rough route from Philadelphia
to Pittsburg. You can now go a third of the distance by railroad, and,
getting into a canal-boat, are dragged over the Alleghany mountains,
through a series of locks not to be surpassed for strength or ingenuity
of contrivance.

In 1833, the journey from Augusta, Georgia, to New York was an affair of
eleven or twelve days; it is now performed in three. Steam and railroad
are, in fact, annihilating time and space in this country. In proof of
it, I can safely assert that if a traveller visiting the South-west,
say, from Savannah to New Orleans, will be at the trouble of
recollecting this book in the year 1837, he will find the account of the
difficulties of my journey extremely amusing; since, in all human
probability, he will perform that in five days, which took me, with hard
labour, perseverance, discomfort, not to say, some peril of life or
limb, just eighteen.

It is these revolutions, and such as these, that form the true wonders
of this country; that stimulate curiosity, excite interest, and well
repay the labour of any voyager embued with a grain of intelligence or
observation, to say nothing of philosophy.

It is to these results, their causes, and their immediate and probable
effects, his mind's eye will be irresistibly drawn, not to
spitting-boxes, tobacco, two-pronged forks, or other conventional
_bagatelles_, the particulars of each of which, as a solecism in polite
manners, can be corrected and canvassed by any waiter from the London
Tavern, Ludgate Street, and by every _grisette_ from America Square to
Brompton Terrace, who may choose to display their acquired gentility
"for the nonce;" and it is the absence of a spirit of philosophy
generally in our writers, and this affectation of prating so like
waiting-gentlewomen, that stings Americans, and with some show of
reason, when they see the great labours of their young country with the
efforts of its people passed lightly by, and trifles caught up and
commented upon, whose importance they cannot comprehend, and which they
have neither leisure nor example to alter or attend to.

After much and close observation, I say fearlessly, that, in all
conventional points, good society in the States is equal to the best
provincial circles in England. The absence of a court, together with the
calls of business, necessarily preclude the possibility of any class
acquiring that grace of repose, that perfection of ease, which
cultivation,