hose of America, like one who attempts to
scan the stars with the naked eye. My notices can only be few, faint,
and superficial; they are but an introduction to what I have to say of
the land of my birth. A few sentences will dispose of them.

America, whose attitude toward England has always been masculine and
real, has no longer to anticipate at our hands the frivolous and
offensive criticisms which were once in vogue among us. But neither
nation prefers (and it would be an ill sign if either did prefer) the
institutions of the other; and we certainly do not contemplate the great
Republic in the spirit of mere optimism. We see that it has a marvellous
and unexampled adaptation for its peculiar vocation; that it must be
judged, not in the abstract, but under the fore-ordered laws of its
existence; that it has purged away the blot with which we brought it
into the world; that it gravely and vigorously grapples with the problem
of making a continent into a state; and that it treasures with fondness
the traditions of British antiquity, which are in truth unconditionally
its own, as well, and as much as they are ours. The thing that perhaps
chiefly puzzles the inhabitants of the old country is why the American
people should permit their entire existence to be continually disturbed
by the business of the Presidential elections; and, still more, why they
should raise to its maximum the intensity of this perturbation by
providing, as we are told, for what is termed a clean sweep of the
entire civil service, in all its ranks and departments, on each
accession of a chief magistrate. We do not perceive why this arrangement
is more rational than would be a corresponding usage in this country on
each change of Ministry. Our practice is as different as possible. We
limit to a few scores of persons the removals and appointments on these
occasions; although our Ministries seem to us, not unfrequently, to be
more sharply severed from one another in principle and tendency than are
the successive Presidents of the great Union.

It would be out of place to discuss in this article occasional phenomena
of local corruption in the United States, by which the nation at large
can hardly be touched: or the mysterious manipulations of votes for the
Presidency, which are now understood to be under examination; or the
very curious influences which are shaping the politics of the negroes
and of the South. These last are corollaries to the great
sl