The names of Franz Sigel and Carl Schurtz and John Fremont carry more weight than those of Jefferson and Hamilton and Madison; and the traditions of the War of Independence are not so vivid as those of '48 and the campaign of Sleswig-Holstein. They are attached to the Union because it secures the prosperity and development of their new country, and because it has proved a good Government to them, or rather, has allowed them the unwonted privilege of governing themselves. The German element, it is true, is modified with wonderful rapidity into the dominant American one; but still, in the process of absorption, it modifies the absorbent.

In like manner it is easy, as I have remarked before, to trace an essential difference of feeling with regard to the question of Abolition in the Free West and in the North. With the New England States, Abolition is a question of principle and of moral enthusiasm. In New York and the great Central States, the abolitionist feeling is checked and hampered by the national reverence for the Constitution. Even amongst the most ardent Abolitionists in the North there are few logical or sincere enough to admit that the maintenance of the Constitution may prove incompatible with the abolition of slavery; and Wendell Phillips is the only Abolitionist who faces this dilemma boldly, and asserts that, if it should arise, then the sooner the Constitution perishes the better. Now, in the West, abolitionism is

Two propositions with

practical, not sentimental. regard to slavery have established themselves firmly in the Western mind. The first is, that slavery in the West is fatal to the progress of the country; the second, which has been adopted chiefly since the outbreak of Secession, is, that the existence of slavery at all is fatal to the peace and durability of the Union. Given these propositions, the West draws the conclusion that slavery must be abolished; and, if emancipation should prove inconsistent with the Constitution, then the masterwork of Washington must be modified. To do the Germans justice, too, they are, with the exception of the poorer Catholics, anti-slavery on principle. In the school in which they learnt democracy, the doctrine of the rights of man was not qualified by a clause against colour.

These remarks of mine must be taken as expressing rather the general tendency of what I saw and heard in the West, than as a description of the exact state of public feeling either then or at the present day. Like all America, the West, though in a less degree perhaps, is in a state of political upheaving. Politics and parties and principles vary from day to day, with the events of the war. The one point on which all Western men seemed agreed was, that the insurrection must and should be suppressed; and the war, in every railway car and tavern and house you entered, was the sole topic of talk and interest. You could not forget the

war, even if you had wished. Every carriage on the railway trains was laden with sick or wounded soldiers, travelling homewards to be nursed, and, if I could judge their faces rightly, to die. So far, the West had done the hardest part of the fighting, and still appeared ready to fight on to the end. With this mention I must pass on from the West. I trust it may never be my fortune to settle in a new country; but, if it should be, my prayer is, that it may be in the Free West, on the country watered by the Mississippi river.

BOSTON.

"THE oldest house in all Boston, built MDCLVI." This was the notice over a mercer's shop in Washington Street, which caught my eye in entering Boston. The shop was one of those little wooden pill-box houses you see about seaport towns at home, which might as well have been built yesterday or a thousand years ago. In itself it contained nothing noticeable; but what rendered it remarkable was that, in this new world, age should be considered any recommendation. It is, I think, Swift who suggests that in an ideal State, all citizens who attained to the age of sixty should be removed as public nuisances. Throughout the West there is a like feeling with reference to inanimate objects. If an hotel is old, travellers cease to frequent it; if a house is old, the owner begins to rebuild it; if a tree is old, it is cut down at once. It is not that the Americans have no reverence for antiquity; but that, settlers in a new hemisphere, they bear with them, unconsciously perhaps, the traditions of the old. Methuselah would not

have attached much value to an heirloom bequeathed by his great grandson to his great-great grandson; and, in like manner, the Americans, whose language and whose race is that of Hengist and Horsa, can hardly consider it a point of great interest, whether a building is two, or twenty, or two hundred years old. In fact, the feeling of Americans towards England is a mixed and often a contradictory one. An American is almost always offended if you tell him that America is very like England. He has a conviction-not altogether I think an absurd one-that his country ought to have a separate individuality, which makes the idea of his nation being the copy of another almost repugnant. At the same time he has an opposite conviction, which I would not gainsay, that, equally with the native-born Englishman, he is the descendant of the England of Shakespeare, and Hampden and Bacon. It is this conflicting state of sentiment which causes half the difficulties between England and America. America is at once proud of England and jealous of her; and I see little prospect of a state of stable equilibrium in the matter of friendship between the two countries, till America has got what she is fast getting, a literature and a history and a past of her own.

This, however, is rather a roundabout manner of coming to the conclusion I wish to draw from my observation of the mercer's shop in Washington Street, Boston, which proclaimed its antiquity as a recommen