repousse brutalement les jambes." The atmosphere becomes fetid, and the windows cannot be opened. He tries to get into the privileged carriage reserved for the "ladies" and their friends: here again "le conducteur me repoussa grossièrement d'un coup de coude dans l'estomac." At last he took his place on the steps, at the door of the "sewer," as he naïvely calls the carriage he had first entered. After some time, the guard took pity on him, "avec un air de supériorité protectrice," tapped him on the shoulder, and took him into the ladies' carriage. There, however, his bliss was short. A lady entered, and claimed the seat he was occupying: there she stood without saying a word, his neighbour gave him a nudge, he rose, and she sat down without a word of thanks." Voilà," says M. de Hauranne, "les bonnes habitudes des femmes américaines! La première venue vous dépouille avec cet air d'insolence hautaine que donne l'exercice d'un privilége incontesté." He is no enemy, he tells us, to politeness, especially towards ladies: but he likes his concessions to be voluntary. But, after all, he was in a ladies' carriage.

Elsewhere he quotes the anecdote told by M. Ampère, of the driver who asked where the man was who had hired the vehicle which he was the gentleman appointed to drive, and he adds a number of incidents of the same kind from his own experience. They certainly do not go beyond the rudeness that he might have met with in railway-carriages or omnibuses among ourselves. He allows also that in Americans all this roughness is redeemed by their cordiality and readiness to oblige. Here, however, he is again most amusing with his side-blows at England. He says, very truly indeed, that perhaps he insists on this point of politeness from a slight touch of national vanity: "la politesse étant, à vrai dire, le seul point du caractère français où nous gardions encore une incontestable supériorité." (The French, therefore, are not only superior on the field of battle?) "Well-educated Americans who come to France are charmed with the universal courtesy that there reigns. In England society is divided into two classes, the insolent, and the humble we alone have the privilege of being at once a democratic and a polished people." "Tandis qu'en Angleterre l'homme riche ou titré répond man ou fellow à l'homme du peuple qui lui parle chapeau bas ou courbé, tandis qu'en Amérique le dernier goujat vous traite comme un camarade. nous savons, nous autres, grands et petits, trouver dans nos manières la mesure de la convenance." He adds, somewhat pathetically, that his own countrymen have not so many virtues as to be able to give up any that they have. Though we are certainly not able to recognise ourselves in the description given of us by M.

:

de Hauranne, we may at least learn from his criticism not to be too severe on others.

Our author is rather severe on the veneration of the Americans for every thing that possesses the shadow of a title to be considered aristocratic. They are 66 new men" themselves, he tells us (vol. i. p. 113). They have made their own fortunes, and have attained a position perhaps one generation back, and so they respect superstitiously any thing that has a certain number of years of existence. "Fifty years ago" is the night of antiquity to them. Families older than the nineteenth century are antediluvian, and venerated accordingly. He gives a hint which may be worth taking to certain old gentlemen. "Un Européen titré, fût-il vieux et ruiné, a encore chance de trouver femme en Amérique." A stranger has only to let things take their course to be dubbed count or marquis. His brother took an old watch out of his pocket with a coat-of-arms upon it, when on board the Arabia, and became at once M. le Marquis de Q. Our author himself had to resign himself to the character of "the French count." It would appear that there is not only an admiration for aristocracy, but an affectation of it. One of the ways in which this shows or showed itself, is abstention from public affairs-of which we may speak again presently. "I saw at Washington a rich democrat whose wife was the daughter of an Irish peasant, who landed no long time ago on the quay at New York in extreme poverty. This lady shrugged her shoulders at the woodcutter President.'" She pointed at the blacks with disdain-most unreasonably, remarks our author, for they do great service to the upstarts who are ambitious of privileges of race, by bringing out into strong relief the nobility of a white skin.

M. de Hauranne is of course struck with those social and domestic developments of the principle of personal independence on which other travellers have been so hard. The courtesy exacted for ladies gives them sometimes a freedom and power of domineering which seems somewhat unfeminine, and of which in particular instances an unfair advantage may be taken. M. de Hauranne considers that the American ladies are often better educated and more cultivated than the men: indeed he complains gently of having been occasionally entertained with lectures or essays on social or political subjects which sounded rather harsh from the lips of a woman. He mentions, of course, the great freedom allowed to the youth of both sexes in arranging their own amusements and order of life without the interference of their parents, the comparative absence of home feeling, the early disruption of family ties. All these things, and others like them, are on the surface of the American system of society; and

we must remember that in these and other matters, Christian feeling and even natural gentleness and refinement of character may make the system better in its actual workings than it appears in theory.

We must say a few words of the reflections on political matters which fill a large space in M. de Hauranne's volumes. He is a hearty admirer of democracy as such, though he appreciates very highly those legacies of courtesy, mutual consideration, the nicely adjusted gradations of classes, exquisite cultivation and elevation of manners, which have come down to modern society from other systems. Thus he finds himself quite at home among the French Canadians, who pique themselves upon having preserved to a certain degree the old manners of France before the Revolution, and whom he compares to the society to be found in some of the retired provincial towns in that country. He gives us with real pleasure a glimpse of a phase of manners which will probably too soon die out altogether. These aristocratic sympathies do not unfit him for entering intelligently into the full-blown democracy of America, which was being put to so severe a test when he was writing the letters of which this book is composed. He gives a striking account of the operation of the system of parties. This system, which is almost a part of the British Constitution, is far more developed on the other side of the Atlantic than among ourselves. Theoretically, it is difficult to account for the immense importance attached to it in both countries. We are apt to ask ourselves, why two great noblemen whose estates are contiguous, whose families are intimate with one another and often related by marriage, who cooperate in a great number of works of practical beneficence and public utility for the advantage of their neighbours and dependents, must always be opposed to one another when the time for the county election comes round, and can never sit side by side in the same Cabinet.

