py; but his pride will not allow him to
acknowledge that he has committed an error in his choice, and he
continues before the world to descant upon her virtues, and to conceal
her errors, while he feels that his home is miserable.

It is because it is more egotistical that the patriotism of the American
is more easily roused and more easily affronted. He has been educated
to despise all other countries, and to look upon his own as the first in
the world; he has been taught that all other nations are slaves to
despots, and that the American citizen only is free, and this is never
contradicted. For although thousands may in their own hearts feel the
falsehood of their assertions, there is not one who will venture to
express his opinion. The government sets the example, the press follows
it, and the people receive the incense of flattery, which in other
countries is offered to the court alone; and if it were not for the
occasional compunctions and doubts, which his real good sense will
sometimes visit him with, the more enlightened American would be as
happy in his own delusions, as the majority most certainly may be said
to be.

M. Tocqueville says, "For the last fifty years no pains have been
spared to convince the inhabitants of the United States that they
constitute the only religious, enlightened, and free people. They
perceive that, for the present, their own democratic institutions
succeed, while those of other countries fall; hence they conceive an
overweening opinion of their superiority, and they are not very remote
from believing themselves to belong to a distinct race of mankind."

There are, however, other causes which assist this delusion on the part
of the majority of the Americans; the principal of which is the want of
comparison. The Americans are too far removed from the Old Continent,
and are too much occupied even if they were not, to have time to visit
it, and make the comparison between the settled countries and their own.
America is so vast, that if they travel in it, their ideas of their own
importance become magnified. The only comparisons they are able to make
are only as to the quantity of square acres in each country, which, of
course, is vastly in their favour.

Mr Sanderson, the American, in his clever Sketches of Paris, observes,
"It is certainly of much value in the life of an American gentleman to
visit these old countries, if it were only to form a just estimate of
his own, whic