l wriggling behind a kite. [Footnote: One would think that Brigadier
Downright had lately paid a visit to our own happy and much enlightened
land. Fifty years since, the negro was a slave in New York, and
incapable of contracting marriage with a white. Facts have, however,
been progressive; and, from one privilege to another, he has at length
obtained that of consulting his own tastes in this matter, and, so far
as he himself is concerned, of doing as he pleases. This is the fact,
but he who presumes to speak of it has his windows broken by opinion,
for his pains! NOTE BY THE EDITOR] As to our purely social imitation and
social follies, absurd as they are, they are necessarily confined to a
small and an immaterial class; but the Indoctrinated spirit is a much
more serious affair. That unsettles confidence, innovates on the right,
often innocently and ignorantly, and causes the vessel of state to sail
like a ship with a drag towing in her wake."

"This is truly a novel condition for an enlightened monikin nation."

"No doubt, men manage better; but of all this you will learn more in the
great council. You may, perhaps, think it strange that our facts should
preserve their ascendency in opposition to so powerful a foe as opinion;
but you will remember that a great majority of our people, if not
absolutely on a level with circumstances, being purely practical, are
much nearer to this level, than the class termed the endoctrinated. The
last are troublesome and delusive, rather than overwhelming."

"To return to Mr. Wriggle--is his sect numerous?"

"His class flourishes most in the towns. In Leaplow we are greatly in
want of a capital, where the cultivated, educated, and well-mannered
can assemble, and, placed by their habits and tastes above the ordinary
motives and feelings of the less instructed, they might form a more
healthful, independent, appropriate, and manly public sentiment than
that which now pervades the country. As things are, the real elite of
this community are so scattered, as rather to receive an impression
FROM, than to impart one TO society, The Leaplow Wriggles, as you
have just witnessed, are selfish and exacting as to their personal
pretensions, irritably confident as to the merit of any particular
excellence which limits their own experience, and furiously proscribing
to those whom they fancy less fortunate than themselves."

"Good heavens!--brigadier--all this is excessively human!"

"Ah! it is-