Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/21

Rh indigence into treating destitution as half a crime. The houses seem those of one vast middle class. Nowhere do you see palaces; and, generally speaking, the eye of the European visitor looks around in vain for the hovels of the poor. The quarters of the Irish and German emigrants in the great seaboard cities (especially those of the Irish, who linger in their helplessness where they land) were the only haunts of misery and squalor that met my eye. I saw nothing so bad as the low quarters of Liverpool or of London in the cities; nothing approaching to the cabins of the English, much less to those of the Irish peasantry in the country. This is partly due to the bounty of nature in a rich and virgin land, which helps to solve so many difficulties in America, as, in justice to European legislators, we must always bear in mind. But it is also partly the effect of just laws. In the transit to the new world primogeniture and entail were left behind.

In England, the place of the old English yeoman knows him no more. In his stead the great proprietor reigns. But in the prairies of Illinois is a tract of deep rich soil, stretching for hundreds of miles each way in one vast plain, with only slight swells of undulation and without a stone for the plough to strike against—an ocean of cornland, monotonous to the eye, yet redeemed from dreariness by its glorious fruitfulness, which seems to bid all that hunger in the earth come there and be fed. Through the midst of it runs the railway, bringing down for the first time all the implements and resources of scientific agriculture into the virgin wilderness, and, like the Nile in its course through Egypt, turning everything round it into fertility and wealth. From the handling of those harvests stately cities have risen where forty years ago the Indian