For Just Now, When A Large Part
Of Our Labouring Population Is Strangely Awakening To The Impression,
That A Dollar
A-day and a vote at elections in the United States are
better than eightpence a-day in Ireland; the
New Home to which our
fellow-countrymen are thus flocking - and in which, somehow or other,
they prosper and are independent - is especially interesting.
"Steam navigation and railways have so far reduced the difficulties and
uncertainties of Western travel, that it is now as easy and as cheap to
spend one's autumn holidays, as I have done, in a trip to America of
some eleven thousand miles out-and-home, as fifteen years ago it was to
get to John o' Groats and back by land conveyance, or to go a-shooting
in Sutherlandshire - which, by-the-bye, is an out of the way and dismal
sort of county even yet.
"Every one ought to know how easy it is, and how pleasant and
instructive, to travel in the States. But, though many people do know
this, the plague of English travellers which annually overspreads
Europe, from July to December, and disturbs even the quiet of the Nile,
has hardly touched America. And while one cannot enter the drawing-room
of any decent house without hearing descriptions of scenery and manners
in Germany, Italy, or Russia, - to have visited America almost involves
the suspicion of some commercial connection with that country. Yet no
other land in the world has so close an alliance with our own; and,
while we are culpably ignorant of almost everything but its
peculiarities and its vices, no other country studies our history, and
watches our progress, with greater interest or more solicitude.
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