198 AN OCTOBER ABROAD. 



against the English, and which is so successfully de- 

 picted by Dickens and Thackery, there is, doubtless, 

 good ground for it, though I actually saw very little 

 of it during five-weeks' residence in London, and I 

 poked about into all the dens and corners I could 

 find, and perambulated the streets at nearly all hours 

 of the night and day. Yet I am persuaded there is 

 a kind of brutality among the lower orders in Eng- 

 land that does not exist in the same measure in 

 this country an ignorant animal coarseness, an in- 

 sensibility, which gives rise to wife-beating and kin- 

 dred offenses. But the brutality of ignorance and 

 stolidity is not the worst form of the evil. It is 

 good material to make something better of. It is 

 an excess and not a perversion. It is not man fallen, 

 but man undeveloped. Beware, rather, that refined, 

 subsidized brutality ; that thin, depleted, moral con- 

 sciousness ; or that contemptuous, cankerous, euphe- 

 mistic brutality, of which, I believe, we can show 

 vastly more samples than Great Britain. Indeed, I 

 believe, for the most part, that the brutality of the 

 English people is only the excess and plethora of 

 that healthful, muscular robustness and full-blooded- 

 ness for which the nation has always been famous, and 

 which it should prize beyond almost anything else. 

 But for our brutality, our recklessness of life and 

 property, the brazen ruffianism in our great cities, 

 the hellish greed and robbery and plunder in high 

 places, I should have to look a long time to find so 

 plausible an excuse. 



