The old world watches the transmuter closely, regarding his methods, perhaps, too distrustfully, and criticizing his results too harshly, but, nevertheless, profoundly convinced that the most important problem of the modern world is being worked out under its eyes in the evolution of the American people. Shall we take a glance, reader, at the alchemist's home and labours? LONDON, May, 1884. OLD-WORLD QUESTIONS AND NEW-WORLD ANSWERS. CHAPTER I. AMERICANS AND AMERICANS. THE average American tourist of to-day spends, usually, a few weeks in cosmopolitan New York, pays flying visits to the Falls of Niagara, the political capital, and the greater cities of the Union, but thinks his trip only beginning when, turning his back on the Atlantic slope, he joins the ranks of the great army of civilization which is always on the march to the Far West. His chief halts are made, probably, at Chicago, St. Louis, the City of the Saints, the mining-camps of the Rocky Mountains, and the cattle-ranches of their western flanks; on the peaks and passes, or by the blue lakes of the Sierra Nevada; in the cities of her silver kings, or among the wheat-fields of Central California and the orchards and vineyards of the Pacific slope. At length, he reaches the city where the old and the new worlds meet, and, through the portals of the Golden 52 R Gate, sees the sun set beneath the misty western horizon. Then he turns, to recross, in a single flight of seven days' duration, three thousand miles of mountain, desert, river, prairie, cultivation and forest. During all that time he passes rude camps, remote homesteads, farming villages, mushroom towns and settled cities, the homes of miners, ranchmen, pig and grain growers, lumberers, husbandmen and citizens. Finally, he steps on board ship to return, in the full belief that he has seen America. And, geographically speaking, this is true; but, be he never so observant a man, such a trip can teach him next to nothing about the American people, properly so called. He has, indeed, become acquainted with a heterogeneous population of English, Irish, German, Scandinavian and Italian birth, to say nothing of Negroes and Chinese, whom we collectively call Americans, although they are only one people in a political sense, being as distinct from each other, and from Americans proper, as if they or their parents had never left their native homes. A time. is coming, though this is still many generations distant, when these various races will become blended into one, and the title of " American" gather a significance not, as yet, existing or even conceivable. Meanwhile, it is scarcely trifling with the average English reader to inquire whom we may properly call Americans and where they are to be found. The act of Elizabeth which, three centuries ago, |