produced difference of feeling, and was a dissociating cause. Now it will lead to rapid, constant, and extensive interchange of productions, by the aid of the telegraph and railway. Each will always be occupied with the thought of supplying the wants of the other. And this will lead to social intercourse, and the union of families. So that what was impossible before is what must be now. [Sidenote: _High Prices._] Everything in the United States, except railway fares and the _per diem_ charges of hotels, is unreasonably dear; and the hotels themselves participate in the general irrationality on this subject as soon as you order anything that is not down in the list of what is allowed for the daily sum charged you. I never got a fire lighted in my bed-room for a few hours for less than a dollar, that is 3_s._ 6_d._; or half a dozen pieces washed for less than a dollar and a half. But the one matter of all in which the charges are the most insane is that of hackney coaches and railway omnibuses. You get into an omnibus at the station to be carried two or three hundred yards to your hotel. As soon as the vehicle begins to move, the conductor begins to levy his black mail. He is only doing to you what his own government is doing to him. And in America it seems to be taken for granted that one will pay just what he is ordered to pay. ‘Sir,’ he addresses you, ‘you must pay now; three quarters of a dollar for yourself, and a quarter of a dollar for each piece,’ that is of luggage. You have perhaps four pieces, being an ignorant stranger; if you had been a well-informed native you would have had only one piece; and for these four pieces and yourself you pay about 7_s._ In an English railway omnibus you would have paid 6_d._ or 1_s._ The hackney coaches are very much worse. I found a driver in New York who would take me for a short distance for a dollar and a half, but I never found so reasonable a gentleman in the profession elsewhere. At New Orleans there appear to be a great many hackney coaches, all apparently quite new, with a great deal of silver-plated mounting about them, almost as if they had been intended for civic processions on the scale of our Lord Mayor’s show. Each of them is drawn by a very fair pair of horses. I once counted two-and-thirty of these coaches standing for hire, on a rainy day, at the door of the St. Charles’s Hotel; and I was told that it was their rule not to move off the stand for less than two dollars, or to take one out to dinner, and bring one back, for less than ten dollars.