ect which interested
Harriet Martineau more passionately than any other events of her time.
In 1834 she had finished her series of illustrations of political
economy; her domestic life was fretted by the unreasonable exigences of
her mother; London society had perhaps begun to weary her, and she felt
the need of a change of scene. The United States, with the old European
institutions placed amid new conditions, were then as now a natural
object of interest to everybody with a keen feeling for social
improvement. So to the Western Republic Miss Martineau turned her face.
She had not been long in the States before she began to feel that the
Abolitionists, at that moment a despised and persecuted handful of men
and women, were the truly moral and regenerating party in the country.
Harriet Martineau no sooner felt this conviction driving out her former
prejudice against them as fanatical and impracticable, than she at once
bore public testimony, at serious risk of every kind to herself, in
favour of the extreme Anti-Slavery agitators. And for thirty years she
never slackened her sympathy nor her energetic action on English public
opinion, in this most vital matter of her time. She was guided not
merely by humanitarian disgust at the cruel and brutal abominations of
slavery,--though we know no reason why this alone should not be a
sufficient ground for turning Abolitionist,--but also on the more purely
political ground of the cowardice, silence, corruption, and hypocrisy
that were engendered in the Free States by purchased connivance at the
peculiar institution of the Slave States. Nobody has yet traced out the
full effect upon the national character of the Americans of all those
years of conscious complicity in slavery, after the moral iniquity of
slavery had become clear to the inner conscience of the very men who
ignobly sanctioned the mobbing of Abolitionists.

In the summer of 1836 Miss Martineau returned to England, having added
this great question to the stock of her foremost objects of interest and
concern. Such additions, whether literary or social, are the best kind
of refreshment that travel supplies. She published two books on America:
one of them abstract and quasi-scientific, _Society in America_; the
other, _A Retrospect of Western Travel_, of a lighter and more purely
descriptive quality. Their success with the public was moderate, and in
after years she condemned them in very plain language, the first of them