East River Steamer told me that, as Americans, they would take my hand.

This story, which to some may appear trivial, to others superfluous, and to all wearisome, is to most intents and purposes my Justification for the eight hundred pages which are to follow.

It need scarcely be pointed out, dear sir, that such a confession as I have made in the foregoing pages,—a confession that I grumbled for twelve months, because I am given to grumbling, and am saturnine and unsocial, can only be received as a plea in abatement. A more definite explanation is needed to justify strictures which I admit to have been severe, but the severity of which I am unable, even now, to modify. I should have been false to my trust had I concealed or glossed over that which I thought demanded censure; but I should be equally false to it now, did I neglect to state the grounds from which that censure rose.

Parenthetically, on the foregoing head I may beg the question. Many persons-English as well as American—may say when they read this: "What on earth does it matter whether the man praise or blame? Who cares one doit about what he thinks or writes about the United States? He is obscure, he is stupid, he is ignorant. His voice has no weight, his verdict is valueless. His book will have but a small circulation, and will be soon forgotten." There is the question as I have begged it. Now, I answer. So far as the United States are concerned, the Americans do trouble themselves about the opinions of the obscurest, the stupidest and the most ignorant of penny-a-liners, if that penny-a-liner happens to

be an Englishman, and republishes his impressions in book form. You know, dear Sir, that these volumes will be reproduced in the North, and will have thousands more readers there than they will probably have in England. You know that if the book were entirely favourable to your countrymen and your cause, your newspapers would be filled with extracts from it; and you know equally well that, as it is, the unfavourable passages will be singled out in order to afford an opportunity for abusing the author. The Americans are not indifferent to the opinion of any Englishman. They may vehemently declare they are, but they know better. I daresay that I am a Fool, and dull, and conceited, and a bore; in fact, I know that I am often all these. I am aware that, as a man of letters, I am not fit to hold a candle to the tourists who have gone before me :-to Basil Hall, to Marryatt, to Fanny Kemble, to the Trollopes, mother and son, to Miss Bremer, to Miss Martineau, to Edward Dicey, to Robert Chambers, to Charles Mackay, to Grattan, to the Howitts, husband and wife, to Sir Charles Lyell, and Lady Emmeline Wortley, to say nothing of Charles Dickens, or Alexis De Tocqueville, or William Howard Russell. But, miserable hack as I may be, nothing will prevent these hack-writings from becoming as public in the States as Barnums Museum. Notoriety and celebrity are, I need not hint, two very different things; but Americans are forced to be as familiar with the name of Old Doctor Jacob Townsend as with that of Ralph Waldo Emerson; -just as in England the names of Alfred Tennyson and Monsieur Francatelli are both household words. One belongs to the library and the other to the kitchen; but both are known.

In America you may endeavour to dismiss this book with a sneer, and call its author a "Holywell Street Scribbler," whereas, in England, a more elaborate attempt will be made to depreciate that which I have written on the ground that I am a slovenly and tedious writer, that continual egotism and irritating digressions deface my writings; that I often blunder in quotation and overload my sentences with long-sounding words that my orthography is defective and my syntax faulty; in a word, that I write rubbish, and am a worthless fellow, anyway. I have grown accustomed to this sort of thing, and it does me good. But neither sneers nor snubs, genteel raps on the knuckles nor savage shovelsful of mud will alter the fact that the Journal in which I wrote the letters which form the nucleus of this work has a daily circulation of over one hundred thousand. Thus, giving three readers to each paper-a fair average, I apprehend-more than a quarter of a million persons read that which I had to say about America every day that one of my letters appeared: unless, indeed, they were so disgusted with the first one that ever afterwards they closed their eyes or skipped the page when they came to "America in the Midst of War." These letters may not have made me favourably known. I have lost by their means, indeed, a great many friends, and gained a great many enemies-but they have made me knownknown as well as Mr. Horniman with his tea, or Mr. Miles with his sixteen shilling trousers. Horniman and Miles and I will all probably be forgotten ten years hence; but, as it is, we have gotten publicity and a big audience, and there is an end of the matter.

"C'est icy ung livre de bonne foy, lecteur," old Montaigne says, in a preface to a book which is all about himself. And you may perceive, dear Sir, that if my book have no other merit, it possesses at least that of candour. There is another prefatory remark by Messire Michel not inappropriate to this undertaking: "Si c'eust été pour rechercher la faveur du monde je me feusse paré de beautez empruntez: je veulx qu'on m'y voye en ma façon simple, naturelle et ordinaire, sans estude et artifice, car c'est Moy que je peinds." Should a strong man be ashamed to avow that his Book is Himself, and that in whatsoever he writes that treats of individual thought or individual opinion, he must be, to a great extent, his own hero? What do they matter: the spiteful and envious sneers, the paltry accusations of egotism? No man alive can be so vain, to others, in print as he is vain, to himself, in the recesses of his own heart; and the conviction of this is my sole excuse for telling you a hundred times over what I have eaten and what I have drunk; when my corns hurt me, and when I had the toothache; what I thought of my friends, and what my friends thought of me. Had I thought it right to build my book on any other model I should not have left a happy home and an assured livelihood, and a host of kind hearts who had known me from my infancy, to knock about for twelve months and more in a strange land and a cruel climate among strangers who hated me. I should have gone to the Library of the British Museum, and in due time, with the aid of Mr. Panizzi's shelves, produced two bulky octavos as modest as Mignon and as dull as ditch

water.

This parenthesis, it must be granted, is of the lengthiest. Come we back to the point from which I started :—the need to set forth the things which prompted me to look upon America more through a lens that was couleur d'orange than one which was couleur de rose. Why did I grumble? At what did I see cause to grumble? At these things, mainly: :

First: It is the common and notorious assertion of Americans that their government is the best in the world; that a pure democracy, such as they have established, secures to every man, without the slightest distinction of race, rank, fortune, or creed, the enjoyment of the fullest personal and political liberty, and that republican institutions have blessed the American people with an amount of aggregate and individual happiness as is unknown to those who are subject to the venal and effete monarchical rule prevailing in Europe.

I found, per contrá, that the government of the Northern States States utterly free from the influences of civil war— was practically a despotism, and that despotism arose not from any military exigencies, but from the deliberate conviction (expressed at the polling booths) of a majority of the Northern States, that the Constitution was a failure, that the doctrine of State Rights, which is the very back-bone of that Constitution, was obsolete and impracticable, that a "strong government" was the one thing needed, and that to make that government strong it was necessary to place supreme and illimitable power in the hands of One Man.

Proof: The President, without formally establishing mar