any young members of either House of Parliament, who aspired to political distinction, to make an American journey, very much as their grandfathers made the grand tour on the Continent. But there are now many of our public men, past, present, and future, who have not crossed the Atlantic. Nor, indeed, in any time can we boast of such serious political students of American institutions and manners as the foreign statesman and publicists, at the head of whom still stands the fine analyst of human nature and charming writer, Alexis de Tocqueville. Indeed, there will be no more interesting historic retrospect than a well-considered comparison of the truth and error of his foresight as to the future of the American Republic, as seen in the great catastrophes of later years.

It is fair to say that till the great extension of railway communication the transit over the large cultivated or barren districts of the West was sufficiently monotonous, nor is there much variety in the construction or position of the lesser towns. In a continental town the language, dress and habits of the people of the country afford amusement, even without natural attractions, but the continual resemblances to his own life, of which we have often spoken, give to the ordinary traveller a discouraging impression. In this respect, indeed, the amount of interest is not increased. The very peculiarities which diversified the daily journey are fast diminishing; Americans are growing more like one another, and all more like Europeans. The late terrible events have had a palpable effect in sobering down the vivacity, in checking the familiarity, in dignifying the demeanour of the community. You hardly meet with a man of mature life who has not been under arms on one side or the other, and the general military bearing is conspicuous. There is none of the very natural garrulity of the olden time, which sprang from a goodnatured curiosity as to the conditions of existence in what was almost another planet, but which is now familiar to thousands. The general commodiousness also affords no opening for the small comments and discussions incidental to the discomforts and chances of travel in a less civilised country. The railway carriages are supplied with conveniences to which ours strangers; indeed, iced water is not a luxury but a necessity, which the Americans most sadly miss in a European summer;' the unexampled cleanliness of the masses (in Philadelphia alone the town supplies water for forty thousand baths, most of them in what we should call artisans' dwellings) carries with it a

are

*At Cincinnati there is the finest fountain in America, raised by the benevolence of a wealthy citizen, and so endowed as to pour out iced water through four great mouths for the use of the people for ever.

physical

physical self-respect that preserves a general decorum, and the offensive habit, of which so much has been said, but which was in the United States just the same and no more than in Germany and in other tobacco-smoking populations, is now kept under due restraint, and there is nothing to remind us of the American traveller of some twenty years ago who was so indignant at the affectation and prudery of English men and women in this respect, that though, as he stated, his medical adviser had desired him to abstain from it in consequence of his consumptive tendency, he never lost an opportunity of practising it in England to show his contempt for our aristocratic insolence. The traveller has nothing to grumble about except the expense of the hack-carriages, which he will compare with our cabs, whereas they really correspond to the remises.

When, indeed, on the other hand there still remains any novelty that especially amuses or surprises him, the Englishman will do well to look for its meaning and origin, and he will find that the speech, the manners and the general demeanour of the Americans are just as much matters of social development as our own have been, and that to subject them to the arbitrary judgment of time, and to condemn them because at any one particular moment they do not exactly agree with our own, is as stupid as unjust. Where would our grandfathers and grandmothers have been in a 'Spelling Bee' a hundred years ago? They had not the advantage of any such competition, which originated in a chance custom of rural life. The profit of bees depends on the judgment with which a swarm is collected, and when emigrant families were settled at accessible distances, it struck some one that it would be well to give to their occasional bee-meetings an educational purpose, and orthography, in truth a very factitious standard, was adopted as the readiest. We have seen reports to our charitable bodies from the Dominion of Canada in which young emigrants recount their victories at a Spelling Bee as guarantees for верст their social and literary status. And thus the custom spread

An

till it became a favourite diversion first in America and ad thence in English cities, till Cabinet Ministers joined, and, it is rumoured, were distanced in this innocent contest. other analogous custom arose in the scantily-peopled districts of the West, and has passed to the highest centres of American civilisation. The farmers at some market meeting agree that they would have a social gathering at the house of one of their friends, and one morning the pioneer of the prairie in his lonely labour is astonished by the sudden and almost simultaneous arrival of waggons from different points of

the

the compass, filled with joyous friends, and each bringing their due share of provisions and liquors for a collective feast. This rare adventure in the lonely and austere existence of the settler, translated to the artificial life of the sister cities, becomes the 'surprise' which is in New York one of the customary forms of social gallantry. It is there mysteriously intimated to some popular heroine of fashion that she must not be surprised if on a certain evening her abode is 'surprised.' In fact it is violently taken possession of by the upholsterer, the restaurateur, the musician, and any other caterer for public amusement. No regard is paid to the inmates of the house, parents, or domestics. Furniture is removed, the ball-room is constituted, the kitchen is transmuted, and at a certain hour a party arrive, generally masked, pay their homage to the young lady, who, somehow or other, happens to be dressed at her best, and a delightful entertainment takes place, of which the cost is defrayed by unknown (though sufficiently familiar) donors, and the next morning the invaded domicile is by the same agencies restored to its normal order and tranquillity.

