IB THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS IN ENGLAND. POCKET EDITIONS IN ONE SHILLING VOLUMES. Authors' Editions. MR. W. D. HOWELLS' WORKS In Fourteen Volumes. THE BREAKFAST TABLE SERIES By Oliver Wendell Holmes In Six Volumes. RUDDER GRANGE. I WINTER SUNSHINE. By FRANK R. STOCKTON. | By JOHN BURROUGHS. ONE SUMMER. By B. W. HOWARD. OLD CREOLE DAYS. By GEORGE W. CABLE. Others in preparation. MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS IN ENGLAND BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE AUTHOR OF 'ENGLAND WITHOUT AND WITHIN,' ETC. ETC. Author's Edition EDINBURGH DAVID DOUGLAS, CASTLE STREET 1883 Oimburgl) JDlmfaersttg ^rcss: T. AND A. CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY. (ntf THE FELLOW-TRAVELLERS. OLD ENG- LAND AND NEW ENGLAND. /^\NE bright September day I was on V-' my way from London to in shire, where I expected to ramble for half a week among the farmsteads and cottages,unknowing and unknown, and then to visit a gentleman of the county, whom I had not seen since he parted from me at my own door, leaving pleasant memories behind him. I was alone in the railway carnage, and was as nearly in a state of perfect happi- ness as a man could be who was away from home and from those who make 4 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS it home, and the desire of whose life was not only unattained but unat- tempted. The air was soft ; the grey- blue sky was lightly clouded ; the morning beamed with a mellow bright- ness that was like the smile of a happy woman. Sitting in the middle back seat, leaning at mine ease in mine inn, swift-moving, silent, secluded, luxuri- ous, I looked alternately through one window and the other upon that beau- tiful human scenery of England which was such a never-ending, ever-vary- ing source of delight to me that its only shadow was the regret which it now and then awakened that a certain steeple-crowned gentleman had not stayed at home and minded his business, instead of seeking that "freedom to worship God," which, having obtained, he immediately took vigorous measures to deny to others. My reveries did not attain the IN ENGLAND. dignity of thought ; and I was as nearly in the state of sweet-doing- nothing as is possible to a man of English blood and American birth in the nineteenth century. The speed of the train was diminished by almost insensible gradation, until we stopped at one of the minor way-stations, where I saw half a dozen persons waiting : a clergyman, manifestly, not only from the cut and colour of his coat, and his hat, and his white tie in the morning, but most of all from his very clerical but cheerful counten- ance ; a roughish, sharp-eyed com- mercial traveller or two ; a lean, pale, spinster-looking gentlewoman, with a maid of dangerous freshness of lip and roundness of waist, carrying her bag ; and a farmer, not big and burly, but rather under-sized, with a gnarled and almost knotted visage. All these were evidently going short distances, and they disappeared into other car- MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS riages ; when, just as the train was about moving, my open door was darkened by a porter who had in his hand a small portmanteau., on which 1 at once saw, among other labels and relics of others, two that interested me, Boston and Roma. " Step quick, sir, please/' said the porter ; and the passenger was in his seat, with his portmanteau at his feet, before I recognised him. " Why, Humphreys, is it you? How came you here?" " In a fly," he answered, with a smile, partly at his old joke, partly of plea- sant recognition. After a grasp of the hand, which was somewhat closer than it would have been if we had met in Broadway or in Beacon Street, we fell into the quick inquiring and replying chat of compatriots who meet unexpectedly in a strange country. Mansfield Humphreys, whose first name w r as William, but who was always called by his second, that of his IN ENGLAND. 7 mother's family, was a New England man, who spent a great part of his time in New York. His people were of well-settled respectability in the interior of Massachusetts : his father, a judge, an Episcopalian when Episco- palians were rare in the Old Common- wealth, an unflinching Federalist in the waning days of Federalism; his mother, the daughter of a Congrega- tional minister. They were one of those numerous New England families who, having lived savingly in the past on fewer hundreds a year than many of them now have thousands, had yet been known through generations for their culture, their fine breeding, and their character. Whether all the men were brave we know not ; and if all the women were not virtuous, that too was never known ; but they were of that order of New England folk among whom the doing of a shabby thing was almost social death ; MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS and for generations they had held their heads high with modest dignity ; so that in the times when representa- tives were chosen because they were thought to be worthy of considera- tion and the fittest men to speak and act for their fellow-citizens, the Humphreys sat again and again in the General Court of Massachusetts. He was a Harvard man, and a lawyer by profession; but he had appeared little in the courts, and was chiefly employed as counsel for railway com- panies, in one or two of which he was a shareholder. In the civil war, after standing uncertain for a while (for he was no abolitionist), he became a very pro- nounced Unionist; not because he went with the multitude, but chiefly, I suspect, because of his resentment of the political domineering and social arrogance of the South. He did not go into the army ; for although he was IN ENGLAND. 9 very young at the time, he thought he could do more service out of the field than in it. " I 've no military instincts/' he said ; " if I were to put on a uniform, I should only feel as if I was going to a bal costume in a cha- racter that didn't suit me. I hardly know one end of a gun from the other ; I never in my life fired even a revolver ; and in battle I should count only as one man, either to shoot or to be shot at; but of such perhaps if I stayed at home I might count for quite half a dozen." Wherefore he stayed ; and he did count for many half-dozens by his energy and skill in affairs, and his indomitable spirit in the darkest days of the Union. He was very versatile; and one un- expected manifestation of a special talent brought us into close com- munion. In a series of amateur dramatic performances, got up for the purpose of combining social enter- 10 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS tainment with the raising of funds for the equipment of a regiment, I had acted as a sort of stage manager, and he had been general business manager and treasurer ; but on the defection of one of the princi- pal amateur artists, and the despair of the company at finding a rem- pla$ant, he, to the surprise of all, declared that he would take the vacant role himself. To the still greater surprise of all, this sober lawyer and then nascent railway manager, displayed a marked histri- onic ability. Although he was a fine- looking fellow, he had a face and a figure that were not impressively individual, and when he appeared upon the stage he was dressed and made up with such skill that, if his name had not been known, his near- est friends would not have recognised him. He played with an entire unconsciousness of self, and with such IN ENGLAND. 