desire to return
to his mother country. When the financial fortune of _The Nation_ was
doubtful, he wrote to Norton that he should not go back to England
except as a "last extremity. It would be going back into an atmosphere
that I detest, and a social system that I have hated since I was
fourteen years old."[194] In 1889, after an absence of twenty-seven
years, he went to England. The best intellectual society of London and
Oxford opened its doors to him and he fell under its charm as would any
American who was the recipient of marked attentions from people of such
distinction. He began to draw contrasts which were not favorable to his
adopted country. "I took a walk along the wonderful Thames embankment,"
he wrote, "a splendid work, and I sighed to think how impossible it
would be to get such a thing done in New York. The differences in
government and political manners are in fact awful, and for me very
depressing. Henry James [with whom he stopped in London] and I talk over
them sometimes 'des larmes dans la voix.'" In 1894, however, Godkin
wrote in the _Forum_: "There is probably no government in the world
to-day as stable as that of the United States. The chief advantage of
democratic government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it
can command in an emergency."[195] But next year his pessimism is
clearly apparent. On January 12, 1895, he wrote to Norton: "You see I am
not sanguine about the future of democracy. I think we shall have a long
period of decline like that which followed (?) the fall of the Roman
Empire, and then a recrudescence under some other form of society."[196]

A number of things had combined to affect him profoundly. An admirer of
Grover Cleveland and three times a warm supporter of his candidacy for
the Presidency, he saw with regret the loss of his hold on his party,
which was drifting into the hands of the advocates of free silver. Then
in December, 1895, Godkin lost faith in his idol. "I was thunderstruck
by Cleveland's message" on the Venezuela question, he wrote to Norton.
His submission to the Jingoes "is a terrible shock."[197] Later, in a
calm review of passing events, he called the message a "sudden
declaration of war without notice against Great Britain."[198] The
danger of such a proceeding he had pointed out to Norton: Our "immense
democracy, mostly ignorant ... is constantly on the brink of some
frightful catastrophe like that which overtook France in 1870."[199] In
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