But the presence which above all others affects an Englishman in America, as indicative of the still-enduring influence of the mother-country, is that of English law throughout that immense and composite people. From the Supreme Courts of the United States, the most powerful tribunal that any Government has ever constituted, for it is above the Legislature itself, to the police-court of the smallest town, the principles of our judicature, and the procedure of our courts, are in most cases authoritatively adopted, and everywhere respectfully_regarded; still further, we are inclined to believe that Judge Lynch disposes of the border horse-stealer or inveterate gambler with forms that an Old Bailey practitioner would recognise, and that a well-organised Vigilance Committee' has many resemblances with Quarter-Sessions. The changes and development of our civil and criminal legislature are followed with deep interest, and often imitated in practice; the dicta of our judges are not only appealed to as legitimate exponents of opinion, but are generally decisive of the merits of the case; and on the other hand, the judgments of Story and of Wheaton have with us the weight and character of our own authorities. When the readiness with which the French code and its accompanying procedure has been adopted in various States is remembered, remaining, as it does, the one cosmopolitan memorial of the Great Revolution, it is most noteworthy that all the natural attraction that it would have had for the American Republic, both from its revolutionary origin and its appearance of com

pleteness,

pleteness, failed to supersede the traditionary common law of England, broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent,' and the long procession of Statutes that represent the chequered course, but constant progress of British justice and liberty.

There could be no more interesting illustration of this phenomenon than the liberty of testamentary disposition that exists throughout the United States, contradicting all experience as to the correlation of manners and legislation. We have seen the advance of not only democratic but constitutional institutions in Europe so uniformly accompanied by the introduction of the compulsory distribution of property after death, even against the wish of the large landed proprietors-as most recently in Italy—that the power of such capitalists as the late Mr. Astor and Mr. A. T. Stewart to devise their wealth in any manner they pleased would seem not only contradictory to the fundamental ideas of democratic quality, but dangerous to the republic itself. So far from this being the case, the former of the two millionaires made it his profession to administer the family estate in such a manner as to increase it to the utmost by frugality and judicious investments, and this without incurring popular jealousy or private ill-will. 'Real Estate,' the ordinary American phrase for freehold property, is accumulating in individual hands to an unprecedented extent, but the forcible division of it by legal process on the demise of the owner seems to form no part of the programme of any serious party of radical reformers in the States any more than amongst ourselves. This retention of private rights in the two countries assuredly lies deep in some common sense of personal liberty which other free peoples have not been able to combine with their conception of duty to the public good, but in America no doubt it requires to be so administered as to be in conformity with the habits and feelings of the masses. This public opinion is strong enough to check any considerable difference of inheritance among children from caprice or pride, and in one direction it secures the family from an injustice which in this country has grown up to an extent that shocks not only the foreign observer, but the Englishman, who is impressed with the later notions of civilisation. The disproportion of the fortunes allotted to the daughters of an English household, especially in noble and wealthy families, strikes an American not only as ungenerous in itself, but as injurious to the best interests of society. The women of the United States not only share equally with their brothers, but there is a strong disposition to regard the sons as the more able to provide for themselves

themselves when once fairly educated and started in life; and it is by no means unfrequent to find the daughters enjoying a larger share of the patrimonial estate. It is a great social good that early marriages may be contracted without imprudence, and professional men may have in the incomes of their wives a security from destitution and sickness or ill-fortune. On the other hand, an American father is usually unwilling to withdraw any large portion of his capital from advantageous, or it may be perilous, investments during his lifetime, for the purpose of settlement; and thus the son-in-law is often implicated in the commercial troubles of his wife's family, while he is pretty sure to be a gainer by its prosperity. An indirect advantage has come from this greater independence in fortune of the women of America that has not resulted from their participation in this forced distribution of property on the Continent. They have succeeded in establishing a code of manners for young persons of both sexes, which makes their country the dise of girls, as much as England is the paradise of wives, or France the paradise of mothers. The entire safety of the free intercourse of young men and women with nothing but mutual advantage is not only a highly moral result of liberal institutions, but adds largely to the comforts of life in a country often requiring the adaptation of personal convenience to general exigencies. That a young woman can travel alone from one end of the Union to another without a possibility either of insult or neglect; that she can join in all amusements with any male friend without a shadow of suspicion, and with a certainty of delicate perception and arrangement if any deeper feelings come into play on either side, is a triumph of manners due to the honesty of social opinion, and to an education combining the habit of personal independence with a knowledge of the value of self-restraint.

para

And as with social customs, so with language in the United States. We, with many other exponents of English literature, have called attention to the survival of many English words across the Atlantic which have here fallen into disuse. It has been the same with the French in Canada to a still greater extent, so that M. de Tocqueville has remarked that when there he thought himself in the France of Louis Quatorze. Some American has suggested that the English-speaking race will some day have circled the world, and will meet at Greenwich meridian-point one;' and, in a more modest spirit, an English verse-writer, in an Envoy to an American Lady' has expressed what we all feel in this wonderful continuance of our speech over that immense range of humanity.

6

'Beyond