"What a prig he was!" is scrawled across the page, as Charles Dilke's judgment on himself, when later the letter fell into his hands. But, happily, in all the ordinary intercourse of life, ease and geniality were native to him; he got on readily with all manner of men; and nothing could have been better for him than the plunge into a society where all was in the rough. He shed his priggishness once and for all somewhere on the "Great Divide." What makes the permanent charm of _Greater Britain_ is its sense of enjoyment, its delighted acceptance of new and unconventional ways. In crossing the plains, he first made the experience of actual physical privations, and for the first time saw and fell in love with "the bright eyes of danger." Through all the seriousness and solid concentration of _Greater Britain_ there runs a vein of high spirits. Facts are there, but with them is a ferment of ideas and of feeling. Part of that feeling is just a contagious delight in the joyous business of living. But the strong current which lifted him so buoyantly was an emotion which no shyness or stiffness hampered in the expression--in its essence an exultant patriotism of race. Democracy meant to him in this stage of his development, not any abstract theory of government, but the triumph of English ideas. California, then in the full rush of mining, was the touchstone of Democracy; where, out of the chaos of blackguardism, through lynchings and vigilance committees, judge and jury were at work evolving decent security and settled government. "The wonder is" (he wrote) "not that, in such a State as California was till lately, the machinery of government should work unevenly, but that it should work at all. Democracy has never endured so rough a test as that from which it has triumphantly emerged in the Golden State and City.... "California is too British to be typically American: it would seem that nowhere in the United States have we found the true America or the real American. Except as abstractions, they do not exist; it is only by looking carefully at each eccentric and irregular America--at Irish New York, at Puritan New England, at the rowdy South, at the rough and swaggering Far West, at the cosmopolitan Pacific States-- that we come to reject the anomalous features, and to find America in the points they possess in common. It is when the country is left that there rises in the mind an image that soars above all local prejudice --that of the America of the law-abiding, mighty people who are imposing English institutions on the world." [Footnote: _Greater Britain_ (popular edition), p. 193.] The same thought is summed up in the chapter where he sets down his recollected impressions on board the ship that carried him southwards along the shores of America from the Golden Gate towards Panama: