Every nation has a right to its prejudices--certainly the English towards the American--America appearing to the English eye a huge mushroom affair, the growth of a night and unsubstantial. But it is surely wrong to censure a whole nation--as some have done the Southern people--for the faults of a few. For although every nation has a right to its prejudices, none has a right, without thorough examination and acquaintance with the subject, to seize a few exaggerated accounts, of another nation by its enemies, and publish them as facts. The world in this way receives very erroneous impressions. For instance, we have no right to suppose the Germans a cruel race because of the following paragraph clipped from a recent newspaper: "The cruelty of German officers is a matter of notoriety, but an officer in an artillery regiment has lately gone beyond precedent in ingenuity of cruelty. Some of his men being insubordinate, he punished them by means of a 'spurring process,' which consisted in jabbing spurs persistently and brutally into their legs. By this process his men were so severely injured they had to go to the hospital." Neither have we a right to pronounce all Pennsylvanians cruel to their "helps," as they call them, because a Pennsylvania lady told me "the only way she could manage her 'help'"--a white girl fourteen years old--"was by holding her head under the pump and pumping water upon it until she lost her breath;" a process I could not have conceived, and which filled me with horror. But sorrow and oppression, we suppose, may be found in some form in every clime; and in every phase of existence some hearts are "weary and heavy laden." Even Dickens, whose mind naturally sought, and fed upon, the comic, saw wrong and oppression in the "humane institutions" of his own land! And Macaulay gives a painful picture of Madam D'Arblay's life as waiting maid to Queen Charlotte--from which we are not to infer, however, that all Queens are cruel to their waiting maids.