She had wished to call the book _Theory and Practice of Society in America_, a title which would have exactly expressed the position that she took up in it, viz., that the Americans should be judged by the degree in which they approached, in their daily lives, to the standard of the principles laid down in their Constitution. Her publishers so strongly objected to this title, that she consented to call the work simply _Society in America_. She held to her scheme none the less, and the book proceeds upon it. She quotes the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. "Every true citizen," she claims, "must necessarily be content to have his self-government tried by the test of the principles to which, by his citizenship, he has become a subscriber." She brings social life in the United States of 1834-6 to this test accordingly. That method of approaching her subject had some advantages. It enabled her to treat with peculiar force the topics of slavery, of the exclusion of women from political affairs, and of the subservience to the despotism of public opinion which she found to exist at that time in America. But she herself came to see, in after times, that her _plan_ (leaving the details aside) was radically faulty. She was, as she says, "at the most metaphysical period" of her mental history. Thus, she failed at the moment to perceive that she commenced her subject _at the wrong end_ in taking a theory and judging the facts of American society by their agreement or disagreement with that _a priori_ philosophy. It was the theory that had to be judged by the way in which the people lived under a government framed upon it, and not the people by the degree in which they live up to the theory. The English public wanted a book that would help them to know the American public and its ways; the Americans required to see through the eyes of an observant, cultivated foreigner, what they were being and doing. It is this which a traveller has to do--to observe _facts_: to draw lessons from them, if he will, but not to consider the facts in their relationship to a pre-conceived theory. Human experience is perennially important and eternally interesting; and this is what a traveller has to note and record. Political philosophies must be gathered from experience instead of (what she attempted) the real life being viewed only as related to the philosophy. In fine, her error was in treating abstractedly what was necessarily a concrete theme. With this objection to the scheme of the book, all criticism may end. All criticism did not end (any more than it began) in this way in 1837. Speaking out so boldly as she did on a variety of the most important social topics, she naturally aroused opposition, which the power and eloquence of the style did not mitigate.