they are numerous only in cities; still the criminal
records of the United States appear somewhat full when compared with
ours. I know how great a part of this must be assigned to the
insufficiency of repression; in America, criminals doubtless escape
punishment much oftener than among us. Notwithstanding, there is real
security; and a child might travel over the entire West without being
exposed to the slightest danger.

M. de Tocqueville has said that morals are infinitely more rigid in
North America than elsewhere. This is not, it seems to me, a trifling
advantage. Whatever may be the depravity of the seaports, where the
whole world holds rendezvous, it remains certain that it does not
penetrate into the interior of the country. Open the journals and novels
of the United States; you will not find a corrupt page in them. You
might leave them all on the drawing-room table, without fearing to call
a blush to the brow of a woman, or to sully the imagination of a child.

In the heart of the manufacturing States, model villages are found, in
which every thing is combined to protect the artisans of both sexes from
the perils that await them in other countries. Who has not heard of the
town of Lowell, where farmers' daughters go to earn their dowry, where
the labor of the factories brings no dissipation in its train, where the
workwomen read, write, teach Sunday-schools, where their morality
detracts nothing from their liberty and progress? When I have added
that the United States have not a single foundling asylum, it seems to
me that I have indicated what we are to think at once of their good
morals and good sense.

And let not the Americans he represented as a people at once honest and
narrow-minded. If they are still far from our level--and this must
necessarily be true, in an artistic and literary point of view--we are
not, however, at liberty to despise a country which counts such names as
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Emerson, Cooper, Poe, Washington Irving,
Channing, Prescott, Motley, and Bancroft. Note that among these names,
men of imagination hold a prominent place, which proves, we may say in
passing, that the country where we oftenest hear the exclamation, "Of
what use is it?" agrees in finding poetry of some use. And I speak here
neither of orators, like Mr. Seward or Mr. Douglas, nor of scholars,
like Lieutenant Maury, nor of those who, like Fulton or Morse, have
applied science to art: judgment has been passed on