Retrospect of Western Travel

IT is over a hundred years now since a self-possessed Englishwoman of thirty-two stepped off a sailing vessel from Liverpool to abide two years in the young United States of the 1830’s. She stagecoached it over the Alleghenies and rode the Erie Canal packets and the Great Lake steamers. She steamboated up the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and crossed the prairies. She summered in a New England village. She talked with Presidents, convicts, Senators. She went everywhere, she met. everybody, she kept a voluminous journal. She came just in time to visit and learn to love the last of live Fathers — Madison and Marshall. She talked with Calhoun, Clay, Webster, watched them in action, saw in them the beginning of the degradation of the democratic dogma, great men debauched by political ambition. In the Abolition riots in Boston she observed that there were more compassion and manhood in the workingmen than in their employers.

She judged, too. “The South must learn to be just first before it can be generous.” “In New England, the veneration for England is greater than I think any one people ought to feel tor any other.” This reissue in facsimile is well justified and timely. The book is one of permanent interest and value, H. R.