He may have been the life-long victim of the London _cabby_, but he
first becomes aware of extortion as he struggles with the porters of
Avignon or the hackmen of Jersey City. We are not finding fault with
this insularity as a feature of national character,--on the contrary,
we rather like it, for the first business of an Englishman is to be
an Englishman, and we wish that Americanism were as common among
Americans,--but, since no man can see more than is in his own mind, it
is a somewhat dangerous quality in a traveller. Moreover, the Englishman
in America is at a double disadvantage; for his understanding the
language leads him to think that everything is easy to understand, while
at the same time he cannot help looking on every divergence of manners
or ideas from the present British standard in a nation speaking the same
tongue, as a barbarism, if not as a personal insult to himself. Worse
then all, he has perhaps less than anybody of that quality, we might
almost say faculty, which Mirabeau called "political sociability,"
and accordingly can form no conception of a democracy which levels
upward,--of any democracy, indeed, except one expressly invented to
endanger the stability of English institutions, certainly the most
comfortable in the world for any one who belongs to the class which
has only to enjoy and not to endure them. The travels of an average
Englishman are generally little more than a "Why, bless me, you don't
say so! how very extraordinary!" in two volumes octavo.
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