1 1 a dry, pungent humour that his speeches told like rifle-bullets on his audience. His success did not turn his head. After the war was over, he could not be induced to repeat his theatrical performances. He sub- sided again into his business, and grew moderately rich ; and in the mature man who looked after stocks and legislatures no one, except a few who remembered the young fellow of fifteen years before, would have supposed there was an amateur actor of the first quality. This was the man who dropped by my side, out of the clouds into a rail- way carriage. As we chatted, the train stopped again, and there entered our compartment a tall, fine-looking man, with dark eyes and hair, aquiline features, and military-looking mous- tache and whiskers in which a little grey was gleaming. He looked strong and alert, notwithstanding a pale face 12 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS and a rather slender figure. Taking off his hat, after bidding us good- morning, he put it into the rack above his head, and substituted for it a little black silk smoking-cap. Then he took up a railway novel and began to read. Soon, turning to Humphreys, who was on the opposite seat, he said, " I beg your pahdon, but would you kindly tell me if this is a fast train ? I forgot to inquire." "With pleasure," said Humphreys; " but I don't know, myself. I 'm quite a stranger here, an American." If instead of this answer in Hum- phrey's sweet, rich voice, he had re- ceived a snub, he could hardly have shown more astonishment in the change of the expression of his face. His eye rested a moment on Hum- phreys, and with "Ah, thanks," he slowly went back to his book. After reading a while, with an uneasy hitch IN ENGLAND. 13 or two of his elbows, he suddenly turned to Humphreys again, saying, " I beg your pahdon, but you said you were an American. You weren't jokin' ?" " Not at all ;" and after a glance at me, with an affirmative glance in reply, " My friend here and I are both Americans, Yankees. I 've been here before, but I believe this is his first visit to England." " Indeed ! That 's very surprisin'. Will you pahdon a stranger for saying so, but (I 've never been in America) you're not at all the sort of person that we take Americans to be, and generally find 'em, if you '11 excuse me for sayin' so. Indeed, I know I 'm takin' a liberty ; but I was so much surprised that that I'm sure I hope you'll pahdon me." It is impossible to exaggerate the manly Courtesy and deference of his manner as he spoke, looking frankly and modestly from his hazel eyes, and 14 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS the little hesitation in his speech rather lent it grace and charm. " Pray don't apologise/' said Hum- phreys, " but let me ask in turn,, What sort of creature do you expect an American to be, black, with woolly hair, or copper-coloured, with a scalp- lock and a tomahawk in hand ?" He laughed gently, and replied, " Not exactly that ; at least except in some cases. But the few Americans that I 've seen could be told for American across a theatre : their faces, their figures, their carriage, the cut of their clothes, all told it ; and if one were blind they could be known by their voices, and, if you '11 pahdon me, by the very queer language they used, which w r as English merely because it wasn't anything else. I know I 've no right to presume on these criticisms to you; but you seemed to invite it, after kindly passin' over my first intrusion." IN ENGLAND. 15 " Pray be at ease on that score. We 're very glad, I 'm sure, of a little enlightenment in regard to those very queer people, 'the Americans/ who you seem to think are all as like as Rosalind's halfpence. But now par- don me for saying, in my turn, that if you were to come to Boston, you would be taken, by most of my friends, at least in your evening dress, for a Yankee, except by those whose quick ears detected some slight John Bullish inflections in your voice, or whose quick eyes discovered some kindred and equally slight peculiarities of manner." "I taken for a Yankee!" and he looked blank, and even slightly aghast. It was the nearest approach to un- pleasantness that our fellow-traveller had yet been guilty of; but it was so honest and simple, so plainly without thought of offence, and so earnest, that Humphreys and I enjoyed it and 16 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS laughed ; at which he blushed like a girl, and then laughed himself, w r ith gleaming teeth and mobile lips. " Why/' said Humphreys, " are you not English?" "What a question ! To be sure I am." "English for many generations ?" " For more than I know. My peo- ple were here when William the Con- queror came over." " So were mine ; so were my friend's ; so were those of most of our friends at home. Did you ever think of that?" " Ah yes. Just so ; quite so, quite so. That 's an old story. But hasn't there been some admixture ah, some interminglin', or ah, somethin' ? Else how could we tell an American the moment we look at him, the very moment, don't you see ? You find 'em in Paris, and all over the Continent, and you can tell 'em as you pass 'em in the street." IN ENGLAND. 17 " Hardly, it would seem ; for here 's a case this morning, perhaps two/' with a glance at me, who kept silence, "in which it seems the sure tests failed." " Ah, yes, 'm ; just so ; quite so, quite so. You 're right there. Bless my soul ! I never was so astonished in my life as when you coolly told me you were an American." "Coolly?" " I beg your pahdon ;" and again he blushed. " I meant no offence." " Not more than I did, I 'm sure, when I said that you might be taken for a Yankee." I saw by his eye that he winced again, internally ; but he said nothing. " Of course," said Humphreys, in an easy, off-hand manner, " we can always tell an Englishman by his face and his figure, and his dress and his speech." " Ah, just so ; I should think so," B 18 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS with a little involuntary drawing of himself up. " Oh, yes ; we all know an English- man by his being red-faced and bull- necked and clumsy, with coat and trousers of a furious check, and a waistcoat of a different suit, and a lot of chains and rings, and his saying Hengland for England, and calling a hen an N. We can't mistake them." And as Humphreys told this off, there was a good-natured smile upon his lip, and a twinkle in his eye that made it impossible for our carriage com- panion to take offence at what he himself had provoked. But he re- joined quickly and rather sharply, dropping his voice "I beg your pahdon, I beg your pahdon; you said that you'd been here before. Did you ever happen to be in the company of an English gentleman ? " "This morning, at least, I hope IN ENGLAND. 