*He says: "I like better (than the Canadian society which imitates English fashions) the bonhomie of the old French-Canadian society-it resembles our provincial communities in the most retired and patriarchal of our towns, where people think little of serious matters, and are occupied only in diverting themselves, and that only after the fashion of the good old times. Thus in the balls of the Catholic world fast dances, as "les danses tournantes" are alarmingly called, are rigorously prohibited. Quadrilles alone are danced from nine at night to two in the morning, yet with a zest, a devotion, an air of happiness which cannot be described." Young and old, he tells us, mix in these dances: grandmothers dancing with their grandchildren, no one is too old or too grave to join in the fun. The suppers are simply apples and beer. The proscription of "les danses tournantes" prevails also in the Southern States, except when the partners are very near relations.

Or again, we are inclined to ask why, because some Foreign Secretary makes a mess of his policy by officious interference with the affairs of other nations, or because the House of Commons quarrels with the Irish measures of a Government, we are therefore to lose the services of some admirable financier as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or of some first-rate administrator at the Home Office, or of some unequalled Judge as Lord Chancellor? Why must every one belong to one of two great parties, why must he always vote with his party, stand with it, and fall with it? and why is it considered a sort of treason to desert it for another?

Among ourselves, the line of principle which divides the two great parties is usually faint indeed, and yet their organisation is as complete and their discipline as exacting as ever. They divide neighbours and friends from one another, they have their own clubs and reviews and newspapers, their great houses where social influences are freely used for political purposes, their patronage, their funds to help on less opulent candidates, their ramifications spreading over the whole country, by means of which their presence is felt every where, and they confront one another in every town and almost in every village. It is impossible not to see that the whole nation is divided into two "sides" as in a game, that the two parties will often oppose one another when there is scarcely a shade of difference between them, and that the public service sometimes suffers the inconvenience of losing the right man from the right place just at some critical moment, and is always supplied by only half the intellectual strength of the country. In England, the advantages of the party system, notwithstanding all these drawbacks, are very great: because it divides the country on issues which are not vital, instead of matters of principle, and by so doing, prevents that greatest of all dangers, which it is always the aim of the most unscrupulous and reckless demagogues to bring on-the war of class against class, or as it may sometimes be, race against race, or creed against creed. In a social and political sense, those who raise this cry are the truest enemies of their country, and deserve to be dealt with as traitors. It may very well be that the system of parties, which has hitherto preserved England from this evil, may often on the other hand act disadvantageously with regard to the efficiency of administration or a high-minded and consistent foreign policy. There is really no reason in the nature of things why Chancellors of the Exchequer, Home Secretaries, or Presidents of the Poor-law Board should go out of office on account of parliamentary conflicts any more than her Majesty's Judges.

In America the party system is far more powerful than with

ourselves, and its organisation looks at a distance like a simple tyranny. Yet M. de Hauranne does not hesitate to attribute to it the preservation of the American democracy. He considers the ready obedience paid to the "Conventions" which fix the politics of the parties and determine their candidates, to be a sign of the political intelligence of the nation. America, he says, has nothing to fear from the secret dangers which underlie the fair surface of those European communities in which administrative centralisation has been carried to its highest perfection, and where the organs of opinion are under the control of the Government. In these cases the daily political life of the nation is one of profound quiet, but it is liable to be interrupted from time to time by convulsions that are as destructive as earthquakes. In America, public life runs on day after day in excitement and conflict: but there is no element of possible confusion which is not provided with its safety-valve. This, however, could not be, in a society spread over a territory so immense and with the principle of local self-government so largely developed, but for the organisation of the parties, which link together the activity of the most distant States, and thus furnish a real system of centralisation which contributes powerfully to the political energy of the nation as well as to its unity. "Peu importe que la constitution des Etats-Unis laisse à l'Etat d'Illinois ou du Missouri une grande partie de son indépendance souvraine, qu'elle lui concède même, si l'on veut, le droit absurde de la sécession, si les mêmes idées, les mêmes passions animent les républicains de l'Iowa et ceux du Maine, si les démocrates de l'Ohio obéissent à la même direction politique que les démocrates de New York. Rien ne donne au peuple l'esprit conservateur comme l'habitude de voir souvent le gouvernement descendre sur la place publique."

We have already alluded to that abstention from public affairs and political action which seems unfortunately to prevail among the more educated and refined classes of American society. M. de Hauranne does not scruple to point this out as the great danger of the democracy. He cannot understand it in the active vigorous life of the United States, and considers it a bad sign when influential and enlightened men take no part in the concerns of a free country. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon meets us elsewhere; even when the most important interests of the Church and religion are at stake, it is very difficult to prevail on high-minded but indolent men to exert themselves on the right side. In America, he tells us, the evil is confessed and deplored. "Politics are left to intriguers and inferior men, and it is even thought a distinction and a virtue to take no part in them. In general, therefore, with some brilliant

VOL. V.

II