from Mesopotamia, reaches the vast table-lands of the Far West and
inspects their interesting fauna of antelopes and buffaloes, red Indians
and Mormons. In a journey of this sort one gets a very superficial view
of the peculiarities, physical and social, which characterize the
different portions of our country; and in this there is nothing to
complain of, since the knowledge gained in a vacation-journey cannot
well be expected to be thorough or profound. The traveller, however,
who should visit the United States in a more leisurely way, with the
purpose of increasing his knowledge of history and politics, would find
it well to proceed somewhat differently. He would find himself richly
repaid for a sojourn in some insignificant place the very name of which
is unknown beyond sea,--just as Mr. Mackenzie Wallace--whose book on
Russia is a model of what such books should be--got so much invaluable
experience from his months of voluntary exile at Ivánofka in the
province of Novgorod. Out of the innumerable places which one might
visit in America, there are none which would better reward such careful
observation, or which are more full of interest for the comparative
historian, than the rural towns and mountain villages of New England;
that part of English America which is oldest in civilization (though not
in actual date of settlement), and which, while most completely English
in blood and in traditions, is at the same time most completely American
in so far as it has most distinctly illustrated and most successfully
represented those political ideas which have given to American history
its chief significance in the general work of civilization.

The United States are not unfrequently spoken of as a "new country," in
terms which would be appropriate if applied to Australia or New Zealand,
and which are not inappropriate as applied to the vast region west of
the Mississippi River, where the white man had hardly set foot before
the beginning of the present century. New England, however, has a