plate all the trouble that has come on this peaceful and interesting country and people. As in all cases, the many must suffer for the faults of the few, but it is earnestly to be hoped that annexation will not be deemed necessary. The offenders against the majesty of the British Government must be punished with the utmost severity, if only as an example to others, but let us spare the country, and allow it to develop in its natural way, under our fostering care and guidance.

J. JOHNSTONE

(Late Political Agent, Manipur).

SOCIAL ASPECTS OF AMERICAN LIFE.

AFTER a tour of six months in the United States have I anything to say worth committing to paper-any impressions of a country so rapidly changing from year to year that can be of the smallest value? Unless I read all the books that appear annually on this subject it is difficult to decide whether anything new is left to be said, even if it appear new to me. But, as I had rather exceptional opportunities of seeing various social aspects of American life, it seems to be thought that a digest of the notes I made at the time may not be altogether valueless. If the result of my observation be to remove some prejudices on both sides, and to prove to our cousins' that, while alive to certain defects, an average Englishman's estimate of them has, on closer acquaintance, in their own homes, been considerably raised, I shall not have written in vain.

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Foreigners in all countries are too apt to form hasty conclusions from one or two instances, and to pronounce very decided opinions on this insecure basis. I have tried to avoid, even in my own mind, doing this. I know of how few books, or articles, touching the contemporaneous history of an alien country can it be said, as an American said to me of Mr. Bryce's American Commonwealth, 'The knowledge it shows of our political institutions is simply amazing.' On these as on the religious and business sides of American life I shall be silent, feeling my own ignorance. I write of what I have seen, of what I know, and hope to be free from the charge of discussing subjects that are beyond my ken. Bounded by this horizon, the landscapes, the groups, the colour, and the light and shade are such as they have appeared to my eye, and as they were blotted in upon the spot. They must be accepted for what they are-suggestions, not finished pictures.

Those who do not know the United States are apt to speak of the nation as of one people. Of course to the American it is a truism that the agglomeration of various nationalities has produced the most diverse and even opposed characteristics; but upon the Englishman who would form anything but the vaguest idea of America it is necessary to impress this.

It is true, as Mr. Bryce observes, that there is a certain broad

similarity of type; that one American is more like another American than one Englishman is like another Englishman. A man who steps out of the beaten path and shows any originality is at once styled a crank.' Yet the conditions of life in the eastern and western States are so different that the observations made in one city do not apply necessarily to another; and even in the east the rival cities regard each other with a jealousy which would resent any confounding of their idiosyncrasies. In New York the Irish population preponderates so largely that political power and civic influence are wholly in their hands. If one asks how it comes about that so rich a community can allow its streets to remain in the disgraceful condition in which they are, there is the same invariable reply: We are in the hands of the Irish. None of the millionaires who live here have any power to alter the state of things.' In Cincinnati, and other cities, it is the German element that prevails. Newspapers, institutions of all kinds, and the cultivation of the higher class of music colour the existence, and must largely affect the mental development of the younger generation. In San Antonio I was told there were seventeen distinct nationalities. In New Orleans there is, as the world has been made well aware lately, in addition to the French creoles, a very large Italian settlement. And when you have done with the negro in the South (though you never have done with him entirely throughout the United States) you take up the Chinese, and find whole quarters of the cities and occasionally a village in California inhabited by them. So many nationalities interfused with the native population must necessarily alter the complexion of each State. Yet some qualities are of universal growth here.

Self-dependence, enterprise, and perseverance seem indigenous to the American soil, and munificence towards his native city a virtue which nearly every wealthy citizen considers a paramount duty. Whether among those who have carved a name for themselves on tables of stone, as inventors or pioneers, the men who have opened up and civilised vast tracts of this great continent, or those who have rendered services to mankind in yet wider fields of science, the same characteristics are marked. The true American cannot understand the delight of repose: to him inactivity is irritating; whether it be the building up of a city or of a private fortune, whether the object be personal or patriotic, an almost feverish energy directs his movements. Chicago stands as a testimony of this-a city burnt down but a few years since, and now the biggest in area throughout the States. An American is never discouraged, never disheartened. Where an Englishman fails, and is heard of no more, the instances here of wealth, won by daring speculation, lost, and then won back again, are of everyday occurrence. The reverse of this golden medal is that moneyed success at all hazards—is too much held up to youth as the aim of

existence. To some of us it seems that there are things better worth striving for than such success.

