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

[99] and power of these middle-class misgrowths there as here. We have not succeeded in counteracting them here, and while our statesmen and leaders proceed as they do now, and Lord Frederick Cavendish congratulates the middle class on its energy and self-reliance in doing without public schools, and Lord Salisbury summons the middle class to a great and final stand on behalf of supernaturalism, we never shall succeed in counteracting them. We are told, however, of groups of children of light in every town of America, and an elegant social order prevailing there, which make one, at first, very envious. But soon one begins to think, I say, that surely there must be some mistake. The complaints one hears of the state of public life in America, of the increasing impossibility and intolerableness of it to self-respecting men, of the “corruption and feebleness,” of the blatant violence and exaggeration of language, the profligacy of clap-trap — the complaints we hear from America of all this, and then such an exhibition as we had in the Guiteau trial the other day, lead one to think that Murdstone and Quinion, those misgrowths of the English middle-class spirit, must be even more rampant in the United States than they are here. Mr. Lowell himself writes, in that very same essay