19 and believe/' said Humphreys,, bow- ing, and looking him very steadily in the eye. There was a slight pause, and then the Englishman said, " I ask your pahdon, I ask your pahdon ; I see I was wrong. But it 's all so very odd, so very strange. The truth is that you see that, as I told you, I Ve never been in America, and the few Ameri- cans I Ve seen I Ve met by chance, and didn't know who or what they were, and that, by the way, isn't an easy thing to find out about Ameri- cans ; and so well, I suppose," with a pleasant smile and a very sweet and simple courtesy, "I suppose I haven't happened to fall in with an American gentleman until this morning." "A Roland for my Oliver," said Humphreys, with a frank smile ; " but let us leave compliments and fencing, and talk a little plain common-sense. What do you mean by an American ? " 20 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS " Oh, a man born in America, to be sure, a man from the States." "That's a definition that would quickly land you on veiy queer and heterogeneous shores. For it would include some millions of negroes, some tens of thousands of Indians, to say nothing of a great number of sons of Irishmen and Germans, whose brothers and sisters, as well as whose parents, were born in Ireland or in Germany. Now all these people are almost as completely separated from each other, and from us Yankees, and from Vir- ginians and South Carolinians, as if they or their parents had remained at home. The time will come when they the whites among them at least will all be blended into one people ; but many generations must pass away before that is brought about. Meantime, they are all citi- zens of the United States, just as all your Irishmen and Scotchmen and IN ENGLAND. 21 East Indiamen are British subjects. But although they are thus politically united, and being scattered over a half-continent that has no distinctive name,, are called Americans for con- venience' sake, because there is no other way of designating them., they are in no sense one people,, like the English people, or the Irish, or the Scotch, or the French, or like the Germans and the Italians, who have been distinctive races or peoples from prehistoric times, but only recently have become politically nations." "Ah, I see; just so, just so. But what has that to do with my taking you and your friend, as a matter of course, for Englishmen, and my being taken for for a Yankee ? " " Well, this : Are you not apt to forget that New England was settled by Englishmen w r ho went over there in large numbers (nearly forty thou- sand in less than twenty years) two 22 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS centuries and a half ago, Englishmen who were, so to speak, the most Eng- lish of their kind, typical representa- tives of the Anglo-Saxon race as it had been developed in England dur- ing one thousand years ; the men who beheaded Charles i. because he was a faithless tyrant, and who made the Commonwealth : who, as John Rich- ard Green has told you, were in great part men of the professional and middle classes ; some of them men of landed estate ; some clergymen, some London lawyers, or young Oxford scho- lars ; the bulk, god-fearing farmers ? Don't you forget that these men and their descendants, through a century and a half (with no important admix- ture), settled and built up the country, and framed a society and a system of government which, omitting only the elements of monarchy and aristocracy, was thoroughly English in its spirit, in its laws, and in its habits and cus- IN ENGLAND. 23 toms which indeed could not have been other than thoroughly English, because they were English ; and that American Society, as they thus made it, was subjected to no considerable external influences until about fifty years ago ? It is within that time, within the memory of men yet living and acting, that the emigration from other countries than England began. Fifty years ago the people of New England and Virginia (excluding the slaves) were probably the most thoroughly English people in the world." The Englishman raised his eye- brows, and looked inquiringly. "Because," Humphreys continued, in reply to the look, " there was less admixture of any foreign element among them than there was in Eng- land itself. You might then travel through New England in its length and breadth, and not encounter, in 24 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS your journey, half a dozen names that were not English. Do you suppose that the blood, the nature, of these men was changed because, in contend- ing for their rights as Englishmen, they had severed their political con- nection with the mother country ? Did the absence of monarchy affect their race, or change their race traits? Were Cromwell's Ironsides any less Englishmen than Goring's troopers ? Were Englishmen any less English under the Commonwealth than they had been before under Charles i., or than they became afterwards under Charles 11. ? " "I suppose not. I never thought of that. But they were in England." " And you suppose that that made them Englishmen ? I thought, on the contrary, that Britain became England because Englishmen lived there, possessed the country, and ruled it." IN ENGLAND. 25 " Very true. Just so ; quite so, quite so." "Well, if a large body of English- men went to another country, and possessed it and ruled it, would they therefore cease to be Englishmen ? " " N-n-no ; I can't see exactly how they would. But they might change, you know, in time, and by intermix- ture with other people, natives of the new country, the aborigines, you know; and that would modify their language and their customs, and so gradually make them a different people." " So it might, in a long period of time. But what are two centuries in the life of a race, and above all a race so scrupulously averse to social inter- mixture as the English race is when it colonises ? Aborigines ! Why, the Englishmen that came from Jutland into Britain didn't sweep it so clean of the British tribes, as the English- 26 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS men who came from Old England to America swept their part of the coun- try clean of Americans. Yes " (in answer to a look of surprise at the word), " Americans ; for you Ve only to turn back less than a hundred years in English literature to find the word ' American ' applied (and rightly) only to the tribes for whose miserable remnants you have now to go to the Rocky Mountains, two thousand miles from Boston, further than from Lon- don to St. Petersburg. And then these Englishmen clung with singular tenacity to every element of their English birthright, its laws, its lan- guage ; and chiefly to its English Bible, which has been thus far the most indestructible of all the bonds of union between scattered men of English race, even the most godless of them. But we're getting into deep waters for a railway chat, and I 'in almost lecturing you." IN ENGLAND. 