best Englishmen think the least worth perpetuating to keep up
among themselves dim traditional notions and literary illusions
unrecognized by the land at large. Her aristocratic friendships
were better known to them than her democratic sympathies;
and they desired the reflected light of such glories. She came,
too, with an unequalled religious prestige to her own denomina-
tion; which, unlike Unitarianism at that time in England, was
here an influential one for its wealth, social position, mud liter-
ary culture. She came with unexampled claims on the minds
of leaders in national and state politics; while our "millions,"
the reading public, who were to succeed to this leadership in
their turn, were longing to express their grateful acknowledg-
ments for the pleasant awakening she had given to their moral
sense.

For the thing that had principally marked the few years im-
mediately preceding her arrival was a singular moral apathy or
paralysis of the public mind, which made its literature, politics,
and religion all seem either formal and unreal, or dispropor-
tioned and extravagant, -- the smooth, relenting movement of the
spent engine, with great noise and bustle among the conductors.
Life was fast degenerating into insipid sentimentalism or ridicu-
lous caricature among all who were not actually struggling for a
living. There was no advance, for that part of the nation that
ought by position and cultivated intelligence to have led had
lost the way.

But popularly accepted and borne onward by the admiration
of all, Harriet Martineau enjoyed unequalled opportunities
for coming to just conclusions about America. She landed
in New York in the middle of September, 1834, and travelled
first in the states of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts,
and Pennsylvania, examining their cities, villages, and manufac-
tories, visiting friends and making pilgrimages to every scene of
interest, from its sublimity and beauty, or from its moral associa-
tions. She remained six weeks in Philadelphia, where there are
as many circles of society as at Geneva, each personally unknown
to the other, having constant intercourse with most of them;
she stayed three weeks in Baltimore before establishing her-

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