Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

Besides, there are considerations which diminish its difficulty. When one has confessed the belief that the social system of one's own country is so far from being perfect that it presents us with the spectacle of an upper class materialized, a middle class vulgarized, a lower class brutalized, one has earned the right, perhaps, to speak with candor of the social systems of other countries. Mr. Lowell complains that we English make our narrow Anglicism, as he calls it, the standard of all things; but “we are worth nothing,” says Mr. Lowell of himself and his countrymen, “we are worth nothing except so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism.” Mr. Hussey Vivian, the member for Glamorganshire, goes to travel in America, and when he comes back, delighted with the country and the people, he publishes his opinion that just two things are wanting to their happiness,--a sovereign of the British type, and a House of Lords:--

If Americans could only get over the first wrench, and elect a king of the old stock, under the same limited constitutional conditions as our sovereigns, and weld their separate states into one compact and solid nation, many