2? " No, no ; do go on. I suppose I knew all this before ; but I never saw it before quite in this light." " Well, however it all may be that I 've just been telling you, at the risk of being trite and commonplace, is it not reasonable in judging a countiy in which a new government and a new society have been established, to judge it by those who have been longest under the influences of the country, physical, political, and social ? Must not they be the best examples of what that new country, as you call it, and that new government and society have produced ? " " Ah ! 'm ! seems so ; can't say but they are." " How could it be otherwise ? Now the most thoroughly English- seeming men that you will find in America are New England men and Virginians whose families have been in New England and Virginia for two 28 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS hundred years. I remember a man on shipboard whom not one of those whom you call Britishers " "We?" "Surely you, or nobody. It is a word never heard in the United States : absolutely unknown except as a quizzical quotation of what you must pardon me for calling British blundering." " Well, well ! " said our railway friend, a little testily. " There would seem to be no end to our blunderin'. You mean,, I suppose, your English shipmates." " Some were English, yes ; but some were Scotch, some Irish, and there was a handsome Welshman, with a sweet English wife. But they were all British subjects, as they might all have been citizens of the United States, might they not ? " " I 'm afraid you 're an American Socrates, and are gettin' me into a IN ENGLAND. 29 corner with your questions ; but I suppose that I must admit that they might." " And in that case would they have ceased to be English, Irish, Scotch, and Welsh?" "To be sure they would." 11 How is that ? Would the govern- ment under which they chose to live change their identity, their race, and make them other than they were born?" " N-n-no. At least, I can't say just now how it would. But aren't you puttin' rather too fine a point on it, as we say in England ? ' ' ' And as we say in' New England. I think not. But be that as it may, this motley crowd of four races undertook to label some dozen or twenty of their fellow-passengers as foreigners, because they were born in America, men of as unmitigated English blood as could be found be- tween the Humber and the Channel. SO MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS But this one man whom I mentioned they positively refused to accept as an American, even upon the assur- ance of his countrymen ; insisting upon it, in a hooting sort of way, that he was English. And so he was, as English as King Alfred ; but, as I happened to know, he was from the interior of New England, where his father's family and his mother's had lived for more than two hundred years." " A singular exception, I suppose. There must always be such excep- tions, you know." " Pardon me, rather as you know ; just such exceptions as you found my friend here and myself." And as Humphreys smiled, his good-natured colloquist smiled too, and said "You have me there. But you see, I 'm no fair match for you. You have thought on this subject, and I haven't." IN ENGLAND. 31 "And therefore you have under- taken to decide it; for yourself, at least." " Come, come ! This is getting to be a little too much. I didn't expect that when I asked a simple question I should be sat upon in this awful way;" saying this in the pleasantest tone and with perfect good-nature, and yet evidently feeling a little nettled at Humphrey's close pursuit. "Isn't the truth of the matter that you I mean you in the Old Home here have done the sitting down yourselves for so long that you don't quite like any change in the fashion?" There was a silence of a few moments, broken only by the half- musical hum with which a fast English railway train pursues its swift but gentle course ; and I, look- ing out of the window, as we passed, upon a viaduct, over a pretty road, 32 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS saw a great van toiling along just under us, and a humble foot-passenger resting himself on a bench under an old oak opposite a little inn, at the door of which stood a stout, red-faced woman, probably the wife of the publican. I had hardly had this cha- racteristic glimpse of rural England, and we were whisking again through sprout-fields and meadows, when our companion resumed the conversa- tion, saying, " Perhaps, perhaps. The truth is that likely enough we have been a little hard upon you, from Mrs. Trollope down." ee Ay," answered Humphreys ; ec you all begin with Mrs. Trollope's dam- nable book. And yet Mrs. Trollope was right." " Right ! And you say that !" " I. So far as I have the means of knowing, Mrs. Trollope was quite correct in all her descriptions." "Quite so," I said, putting in my IN ENGLAND. 33 little oar for the first time, as the Englishman turned to me with an astonished and inquiring eye. " And yet you called her book damnable/' " And so it was," said Humphreys ; " professing as it did to give a picture of the domestic manners of the Ameri- cans,, and taken, as it was, to be a correct representation of society in the United States. It was written in a pleasing and picturesque style, for Mrs. Trollope's style was better than her son Anthony's ; and that book has leavened, or rather soured and doughed, British opinion and tinged British feeling in regard to the Americans to this day." " Correct, and yet damnable ; pleas- ing and picturesque, and yet souring and doughing ! Matters, I must say, are becoming rather complicated ; 1 mixed ' I believe it 's called in America." c 34> MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS "Do you know," said Humphreys, sharply, "anything of the geography of the United States, and did you ever hear of Botany Bay ? " " Oh, yes," replied our companion, blandly brightening ; " I 'm pretty well up there. I know, of course, that the States lie south of Canada, and north of the island of Nassau ; and I know all about your big rivers and lakes, and your immense prairies, and the Rocky Mountains, and Cali- fornia, and all that sort of thing. But what has that to do with Botany Bay ?" "Do you know how far New Orleans and Cincinnati are from Boston and Philadelphia?" " New Orleans ? That 's where the British troops lost a battle. Washing- ton defeated us there, didn't he ? You see I 'm determined to be fair. Quite at the south, isn't it? And Cincinnatus, one of your western IN ENGLAND. 