In both countries, when any class holds power and wealth
by institutions which in the long run bring misery on lower classes,
they are very unwilling still to part with that wealth and power. They
are unwilling to be convinced that it is their duty, and unwilling to
do it if they are. It is always so everywhere; it is not English
nature or American nature, but human nature. We have seen in England
the battle for popular rights fought step by step with as determined a
resistance from parties in possession as the slaveholder offers in
America.
There was the same kind of resistance in certain quarters there to the
laws restricting the employing of young children eighteen hours a day
in factories, as there is here to the anti-slavery effort.
Again, in England as in America, there are, in those very classes
whose interests are most invaded by what are called popular rights,
some of the most determined supporters of them, and here I think that
the balance preponderates in favor of England. I think there are more
of the high nobility of England who are friends of the common people
and willing to help the cause of human progress, irrespective of its
influence on their own interests, than there are those of a similar
class among slaveholding aristocracy, though even that class is not
without such men. But I am far from having any of that senseless
prejudice against the English nation as a nation which, greatly to my
regret, I observe sometimes in America.
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