, followed this
dinner. The second was our own introduction into European society. The
how and wherefore it is unnecessary to explain, but some of the
cleverest and best-bred people of this well-bred and clever capital took
us by the hand, all "unlettered" as we were, and from that moment,
taking into consideration our tastes and my health, the question has
been, not how to get into, but how to keep out of, the great world. You
know enough of these matters, to understand that, the ice once broken,
any one can float in the current of society.

This little footing has not been obtained without some _contretems_, and
I have learned early to understand that wherever there is an Englishman
in the question, it behoves an American to be reserved, punctilious, and
sometimes stubborn. There is a strange mixture of kind feeling,
prejudice, and ill-nature, as respects us, wrought into the national
character of that people, that will not admit of much mystification.
That they should not like us, may be natural enough; but if they seek
the intercourse, they ought, on all occasions, to be made to conduct it
equally, without annoyance and condescension and on terms of perfect
equality; conditions, by the way, that are scarcely agreeable to their
present notions of superiority.[6]

[Footnote 6: The change in this respect during the last ten years is
_patent_. No European nation has, probably, just at this moment as much
real respect for America as the English, though it is still mixed with
great ignorance, and a very sincere dislike. Still, the enterprise,
activity, and growing power of the country are forcing themselves on the
attention of our kinsmen; and if the government understood its foreign
relations as well as it does its domestic, and made a proper exhibition
of maritime preparation and of maritime force, this people would hold
the balance in many of the grave questions that are now only in abeyance
in European politics. Hitherto we have been influenced by every
vacillation in English interests, and it is quite time to think of
turning the tables, and of placing, as far as practicable, American
interests above the vicissitudes of those of other people. The thing is
more easily done than is commonly imagined, but a party politician is
rarely a statesman, the subordinate management necessary to the one
being death to the comprehensive views that belong to the other. The
peculiar nature of the American institutions, and the pecu