I should just think I had. I would not dream of fancying myself in a position to give any trustworthy opinion on the subject of America and its people, unless I had thus mixed amongst all classes of the community during a lengthened stay in the country--although, mind you, your "working-man's friend," and "trades' union delegate," and "Alliance" teetotaller, and "liberal" peer, and disestablishing Nonconformist-- tourists all of only three weeks' experience--think they can take in, in one glance, the whole extent of a continent embracing some hundred million square miles, understanding the entire working of the "institutions," of the "great republic" through travelling on a railroad from New York to Chicago! As you will have noticed, reporters over there are set to very varied work instead of being fixed in any one especial groove as in England. On the paper, for instance, to which I was attached, all the staff used, regularly in turn, to do the dramatic criticism at the various theatres. We, also, had to report the sermons at all the many churches of various religious denominations on Sunday--whether they were Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Universalist, or other which would tire you to even hear named; not omitting the "Spiritualists," "Agapemonites," and the "Peculiar People"--so, as was pointed out in an opposition paper at the time, we "took the devil and the deity on week days and Sundays alternately!" On the whole, putting the higher class of Americans on one side--I refer to those who mostly belong to the older families, in some instances tracing back their descent to the days of the Puritan Fathers, and who, having learnt culture and refinement abroad, rarely mix in public life in the States--the general faith and morality of our Yankee "cousins" have never been so tersely described as in the "Pious Editor's Creed" of the _Biglow Papers_, which were written, as you are doubtless aware, by an American, too:-- "I du believe in special ways O' prayin' an' convartin'; The bread comes back in many days, An' buttered, tu, for sartin; I mean in preyin' till one busts On wut the party chooses, An' in convartin' public trusts To very privit uses!" In one speciality, the New York journals, otherwise so inferior, set an example which might be imitated to advantage by their London contemporaries;--and, that is, in their news, the back-bone of an ostensible "news"-paper. I say nothing for their tone, which is essentially low--exhibiting, as it does, a tendency of rather pandering to the vitiated appetites of the mob than seeking to raise the standard of public taste and public manners; nor, for their literary power and status, as their leading articles are mostly a collection of loose sentences, strung loosely together without method or reasoning, and they frequently display such crass ignorance in the way of blunders in history and geography, as would shock an English school-boy.