28 NOVEMBER 1874, Page 3

General Schenck evidently does us the honour to believe that

-we are a nation of shopkeepers. At the Cutler's Feast at Sheffield on Thursday—a very dull meeting, at which nothing was said worth reporting—the American Minister told his hearers that England and the United States ought to love each other, for "we are your greatest market," we "take a hundred and five millions sterling, one-sixth your aggregate trade with all the world." This he considered a practical proof of affection which would come "home to the hearts" of the men of Sheffield. Do dealers and customers love each other so much in America ? They don't here. We should say, on the -whole, that the feeling in Europe between those two classes is not universally fraternal, that it is just as common for the seller to think the buyer a skin-flint, and for -the buyer to call the seller an extortioner, as for the two to embrace with effusion. General Schenck seems himself to have doubted his own sentiment, for he immediately clinched it by announcing that his people were becoming our rivals, and now produce /200,000,000 sterling of manufactured goods. If the General were to include all the mines manufactured in a year for British consumption, the total would "figure up" heavier than that