philanthropist and abolitionist, made a tour, under the guidance of the
poet Whittier, through the Northern and Eastern States[20].
Featherstonaugh, a scientist and civil engineer, described the Southern
slave states, in terms completely at variance with those of Sturge[21].
Kennedy, traveller in Texas, and later British consul at Galveston, and
Warburton, a traveller who came to the United States by way of Canada,
an unusual approach, were both frankly startled, the latter professedly
alarmed, at the evidences of power in America[22]. Amazed at the energy,
growth and prosperity of the country and alarmed at the anti-British
feeling he found in New York City, Warburton wrote that "they
[Americans] only wait for matured power to apply the incendiary torch of
Republicanism to the nations of Europe[23]." Soon after this was written
there began, in 1848, that great tide of Irish emigration to America
which heavily reinforced the anti-British attitude of the City of New
York, and largely changed its character.

Did books dilating upon the expanding power of America reflect British
public opinion, or did they create it? It is difficult to estimate such
matters. Certainly it is not uninteresting that these books coincided in
point of time with a British governmental attitude of opposition, though
on peaceful lines, to the development of American power, and to the
adoption to the point of faith, by British commercial classes, of free
trade as opposed to the American protective system. But governing
classes were not the British public, and to the great unenfranchised
mass, finding voice through the writings of a few leaders, the
prosperity of America made a powerful appeal. Radical democracy was
again beginning to make its plea in Britain. In 1849 there was published
a study of the United States, more careful and exact than any previous
to Bryce's great work, and lauding American political institutions. This
was Mackay's "Western World," and that there was a public eager for such