35 towns isn't it, near Chicago ? I suppose they must both be pretty well away from Boston ; some two or three hundred miles or so." "And do you know when Mrs. Trollope wrote her book ?" " I can answer that question of my American catechism too/' he replied. " I know it 's not a new book, twenty or thirty years old ; and since that time, I know/' he continued, with a courtesy which I thought rather severely tried by Humphrey's sharp fire of questions, "the Ameri- cans have made great advances, very great advances, indeed," bowing to both of us. ' c My stars and garters ! nothing of the sort," rejoined Humphreys, like a steel-trap. " If you mean that we 've grown richer, and bigger, and stronger, very well ; that 's true enough. But if you mean that we Ve made great advances in morality, in social refine- 3D MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS ment, and particularly in domestic manners, to use Mrs. Trollope's very good phrase, permit me to assure you, you 're quite wrong. This was before my memory : I 'm not praising the doings of the days when I was a boy. I spare you the quotation " " Sese puero," murmured our friend. ' ( but if you will look into the books of some British travellers who pre- 1 ceded Mrs. Trollope a generation or so, you will find that they present a picture of morals and manners in the United States much more admirable than could be composed from the columns of our own newspapers at the present day." " You have been deterioratin' then, you mean to say ?" "Looking at the surface of our society without discrimination, it must be admitted that the deterioration has been great in those respects." " I 'm sorry to hear it ; and to tell IN ENGLAND. 37 you the truth, I think somethin' of the same sort has been goin' on in England. To what do you attribute it?" " Several causes ; but chiefly, our great and sudden increase in wealth, the war, and largely, European in- fluence." "Whew!" a very soft whistle of surprise. " Not such European influence as would be likely to be under your per- sonal cognisance, or to occur to you in your estimate of social forces. But let me go on as I began. The de- terioration in morals is so certain and so well known that no one thinks of disputing it. To look through a file of one of our leading newspapers for the last fifteen years is to be led to the conclusion that personal honesty has become the rarest of virtues in the United States, except public pro- bity, which seems no longer to exist. 38 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS The very ruins of it have disappeared. Our State legislatures, instead of being composed of men to whom their constituents looked up, are now composed of men upon whom their constituents look down, not second- rate, nor even third-rate, but fourth and fifth rate men, sordid in morals and vulgar in manners, who do politics as a business, for the mere purpose of filling their own pockets. No one thinks of disputing this more than the presence of the blood-sucking insects of summer. Congress itself is openly declared by our own journals to be, because it is known to be, the most corrupt body in civilised Christendom. Within the last fifteen years we have seen men occupying the highest, the two very highest, positions in the government of the United States, who were not only purchasable, but who had been purchased, and at a very small price. I know what I say, IN ENGLAND. 39 and mean it " (in answer to a look of surprise). " The Cabinets, during the same period, have been so rotten with corruption that the presence in them of two or three men of integrity could not save them. Worse even than this, judges are openly called Mr. This-one's judge, or Mr. That- one's; their owner being generally the controlling stockholder and man- ager of some great corporation, which coins wealth for him and his satellites by schemes of gigantic extortion. I know something of this by personal observation. There was a time when the bench of the United States was not inferior in probity, and hardly in learning or ability, to that of Great Britain. As to manners, did you see that social sketch in Punch ticketed " In Mid-Atlantic," in which a bishop or a dean, who has plainly been en- gaged in an upper-deck fair-day chat with an American mother, turns to 40 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS her son, a lad in knickerbockers, and looking with benign reproof upon him, says, ' My young friend, when I was of your age it was not thought decor- ous for young people to mingle in the conversations of their elders, unless they were requested to do so.' And young Hopeful replies, 'That must have been eighty years ago, and we've changed all that now.' The cut is hardly an exaggeration ; but here are my friend and myself, who are little more than half the age attributed to your bishop, and who can tell you that in our boyhood that point of breeding was not only taught and insisted on, but punctiliously observed among all respectable New England folk. And who, at that time, among such people, even not in our boyhood, would have ventured to come up to two persons engaged in conversation, and break directly in upon them with another topic, at his pleasure, or for his in- IN ENGLAND. 41 terest, as now is done constantly ? Deterioration of manners indeed ! " " But these are comparatively triflin' matters, mere surface marks, not peculiar to America, you may be sure. Boys are saucier in England than they used to be ; and here rude men thrust themselves upon you now with a freedom that certainly shows the world is movin' ; but as to which way, they and you might have a differ- ent opinion." " Surface marks ! So are the bub- bles on a stream ; but they float with its current, and the foul air that fills them comes from the bottom. Let me tell you, ex cathedrd, what I know, merely as every observing man who has the means of knowing knows : that the manners and the manner, as well as the morals, of America let us say of Boston and Philadelphia, for example, and the surrounding countiy were of a much finer type in the 42 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS days of our fathers than they are in ours. Behaviour is common now in splendid drawing-rooms, filled with every attainable object of luxury and of taste, which then would not have been tolerated in modest parlours of people who lived frugally and worked hard for their moderate incomes. Among them, young people did not lounge and loll about and talk slang in the presence of their elders and of ladies." " Come, come ! Aren't you playin' the middle-aged cynic ? That 's not at all peculiar to America. The very same change has been remarked upon here." "And therefore," remarked Hum- phreys, with a little smile, " Americans have been becoming zmlike English- men ? Strange, that among people so unlike, the social changes should have been the same within the same period of time !" IN ENGLAND. 