ees in being willing to show
some of their finery out of doors. This would be the feeling especially
of that part of our population which is composed of foreigners, who have
been used to the sight of such demonstrations in their native countries,
which are not democracies. In fact, we suspect that the reason why
English "flunkeys" hate American "flunkeyism," with its laced coachmen,
etc., is because mere money, by aping the insignia of rank, its gewgaws
and trumpery, shows too plainly how much of the rank itself depends upon
the fabrics and demonstrations through which it sets itself forth. We
can conceive that an English nobleman travelling in this country, who
might chance in one of our cities to see a turn-out with its outriders,
tassels, and crests, almost or quite as fine as his own, if he were
informed that it belonged to a plebeian who had grown vastly rich
through some coarse traffic, might resolve to reduce all the display
of his own equipage the moment he reached home. The labored and
mean-spirited purpose of the writer of the aforesaid article in the
Quarterly, and of other writers of like essays, is to find in our
democracy the material and occasion of everything of a discreditable
sort which occurs in our land. Now we apprehend, not without some means
of observation and inquiry, that the state and features of society in
Great Britain and in all our Northern regions are almost identically the
same, or run in parallelisms, by which we might match every phenomenon,
incident, prejudice, and folly, every good and every bad trait and
manifestation in the one place with something exactly like it in the
other. During a whole score of years, as we have read the English
journals and our own, the thought has over and over again suggested
itself to us that any one who had leisure and taste for the task might
cut out from each series of papers respectively, for a huge commonplace
book, matters of a precisely parallel nature in both countries. A simple
difference in the names of men and of places would be all that would
appear or exist. Every noble and every mean and every mixed exhibition
of character,--every act of munificence and of baseness,--every
narrative of thrilling or romantic interest,--every instance and example
of popular delusion, humbug, man-worship, breach of trust, domestic
infelicity, and of cunning or astounding depravity and hypocrisy,--every
religious, social, and political excitement,--every panic,--a