which heavily reinforced the anti-British attitude of the City of New York, and largely changed its character. Did books dilating upon the expanding power of America reflect British public opinion, or did they create it? It is difficult to estimate such matters. Certainly it is not uninteresting that these books coincided in point of time with a British governmental attitude of opposition, though on peaceful lines, to the development of American power, and to the adoption to the point of faith, by British commercial classes, of free trade as opposed to the American protective system. But governing classes were not the British public, and to the great unenfranchised mass, finding voice through the writings of a few leaders, the prosperity of America made a powerful appeal. Radical democracy was again beginning to make its plea in Britain. In 1849 there was published a study of the United States, more careful and exact than any previous to Bryce's great work, and lauding American political institutions. This was Mackay's "Western World," and that there was a public eager for such estimate is evidenced by the fact that the book went through four British editions in 1850[24]. At the end of the decade, then, there appeared once more a vigorous champion of the cause of British democracy, comparing the results of "government by the wise" with alleged mob rule. Mackay wrote: "Society in America started from the point to which society in Europe is only yet finding. The equality of men is, to this moment, its corner-stone ... that which develops itself as the sympathy of class, becomes in America the general sentiment of society.... We present an imposing front to the world; but let us tear the picture and look at the canvas. One out of every seven of us is a pauper. Every six Englishmen have, in addition to their other enormous burdens, to support a seventh between them, whose life is spent in consuming, but in adding nothing to the source of their common subsistence." British governing classes then, forgoing after 1850 opposition to the advance of American power, found themselves involved again, as before 1832, in the problem of the possible influence of a prosperous American democracy upon an unenfranchised public opinion at home. Also, for all Englishmen, of whatever class, in spite of rivalry in power, of opposing theories of trade, of divergent political institutions, there existed a vague, though influential, pride in the advance of a people of similar race, sprung from British loins[25]. And there remained for all Englishmen also one puzzling and discreditable American institution, slavery--held up to scorn by the critics of the United States, difficult of excuse among her friends. Agitation conducted by the great philanthropist, Wilberforce, had early committed British Government and people to a crusade against the African slave trade. This British policy was clearly announced to the world in the negotiations at Vienna in 1814-15. But Britain herself still