of American braggadocio with which his sores are kept open.  But though I was badly off on that railway platform, worse off than I should have been in England, all that crowd of porters round me were better off than our English porters.  They had a “good time” of it.  And this, O my English brother who has traveled through the States and returned disgusted, is the fact throughout.  Those men whose familiarity was so disgusting to you are having a good time of it.  “They might be a little more civil,” you say, “and yet read and write just as well.”  True; but they are arguing in their minds that civility to you will be taken by you for subservience, or for an acknowledgment of superiority; and looking at your habits of life—­yours and mine together—­I am not quite sure that they are altogether wrong.  Have you ever realized to yourself as a fact that the porter who carries your box has not made himself inferior to you by the very act of carrying that box?  If not, that is the very lesson which the man wishes to teach you.

If a man can forget his own miseries in his journeyings, and think of the people he comes to see rather than of himself, I think he will find himself driven to admit that education has made life for the million in the Northern States better than life for the million is with us.  They have begun at the beginning, and have so managed that every one may learn to read and write—­have so managed that almost every one does learn to read and write.  With us this cannot now be done.  Population had come upon us in masses too thick for management, before we had as yet acknowledged that it would be a good thing that these masses should be educated.  Prejudices, too, had sprung up, and habits, and strong sectional feelings, all antagonistic to a great national system of education.  We are, I suppose, now doing all that we can do; but comparatively it is little.  I think I saw some time since that the cost for gratuitous education, or education in part gratuitous, which had fallen upon the nation had already amounted to the sum of 800,000l.; and I think also that I read in the document which revealed to me this fact a very strong opinion that government could not at present go much further.  But if this matter were regarded in England as it is regarded in Massachusetts, or rather, had it from some prosperous beginning been put upon a similar footing, 800,000l. would not have been esteemed a great expenditure for free education simply in the City of London.  In 1857 the public schools of Boston cost 70,000l., and these schools were devoted to a population of about 180,000 souls.  Taking the population of London at two and a half millions, the whole sum now devoted to England would, if expended in the metropolis, make education there even cheaper than it is in Boston.  In Boston, during 1857, there were above 24,000 pupils at these public schools, giving more than one-eighth of the whole population.  But I fear it would not be