There undeniably exist marked points of difference between the Swiss and the Americans. The dominion of a really popular sway is admitted nowhere here, except in a few unimportant mountain cantons, that are but little known, and which, if known, would not exercise a very serious influence on any but their own immediate inhabitants. With us, the case is different. New York and Pennsylvania and Ohio, for instance, with a united population of near five millions of souls, are as pure democracies as can exist under a representative form of government, and their trade, productions, and example so far connect them with the rest of Christendom, as to render them objects of deep interest to all who look beyond the present moment, in studying the history of man. We have States, however, in which the franchise does not materially differ from those of many of the cantons, and yet we do not find that strangers make any material exceptions even in _their_ favour. Few think of viewing the States in which there are property qualifications, in a light different from those just named; nor is a disturbance in Virginia deemed to be less the consequence of democratic effervescence, than it is in Pennsylvania. There must be reasons for all this. I make no doubt they are to be found in the greater weight of the example of a large and growing community, of active commercial and political habits, than in one like this, which is satisfied with simply maintaining a quiet and secure existence; in our total rejection of the usual aristocratical distinctions which still exist, more or less, all over Switzerland; in the jealousy of commercial and maritime power, and in the recollections which are inseparable from the fact that the parties once stood to each other, in the relation of principals and dependants. This latter feeling, an unavoidable consequence of metropolitan sway, is more general than you may imagine, for, as nearly all Europe once had colonies, the feelings of superiority they uniformly excite, have as naturally led to jealousy of the rising importance of our hemisphere. You may smile at the suggestion, but I do not remember a single European in whom, under proper opportunities, I have not been able to trace some lingering feeling of the old notion of the moral and physical superiority of the man of Europe over the man of America. I do not say that all I have met have betrayed this prejudice, for in not one case in ten have I had the means to probe them; but such, I think, has uniformly been the case, though in very different degrees, whenever the opportunity has existed.