The chief reason why America finds much to offend her in our conduct is, that she cares for the opinion of no other people than the English. Before the terrible blow to her confidence and love that our conduct during the rebellion gave, America used morally to lean on England. Happily for herself, she is now emancipated from the mental thraldom; but she still yearns towards our kindly friendship. A Napoleonic senator harangues, a French paper declaims, against America and Americans; who cares? But a Times' leader, or a speech in Parliament from a minister of the Crown, cuts to the heart, wounding terribly. A nation, like an individual, never quarrels with a stranger; there must be love at bottom for even querulousness to arise. While I was in Boston, one of the foremost writers of America said to me in conversation: "I have no son, but I had a nephew of my own name; a grand fellow; young, handsome, winning in his ways, full of family affections, an ardent student. He felt it his duty to go to the front as a private in one of our regiments of Massachusetts volunteers, and was promoted for bravery to a captaincy. All of us here looked on him as a New England Philip Sydney, the type of all that was manly, chivalrous, and noble. The very day that I received news of his being killed in leading his company against a regiment, I was forced by my duties here to read a leader in one of your chief papers upon the officering of our army, in which it was more than hinted that our troops consisted of German cut-throats and pot-house Irish, led by sharpers and broken politicians. Can you wonder at my being bitter ?"

That there must be in America a profound feeling of affection for our country is shown by the avoidance of war when we recognised the rebels as belligerents; and, again, at the time of the "Trent" affair, when the surface cry was overwhelmingly for battle, and the Cabinet only able to tide it over by promising the West war with England as soon as the rebellion was put down. "One war at a time, gentlemen," said Lincoln. The man who, of all in America, had most to lose by war with England, said to me of the "Trent" affair: "I was written to by C to do all I could for peace. wrote him back that if our Attorney-General decided that our seizure of the men was lawful, I would spend my last dollar in the cause."

The Americans, everywhere affectionate towards the individual Englishman, make no secret of their feeling that the first advances towards a renewal of the national friendship ought to come from us. They might remind us that our Maori subjects have a proverb, "Let friends settle their disputes as friends."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

AMERICA.

WE are coasting again, gliding through calm blue waters, watching the dolphins as they play, and the boobies as they fly stroke and stroke with the paddles of the ship. Mountains rise through the warm misty air, and form a long towering line upon the upper skies. Hanging high above us are the Volcano of Fire and that of Water-twin menacers of Guatemala City. In the sixteenth century, the water-mountain drowned it; in the eighteenth, it was burnt by the fire-hill. Since then, the city has been shaken to pieces by earthquakes, and of sixty thousand men and women, hardly one escaped. Down the valley, between the peaks, we have through the mahogany groves an exquisite distant view towards the city. Once more passing on, we get peeps, now of West Honduras, and now of the island coffee plantations of Costa Rica. The heat is terrible. It was just here, if we are to believe Drake, that he fell in with a shower so hot and scalding, that each drop burnt its hole through his men's clothes as they hung up to dry. "Steep stories," it is clear, were known before the plantation of America.

Now that the time has come for a leave-taking of the continent, we can begin to reflect upon facts gleaned during visits to twenty-nine of the forty-five territories and States--twenty-nine empires the size of Spain.

A man may see American countries, from the pine-wastes of Maine to the slopes of the Sierra; may talk with American men and women, from the sober citizens of Boston to Digger Indians in California; may eat of American dishes, from jerked buffalo in Colorado to clambakes on the shores near Salem;

and yet, from the time he first "smells the molasses" at Nantucket light-ship to the moment when the pilot quits him at the Golden Gate, may have no idea of an America. You may have seen the East, the South, the West, the Pacific States, and yet have failed to find America. It is not till you have left her shores that her image grows up in the mind.

The first thing that strikes the Englishman just landed in New York is the apparent Latinization of the English in America; but before he leaves the country, he comes to see that this is at most a local fact, and that the true moral of America is the vigour of the English race-the defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples, the victory of the man whose food costs four shillings a day over the man whose food costs four pence. Excluding the Atlantic cities, the English in America are absorbing the Germans and the Celts, destroying the Red Indians, and checking the advance of the Chinese.

The Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader. The Danes and Normans amalgamated with the English, the Tartars with the Chinese, the Goths and Burgundians with the Gauls: the Spaniards not only never annihilated a people, but have themselves been all but expelled by the Indians in Mexico and South America. The Portuguese in Ceylon, the Dutch in Java, the French in Canada and Algeria, have conquered but not killed off the native peoples. Hitherto it has been nature's rule, that the race that peopled a country in the earliest historic days should people it to the end of time. The American. problem is this: Does the law, in a modified shape, hold good, in spite of the destruction of the native population? Is it true that the negroes, now that they are free, are commencing slowly to die out? that the New Englanders are dying fast, and their places being supplied by immigrants? Can the English in. America, in the long run, survive the common fate of all migrating races? Is it true that, if the American settlers continue to exist, it will be at the price of being no longer English, but Red Indian? It is certain that the English families long

in the land have the features of the extirpated race; on the other hand, in the negroes there is at present no trace of any change, save in their becoming dark-brown instead of black.

The Maories-an immigrant race-were dying off in New Zealand when we landed there. The Indians of Mexicoanother immigrant people—had themselves undergone decline, numerical and moral, when we first became acquainted with Are we English in turn to degenerate abroad, under pressure of a great natural law forbidding change? It is easy to say that the English in Old England are not a native but an immigrant race; that they show no symptoms of decline. There, however, the change was slight, the distance short, the difference of climate small.

The rapidity of the disappearance of physical type is equalled at least, if not exceeded, by that of the total alteration of the moral characteristics.of the immigrant races—the entire destruction of eccentricity, in short. The change that comes over those among the Irish who do not remain in the towns is not greater than that which overtakes the English handworkers, of whom some thousands reach America each year. Gradually settling down on land, and finding themselves lost in a sea of intelligence, and freed from the inspiring obstacles of antiquated institutions and class prejudice, the English handicraftsman, ceasing to be roused to aggressive Radicalism by the opposition of sinister interests, merges into the contented homestead settler, or adventurous backwoodsman. Greater even than this revolution of character is that which falls upon the Celt. Not only is it a fact known alike to physiologists and statisticians, that the children of Irish parents born in America are, physically, not Irish, but Americans, but the like is true of the moral type: the change in this is at least as sweeping. The son of Fenian Pat and bright-eyed Biddy is the normal gaunt American, quick of thought, but slow of speech, whom we have begun to recognise as the latest product of the Saxon race, when housed upon the Western prairies, or in the pine-woods of New England.

For the moral change in the British workman it is not difficult to account: the man who will leave country, home, and friends to seek new fortunes in America, is essentially not an ordinary