rica because it
is very much missed in a mere contrast with England. I need not say that
if I felt it even about slight figures of fiction, I felt it even more
about solid figures of history. Such ghosts seemed particularly solid in
the Southern States, precisely because of the comparative quietude and
leisure of the atmosphere of the South. It was never more vivid to me
than when coming in, at a quiet hour of the night, into the
comparatively quiet hotel at Nashville in Tennessee, and mounting to a
dim and deserted upper floor where I found myself before a faded
picture; and from the dark canvas looked forth the face of Andrew
Jackson, watchful like a white eagle.

At that moment, perhaps, I was in more than one sense alone. Most
Englishmen know a good deal of American fiction, and nothing whatever of
American history. They know more about the autocrat of the
breakfast-table than about the autocrat of the army and the people, the
one great democratic despot of modern times; the Napoleon of the New
World. The only notion the English public ever got about American
politics they got from a novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_; and to say the
least of it, it was no exception to the prevalence of fiction over fact.
Hundreds of us have heard of Tom Sawyer for one who has heard of Charles
Sumner; and it is probable that most of us could pass a more detailed
examination about Toddy and Budge than about Lincoln and Lee. But in
the case of Andrew Jackson it may be that I felt a special sense of
individual isolation; for I believe that there are even fewer among
Englishmen than among Americans who realise that the energy of that
great man was largely directed towards saving us from the chief evil
which destroys the nations to-day. He sought to cut down, as with a
sword of simplicity, the new and nameless enormity of finance; and he
must have known, as by a lightning flash, that the people were behind
him, because all the politicians were against him. The end of that
struggle is not yet; but if the bank is stronger than the sword or the
sceptre of popular sovereignty, the end will be the end of democracy. It
will have to choose between accepting an acknowledged dictator and
accepting dictation which it dare not acknowledge. The process will have
begun by giving power to people and refusing to give them their titles;
and it will have ended by giving the power to people who refuse to give
us their names.

But I have a special reason for end