on the old.

After taking leave of our hospitable friends, we took to our carriages
again. As we were driving slowly through the beautiful grounds,
admiring, as we never failed to do, their perfect cultivation, a party
of servants appeared in sight, waving their hats and handkerchiefs, and
cheering us as we passed. These kindly expressions from them were as
pleasant as any we received.

In the evening we had engaged to attend another _soiree_, gotten up by
the working classes, to give admission to many who were not in
circumstances to purchase tickets for the other. This was to me, if any
thing, a more interesting _reunion_, because this was just the class
whom I wished to meet. The arrangements of the entertainment were like
those of the evening before.

As I sat in the front gallery and looked over the audience with an
intense interest, I thought they appeared on the whole very much like
what I might have seen at home in a similar gathering. Men, women, and
children were dressed in a style which showed both self-respect and good
taste, and the speeches were far above mediocrity. One pale young man, a
watchmaker, as I was told afterwards, delivered an address, which,
though doubtless it had the promising fault of too much elaboration and
ornament, yet I thought had passages which would do honor to any
literary periodical whatever.

There were other orators less highly finished, who yet spoke "right on,"
in a strong, forcible, and really eloquent way, giving the grain of the
wood without the varnish. They contended very seriously and sensibly,
that although the working men of England and Scotland had many things to
complain of, and many things to be reformed, yet their condition was
world-wide different from that of the slave.

One cannot read the history of the working classes in England, for the
last fifty years, without feeling sensibly the difference between
oppressions under a free government and slavery. So long as the working
class of England produces orators and writers, such as it undoubtedly
has produced; so long as it has in it that spirit of independence and
resistance of wrong, which has shown itself more and more during the
agitations of the last fifty years; and so as long as the law allows
them to meet and debate, to form associations and committees, to send up
remonstrances and petitions to government,--one can see that their case
is essentially different from that of plantation slaves.

I must s