CHAP. XXIV.] DEMOCRATIC EQUALITY. 73 



and they are said to thrive more on this mixture 

 than on the grain alone. 



The different stages of civilisation to which fami 

 lies have attained, who live here on terms of the 

 strictest equality, is often amusing to a stranger, but 

 must be intolerable to some of those settlers who 

 have been driven by their losses from the more 

 advanced districts of Virginia and South Carolina, 

 having to begin the world again. Sometimes, in 

 the morning, my host would be of the humblest 

 class of &quot;crackers,&quot; or some low, illiterate German 

 or Irish emigrants, the wife sitting with a pipe in 

 her mouth, doing no work and reading no books. 

 In the evening, I came to a neighbour, whose library 

 was well stored with works of Frencli and English 

 authors, and whose first question to me was, (f Pray 

 tell me, who do you really think is the author of the 

 Vestiges of Creation?&quot; If it is difficult in Europe, 

 in the country far from towns, to select society on a 

 principle of congeniality of taste and feeling, the 

 reader may conceive what must be the control of 

 geographical circumstances here, exaggerated by 

 ultra-democratic notions of equality and the pride of 

 race. Nevertheless, these regions will probably 

 bear no unfavourable comparison with such parts of 

 our colonies, in Canada, the Cape, or Australia, as 

 have been settled for an equally short term of years, 

 and I am bound to say, that I passed my time agree 

 ably and profitably in Alabama, for every one, as I 

 have usually found in newly peopled districts, was 

 hospitable and obliging to a stranger. Instead of 

 the ignorant wonder, very commonly expressed in 



VOL. II. E 



