ative failure. Cooper himself tells us that it
occasioned him a heavy pecuniary loss. Manner and matter, both
foredoomed it to the fate which it met. The plan of it was an unfortunate
one as well as a purely artificial one. The views and observations and
statements of fact are put into the mouth of a European traveling
bachelor, a member of a club of cosmopolites, who, in consequence of
meeting an American, named Cadwallader, is persuaded to visit and see
for himself the new world. Arriving there he writes letters to his
friends, giving an account of his impressions. The fiction of foreign
authorship was the first mistake. It could not mislead any one, nor was
it intended to mislead any one. But a grave didactic treatise which was
designed to convey a truthful impression, lost something and gained
nothing by being connected with any artifice, even though not meant to
impose upon the reader. Nor was the work interesting to one not (p. 102)
specially interested in the subject. To the American it gave the
strongest assurances of loyalty to republican institutions on the part
of her most widely-known man of letters; but it added little or nothing
to the information of which he was already in possession. On the other
hand, the laudatory style in which this country was invariably spoken of
was certain to be offensive to those whom it was the design of the work
to enlighten. The weight of matter, moreover, was not rendered any more
endurable by lightness of treatment. At the present day the work is
chiefly interesting for the keen observations that are found in it, and
for its remarks upon the future of the country rather than upon its then
existing state. Cooper's predictions were concerned with the minutest,
as well as the greatest subjects. They ranged all the way from the
indefinite assurance, that New York must eventually become the
gastronomic capital of the globe, to the precise statement, as to the
exact number of the population there would be in the United States fifty
years from the time in which he was writing. This last prophecy, it is
to be said, has turned out singularly true. He fixed the number at fifty
millions. That this was no chance guess, but a carefully worked out
computation, is evident from the fact that he repeats it several times
in this work and occasionally in later ones. He, moreover, assigned
definitely forty-three millions to the whites and seven millions to the
blacks.

It is not for an Ameri