Such A Work Is Fitter For A Man Than For A Woman, I Am Very Far From Thinking That It Is A Task Which I Can Perform With Satisfaction Either To Myself Or To Others.

It is a work which some man will do who has earned a right by education, study, and success to rank himself among the political sages of his age.

But I may perhaps be able to add something to the familiarity of Englishmen with Americans. The writings which have been most popular in England on the subject of the United States have hitherto dealt chiefly with social details; and though in most cases true and useful, have created laughter on one side of the Atlantic, and soreness on the other. if I could do anything to mitigate the soreness, if I could in any small degree add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other so well, and which do hang upon each other so constantly, I should think that I had cause to be proud of my work.

But it is very hard to write about any country a book that does not represent the country described in a more or less ridiculous point of view. It is hard at least to do so in such a book as I must write. A de Tocqueville may do it. It may be done by any philosophico-political or politico-statistical, or statistico- scientific writer; but it can hardly be done by a man who professes to use a light pen, and to manufacture his article for the use of general readers. Such a writer may tell all that he sees of the beautiful; but he must also tell, if not all that he sees of the ludicrous, at any rate the most piquant part of it. How to do this without being offensive is the problem which a man with such a task before him has to solve. His first duty is owed to his readers, and consists mainly in this: that he shall tell the truth, and shall so tell that truth that what he has written may be readable. But a second duty is due to those of whom he writes; and he does not perform that duty well if he gives offense to those as to whom, on the summing up of the whole evidence for and against them in his own mind, he intends to give a favorable verdict. There are of course those against whom a writer does not intend to give a favorable verdict; people and places whom he desires to describe, on the peril of his own judgment, as bad, ill educated, ugly, and odious. In such cases his course is straightforward enough. His judgment may be in great peril, but his volume or chapter will be easily written. Ridicule and censure run glibly from the pen, and form themselves into sharp paragraphs which are pleasant to the reader. Whereas eulogy is commonly dull, and too frequently sounds as though it were false.

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