, that it was used with more economy; yet still a much
larger portion of the weekly income is thus expended than with
us. Ardent spirits, though lamentably cheap,* still cost
something, and the use of them among the men, with more or less
of discretion, according to the character, is universal. Tobacco
also grows at their doors, and is not taxed; yet this too costs
something, and the air of heaven is not in more general use among
the men of America, than chewing tobacco. I am not now pointing
out the evils of dram-drinking, but it is evident, that where
this practice prevails universally, and often to the most
frightful excess, the consequence must be, that the money spent
to obtain the dram is less than the money lost by the time
consumed in drinking it. Long, disabling, and expensive fits of
sickness are incontestably more frequent in every part of
America, than in England, and the sufferers have no aid to look
to, but what they have saved, or what they may be enabled to
sell. I have never seen misery exceed what I have witnessed in
an American cottage where disease has entered.

*(About a shilling a gallon is the retail price of good
(whiskey. If bought wholesale, or of inferior quality, it
(is much cheaper.

But if the condition of the labourer be not superior to that
of the English peasant, that of his wife and daughters is
incomparably worse. It is they who are indeed the slaves of the
soil. One has but to look at the wife of an American cottager,
and ask her age, to be convinced that the life she leads is one
of hardship, privation, and labour. It is rare to see a woman in
this station who has reached the age of thirty, without losing
every trace of youth and beauty. You continually see women with
infants on their knee, that you feel sure are their grand-
children, till some convincing proof of the contrary is
displayed. Even the young girls, though often with lovely
features, look pale, thin, and haggard. I do not remember to
have seen in any single instance among the poor, a specimen of
the plump, rosy, laughing physiognomy so common among our cottage
girls. The horror of domestic service, which the reality of
slavery, and the fable of equality, have generated, excludes the
young women from that sure and most comfortable resource of
decent English girls; and the consequence is, that with a most
irreverend freedom of manner to the parents, the daughters are,
to the full extent of