own personal knowledge the intense virulence
of hatred existing between the Northerns and
Southerns, and to try and explain the causes of
its existence. I only regret that I have had too
certain proofs of such a hatred existing, and of its
being deep as ever raged between Saxon thane
and Norman knight, Irish chieftain and English
baron, Jacobite Highlander and English soldier.
I think it is not a difference arising from
religious feeling, though no Puritan and Cavalier
could hate each other more cordially, for
America is a country where toleration on such
matters is really practised as well as talked
about, but it arises from reasons of climate, and
more especially from trade jealousies. But I will
first attempt to prove the existence of this hatred,
and the deep root it has taken.

It is a burning day in Washington; the
great marble and stone public buildings in
the wide avenue leading from the White
House to the Capitol, glare; the white dust
of the road dazzles; the sky is molten blue;
everything but the ice in the sherry-cobblers
is melting, or blazing, or blistering. As for
the Potomac river, it seems in a sort of golden
seethe of heat and sunshine, and its fish must,
I am sure, be swimming about half boiled.
Sick to death of the incessant tat-tatting of
the electric telegraph indicator in the reading-room
of the vast hotel, I resolve to go and hear
a debate up in the Capitol: having been promised
a seat in the gallery, whenever I want one, by
my friend Mr. Cassius Quattlebom, of Virginia.

I escape from the white glare of the great
wide avenue of Washington, as I pass the iron
gates and enter the Capitol Gardens, where the
trees cast a pleasant dancing shadow on the
path, and the first yellow leaves blow about the
turf. Some kindly ugly negress nurses, with
fragile American children, are sitting in the shade,
doing nothing, and enjoying the nothing that they
do, as only negresses and children can. I pass up
the gentle ascent, and mount the great steps leading
to the noble building whose enormous iron
dome crowns the height above the city. I enter
the door, pass through the great hall with its
circular tapestry of historical pictures, and, by
various passages and vestibules at last reach the
gallery to which the public are admitted. It seats
more than double the number of "strangers"
which our own inhospitable House of Commons
accommodates. The ladies, I observe, are singularly
pale and flaccid in complexion—partly the
result of this exhausting and blood-draining heat,
partly the result of want of exercise and unwholesome
diet—but are often of an exquisite though
rather fragile beauty—the beauty of the tropical
hot-house flower, rather than of the hardy English
rosebud. I cannot, in justice, say that they are
well dressed, for they seem to me always to
have too much or too little on. There is a good
deal of profuse ill-adapted French finery, and a
good deal of the better sort of English mechanic's
wife dowdiness. They all wear the new
bonnet arched over the forehead, with room
enough for a large nosegay between the head
and the arch. They are all, too, I observe,
rather strong-minded in manner, and seem trying
to express their stern opinion that man is a
weed of creation. They receive all politeness,
I remark, as a right wrung from man: not as
a homage voluntarily yielded.

The men are feverishly energetic and nervously
acute—nearly all nerve, in fact, and very little
muscle. (You scarcely ever see an old man in
American out-door life, yet all the young look
old.) They look anxious, excitable, not very
healthy. They all wear that horrid mechanic-looking
best black suit, exaggerated gold chains,
and wrinkly black satin "vest." The spectators
make a very loud noise when they like a speaker,
and a still louder noise when they don't like
him. That grey-eyed quiet man with the clear
brown skin and grave grey eyes, is a New Englander;
that rather wealthy-looking and self-assertive
man, with the enormous gold hatband,
watch chain and seals, is a Southern planter from
St. Louis. That loquacious parrot-nosed man
in the corner, sentineled between two ladies, is a
French sugar-grower from the further Louisiana.

And what is the debate about? Slavery, of
course. To-day, the weather is tolerably mild. No
honourable gentleman, while he tosses about in
debate, does, as of aforetime, unfortunately drop
a revolver from his pocket, and so very nearly
cause a general fight between the North and
South; no honourable gentleman threatens to
hang Mr. Lovejoy higher than John Brown, if he
dare set his foot in Charleston—as he threatened
three weeks since; no Northern member, either,
vociferating too near the Southern benches, is
warned with brandished sticks—as happened not
many months since; but there is something going
on which is equally ominous, and that is an episodical
discussion on the famous anti-slavery
book, written by Helper, of North Carolina,
called "The Impending Crisis," and which has
circulated by hundreds of thousands. The
Northern members have been trying to get the
House to encourage the circulation of this book,
and the Southern members are therefore wild
with rage.

The book is not a conciliating book, as the Honourable
Epaminondas Twigs has just been reading
extracts to show. It advocates, as the great
means of destroying slavery, "no more patronage
to pro-slavery merchants;" "no more going
to slave-waiting hotels;" "no affiliations in society
with slaveholders;" "no fees to pro-slavery
lawyers;" "no employment of pro-slavery
physicians;" "no audience to pro-slavery parsons;"
"no fellowship in religion with pro-slavery
politicians;" and an "abrupt discontinuance
of subscriptions to pro-slavery newspapers."

The gallery boils over at these threats, and I
really begin to fear a charge will be made on
the Northern benches by the Southern chivalry.
Half a dozen more Southerners are preparing to
follow the speaker now on his legs—and a singular
noise is produced by members clapping
their thighs, in the Eastern way, for the "pageboys,"
who bring them fresh pens and paper.
But I see no whittling of desks, and only a
little surreptitious tobacco-chewing and spitting.