of "what is on the table," is a sign of preoccupation with serious
things. It may be; but the German love of food is not necessarily a
sign of grossness, and that "overfed" appearance, of which the
_Union_ spoke, is not necessarily a sign of inefficiency, any more
than leanness or cadaverousness is a sign of efficiency. There is
certainly some power of hard work in King William's army, and,
indeed, we could hardly point to a better illustration of the truth,
that all the affairs of men, whether political, social, or
religious, depend for their condition largely on the state of the
digestion.

Honesty, by which we mean that class of virtues which Cicero
includes in the term _bona fides_, has, to a considerable extent,
owing, we think, to the peculiar humanitarian character which the
circumstances of the country have given to the work of reform, been
subordinated in the United States to brotherly kindness. Now, this
right to arrange the virtues according to a scale of its own, is
something which not only every age, but every nation, has claimed,
and, accordingly, we find that each community, in forming its
judgment of a man's character, gives a different degree of weight to
different features of it. Keeping a mistress would probably,
anywhere in the United States, damage a man's reputation far more
seriously than fraudulent bankruptcy; while horse-stealing, which in
New England would be a comparatively trifling offence, out in
Montana is a far fouler thing than murder. But in the European
scale, honesty still occupies the first place. Bearing this in mind,
it is worth any man's while who proposes to pass judgment on the
morality of any foreign country, to consider what is the impression
produced on foreign opinion about American morality by the story of
the Erie Railroad, by the career of Fisk, by the condition of the