many improvements and conveniences which America has introduced into common life, if it were not demanded so peremptorily with regard to numerous matters on which there may be a reasonable difference of opinion, or on which impartial observers would give the preference to English methods. But whether it be hotels or railway cars, horses or carriage-building, banks or beautiful women, oysters or engineering, the ordinary American loudly asserts his superiority over England, and treats an Englishman as an imbecile creature to whom he was deigning to expound the elementary principles of social and political life. Mr. Washington Adams in England, a novel by Mr. R. G. White, amusingly reviewed last October in the Saturday

Review, is as good an illustration as could be found of the worst type of American critic-ignorant and presumptuous-who, from the internal evidence of his book, could never have crossed the ocean, discussing English life and manners. It is some consolation to find that Mr. White does not reserve his thunders for a subject of which he knows nothing, and that to the September number of The North American Review has contributed an article on "Class Distinctions in the United States," which, for fierce and contemptuous abuse of the mushroom millionaires whose evil example is demoralising American society, exceeds anything which a partially-informed Englishman could fairly or with propriety write. I do not, however, desire, by criticising American society further than it influences political and national life, to lay myself open to the charges of bad taste or superficiality which may justly be brought against Mr. White; and my friends in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and the West, whose kindness and hospitality will always be remembered, would, I am sure, be included by Mr. Matthew Arnold in "the remnant" upon which he was inaudibly eloquent in his first New York lecture -the salt which is to purify American society, the examples of sweetness and light which are to illumine and beautify the degenerate western world. But whether writers like Mr. White misunderstand and misrepresent English society, or whether we are as black as we are painted, British equanimity will probably remain unshaken. In either case it is certain that the English are not popular in the United States, although there is a far more friendly feeling between the two nations than existed some years ago. This is most evident in the eastern towns, such as Boston and New York, where the imitation of English manners and amusements has become for the time the fashion. Horse-racing has grown to large proportions, fox-hunting, lawn-tennis, and cricket are making slow progress, and the New York dude might almost compare, for fatuous imbecility, with the London masher. So far and low have English fashions penetrated, that Mr. Stokes, the affable proprietor of the Hoffman House, keeps no waiters in his employ who will not consent to shave their moustaches and cut their whiskers à l'Anglaise. But in the Central and Western States, with the exception of Colorado, which is being largely developed by English settlers and capital, there is little love for England or English ways, and criticism is almost uniformly unfriendly. As an example of this may be mentioned the savage abuse of Western journals, among which raged an epidemic of discourtesy directed against some members of Mr. Villard's North Pacific party for a misapprehension, amply apologised for, which in England, and affecting American guests, would have remained unnoticed. Americans will often say that the sentiment of the country cannot fairly be ascer

tained from newspapers; but in a country where the press has attained an unprecedented development, and where newspapers are, to all appearance, the only literature of the vast majority, a foreigner must assume that they represent, with some exactness, the popular opinion. There is no reason why the English should be popular in America. They are almost the most disagreeable race extant, and are often unendurable to each other; nor is there any part of Europe, except perhaps Hungary, where they are not more disliked than in the United States. The opinion expressed by the most original of living American poets, the present Minister to the Court of St. James's, represents that of most foreigners, and it is difficult to see that it is essentially unfair :

"Of all the sarse that I can call to mind

England doos make the most onpleasant kind:
It's you're the sinner ollers, she's the saint:
Wat's good's all English, all that isn't ain't
-She's praised herself ontil she fairly thinks
There ain't no light in Natur' when she winks."

Such characteristics are not amiable, and the laws of heredity have transmitted them to our Transatlantic cousins. It is, indeed, probable that the Americans are, intrinsically, as disagreeable as ourselves; for although, on the continent of Europe, they are comparatively popular, this is probably because they are less known. Annually, a flight of pork-packers and successful tradesmen cross the Atlantic, with their families, to complete an education, which has in reality not begun, by a contemplation of Paris hotels and Rhine steamboats. But the American pork merchant is silent in the presence of his peacockvoiced wife and daughters; and the complete party, Philistine though it be, is infinitely preferable to the swarm of London shopboys with their sweethearts, whose uproarious felicity makes hideous all foreign resorts in the near neighbourhood of England. In the continental dislike of England is an element of jealousy and suspicion, in which America has no part. We have fought and bullied in every quarter of the world, and, to-day, we stand with crossed swords with Russia in Central Asia and Armenia, with France in China and Egypt. Eight hundred years of victory-for the English never own a defeat-has left much soreness on every side, while the too fortunate Yankee, navyless and armyless, is not regarded, in a city like Paris, as a past or future enemy, but merely as the welcome victim of hungry shopkeepers. If America were as closely connected with Europe as is England, her citizens would be as much disliked as Englishmen. The two nations, however diverse their special characteristics may appear to a superficial observer, are curiously alike. The true Americans are unaffected by the stream of German or Scandinavian or Irish emigration, with which they

have never mingled. They are now, and will remain, Englishmen in thought, genius and weaknesses-the physical type modified by an uncongenial climate mostly in extremes, the commercial spirit intensified by unrivalled opportunities for its successful employment, and the national genius for mechanical invention developed by the high wages of labour, precisely as the monkey developed a prehensile tail.

Another English characteristic, strongly developed and even grotesquely caricatured in America, is the love of big things, which is, after all, a failing akin to virtue, and which will guide America into fair pastures when adversity and Mr. Matthew Arnold shall have chastened and purified Philistia. At present, Americans are satisfied with things because they are large; and if not large they must have cost a great deal of money. One evening, at the Madison Square Theatre, an American observed to me, "That is the most expensive drop-scene in the world." It was a glorified curtain of embroidery, with a golden crane and a fairy landscape, and might justly have been claimed as the most beautiful drop-scene in the world; but this was not the primary idea in the Yankee mind. The two houses most beautiful architecturally in the Michigan Avenue at Chicago were shown to me as half-a-million-dollar houses. A horse is not praised for his points, but as having cost so many thousand dollars; a man, who certainly may possess no other virtue, as owning so many millions. The habit of making size a reason for admiration is less jarring to an educated taste than that of making money the standard of beauty and virtue.

Full in front of the White House at Washington, as a warning to all future Presidents to avoid the penalties which attach to patriotism, a column of white marble is slowly rising to the memory of Washington. It is intended to eventually appear as an obelisk of six hundred feet, "the highest structure ever raised by man, excepting the Tower of Babel." Whether the design, which would seem to have been framed in the spirit which brought confusion on the builders of its prototype, will ever be completed it is impossible to say. The corner-stone was laid thirty-five years ago, and something more than half the destined height has been already reached. Colonel Casey, in charge of the work, promises its early completion; but if America continues to depart from that standard of free and honest administration which the high-minded, chivalrous, and cleanhanded founder of the Republic set up, it would seem that for very shame the monument will be left unfinished, to symbolise, as the tower of a shot manufactory or a cotton-mill, the triumph of industrial enterprise rather than of successful patriotism. In no case will it possess any interest beyond its size. Many nations have begged or stolen obelisks from Egypt to decorate, with dubious taste, their