AMERICA REVISITED.* IT is impossible to take up this new

series of Mr. Sala's letters from the United States without being reminded of those other letters, written by the same pen for the same journal nearly twenty years ago, which did so much to set English people wrong, and to keep them wrong, concerning the real issues in. volved in the terrible conflict then being waged between North and South. Still, those of us who never wavered in our con- viction that the Northern States were fighting for the cause of justice and freedom, and that their final triumph was inevitable, can at this time of day well afford to let bygones be bygones ; and a full reconciliation is rendered not only easy, but pleasant, by the very frank and handsome confession which Mr. Sala makes in his preface to these volumes. He writes :—

" When I first went to the United States, in the year 1863, I was, comparatively speaking, a young man,—very prejudiced, very con- ceited, and a great deal more ignorant and presumptuous than (I hope) I am now. When I landed in America, the country was con- vulsed by one of the most terrific internecine struggles that history has known. I took, politically, the wrong aide,—that is to say, I was an ardent sympathiser with the South, in her struggle against the North. In so taking a side, I was neither logical nor worldly- wise,—in short, I approved myself to be what is commonly called a fool ; but my partiality for 'Dixie's Land' was simply and solely due to a sentimental feeling ; and at thirty-four years of age it is per- missible to possess some slight modicum of sentimentality. My heart was with:the South, because I came on my mother's side of a West- Indian family—and a slave-owning family—rained by the abolition of slavery in the British Colonies ; and although I know perfectly well that I was altogether wrong in what I wrote politically concern- ing America in the Midst of War,' my heart is still in the Smith— with her gallant sons and her beautiful daughters ; and the song of

Maryland ! my Maryland !' yet stirs that heart like a drum, and will not so cease to stir it, I hope, until it ceases to beat for good and all."

• Ame,iea Revisited. By George Augusta. Sala. Illustrated with nearly 400 Engravings. 2 vols. London; rizetelly and C.

These are simple and manly words. No one will be so churlish as to grudge Mr. Sala his sympathetic heart-stirrings ; and we quote the passage with pleasure, not only because it is honourable to the writer of it, but because it probably explains a good deal of the almost fanatical partisanship of other English, Southerners besides the author of these volumes.

It is quite unnecessary to say that America Revisited is an exceedingly readable and amusing book, because Mr. Sala seems to find it impossible to write anything that is unreadable or dull. To say that he has wonderful powers of observation, is to do him less than justice, because, in general use, the meaning of the word " observation " is limited to the intel- lectual apprehension of impressions made on one sense only, —that of sight ; while Mr. Sala has brought not merely his sight, but all his other senses, into the highest possible- training as purveyors of material for literature. This, though a valuable acquirement, is, as a means to certain ends, a some- what dangerous one. It gives to single facts an interest with which the mind is for the time satisfied, and out of this satis- faction springs the temptation to pass from this small fact to- that, without any thought of those larger facts of relation which alone are the objects of intellectual, as opposed to merely sensuous perception. This is the temptation which has beset Mr. Sala, and it must be said that be has yielded to it, appar- ently without a struggle. In his former book, he gave expres- sion to opinions which turned out to be wrong; in the present work, he saves himself from a repetition of the humiliation by carefully excluding from his pages, not merely opinions, but, for- the most part, even the raw material of classified facts out of which opinion is manufactured.

Of course, it may frankly be admitted that, at this time of day, it is difficult to treat the social aspects of American life with breadth and, at the same time, with novelty; but surely there is some happy mean between hackneyed generalisations and the scrappy details with which Mr. Sala fills his two large- volumes. As we have already remarked, many of these details are entertaining enough in themselves, and even when they are not, Mr. Sala's treatment always makes them so ; but of the great majority of them, nothing more than this can be said, and we should hardly exaggerate, did we declare that all the matter in this work which adds to our real knowledge of the United States of two years ago could be compressed into less than fifty pages. We do not, however, wish to be guilty of unfair- ness, and perhaps it is a little unfair to blame Mr. Sala for not being instructive, when he so consistently refrains from giving himself the airs of an instructor. As a lively record of the author's personal experiences, the book is all that could be de- sired, and as the production of such a record was probably all that he had in view, it may be well for us to remember Pope's capital piece of advice to the critic :—

" In every work regard the writer's end,

Since none can compass more than he intend."

