reets,
so that the public may see what an intoxicated nobleman is like. The
same king pushes a statesman into a pond, and screams with laughter as
the drenched victim crawls out. Morning after morning the chief man of
the realm visits the boxing-saloon, and learns to batter the faces and
ribs of other noble gentlemen. We hear of visits paid by royalty to an
obscure Holborn tavern, where, after noisy suppers, the fighting-men
were wont to roar their hurricane choruses and talk with many
blasphemies of by-gone combats. Think of that succession of ugly and
foul sports compared with the peace, the refinement, the gentle and
subdued manners of Victoria's court, and we see how far England has
travelled since 1837.

Fifty years ago our myriads of kinsmen across the seas were strangers
to us, and the amazing friendship which has sprung up between the
subjects of Victoria and the citizens of the vast republic was
represented fifty years ago by a kind of sheepish, good-humored
ignorance, tempered by jealousy. The smart packets left London and
Liverpool to thrash their way across the Atlantic swell, and they were
lucky if they managed to complete the voyage in a month--Charles
Dickens sailed in a vessel which took twenty-two days for the trip,
and she was a steamer, no less! For all practical purposes England and
America are now one country. The trifling distance of 3,000 miles
across the Atlantic seems hardly worth counting, according to our
modern notions; and the American gentleman talks quite easily and
naturally about running over to London or Paris to see a series of
dramatic performances or an exhibition of pictures. When Victoria
began to reign the English people mostly regarded America as a dim
region, and the voyage thither was a fearsome understanding.

There is something in the catalogue of mechanical devices which almost
affects the mind with fatigue. Fifty years ago the ordinary citizen
picked up his ideas of all that was going on in the world from a
sorely-taxed news-sheet; and a very blurred idea he managed to get at
the best. Poor folk had to do without the luxury of the news, and they
were as much circumscribed mentally as though they had been cattle; we
remember a village where even in 1852 the common people did not know
who the Duke of Wellington was. No such thing as a newspaper had been
seen there within the memory of man; only one or two of the natives
had seen a railway engine, and nobody in the whole vil