es to compare with _Harper's_, _The Century_,
or _Scribner's_. Those three magazines combined have, I believe, a
number of readers in the United States equalling the aggregate
circulation of the London penny dailies; which is a point that is worth
consideration. When, moreover, the cheaper magazines became a
possibility, how came it that such publications as _McClure's_ and _The
Cosmopolitan_ arose? The illustrated magazines of the United States are
indeed a fact of profound significance, for which the Englishman when he
measures the taste and intellectuality of the American people by its
press makes no allowance. Magazines of the same excellence cannot find
the same support in England. At least two earnest attempts have been
made in late years to establish English monthlies which would compare
with any of the three first mentioned above, and both attempts have
failed.

What has been said about the much more representative character of the
American daily press--the fact that the same papers are read by a vastly
larger proportion of the population--brings us face to face with a
root-fact which vitiates almost any attempt at a rough and ready
comparison between the peoples. In America, there exist the counterparts
of every class of man who is to be found in England--men as refined, men
no less crass and brutal--some as vulgar and some as full of the pride
of birth. Most Englishmen will be surprised to hear that the American,
democrat though he is, is as a rule more proud of an ancestor who fought
in the Revolutionary War than is an Englishman of one who fought in the
Wars of the Roses. I am sure that he sets more store by a direct and
authentic descent from one of the company of the _Mayflower_ than the
Englishman does by an equally direct and authentic line back to the days
of William the Conqueror. Incidentally it may be said that the American
will talk more about it. But while in America all classes exist, they
are not fenced apart, as in England, in fact any more than they are in
theory. The American people (_pace_ the leaders of the New York Four
Hundred) "comes mixed"; dip in where you will and you bring up all sorts
of fish. In England if you go into educated society, you are likely to
meet almost exclusively educated people--or at least people with the
stamp of educated manners. Sir Gorgius Midas is not of course inexorably
barred from the society of duchesses. Her Grace of Pentonville must have
met him frequently