A brick is hardly satisfactory as a sample of a house, but half- a-dozen bricks may give a very fair idea, of the quality of a load, and America Revisited is a book which can be sampled by quota- tion much more adequately than it can be described by com- ment. Our first extract has some claim to be :considered in- structive, for it describes a minor development of civilisation which ought to make us ashamed of the comparative barbarity

of English methods, and which we do not remember to have- seen previously noticed :—

"The arrangements for setting down and taking up at public- places of amusement in New York strike me as being admirable. There is no hurry, no confusion, no rudeness, no extortion, and no unnecessary delay. An adequate force of stalwart, intelligent, and obliging policemen is always on hand. I am perfectly well aware that the New York police are being violently abused for the addicted- ness to clubbing' people,—that is to say, to brain them on slight provocation with their truncheons. All I know is that they did not club me, and that whenever I asked a question of a constable, he answered me politely. When you alight from your coups, a ticket bearing a number is handed to you. Another ticket, bearing the same number, is given to your coachman, who knows where to take up his stand, and who promptly responds to the summons of the police, when he is wanted. There is no frenzied shrieking of Smith's carriage' stopping the way. Nobody's carriage stops the way. Mrs. Smith is Number Sixty, or Number One Hundred and Ten, as the case may be ; and when the carriage is called, it comes."

This is a lesson which it will be well for us to learn from our American cousins, as speedily as may be ; but Mr. Sala seems to think that in one little detail of railway management they have something to learn from us. To the generally admirable qualities of the railway system in the States, he pays the usual tribute, but complains strongly of the serious annoyance to which the traveller is subjected by the frequent collection of tickets :—

" The `conductor' or guard seems to be always at you.' For example, between New York and Richmond I was asked to show my ticket, or rather to pay fragments of fare—for circumstances over which I had no control debarred me from booking right through— _first at Jersey City, secondly at Philadelphia, thirdly at Baltimore, fourthly at Washington, and fifthly at Quantico, a little river-side station between Alexandria and Richmond. Dozing off into slumber, com- posing yourself to read, subsiding into meditation and the enjoyment of a cigar, it was all one. The inevitable conductor, a glaring lan- tern in his hand, ruthlessly woke you up, or implacably interposed between yourself and your cogitations, and demanded your ticket."

Perhaps this blot may not really be as large as it seems to Mr.

Sala. On a first perusal of the passage, we were stirred to much sympathy with his broken slumbers and interrupted medita- tions ; but on second thoughts, it occurred to us that in a journey by ordinary train from London to Edinburgh, the ticket-collector would make quite as many incursions, and if Mr. Sala were not to book through, he would not, in this country, be able to pay his way onwards without the inconvenience of leaving the train,' so that in spite of the ruthlessness of the man with the lantern, the balance of advantage seems even here to be with Brother Jonathan.

Mr. Sala has a stronger case when he attacks the church-bell nuisance, as it exists in American cities. Even in England, the ding-dung of the half-hour before service-time is, in some places, somewhat trying ; but here the bell is, for the most part, a monopoly of the Established Church, while in the United States, where the Liberation Society's ideal of religions equality is realised, every church—chapels are never heard of—boasts

or may boast its steeple, and every steeple has its bell or bells, which, as Mr. Sala savagely remarks, " boom and brawl from sunrise to sunset, as though they were so many hotel gongs, calling guests to theological meals." The bells were, however, only one element in Mr. Sala's American Sunday troubles.

He is severe upon the Sabbatarianism of a large number of the States, and he has a theory to account for its maintenence which, at any rate, possesses the merit of novelty. He states it thus: --

" On more than one occasion, I have taken the liberty to observe that the American Sunday, so far as I have had the opportunity of observing it, was socially a day of tribulation In the Northern and Middle States, so it seems to me—but I am, of course, as in all things, open to conviction—the rigid Puritanical or Mosaic observance of Sunday is prescribed by the laws of the State. Those laws are in the highest degree acceptable to a class who, by right and Custom, are socially by far the most influential in the United States, —I mean the ladies. Women do not frequent bars or barbers' shops ; they are not given—in this country, at least—to driving fast-trotting horses; they do not smoke cigars ; and they are extremely fond of going to church, of wearing their finest clothing thereat, and of listening to emotional music, and to preachers who are either emotional or comic, or sometimes both. The sermons of the most popular of the New York clergymen are literally as good as a play ; and with plenty of stirring music, and pulpit oratory appealing either to the risible or the lachrymose faculties, there is surely no reason, so far as feminine New York is concerned, why the theatres should be opened on Sunday. Thus, Lovely Woman, both from a devotional and a recreative point of view, hails Sunday as a sweet boon."

