Page:An Epistle to Posterity.djvu/164

Rh every friend you make you sow dragons' teeth for innumerable other friends, and each one is kinder than the last. Some of my new friends spoke handsomely of American hospitality, I was compelled to say, "It must be an inherited virtue."

They can be more hospitable than we, these fortunate people. They have a far more highly organized system of domestic service; they have immense wealth; they have that regular, graduated society wherein every man and woman knows his or her place; and whatever we, as republicans, may say as to the so-called snobbery of English people, I have seen something like it at home. It is better to pay court to a queen (who to them is abstract England) or to a duke with a "long pedigree" than to worship, as we too often do, some unworthy person whose wealth is his sole passport into society. I believe that a habit of respect is good for the human race — "It blesseth him that gives and him that takes," and it produces in England such manners in the trades-people, servants, innkeepers, and, in fact, in all who serve you, that I would fain become a student and a copyist of the better specimens, that I might become in my turn a teacher "of the same" to the dominant race who drive our carriages and rule our households. I do not wonder that American women like Europe and are happier there than here. Women are more sensitive than men in this matter of respectful attendance; and they receive so little of it here from our so-called servants that the perfect deference and good breeding of that class in the older countries is a happiness in itself.

We reluctantly tore ourselves from the delights of Nilsson and the opera at Covent Garden, and all the theatres, and from the parks and drives and dinners of London, for fresh fields and pastures new. We wanted