43 " H'm ! Democratic tendencies ; influence of democracy in both coun- tries ; lack of deference for authority in both countries." " Perhaps. But among the changes in manners in England haven't you observed the incoming of a certain mildness and gentleness of tone, a considerate charity for weakness and misfortune, and for the feelings of inferiors ? Are personal defects and failings, and the ridicule that Juvenal tells us is inherent in poverty, now openly made the butts of the more fortunate so much as they used to be, say, even when Miss Austen wrote her novels ?" " No, they 're not. In that respect I must say there has been a marked improvement. I suppose the same has taken place with you." " No." "No?" " Not at all : simply because it was 44 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS not needed. I don't know how it was at the South ; but among New England people of decent breeding in colonial days,, and in the early years of the re- public, any reflection upon personal defects or misfortune,, any assumption of superiority because of mere money prosperity, was regarded as the most offensive form of ill-manners ; so much so, that among such people it may be said to have been almost unknown. And this social trait may be taken as typical of the tone and the manners of New England society at the time we are speaking of." " Very admirable, if pahdon me you 're sure you 're correct ; and quite destructive to a suggestion I was about to make, that the Americans, whose manners and mental tone and habits you seem to think should be taken as characteristic, are not real Americans, products of your soil, but Europeanised Americans." IN ENGLAND. 4>5 "Now/' said Humphreys, smartly, "if you use that phrase and take that position, I shall to adopt an ex- pression of the elegant Miss Harriet Byron's e rear up.' The Americans of whom I am speaking are, true enough, not products of the soil ; in the name of Christopher Columbus how could they be ? but they were those who had been free from European influence, not only from their birth, but for gen- erations, people who had never been in Europe, and whose forefathers had never been there from the time when they first went to America, two hun- dred and fifty years ago. They were the people who, Lord Lovelace said, in Queen Anne's time, had, with their colonial and republican simplicity of life, the manners of courtiers, and won- dered (ignorant as he was) where they could have got their breeding. He reminds me of another more dis- tinguished peer, or man who became 46 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS a peer, Bulwer, Lord Lytton. Once, at his own table, when there was a discussion as to some matter of taste as to which an American, there present, ventured to express an opinion ad- verse to that prevalent in England, and to refer to the standard in his own country, Bulwer said, turning pointedly to him, ' We 're not accus- tomed to look to America for opinions on matters of good taste/ a speech which would have been regarded as very rude in America, even in the rural districts of New England ; above all, to a guest at one's own table." " Rather rough, I must confess. But you mustn't judge all English gentle- men by that; for, with all his fine talk, I 'm inclined to think that Bulwer was somethin' of a sham." " I 'm not surprised to hear you say so ; and I don't judge all English gentlemen by such a speech, only some of them ; but unfortunately they IN ENGLAND. 4? are they whose voices are most fre- quently heard by Americans." " A\\, yes; just so, just so; just as the American voices that we most fre- quently hear are pitched in a tone not quite so agreeable as those I Ve heard this morning. Pahdon me for being a little personal." " With all my heart, so far as your intention goes; but as to the fact, I don't know that your apology much helps the matter. For, excuse me for saying that your very apology shows either that you speak in ignorance, or that you pick out what is antipathetic to you, and label that, and that only, as American. Your countrymen, even the intelligent and kindly intentioned, are so stung with a craze after something peculiarly American from America that they refuse to accept anything as American that is not ex- travagant and grotesque. Even in literature they accept as American 48 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS only that which is as strange and really as foreign to the taste and habits of the most thoroughbred Americans as it is to them." "Bret Harte?" "Verily: I should say so. The personages in Bret Harte's brilliant sketches are just as strange, and in the same way strange, to decent people in Boston and Philadelphia as they are to people in London and in Oxford ; and they interest the one exactly as they do the other, and for the same reasons : and they have no peculiarly American character." " That 's an astonishin' criticism." " None but that given them by their scenes being laid in a part of America three thousand five hundred miles from Boston, farther in distance f han from New York to London, and thrice as far in time. Any writer of Bret Harte's talent, whose mother tongue was English, would must have made IN ENGLAND. 49 them just as American as he did. And besides, the men he wrote about were no more American than British. Half the early California]] mining popula- tion were of British birth, English or Scotch, with a few Irish." 