There may be something in this hypothesis ; but, as Mr. Free- man has recently pointed out, there is in many other matters besides this of Sunday observance "a vast deal of Conservative feeling, or at least of Conservative habit, at work in the United States ;" and to speak of the great Western Republic as in every respect a " go-ahead " community, is to indulge in one of those vague generalisations concerning national character which do so much harm, because their simplicity gives them an attractiveness which is not possessed by the complexity of truth. So far as Sabbatarianism is concerned, there are in many of the States such numerous survivals of Puritan tradi- tions, that it seems gratuitous to separate one from the rest, and to try to find some special cause for it.

The evidences of the " go-ahead " instin?,t are, however, much more wide-spread and obvious than those which testify to a lingering Conservatism; and Mr. Sala's descriptions of the changes which had taken place, both in material and social -development, during the interval which had elapsed between his two visits, give one an almost overwhelming impression of the possibilities of American progress, at any rate in certain directions. An amusing illustration of what we are wont to consider typical Yankee characteristics is given in an anecdote of a man of Chicago, who, on the day after the first fire, put up in the midst of the mass of smouldering ruins a pole, surmounted by a board bearing the plucky inscription,—" All lost, except wife, children, and energy. Real-estate agency carried on as usual in the next shanty." Buoyancy of this kind will lift either a man or a community over innumerable difficulties ; and

we read without surprise, but with a good deal of sympathetic satisfaction, that "the undismayed real-estate agent is alive to tell the tale, a prosperous gentleman, who proudly exhibits the `wife, children, and energy' placard in his handsome office." Some of the go-ahead developments, particularly certain recent manifestations of journalistic enterprise, in which Mr. Sala is naturally interested, are not quite so edifying as this Chicago story. The latest feat of the "interviewer," described in the following sentences, is surely a climax to all previous impertin- encies of this shameless personage :— " A few days after I visited the Tombs, the twelve men sentenced to death were `interviewed' seriatim by a zealous reporter of the Yew York Herald, who endeavoured to elicit from them their respec- tive views as to the expediency of capital punishment, and the particular form of death which they would prefer, supposing that they admitted the punishment to be expedient. To speak by the card, there were only ten catechumens actually awaiting strangula- tion, as the sentence on two of their number had been commuted to imprisonment for life just before the reporter arrived. Two more of the miserables refused point-blank to answer the questions put to them ; but the eight remaining were explicit enough. They were all dead against banging. One man said that if he must needs be pat to death, he should like to be drowned, and another avowed a partiality for being shot ; a third wanted to be poisoned ; another suggested electricity, or something scientific of that kind ;' while yet another modestly hinted that he thought all the requirements of his case might be met, if he were sent to the mines.' Their opinions as to the justifiability of their having shed the blood of their fellow- creatures were not taken."

This is disgusting enough in itself, but it would be mach more disgusting, were it really symptomatic of the condition of public taste in the United States; and that this is not the case is hardly indicated with sufficient clearness by Mr. Sala, who, though never aggressively unfair, is too apt to follow the bad example set by Dickens in laying stress upon facts that are ex- ceptional and abnormal, rather than upon those which are ordinary and characteristic. Such a writer is naturally least successful in dealing with the more solid portions of his work. Mr. Sala's account of the condition of the Southern freed- men, which might have been made very valuable, seems to us singularly superficial and inadequate; while his sketch of the Negro Members of the State Legislatures is spoiled, by that spurious picturesqueness of treatment which leaves it doubtful where serious portraiture ends and caricature begins.

Had Mr. Sala devoted the numerous pages now filled with amusingly appreciative criticism of meats and drinks to a record of really illuminating and characteristic facts, his book would have been a valuable addition to our knowledge ; as it is, it is only an addition to the stock of what, for want of a better name, we may call circulating-library literature. The execution of the numerous woodcuts illustrating the book is admirable throughout. As designs, they have both the merits and the defects of the letterpress they accompany.