what you saw, even
if you have travelled in haste or sojourned there but a few days; but
when the similarity in manners, customs, and language is so great, that
you may imagine yourself to be in your own country, it requires more
research, a greater degree of acumen, and a fuller investigation of
cause and effect than can be given in a few months of rapid motion.
Moreover, English travellers have apparently been more active in
examining the interior of houses, than the public path from which they
should have drawn their conclusions; they have searched with the
curiosity of a woman, instead of examining and surveying with the eye of
a philosopher. Following up this wrong track has been the occasion of
much indiscretion and injustice on their parts, and of justifiably
indignant feeling on the part of the Americans. By many of the writers
on America, the little discrepancies, the mere trifles of custom have
been dwelt upon, with a sarcastic, ill-natured severity to give their
works that semblance of pith, in which, in reality, they were miserably
deficient; and they violated the rights of hospitality that they might
increase their interest as authors.

The Americans are often themselves the cause of their being
misrepresented; there is no country perhaps, in which the habit of
deceiving for amusement, or what is termed hoaxing, is so common.
Indeed this and the hyperbole constitute the major part of American
humour. If they have the slightest suspicion that a foreigner is about
to write a book, nothing appears to give them so much pleasure as to try
to mislead him; this has constantly been practised upon me, and for all
I know, they may in some instances have been successful; if they have,
all I can say of the story is that "_se non e vero, e si ben trovato_,"
that it might have happened. [Note 1.]

When I was at Boston, a gentleman of my acquaintance brought me Miss
Martineau's work, and was excessively delighted when he pointed out to
me two pages of fallacies, which he had told her with a grave face, and
which she had duly recorded and printed. This practice, added to
another, that of attempting to conceal (for the Americans are aware of
many of their defects), has been with me productive of good results: it
has led me to much close investigation, and has made me very cautious in
asserting what has not been proved to my own satisfaction to be worthy
of credibility.

Another difficulty and cause of misrepresenta