eme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause we
may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States,
where we do not find a homogeneous mass of white civilisation, but a
state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an
inferior race. To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should
need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African
colonies. Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel
inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are
ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in
political morality distinctly behind.

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American more
good-tempered and good-natured than the Englishman. Women, children,
and animals are treated with considerably more kindness. The American
translation of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant. Horses are driven
by the voice rather than by the whip. The superior does not thrust his
superiority on his inferior so brutally as we are apt to do. There is
a general intention to make things pleasant--at any rate so long as it
does not involve the doer in loss. There is less _gratuitous_
insolence. Servility, with its attendant hypocrisy and deceit, is
conspicuously absent; and the general spirit of independence, if
sometimes needlessly boorish in its manifestations, is at least sturdy
and manly. In England we are rude to those weaker than ourselves; in
America the rudeness is apt to be directed against those whom we
suspect to be in some way our superior. Man is regarded by man rather
as an object of interest than as an object of suspicion. Charity is
very widespread; and the idea of a fellow-creature actually suffering
from want of food or shelter is, perhaps, more repugnant to the
average American than to the average Englishman, and more apt to act
immediately on his purse-strings. In that which popular language
usually means when it speaks of immorality, all outward indications
point to the greater purity of the American. The conversation of the
smoking-room is a little less apt to be _risque_; the possibility of
masculine continence is more often taken for granted; solicitation on
the streets is rare; few American publishers of repute dare to issue
the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the
columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to
anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stag