By this time, the editor of the Active Inquirer began to be extremely elevated--for this was assailing him on his weakest side--and he laughed and rubbed his hands as if he thought the joke particularly pleasant. This person had also a peculiarity of judgment that was singularly in opposition to all his open professions, a peculiarity, however, that belongs rather to his class than to the individual member of it. Ultra as a democrat and an American, Mr. Dodge had a sneaking predilection in favour of foreign opinions. Although practice had made him intimately acquainted with all the frauds, deceptions, and vileness of the ordinary arts of paragraph-making, he never failed to believe religiously in the veracity, judgment, good faith, honesty and talents of anything that was imported in the form of types. He had been weekly, for years, accusing his nearest brother of the craft, of lying, and he could not be altogether ignorant of his own propensity in the same way; but, notwithstanding all this experience in the secrets of the trade, whatever reached him from a European journal, he implicitely swallowed whole. One, who knew little of the man, might have supposed he feigned credulity to answer his own purposes; but this would be doing injustice to his faith, which was perfect, being based on that provincial admiration, and provincial ignorance, that caused the countryman, who went to London for the first time, to express his astonishment at finding the king a man. As was due to his colonial origin, his secret awe and reverence for an Englishman was in proportion to his protestations of love for the people, and his deference for rank was graduated on a scale suited to the heart-burning and jealousies he entertained for all whom he felt to be his superiors. Indeed, one was the cause of the other; for they who really are indifferent to their own social position, are usually equally indifferent to that of others, so long as they are not made to feel the difference by direct assumptions of superiority.