Page:The Story of the House of Cassell (book).djvu/78

 dear; to Cassell, with his bitter memories of boyhood, it was a passion. He constantly inveighed against the sloth that delayed public action on this question; he constantly used our lamentable education statistics in his campaign for free paper and in his advocacy of private educational enterprise.

Among the American institutions Cassell did not like was the pirate publisher. At Washington, he endeavoured to put in an argumentative word or two for international copyright. He found that what international copyright wanted at Washington was not argument, but cash. When he pointed out to the politicians the justice and expediency of international copyright, they cut him off short: "If you English publishers will only subscribe a sum of so-and-so to work the lobby," he was told, "the measure could be carried. You know that there are certain houses here which are deeply interested in the reproduction of English books: what are a few thousand dollars to them, expended to defeat any attempt to interfere with a system by which they have become millionaires?"

When at last Cassell turned his face homeward, his mind full of new and sharp impressions and startling contrasts, with an overwhelming sense of the mighty potentialities of the American nation, he felt that one of his first duties was to warn his countrymen against the danger of passing judgment on communities they did not know, and the almost equally pernicious practice of criticizing a country on slight acquaintance.

"Had our observations of American manners and customs," he wrote, "extended no farther than New York, how erroneous would have been our views! . . . Although we saw much in that country which jarred with our English prejudices, yet upon the whole we left its shores filled with wonder and admiration. The surprisingly rapid progress of the North and North-West, the appearance of well-doing on every hand, and the moral and intellectual advancement of the people, keeping pace