Since returning from the United States I have occasionally been asked
how the general tone of morality in that country compared with that in
our own. To answer such a question with anything approaching to an air
of finality or absoluteness would be an act of extreme presumption.
The opinions which one holds depend so obviously on a number of
contingent and accidental circumstances, and must so inevitably be
tinged by one's personal experiences, that their validity can at best
have but an approximate and tentative character. In making this
comparison, too, it is only right to disregard the phenomena of mining
camps and other phases of life on the fringes of American
civilisation, which can be fairly compared only with pioneer life on
the extreme frontiers of the British Empire. From a similar cause we
may omit from the comparison a great part of the Southern States,
where we do not find a homogeneous mass of white civilisation, but a
state of society inexpressibly complicated by the presence of an
inferior race. To compare the Southerner with the Englishman we should
need to observe the latter as he exists in, say, one of our African
colonies. Speaking, then, with these reservations, I should feel
inclined to say that in domestic and social morality the Americans are
ahead of us, in commercial morality rather behind than before, and in
political morality distinctly behind.

Thus, in the first of these fields we find the American more
good-tempered and good-natured than the Englishman. Women, children,
and animals are treated with considerably more kindness. The American
translation of paterfamilias is not domestic tyrant. Horses are driven
by the voice rather than by the whip. The superior does not thrust his
superiority on his inferior so brutally as we are apt to do. There is
a general intention to make things pleasant--at any rate so long as it