But at least one must admit that, when accomplished here, it is sealed by splendid gifts of patriotism and beneficence. Such buildings as the Californian Academy of Sciences, the Astor and Lennox Librariesin New York, the Newbery Library in Chicago, the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, and numerous hospitals, colleges, and museums in nearly every city throughout the States are evidences of this great public spirit.

I cannot say that my observation has led me to the same conclusions as Mr. Bryce, in the estimate he forms of the pleasantness of American life.' It is probably true that the lower orders are happier, earning as they do larger wages, and with the well-founded hope of growing richer and rising in the social scale. The workman with ten shillings a day, the housemaid with fifty or sixty pounds a year, need not be gnawed by envy and hatred of those born in another sphere, such as corrodes the peace of mechanics innoculated with socialistic doctrine in Europe. But from what I observed. of the upper classes in America I did not receive the impression. that they were more contented, or in any sense happier, than persons. in the same station in England. Among the men the weariness that follows over-work, among the women the disease of unquiet longing for change, are not concomitants of happiness. Whenever I asked why the lowest kind of variety' entertainment at the theatre drew greater crowds of all classes, throughout the States, than a strong play of human passion, I received the same reply: 'Our men at the end of their day's work are too weary to think. They only want to be amused. Anything will do that makes them laugh.' Such a condition of mental prostration is almost pathetic, but it does not give one an idea of happiness. A large proportion of the great wealth of America is confessedly due to speculation; and this must bring anxiety, nervous excitability, exhaustion. The overwrought brain finds little repose in a home built on such bases: the steamer that bears him to Europe affords the master of such a home probably the only breathing-space, the only respite from the pursuit of telegrams, that he has known for a year or more.

The restlessness of American women, which takes different-and often very laudable-forms, is another expression of the same truth, as it seems to me. The woman of fashion, eager for excitement, is probably, in the main, much the same in London or New York; but the very charm of her manner, so blithe and bird-like, twittering from subject to subject, never dull, never too long poised upon the same twig, makes of the typical New York lady a very different being from her English equivalent. She needs no rest. Country life means for her Newport, Lennox, to travel, to yacht, or to fill.a villa residence with city acquaintances for a few weeks. The repose

of a home far from the metropolis, with its small village interests and obligations, or the breezy monotony of a Highland moor, are alike unknown to her. The rocking-chair, in which she will sway herself for hours together, illustrates her condition of unrest, which men miscall delight.' She requires movement, physical or intellectual, all the time.' She is never seen with a needle in her hand; and this is not only true of New York: throughout the length and breadth of America, it may have been chance, but I never once saw a lady working. The employment, unless necessitated (when I feel sure she would stitch as conscientiously as Hood's shirt-maker), is too reposeful, too unstimulating to the American female mind. She will attend Browning lectures, and Wagner expositions, and lectures on the Aztecs, and spiritual séances, and lay sermons upon every subject under the sun; she will take up some study, she will attend classes, and work far more assiduously than the average Englishwoman (not the Girton and Newnham one), who considers when she has left the schoolroom that her education is complete. But having few servants, and rarely a large family, her household duties are light; and her eager mind, abhorring a vacuum, seeks for food in the world of pleasure; or of knowledge, to be gained less from books than from personal oral exposition. This feverishness is, no doubt, partly due to early education. The child is never a child in America, as we understand the word. The infant's petulant irresponsibility is subject to little or no restraint, as those who have dwelt in hotels where there were several children can testify. Later on, a constant round of excitement stimulates their poor little brains at the season when in the intervals between their lessons they most need rest. The number of precocious child-actors testifies to this abnormal development of brain, but, as a great actress said to me, one expects these wonderful children to turn out geniuses-they seldom do.' Americans themselves have told me that they send their young daughters to school, or to Europe, to avoid one of two alternatives. Either they must be allowed to pay and receive daily visits, to have constant parties, with gossip and even flirtations, while still in short frocks, or they must be rendered unhappy by being deprived of amusements shared by all their companions. The consequence is that when the 'bud,' as she is termed, opens upon society she is already an accomplished little woman of the world, quite able to take care of herself, needing no chaperon, able to hold her own in verbal fence with young men and old, generally very 'bright,' often very fascinating, but having long since lost all the aroma of early youth. A man described such a young lady to me thus: "Why, sir, she is that sharp she begins conversation with a brilliant repartee.' The mother is quite put into the background; not from want of affection, but because she would be out of place in the giddy round of pleasure. You read in the newspapers, 'Miss