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

[75] of them would be only too thankful. I cannot help suspecting, also, that they would not be sorry to transform their Senate into a House of Lords. There are fortunes amply large enough to support hereditary rule, and men who will not now enter political life upon any consideration would doubtless do their duty as patriotically as our peers, if not compelled to face the dirt of candidature. As to aristocratic ideas being foreign to Americans, I do not believe it for a moment; on the contrary, I believe them to be a highly aristocratic people.

I suppose this may serve as a specimen of the Anglicism which is so exasperating to Mr. Lowell. I do not share it. Mr. Hussey Vivian has a keen eye for the geological and mining facts of America, but as to the political facts of that country, the real tendencies of its life, and its future, he does not seem to me to be at all at the centre of the situation. Far from “not wishing well to democracy,” far from thinking a king and a House of Lords, of our English pattern, a panacea for social ills, I have freely said that our system here, in my opinion, has too, much thrown the middle classes in upon themselves, that the lower classes likewise are thus too much thrown in upon themselves, and that we suffer from the want of equality. Nothing would please me better than to find the difficulty solved in America, to find democracy a success there, with a type of equality