the manner I have described, and pursued his discourse after

this manner:

6

"Who are these-who are they-who are these fellows? where do they come from? where are they going to? Come from! What's the answer?' leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with his right hand: 'From below!' starting back again, and looking at the sailors before him : 'From below, my brethren. From under the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one. That's where you came from!' a walk up and down the pulpit: and where are you going'-stopping abruptly, 'where are you going? Aloft !'-very softly, and pointing upward: Aloft !'— louder aloft!'-louder still: That's where you are going -with a fair wind-all taught and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory, where there are no-storms or foul weather, and where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' Another walk: That's where you're going to, my friends. That's it. That's the place. That's the port. That's the haven. It's a blessed harbor-still water there, in all changes of the winds and tides; no driving ashore upon the rocks, or slipping your cables and running out to sea, there. Peace-peace-peace-all peace!'-Another walk, and patting the Bible under his left arm.'”

In so vast a country there is room for all, Past and Present; English eccentricities, French novelties, and specimens of antiquated manners are all at their ease there. The increase of population is in proportion to the immensity of the land. The single city of Rochester which in 1815 counted 331 inhabitants now counts 15,000. They have more than tripled in three years; and eleven years have been enough to

multiply its population by twenty-five. When one thinks that these things are going on all over America without being noticed, one recognizes the force of this infant, giant society. It goes so rapidly and so powerfully that we cannot demand elegant attitudes from it.

It has its puerilities, and buries our Europe before she is dead. It has villages called Paris, and towns called Rome. There is something comic about this renewing of the Old World, this dressing of it in masquerade clothes. Syracuse after Orleans, Chartres and Memphis, Canton and Venice. The old globe is mirrored here, upon this young unknown hemisphere. You cross Troy to get to Pontoise; thence you go to Mondaga, or Tchecktawasaga; you find yourself in Corinth, and from thence you go to Madrid, passing on your road Thebes, Tripoli, Schenectady, Tomkins, Babylon, London, Sullivan, and Naples. What is remarkable is the progress of all these places. Where Captain Basil Hall saw two shops and a church, Hamilton found a town; three years afterward, Miss Martineau saw here a small city, and two years later Charles Dickens admires its hotels, its theatre, its promenade, its port, its quai.

'Tis a miraculous rapidity of growth. Everything grows like mushroons. How then can you ask a finished society from a people in so great a hurry! A nation so soon successful (parvenue), has the faults of parvenues, susceptibility, ostentation, vanity, love of rule, anxiety about public opinion. One is not astonished, one does not try to enjoy perfect pleasure in a house which is being built, where the hammer is sounding, where flames sparkle and cyclops toil regardless of aught else but their toil. Why impute, to them, as a crime, the intense activity which is both their strength and their great

ness.

SECTION VI.

SUPERSTITIOUS REGARD FOR PUBLIC OPINION-THE AMERICAN

PRESS AND ITS EXCESSES-HELPS.

Public opinion, and the press, its minister and slave, have made extraordinary ravages and accomplished incredible usurpation in the United States. It appears that every people have need of a tyrant, and that the laws of humanity require it to submit to power, as the law of power seems to require abuse. The Americans, professors of democratic principles, have created a power of opinion to which they submit. This power is abused. As the nation chooses it, she also encourages it. Armed with a journal, that is, with a battery of opinion, you can pillage and assassinate with impunity. For instance, the horrible case of the murderer Colt, who was several times reprieved by journal-influence and at last committed suicide.

Some citizens of the States who have had the courage to tell the truth have incurred real danger. Where," " cries an American, "shall the free thinker take refuge? To speak unreservedly of any country, must we establish a press in some desert island? or beside the Pole? The facility and rapidity of communication seem to have repressed rather than encouraged the independence of ideas, and soon one will recognize with astonishment that typography, that second Word of humanity, has been, like speech, given but to conceal thought." The independent thinkers who have dared to write thus, true heroes of moral courage Clay, Webster, Channing, Cooper, and Garrison, should be cited with honor.

Garrison has sustained the rights of the slave at the peril of his life; had he possessed the power, slavery would not now exist. But in the Carolinas where no one will serve, how can one get on without slaves? Bells are banished, their use being humiliating. The servants or rather the helps, as there are no servants, let you wait for hours.

This chapter is, as we have already said, abundant in original adventures. A lady expected some friends to supper, they came late, and the dishes were placed in one of those portable stoves intended to preserve the heat and kept in the eating room. When the guests entered, they saw a help sitting at table and demolishing a fine bird. When reproached the answer was, "Well, nobody came, and everything was getting cold." "Another lackey," says Miss Martineau, 66 received orders from his mistress to say and do nothing, but to see that every guest had sugar and milk for their tea. For two hours he performed this service well and then opened the door and went out. But remorse seized him and half opening the door he cried to a company occupying a sofa, 'Say! you! have you got sugar enough?""

Nor is it only in this article that destruction of class is felt. There, as in France, commerce and production lower each other. The buyers are no longer a class; consumers are on the same footing with furnishers; makers and sellers are on the same level. They manufacture quick and well enough to secure a sale, at race-course speed, and hence results a general mediocrity of products.

Germans, Spaniards, Irish, Scottish, French, fall at once into the Anglo-Saxon and Dutch mass, the ancient basis of the colony, and produce a curious result; the hostile colors are neutralized and lost, as the fusion of all the colors on a painter's palette results in a grey and nameless tint.

Yet there are terrible dramas there. Near the Rocky

Mountains, and in parts of the South, the life of the settlers is frightfully wild. There law is silent or powerless; in those solitudes take place the most horrible and incredible things. We were much amased in Europe at the Hindoo association of Thugs and Phansigars, who strangled travellers so scientifically, and formed a religious sect. The little volume published in Boston, called the Life and Confessions of Murel, prove that the same sort of association, submitted to more refined laws (as was proper for the children of the old European civilization) can exist in the United States. There was the same concord of evil for money, the same cupidity, the same secret and cautious regularity in the execution of murders. It is only necessary to read the trials in the public papers to form an idea of these horrors. It is generally on the banks of the Mississippi that they occur; muddy and blood-stained stream, whose waters, says an American, has engulfed more corpses, and whose banks have concealed more crime than we will ever know. A clever writer could make much of the life of Murel or of Mike; or even of the newspaper recitations of the loss of the Home or the Moselle.

Still, in all this, the ancient nationalities may be traced, the enterprising energy and patient audacity of the Saxon, the indomitable temerity of the Norman, the exaggerated cockneyism and vulgarity of Wapping, the calm sterility and cipher-egotism of Leadenhall Street, the adventurous smartness of the blackleg, the outward and formal rigor of the Puritan. The Old English nationality has not yet had the time to get quiet and refined, nor to transform itself thoroughly; but this will take place, and soon one will no longer recognise its source. Every day furthers the metamorphosis, and few see what is going on under their very eyes.

Precisely as in 1666, the germs of a republic filled America without attracting notice; so now a colossal Europe is being