following
day, in order to gain votes and recover power, he adopts, and with
equal vehemence advocates; he would ask what can be the moral
standards of a country where a great party turns right round, at the
bidding of their leader, and follows him like a flock of sheep,
applauding, voting, advocating as he bids them, to-day,
this--to-morrow, its opposite.

These things and more will be found in that book of the American in
England when it appears. You see how small and worthless and
prejudiced would be such a volume. Well, it is precisely such a volume
that the ordinary traveller is capable of writing. All the things that
I have mentioned are accidentals; they are differences which mean
nothing; they are not essentials; what I wish to show is that he who
would think rightly of a country must disregard the accidentals and
get at the essentials. What follows is my own attempt--which I am well
aware must be of the smallest account--to feel my way to two or three
essentials.

First and foremost, one essential is that the country is full of
youth. I have discovered this for myself, and I have learned what the
fact means and how it affects the country. I had heard this said over
and over again. It used to irritate me to hear a monotonous repetition
of the words, 'Sir, we are a young county.' Young? At least, it is
three hundred years old; nor was it till I had passed through New
England, and seen Buffalo and Chicago--those cities which stand
between the east and time west--and was able to think and compare,
that I began to understand the reality and the meaning of those words,
which have now become so real and mean so much. It is not that the
cities are new and the buildings put up yesterday; it is in the
atmosphere of buoyancy, elation, self-reliance, and energy, which one
drinks in everywhere, that this sense of youth is apprehended. It is
youth full of confidence. Is there such a thing anywhere in America as
poverty or the fear of poverty? I do not think so. Men may be hard up
or even stone-broke; there are slums; there are hard-worked women; but
there is no general fear of poverty. In the old countries the fear of
poverty lies on all hearts like lead. To be sure, such a fear is a
survival in England. In the last century the strokes of fate were
sudden and heavy, and a merchant sitting to-day in a place of great
honour and repute, an authority on 'Change, would find himself on the
morrow in the Marshalsea or the Fleet