o forth, was as
disagreeable a discovery as he could well have made.

From public life in any shape, with all its vulgar noise, its petty
chicanery, its pandering to the mob whom he despised, he had always
shrunk, as so many Americans of his stamp have done. He had no wish to
struggle, unrewarded and disappointed, in the ranks of the minority;
while to gain place and power on the side of the majority was to lend
himself to that fatal policy which, ever since the Missouri Compromise
of 1820, has been gradually making the northern states more and more
the tools of the southern ones. He had no wish to be threatened in
Congress with having his Northerner's "ears nailed to the counter,
like his own base coin," or to be informed that he, with the
17,000,000 of the north, were the "White Slaves" of a southern
aristocracy of 350,000 slaveholders. He had enough comprehension
of, enough admiration for the noble principles of the American
Constitution to see that the democratic mobs of Irish and Germans,
who were stupidly playing into the hands of the Southerners, were not
exactly carrying them out; but he had no mind to face either Irish or
Southerners. The former were too vulgar for his delicacy; the latter
too aristocratic for his pride. Sprung, as he held (and rightly), from
as fine old English blood as any Virginian (though it did happen to be
Puritan, and not Cavalier), he had no lust to come into contact with
men who considered him much further below them in rank than an English
footman is below an English nobleman; who, indeed, would some of them
look down on the English nobleman himself as a mushroom of yesterday.
So he compounded with his conscience by ignoring the whole matter, and
by looking on the state of public affairs on his side of the Atlantic
with a cynicism which very soon (as is usual with rich men) passed
into Epicureanism. Poetry and music, pictures and statues, amusement
and travel, became his idols, and cultivation his substitute for the
plain duty of patriotism, and wandering luxuriously over the world, he
learnt to sentimentalise over cathedrals and monasteries, pictures and
statues, saints and kaisers, with a lazy regret that such "forms of
beauty and nobleness" were no longer possible in a world of scrip and
railroads: but without any notion that it was his duty to reproduce in
his own life, or that of his country, as much as he could of the said
beauty and nobleness. And now he was sorely tried. It wa