land with a selection of species:  the active and the adventurous, the malcontent and the malefactor, readily expatriate themselves, while the pauvre diable remains at home.  The potato-famine in Ireland (1848) gave an overwhelming impetus to the exode of a race which had never known a racial baptism; and, lastly, the Germans flying from the conscription, the blood tax of the Fatherland, carried with them over the ocean a transcendentalism which has engendered the wildest theories of socialism and communism.  And the emigration process still continues.  Whole regions, like the rugged Bocche di Cattaro in Dalmatia and pauper Iceland, are becoming depopulated to me the wonder is that a poor man ever consents to live out of America or a rich man to live.

The result of such selection has been two-fold.  The first appears in a splendid self- esteem, a complacency, a confidence which passes all bounds of the golden mean.  “I am engrossed in calmly contemplating the grandeur of my native country and her miraculous growth,” writes to me an old literary friend.  The feeling normally breaks out in the grossest laudation of everything American.  The ultra-provincial twang which we still hear amongst the servant-classes of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and which is so notable in the nouveau riche, modified by traditional nasalisation and, as in Australia, by climatic influences, is American and, therefore, the purest of English utterances.  The obsolete vocabulary often obsolete in England without just reason—­contrasting with a modern disfigured etymology which strips vocables of their genealogy and history, is American and ergo admirably progressive.  The spurious facetiousness which deals mainly in mere jargon words ill-spelt and worse pronounced; in bizarre contrast of ideas, and in ultra-Rabelaisian exaggeration, is American wit and humour—­therefore unsurpassable.  The Newspaper Press, that great reflector of nationalities, that prime expression of popular taste, too often of an ecoeurant vulgarity, personal beyond all bounds of common decency, sensational as a transpontine drama, is American; America is the greatest nation upon earth’s face, ergo the daily sheet is setting-up the standard of English speech and forming the language of the Future, good and too good for all the world.  This low standard of the Press is the more regretable as its exalted duty is at present to solve the highest problems social and industrial, such as co-operation in labour, the development of fisheries, direct taxation versus indirect and a host of enigmas which the young world, uncumbered by the burdens of the Old World, alone shall unravel.