Coal and iron, silver and gold, rivers full of fish, forest and prairie teeming with game, pasture for millions of cattle, wheat land and corn land, cotton land and orchard for any man who chose to take them;--the wretches struggling and stifling in the London slums having nothing to do but grasp axe and rifle and go out to subdue the wilderness;--farms, not by the half-acre, but by the hundred acres for every one of the unemployed. Is it possible to doubt that the race would be strengthened, not materially only, but in its moral qualities,--that Englishmen in another generation would not only be a wealthier and a more powerful people but a healthier, lustier, nobler? How then are we to suppose that just such a change, such an uplifting, has not come about in that other British people to whom all this has happened, who came into their wonderful birthright four generations ago and for a century and a quarter have been fashioning it to their will and being fashioned by it after the will of Another? By what process of logic, English reader, are you going to convince yourself that this race--your own with larger opportunities--is not the finer race of the two? I have not, be it observed, expressed the opinion that the American national character is finer than the English; only that it is finer than the European commonly supposes. Nor am I expressing such an opinion now but only setting forth certain elementary considerations for the reader's judgment. When the European sees in the individual American, or in a dozen individual Americans, certain peculiarities, inelegancies, and sometimes even impertinences--call them what you will,--he is too prone to think that these are the essentials of the American character. The essentials of the American character are the essentials of the English character--with elbow-room. "While the outlook of the New Yorker is wider than ours," says Mr. Archer, "his standpoint is the same." In that elbow-room, with that wider outlook, it is likely that new offshoots from the character will have developed--excrescences, not perhaps in themselves always lovely--but if we remember what the trunk is from which they spring, or what it was, we shall probably think better, or less, of those excrescences, while remembering also the likelihood that in the larger room and richer soil the trunk itself may also have expanded and strengthened and solidified. The English reader might decide for himself what justification there is for supposing that the character of that offset from the British stock which, a century and a quarter ago, was put in possession of this magnificent estate should have deteriorated rather than improved as compared with the character of that portion of the stock which remained rooted in the old soil hemmed in between the ancient boundaries. * * * * *