11 Are you sure of that ?" " Sure ; if you don't pin me down to tens in a row of figures. Don't you remember in the letter of the Fifth Avenue belle to her California lover ' And how I went down the middle With the man that shot Sandy M c Gee ' ? And don't you remember that she her- self was ould Follinsbee's daughter? Mr. M c Gee and Mr. Follinsbee were typical men, in whom your interest was as great as ours, and for whom your responsibility was much greater. But to turn back to Bulwer, and his pretty speech : he deserved, I hope you'll think, to have the truth told him, that among Americans of the D 50 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS best breeding his earlier novels were condemned, although they were read." " Ah, yes ; for their immorality, I suppose. I Ve always heard that in such matters you were of a most exemplary particularity ; although you seem, in those also " (with a sly smile) " to have made some progress." " Less on that account than for their bad taste and their low social tone. Men of my age can remember hearing Bulwer spoken of in our boyhood, by our elders, as essentially vulgar, a snob, a gilded snob, but none the less a snob. Is not that true ?" turning to me. "Yes," I answered; "but he im- proved in this respect astonishingly. There are few more remarkable phenomena in literature than Bulwer's moral growth. You would hardly be- lieve that the same soul and the same breeding were in the man who wrote Pelham and The Caxtons" IN ENGLAND. 51 " But after all/' urged Humphreys,, "wasn't this the result rather of an intellectual perception of moral beauty than of a regenerate condition ? Had he in him,, the man who wrote Pelham, the capacity of ever becoming, at heart, a gentleman?" " I 'm afraid you 're right/' said our friend ; " but haven't we taken rather a flyer ? What has all this to do with Mrs. Trollope, and New Orleans, and Cincinnatus, and Botany Bay?" " This/' answered Humphreys, with a mild conclusive fall of his voice ; "the people who thus condemned Btilwer, just as you condemn him, on the score of taste and true good breed- ing, were the very Americans whose domestic manners Mrs. Trollope's book misrepresented." "Beg pahdon, I thought you said her book w T as true." " So it was. It did not caricature, or very little. What it did was to 52 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS present to the ignorant and preju- diced people of England a carefully made, but lively and graphic, series of sketches of society, which were about as fair representations of the domestic manners of such Americans I ever met under a roof as a series of like sketches of the society of Botany Bay at that time would have been of any English people that you are likely to know anything about." "I don't quite understand. Pray explain." " Mrs. Trollope published her book not twenty or thirty years ago, but fifty. She entered the America which she professed to describe, not at Boston, New York, or Philadelphia, but at New Orleans ; and going up the Mississippi a thousand miles, yes" (in answer to a look of astonished inquiry), " one thousand miles, and more, she established herself as the keeper of a sort of big milliner's shop, IN ENGLAND. 53 or bazaar, at Cincinnati. Now Cin- cinnati is not two or three hundred miles from Boston or Philadelphia,, but almost a thousand; and it's not near Chicago, but three hundred miles from it ; and when she was there Chicago didn't exist. Cincin- nati was then not only its thousand miles from Boston and Philadelphia, but as socially remote from any of the centres of civilisation in which the domestic manners of the Americans could be properly studied as Botany Bay was from London and Oxford." Doubt, astonishment, and interest were strongly expressed in the face of our fellow-traveller ; and he said, in a low apologetic tone, " But Botany Bay was a penal colony." " Of course," said Humphreys, " I don't mean to compare the two places in that respect. They had no such likeness, even at that time. I speci- fied Botany Bay only for the sake of 54 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS using a name that would bring to your mind vividly a very remote colony of Englishmen cut off from intercourse with established English society, surrounded by a wild country, and composed chiefly of people whom circumstances had made pioneers on the remotest confines of civilisation. You in England have to reach your colonies of that sort by sea; we, so vast is the territory of the United States, reach ours by land. The countiy around Cincinnati then, with- in a few miles, was covered by the primeval forest, through which people who must travel passed upon tracks rather than roads, on horseback or in vehicles of the rudest and most primitive construction. It was then the far West, and not only physically distant, but a great deal farther removed from the long-established and slowly-developed social centres of America than any place in the IN ENGLAND. 55 world is now from any other place, except the interior of Russia,, Siberia, and Southern Africa. My father had to go to Ohio, at that time or later, on some professional business connected with a land claim. He used to tell the story of it years afterward ; and child as I was, I shall never forget his description of his experiences : how he was two weeks in getting there, creeping across the State of New York in a canal boat, travelling through Ohio on horseback, with saddle-bags, his papers in one and his few toilet articles in another, and his scanty wardrobe in a leathern valise strapped behind his saddle I have it yet : his description of the queer, uncouth people that he met, the privations he endured : how one day, when he had ridden from morning almost till night without coming upon anything like an inn, he stopped at a house that seemed to consist of two or three rooms, and 56 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS asked for something to eat ; and how the mistress of the establishment, who was the only person visible, set before him a coarse earthen dish, in which were some slices of cold boiled pork surrounded by dirty congealed fat, some half-sodden cakes of Indian corn, and a jug of whisky; and how the repulsiveness of the viands and of all the surroundings, including the slatternly w r oman, so affected him that, fatigued and famished as he was, he could not eat. For it 's apropos of our subject for me to say, after some acquaintance with society in England and on the Continent, that he was one of the daintiest and most fastidious of men, although his father had reared his family with difficulty upon a slender income. I remember that in his story this woman spoke of her husband as the Judge, or rather the Jedge." " Judge ! " "Yes, he was a justice of the peace." IN ENGLAND. 