ure
that, being such a minority as it is, it has not made as good a fight as
is practicable under most difficult conditions. The American people as a
whole should not be judged by the conditions to which a portion of it
submits unwillingly in certain narrow areas.

* * * * *

It may be well to explain here (for it is a subject on which the
Englishman who has lived in America is often consulted) that the
Republican party may roughly be said to be the equivalent of the
Conservative party in England, while the Democrats are the Liberals. It
happens that a precisely reverse notion has (or had until very recent
years) some vogue in England, the misconception being an inheritance
from the times of the American Civil War.

British sympathy was not nearly so exclusively with the South at the
time of the war as is generally supposed in the United States; none the
less, the ruling and aristocratic classes in England did largely wish to
see the success of the Southern armies. The Southerner, it was
understood, was a gentleman, a man of mettle and spirit, and in many
cases the direct descendant of an old English Cavalier family; while the
Northerners were for the most part but humdrum and commercially minded
people who inherited the necessarily somewhat bigoted, if excellent,
characteristics of their Dutch, Puritan, or Quaker ancestors. The view
had at least sufficient historical basis to serve as an excuse if not
as a justification. So it came about that those classes which came to
form the backbone of the Conservative party were largely sympathisers
with the South; and, after the war, that sympathy naturally descended to
the Democratic party rather than to the Northern Republicans. Except,
however, in one particular the fundamental sentiments which make a man a
Republican or a Democrat to-day have nothing to do with the issues of
war times.

I do not know that any one has successfully defined the fundamental
difference either between a Conservative and a Liberal, or between a
Republican and a Democrat, nor have I any desire to attempt it; and
where both parties in each country are in a constant state of flux and
give-and-take, such a definition would perhaps be impossible. It may be
that Ruskin came as near to it as is practicable when he spoke of
himself as "a Tory of the old school,--the school of Homer and Sir
Walter Scott."

Many people in either country accept their political opinions rea