Page:The Civil War in America - an address read at the last meeting of the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society.djvu/29

Rh less meanness commonly goes with the wealth that has been earned by labour than with that which is inherited and not earned. There is, if I mistake not, many a spirit among the great merchants of America as magnificent as that of any Cosmo or Lorenzo, though the magnificence of the American may not yet be guided by the same taste as that of the Florentine. Nor is wealth the thing, generally speaking, most worshipped by American society. Intellectual distinction is generally most worshipped. No owner of millions would have had the reception given to Mr. Dickens. The worship of intellect may itself be foolish and even wrong, it may be ill-directed, and assume ridiculous and repulsive forms. But it is a different thing from the worship of wealth.

Where wealth is luxury will be. Where wealth is suddenly made by men of little education or refinement luxury will be coarse. No doubt among the wealthy upstarts of New York and other great cities, sensualism, unregulated by taste, does assume its coarsest, most repulsive, and, therefore, perhaps least dangerous form. No doubt the world of mock-fashion in America does justly excite the scorn and disgust of the real world of fashion in Europe. I have seen myself figures which would have moved laughter in an English pantomime. But among the people of the better sort, however wealthy, I found, together with the greatest hospitality, genuine simplicity of life. The very scarcity of servants keeps ostentation, at all events, within bounds; and public opinion is opposed to a display of wealth, partly, it may be, from democratic jealousy, but partly, as I think, from feelings of a better and a more Christian kind.

Again, Americans are said to be wanting in courtesy.