any rate, a manlier air
than the vulgar obsequiousness of England towards the superior on the
one hand or its cynical insolence to the inferior on the other. The
feeling which made a French lady of fashion in the seventeenth century
dress herself in the presence of a footman with as much unconcern as
if he were a piece of furniture still finds its modified analogy in
England, but scarcely in America. Almost the only field in which the
Americans struck me as showing anything like servility was in their
treatment of such mighty potentates as railway conductors, hotel
clerks, and policemen. Whether, until a millenial golden mean is
attained, this is better than our English bullying tone in the same
sphere might be an interesting question for casuists.

Americans can rarely understand the amount of social recognition given
by English duchesses to such American visitors as Col. William Cody,
generally known as "Buffalo Bill." They do not reflect that it is
just because the social gap between the two is so irretrievably vast
and so universally recognised that the duchesses can afford to amuse
themselves cursorily with any eccentricity that offers itself. As
Pomona's husband put it, people in England are like types with letters
at one end and can easily be sorted out of a state of "pi," while
Americans are theoretically all alike, like carpet-tacks. Thus
Americans of the best class often shun the free mixing that takes
place in England, because they know that the process of redistribution
will be neither easy nor popular. The intangible sieve thus placed
between the best and the not-so-good is of a fine discrimination,
beside which our conventional net-works seem coarse and ineffective.

Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked
how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in
our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air
of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption.
The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of
contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be
tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best
have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this
comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining
camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American
civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on
the extr