which is not practical and
distinctly utilitarian. Nothing can be further from the truth; yet I
have the greatest difficulty in making people comprehend that a true
feeling for science, art, and literature can co-exist with our great
practical genius. There is more intellectual activity in the Free States
than in any other part of the world, a more general cultivation, and,
taking the collective population, I venture to say, a more enlightened
taste. Nowhere are greater sums spent for books and works of art, or for
the promotion of scientific objects. Yet this cry of "Materialism" has
become the cant and slang of European talk concerning America, and is
obtruded so frequently and so offensively that I have sometimes been
inclined to doubt whether the good breeding of Continental society has
not been too highly rated.

While on the steamer, I heard an interesting story of a Swedish
nobleman, who is at present attempting a practical protest against the
absurd and fossilised ideas by which his class is governed. The nobility
of Sweden are as proud as they are poor, and, as the father's title is
inherited by each of his sons, the country is overrun with Counts and
Barons, who, repudiating any means of support that is not somehow
connected with the service of the government, live in a continual state
of debt and dilapidation. Count R----, however, has sense enough to know
that honest labour is always honourable, and has brought up his eldest
son to earn his living by the work of his own hands. For the past three
years, the latter has been in the United States, working as a
day-labourer on farms and on Western railroads. His experiences, I
learn, have not been agreeable, but he is a young man of too much spirit
and courage to give up the attempt, and has hitherto refused to listen
to the entreaties of his family, that he shall come home and take charge
of one of his father's estates. The second son is now a clerk in a
mercantile house in Gottenburg, while the Count has given his daughter
in marriage to a radical and untitled editor, whose acquaintance I was
afterwards so fortunate as to make, and who confirmed the entire truth
of the story.

We were to pass the locks at Trollhatta in the middle of the night, but
I determined to visit the celebrated falls of the Gotha River, even at
such a time, and gave orders that we should be called. The stupid boy,
however, woke up the wrong passenger, and the last locks were reached
be