North America, vol 1 | Page 4

and soreness on the other. if I could do anything to mitigate
the soreness, if I could in any small degree add to the good feeling
which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other
so well, and which do hang upon each other so constantly, I should
think that I had cause to be proud of my work.
But it is very hard to write about any country a book that does not
represent the country described in a more or less ridiculous point of
view. It is hard at least to do so in such a book as I must write. A de
Tocqueville may do it. It may be done by any philosophico-political or
politico-statistical, or statistico- scientific writer; but it can hardly be
done by a man who professes to use a light pen, and to manufacture his
article for the use of general readers. Such a writer may tell all that he
sees of the beautiful; but he must also tell, if not all that he sees of the
ludicrous, at any rate the most piquant part of it. How to do this without
being offensive is the problem which a man with such a task before
him has to solve. His first duty is owed to his readers, and consists
mainly in this: that he shall tell the truth, and shall so tell that truth that
what he has written may be readable. But a second duty is due to those
of whom he writes; and he does not perform that duty well if he gives
offense to those as to whom, on the summing up of the whole evidence
for and against them in his own mind, he intends to give a favorable
verdict. There are of course those against whom a writer does not
intend to give a favorable verdict; people and places whom he desires
to describe, on the peril of his own judgment, as bad, ill educated, ugly,
and odious. In such cases his course is straightforward enough. His
judgment may be in great peril, but his volume or chapter will be easily
written. Ridicule and censure run glibly from the pen, and form
themselves into sharp paragraphs which are pleasant to the reader.
Whereas eulogy is commonly dull, and too frequently sounds as though
it were false. There is much difficulty in expressing a verdict which is

intended to be favorable; but which, though favorable, shall not be
falsely eulogistic; and though true, not offensive.
Who has ever traveled in foreign countries without meeting excellent
stories against the citizens of such countries? And how few can travel
without hearing such stories against themselves! It is impossible for me
to avoid telling of a very excellent gentleman whom I met before I had
been in the United States a week, and who asked me whether lords in
England ever spoke to men who were not lords. Nor can I omit the
opening address of another gentleman to my wife. "You like our
institutions, ma'am?" "Yes, indeed," said my wife, not with all that
eagerness of assent which the occasion perhaps required. "Ah," said he,
"I never yet met the down-trodden subject of a despot who did not hug
his chains." The first gentleman was certainly somewhat ignorant of
our customs, and the second was rather abrupt in his condemnation of
the political principles of a person whom he only first saw at that
moment. It comes to me in the way of my trade to repeat such incidents;
but I can tell stories which are quite as good against Englishmen. As,
for instance, when I was tapped on the back in one of the galleries of
Florence by a countryman of mine, and asked to show him where stood
the medical Venus. Nor is anything that one can say of the
inconveniences attendant upon travel in the United States to be beaten
by what foreigners might truly say of us. I shall never forget the look of
a Frenchman whom I found on a wet afternoon in the best inn of a
provincial town in the west of England. He was seated on a
horsehair-covered chair in the middle of a small, dingy, ill-furnished
private sitting-room. No eloquence of mine could make intelligible to a
Frenchman or an American the utter desolation of such an apartment.
The world as then seen by that Frenchman offered him solace of no
description. The air without was heavy, dull, and thick. The street
beyond the window was dark and narrow. The room contained
mahogany chairs covered with horse- hair, a mahogany table, rickety in
its legs, and a mahogany sideboard ornamented with inverted glasses
and old cruet-stands. The Frenchman had come to the house for shelter
and food, and had been