I perceived more clearly every day of my stay in England, that this period is one of a general awakening to a new, fresh life. In the manufacturing districts, in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, every where, I heard the same conversation among all classes; prosperity was universal and still advancing. That pale countenance of want, which had on my first visit appeared to me so appalling, I now no longer saw as formerly; and even where it was seen stealing along, like a gloomy shadow near to the tables of abundance, it appeared to me no longer as a cloud filled with the breath of cholera, darkening the face of heaven, but rather as one of those clouds over which the wind and sun have power, and which are swallowed up, which vanish in space, in the bright ether. . . . The low price of grain, the consequence of free-trade, has produced this change: and it was universally acknowledged. The only objection I heard brought against the low price of corn was this, “The people are become proud and careless; I have seen great pieces of bread thrown out into the streets!” Yet bread alone had not really done all this; a nobler bread is required for man in order that he may fully derive the benefit even of the outward material bread. Nor had free-trade alone done all this either; there is also another power besides this which has been operative in that general awakening, in that wholesome spirit which I perceived in England. If this power were to be symbolized by art, it would present us with a female figure—a beautiful woman with the child at her breast, is the symbol which art makes use of, to express human love. And, perhaps, art is right in so doing. And perhaps it is the female principle in human nature, which, in the present new life in England, enables the man’s hand to accomplish the work; because from the most remote antiquity, has a male deity been chosen to represent trade, and navigation and mining, and all occupation of the earth. But, so says one of the oldest sagas of the world—when the divine life revealed itself on the earth, a divine pair came forth. In a lotus-flower which ascended from the waters of the Nile, were born at the same time Osiris and Isis, and together they went forth to bless the earth. I saw the truth of this saga confirmed by what I beheld in England. But in speaking of this, I shall especially linger on the new proofs thereof, in the new Institutions which promise a more beautiful future to the human race; not upon the old and insufficient, however good they may be, but upon the new, because it is upon the new that my eye has been especially directed. Let me linger, in the first place, on works of human love—the female figure with the child at her breast; because these are they which lay the foundation of all others.