57 " A justice of the peace ! Pahdon my repeatin' your words." " You are surprised : naturally. Your justices of the peace are county gentlemen and clergymen. With us a justice of the peace is the very low- est in consideration of all official dig- nities,, simply because it is the least profitable." "This is very strange, a justice of the peace holdin' his office for profit !" ' " Yes ; that is one of the differences between the two countries. And you may set this down as an axiom of general application : that everything in America is done, every position is sought, with a single eye to pecuniary profit." " And have you no gentlemen of leisure and character w r ho might hold such an important position ? " " Very few ; and they don't want it. Why should they? It would 58 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS bring them no distinction, no honour among men of their own condition in life, and would subject them to ex- periences from which they would shrink. We have some men of wealth who, to become senator, with a chance for the presidency or a first-rate foreign mission, will spend a moderate fortune." e( Bless my soul ! How, pray ? " " In bribery : bribing caucus mana- gers, bribing legislators, bribing even political parties ; and so establishing what in our politics are called claims. But we are wandering. It was in such society as she found in these then remote and uncivilised regions, and others little differing from them, that Mrs. Trollope drew her pictures in all her books about the States, and labelled them Domestic Manners of the Americans. She has at the end of her book a few pages of kind approval of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. IN ENGLAND. 59 Why, I can remember that our friends used to listen to my father's descrip- tions of his Western travel as they would now if a man had returned from Patagonia or Japan; quite ignorant that pictures of that strange life were accepted by the world of Europe as faithful descriptions of their manners and customs. The great difficulty with you here upon this subject is that to you America, you don't know exactly what the name means, and in- deed it is very vague and meaning- less is simply America, all one and the same ; and that Americans are simply Americans, all alike. At the present day they are becoming more and more alike, under the shaping material and moral forces, which have been developed during the last twenty years ; but before that limit of time the unlikeness was greater than you seem to be able to imagine." " Quite so, I should say, from what 60 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS you tell me of the effect of the strange- ness upon yourselves." " Strangeness, indeed ! Let me tell you a little characteristic story of old New England domestic manners,, which you may compare with your recollections of Mrs. Trollope's book. My friend here will assure you of its literal truth ; for he knows it. In 1789, when Washington was travel- ling slowly through New England,, receiving and paying visits, he called at a house in Connecticut, the master of which, although one of the leading men in his neighbourhood, a scholar, and one who lived comfortably, never saw one thousand dollars in money (that 's two hundred pounds, you know) in a year in all his life. Washington, when he departed, was conducted to the door by his host and hostess, accompanied by their daughter, a young girl just in her 'teens. She of course did not pre- IN ENGLAND. 6l sume to say good-bye to General Washington ; but as she opened the door for him and stood modestly aside that he might pass out, the great ex-commander-in-chief of the ragged Continental army, looking down upon her from his six feet two of stature, and from his Olympian top of grandeur, laid his hand with stately kindness upon her head, say- ing, ( Thank you, my little lady ; I wish you a better office.' ' Yes, sir/ she replied, doing reverence with a gentle curtsey, ' to let you in.'" " By George ! worthy of a duchess ! Only half of 'em wouldn't be up to it. 'Twould take Waldegrave to say that." " I shan't say it wasn't ; but I know it is merely a somewhat salient and striking example of New England manners until within the last forty years or so ; and among people who were without servants that opened 62 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS their doors for them on any occa- sion." " Most extrawd'nary condition of society !" " Extraordinary to you, but quite natural to us at that time : the union of culture and character and fine manners with the absence even of moderate wealth was quite as common in New England as their union with wealth is here. Now the great mis- take that you all make, in your uneasy search after ' the real American ' and the American thing, is that you don't look for them among those who have made America what it is (or w r hat it was till within the last few years), and who are the product of genera- tions of American breeding, but among " Here the train slowed, and our fellow-traveller, interrupting Hum- phreys hurriedly, said, "This has been very interestin' to me ; but now IN ENGLAND. 63 I 'm afraid I must say good-mornin'. Can't I have the pleasure of seem' you again, and your friend ? See ; this is my address/' taking out his card, and writing a word or two 011 it in pencil. " If you 're in my country, do look me up. Almost any one '11 tell you where I live ; and I '11 be de- lighted to see you, gentlemen, both of you, and make you as comfortable as I can. Give you some good shoootin', too, as you'll come after the 1st." 1 We exchanged cards, and parted pleasantly. "Hi!" said Humphreys (showing 1 It is only by the use of a superfluous o that I can indicate the prolonged vowel sound in this word, which is one of the very few and slight differences in pronunciation between English and New England or New York men of similar breeding. The dropping of the g from the syllable ing is not universal among men of this class in England, but it is very common ; much more common than in the class just below them. 64 MR. WASHINGTON ADAMS me the card, on which appeared in plain, bold script, eveiy letter of which proclaimed Strongi'tharm EARL OF TOPPINGHAM, and in pencil The Priori/, Toppitigtoji), " I 've a letter to him in my pocket from Dr. Tooptoe, his old tutor at Oxford, who says he 's one of the best fellows in the world, but too independent ; that is, from old Dr. Tooptoe's point of view. You may think it queer that he asked two strangers, that he chanced upon in a railway carriage, to his house. With us, we should never venture on such a step ; but here a man like him can do almost anything in reason without risk, not only because of his rank, but because he 's a tip-top man among his peers. And then we 're Americans. If we were John Bulls, catch him at it ! Besides, Americans are always interesting subjects of study, and objects to be exhibited." " You know something of him, then. IN ENGLAND. 65 He seems, indeed, a thorough good fellow, with charming manners." " Only in a general way, and from what Dr. Tooptoe told me. Just think of it ! that man took a double first class ; and to do that at Oxford an Earl must work like any other man ; besides, he counts for something in the House of Lords. And yet his ignorance ! New Orleans was to him a place where the British troops were defeated, and by Washington ! and the States lie to the north of the island of Nassau !" "Well, well, what occasion has he had to know more? If he had, he could learn it all, pretty well, in an hour's smart reading."