cannot help looking on every divergence of manners
or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same
tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse
then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might
almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called "political sociability,"
and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels
upward,--of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to
endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most
comfortable in the world for any one who belongs to the class which
has only to enjoy and not to endure them. The travels of an average
Englishman are generally little more than a "Why, bless me, you don't
say so! how very extraordinary!" in two volumes octavo.

Mr. Russell is only an Irishman with an English veneer, and, to borrow
the Kalewala formula, is neither the best nor the worst of tourists. In
range of mind and breadth of culture he is not to be compared with Mr.
Dicey, who was in America at the same time, and whose letters we hope
soon to see published in a collected form; but he had opportunities,
especially in the Seceding States, such as did not fall, and
indeed could not have fallen, to the lot of any other man. As the
representative of an English journal, he was welcomed by the South,
eager to show him its best side; as a foreigner, his impressions were
fresh and vivid; and his report of the condition of things there is the
only even presumably trustworthy one we have had since the beginning of
the Rebellion. The New England States, he tells us, he did not visit;
but that does not prevent his speaking glibly of their "bloody-minded
and serious people," and of the "frigid intellectuality" of Boston,
about both of which he knows as little as of Juvenal. This should serve
to put us on our guard against some of his other generalizations,
which may be based on premises as purely theoretic. But it is not in
generalizations that Mr. Russell is strong, nor, to do him justice, does
he often indulge in them,--always excepting, of course, the _ex officio_
one which he owes his employers, and which he was sent out to find
arguments for, that the Union is irrevocably split asunder. It is as a
reporter that he has had his training, and it is as a reporter that he
is valuable. Quick to catch impressions, and from among them to single
out the _taking_ parts, his sketches of what he saw and heard, if