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AMONG THE AMERICANS

AND

A STRANGER IN AMERICA.

_______________

BY GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE.
_______________


 

                      "He ties up hands
                        Who locks up lands:
The lands which can't be sold and bought
Bring men and States to worse than nought:
The lands which cab be freely sold
Are worth a world of barren gold."

  —EBENEZER ELLIOTT.

___________

 



BELFORD CLARKE & CO.,
CHICAGO.


1881.

______________________________

 

 

PREFACE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.


The portion of these pages entitled "Among the Americans," was written for the Manchester "Co-operative News."  Messrs. Belford, Clarke & Co. do me the honor to reprint these papers here, together with the article contributed to the "Nineteenth Century," entitled, "A Stranger in America," and they have generously and voluntarily agreed to give me a fair share of the profits that may accrue therefrom.  As they are pleased to think the papers will interest the American people, among whom I spent happy months, I should feel indebted to them did no advantage come to me thereby.  I will not conceal that their honorable offer does not decrease my satisfaction; and I have to acknowledge that the "New York Tribune" and the "Index," of Boston, which has published passages from these Chapters, have treated me in the same handsome manner.

    John Bull, in his solid, bovine way, does make steady progress after his kind.  But his dietary, consisting of precedents, is not very stimulating, and he takes a long time chewing the cud of progress.  Like the oxen of Cuyp, he stands meditating over the hedge of his verdant little island, looking as though he was going to think: but he is so long about it that the spectator never feels sure that he does it.

    If anybody in England proposes to do a new thing, everybody exclaims, like Lord Melbourne, "Can you not let if alone? If you do it everybody will do it."  But everybody does not do it.  England is a country where nothing leads to anything, and anything leads to nothing.

    Three centuries ago the Reformation broke out, when it was predicted that everybody would come to have ideas of his own.  A few new creeds flew into the air and alighted upon ledges in the old rocks of opinion, where they have nestled in inadventurous content, and the groves of thought have seldom since been enlivened by new brightness of plumage or cheered by varieties of song.  The republican equality and the republican freedom of America, with their infinite incentives and fertility of aspirations, were to me as a land of new color and new notes, where the minds of the people, like keyless watches, wind themselves up and always keep going.  I should have been glad to live there for years, so as to write about it; as it is, I content myself with relating a few of the things which I noticed.

    It is not intended that these papers, now collected into a book form, should be regarded as a "book upon America."  That would be a very absurd pretension.  These pages are the story of nearly four months travel, and if I had been in America four years I should not think myself competent to write a "book about America."  Only an ex-President could write that in a complete way.  When I returned home my friends naturally asked me what I thought of a country I had never seen before.  What I have written is what I told them.  It is a mere fireside story of what interested me.

G. J. H.

NEWCASTLE CHAMBERS,
    Essex St., Temple Bar.
London, April, 1881.

______________________

 


CONTENTS.
_________


CHAPTER I.

Sea Ways and Sea Society

CHAPTER II.

Courtesies of New York

CHAPTER III.

The Republican Convention at Saratoga

CHAPTER IV.

Propagandist Uses of Interviewing

CHAPTER V.

Men of Action in Boston

CHAPTER VI.

City of Holyoke—Discourses in Free Churches

CHAPTER VII.

Wanderings in Five Great Cities

CHAPTER VIII.

American Orators—Wendell Phillips, Col. R. G. Ingersoll, and George W. Curtis

CHAPTER IX.

 Famous Preachers—Henry Ward Beecher, Robert Collyer, and Prof. Felix Adler

CHAPTER X.

Co-operation in the New World

CHAPTER XI.

State Socialism in America

CHAPTER XII.

Co-operative Emigration—Visits to the Premier of Canada and President of America.

CHAPTER XIII.

Wayside Incidents

CHAPTER XIV.

Manners and Opinions in America

CHAPTER XV.

Emigrant Education

_______________

'A Stranger in America,'
from the "Nineteenth Century."

 


 

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