Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/115

112 system of ranks here, as absolute as the Oriental caste, is the feature in English society most striking to an American. For the progress of the human race it was worth coming to the New World to get rid of it. Yes, it was worth all that our portion of the human family sacrificed, encountered, and suffered. This system of castes is the more galling, clogging, and unhealthy, from its perfect unfitness to the present state of freedom and progress in England.

Travellers laugh at our pretentions to equality, and Sir Walter Scott has said, as truly as wittily, that there is no perfect equality except among the Hottentota. But our inequalities are as changing as the surface of the ocean, and this makes all the difference. Each rank is set about here with a thorny, impervious, and almost impassable hedge. We have our walls of separation, certainly; but they are as easily knocked down or surmounted as our rail-fences.

With us, talents, and education, and refined manners command respect and observance, and so, I am sorry to say, does fortune; but fortune baa more than its proverbial mutability in the United States. The rich man of to-day is the poor man of to-morrow, and so vice versa. This unstableness has its evils, undoubtedly, and so has every modification of human condition; but better the evil that is accidental than that which is authorized, cherished, and inevitable. That system is most generous, most Christian, which allows a fair start to all;