of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within
twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of
interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with
invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of
rank and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These
have their stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but
they are not at the landing-stage, and even the uncultivated
American cannot stay for the vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool,
like the cities of his own land, is composed. Our own cities have
a social consciousness, and are each sensible of being a centre,
with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange thing about
Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are without any
social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially unborn;
they can come into the world only in London, and in their
prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence,
while all the commercial and industrial energies rage round them
in a gigantic maturity.


V

The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of
entry for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the
beautiful, the historical. With the almost immediate transference
of the original transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol,
Liverpool became the only place where you could arrive. American
lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard
line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you nowhere
else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse
schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox