will remain a long time unmolested.

But the first thing which you say concerning the men and institutions of
England is, that they are established. In America some things are
finished before they are done; but there are no tottering
trestle-bridges in the routes of English enterprise to let the
travellers through. When a business firm becomes fairly built up, it
lasts a hundred years or more. Shop-signs are not taken down except by
the weather; new fronts grow so slowly along the ancient streets that
they appear to be deposited by secretion, like corals and shells. I took
a book to a printer, and found he was the grandson of the man who
published "Junius" in 1769, doing business in the same dingy court and
office, with the old regularity and deliberation. When I said, that, for
want of time, I should have to risk formidable errata and print at the
rate of sixty-four pages a day, he plainly suspected me of derangement
and of a desire to impart my condition to his machinery. On repeating it
with calmness, he set it down for Yankee braggadocio, and assured me
that not an author in England could print at that rate. Then he went to
work. They detest being hurried, but their latent momentum is very
great. Limited suffrage and many administrative abuses will feel it
soon, as similar things have felt it before.

But you are deceived at first, and anticipate deterioration rather than
improvement for the people of England. The city of London, with its two
and a half millions of inhabitants, looks like a huge stone that has
been pried over a sweet well; nobody need expect to draw water there any
more; fresh ones must be dug, we say, in America, in Russia, to reach
primitive human nature again, and set it free to make the wilderness
blossom. London looks as if it had slowly grown from the soil and the
climate, like a lichen that clings closely to its rocky site. The heavy,
many-storied buildings of Portland stone are blackened by the smoke till
they appear more like quarries then habitations; the swarms of human
beings look ephemeral as moths. The finest architecture becomes in a few
years indistinguishable, and delicate ornamentation is as much
superfluous as among the weather-stained cliffs and boulders of the
coast. Monumental inscriptions are smutted and half-obliterated, but the
scurf protects the monument. Under the huge pile of St. Paul's the
ceaseless traffic of human passions passes as through a defile of the
hills. When