How it Strikes a Stranger.

Evening Post, Issue 111, 17 June 1865, Page 2

How it Strikes a Stranger.

—The KeY F. G. Clark has been giving a lecture before a fashionable audience in New York, stating what he thought of London and Paris in a recent visit. The characteristics of the English, he said, were reserve and formality to the stranger : but once across the threshold of their dingy-looking houses and fairly introduced, and you find yourself in the lap of domestic bliss. An American gentleman is always treated with politeness, and, when he mentions his nationality, he can find a good seat even in Spurgeon's crowded place of worship, where scores of Englishmen have to stand. As an illustration of the general sentiment of the English mind regarding American affairs, he said that a merchant prince might sfty to you, on being introduced, " Glad to see you ; rather gloomy times with you in America just now. Things are looking badly. What do you think of the war ? Do you think you can ever subdue the Confederate States ? Better let them go. That is what England would do if Ireland or Scotland should ever want to live apart. Let the South go, and you will be strong enough." These rich, good natured, and ruddy English gentlemen grow radiant when speaking of our misfortunes. They don't know how cheerfully they acquiesce in that Providence which threatened to divide our republic. The Englishman hates slavery in the United States but slavery in the Confederate States is another thing, and he has nothing to say about it. The speaker deplored the growing sentiment of hatred to England. We were too closely united in sympathy to think of war. If it should come to pass, it would be the most monstrous disaster of the nineteenth century, and stop the world's progress. The stern logic of events and the eloquence of such men as John Bright would save England from dangers she does not now anticipate Paris the lecturer described the most beautiful, the gayest, the most frivolous, and the most, openly sinful capital in Europe. By the stranger sin was to be found on every side garnished with beauty and yet deep in its bosom was the cancer of licentiousness. The speaker thought that the better qualities of the French and English might be united successfully in the American citizen, and that the quality of cheerfulness might give place to that deep care in which the American mind is struggling. Punishment by death has been abolished in Wurtemburg and in the Grand Duchy of JSaxe-Weimar.