*

equal right and logic in the parlor as in the kitchen, in the mansion as on the farm, to the luxurious and the idle, as to the laborious and the plain. But by its shabby genteel sense, this lady and ladylike character stands often in the way of truthfulness and nature, stands in the way even of accomplishing many social, conventional, as well as real duties, besides generating shams, affectations, and all kinds of spurious displays, defacing genuine reality. It is as an acid, destroying the suave perfume of ingenuousness, discoloring the freshest tints of a richly blossoming flower. The misuse overflows all the strata, and spreads even in literature, while the word gentlewoman, the noblest in the English language, and unequalled in any other, resuming all the purest qualities of the soul, of the heart, combining them harmoniously with external gentleness of demeanor, is unheard in conversation, and has scarcely penetrated into literature.

Artificiality, internal or external, in notions or in halfformed manners, stiffness denoting or covering mostly fragmentary crumbs of breeding, lame imitations, make not a woman, not even a lady. The best manners are simple, not attracting notice, not striking by any extreme. High

* A farmer in New England, questioned by me about the number of cows kept on his farm, answered, that he could keep twice as many, but that his ladies (wife and daughters) objected to it on account of the increased work in the dairy. I could not abstain from saying, that he would be better off if he had in his family true women, instead of ladies.

† Even Motley in his history could not avoid the contagion. In relating the defence of a small Dutch city besieged by the Spaniards, he extols the devotion, the sacrifices made by the ladies. Who ever used this word speaking of the women of Carthage, Numanea, Saragossa, etc.? Or who will speak of Imogen, Portia, Desdemona, Juliette, Rosalinda, or even of lady Macbeth, as of the ladies of Shakspeare?

toned, well-bred, elegantly accomplished women are not stylish, have no style at all. Stylish looking, an appellation profusely applied in America, would be considered the poorest compliment, if not an offence, in Europe.

The scrupulous observance of rites regulating social courtesy, their exchange, and that of these unavoidable conventionalities, cementing, facilitating, and smoothing daily intercourse between individuals as well as between families, not only in relations between equal, but between most distant and distinct positions; all these in Europe are generally watched over, directed, and maintained by the man. Acting and representing the head of the family, as husband or father, it belongs to him to give the example, to him the prize for urbanity, for good breeding, to him the blame for omissions, lesions, deviations from or breach of established, and in their nature, easy and elastic rules. Almost as generally the contrary is the case in America. The wife, the mother, often advised by children, is the mainspring, the anima movens, of all sociability. She is the arch on which the law reposes, and on her depends its fulfilment. The husband, the father, acts under her advice; he is the deacon where she is the highpriest. The woman, wife, mother, or even daughter, exercise in all these worldly relations an omnipotence and latitude nowhere conceded to them in Europe. The woman, therefore, in America, and more preeminently than in Europe, constitutes the charm, the attraction of sociability, animates, sustains integrally its current. To her the incense and tribute, but with her likewise the responsibility when the charm is dispelled, rites omitted, courtesy ruffled and bruised, and intercourse rendered knobby and unattractive.

CHAPTER XIII.

COUNTRY AND CITY.

IN America, the country and city as constituent social, political elements and agencies, stand in an inverse relation to each other from that in which they stood in the ancient and in the European world. Their respective significations are different, and the difference runs through almost all the fibres of their multiform development, is visible in all the lights and shadows of general, political, social, as well as of domestic life and intercourse. Country and city in the greater part of their mutual relations each other by different currents from those in the Old World, and are to be judged and appreciated by new and original criteria.

affect and react on

The ancient world was essentially municipal in all its social, political, legislative, and governmental structure. It was so, taking the world in its original, strictest, Roman or Latin sense. Within the walls of the city was concentrated the whole human multifarious development and movement. Light, culture, civil and political rights, were embodied in the cities, or intrinsically depended on them. Without its walls, the space was a social vacuum, life in all its humane elevated manifestations evolving from the city. The society which emerged out of the ruins of the Roman world changed integrally at the start its

social pivot, transferring power in all its character and ramifications to the independent nobility and knighthood, scattered over the country; but this was another feature of privileges enjoyed comparatively by few who were masters of the whole land, and of the, in all respects, disfranchised masses. Soon, however, the city, by various means, either as the residence of royalty, as the capital of the State, as one of the powerful compartments in the feudal edifice; as the creator and agent of culture, industry, and commerce, and by numerous other ways, the city recovered its signification, acquired rights, stood next to and rivalled the nobility, and in several cases absorbed it. Amidst all these changes and fluctuations, no country existed, politically or socially, with free self-asserting populations, with equal rights to all other portions of the nation. America inaugurated such a one. The country and its inhabitants are on an absolute parity here with the city. The relations between the one and the other depend on free intercourse and attractions, they result from the nature of things, from their respective as well as their relative occupations. Uninterrupted but free currents circulate between city and country, carrying and exchanging forces and products, and combining production and reproduction.

Democracy, decentralization, emancipated man, space, localities, have created those new and equal relations, formerly unknown in Europe. In various preceding chapters have been pointed out the preeminent features and influences which constitute the difference between the European and American cities, principally of capitals, their different action on the country, as civilizing, as political or governmental agencies. No such distance separates country and city in America as existed and partly now exists in Europe, stamping the one with real or conven

tional inferiority in comparison with the other. No city, as was always the case among the European nations, rises above the country, or impresses upon it its own stamp, in language, manners, customs, habits, notions, conceptions, impulses, aspirations. No positive relations constitute a capital and a province, making the one wholly dependent on the other-no social provincialism in reality lowers the country in comparison with a large city.

The apparent social superiority of any American commercial metropolis consists more especially in a certain external, material perfection and polish, a result of the accumulation of wealth and capital, facilitating and stimulating acquisition, continual renovation, or imitation of foreign models. The extensive trade, the uninterrupted movement creating intercourse with foreign and distant regions, brings into exchange their various creations, and the cities. are the first to assimilate and to transmit them to the country. But they do not acquire thereby any supremacy similar to that of European capitals. The American metropolises act rather as mediators towards the country, mediators between the foreign and the domestic. The commercial cities are no foci or exclusive depositaries of light and culture, where from those elements radiate and spread over the country; nor are they types-as are the capitals in Europe, with royalty, nobility, and concentration as well of wealth and of culture-after which the intellectual, moral, and material life, and the modes, the refinement, and tastes of the country at large are exclusively developed and fashioned. Therefore provincialism, in its extensive and manifold meaning, does not characterize the stand-point of the country, in relation to the city or capital, as it does in Europe.

The city of Boston alone possesses a certain tradition of supremacy, of a similar kind. This was once real in