Geo; Alfred Townsend
Published: 2015-06-30
Total Pages: 700
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Excerpt from The New World Compared With the Old: A Description of the American Government, Institutions, and Enterprises, and Those of Our Great Rivals at the Present Time, Particularly England and France The publishers of this book, believing that the subject of our foreign relations had become of enough consequence to Americans to warrant a publication of the present dimensions, entrusted the task of its compilation to me on the day General Grant was inaugurated. Between that date and August the whole work has been done, interrupted somewhat by my newspaper correspondence, but assisted by the good offices of Mr. A. R. Spofford and his cheerful associates of the Congressional Library. The work was at times embarrassed by improvements in the institutions of Europe: by a change of front in the French Imperial Government, by the Revolution in Spain, by the unfinished condition of Germany and Italy, by the Disraeli Reform Bill, and by Gladstone's disestablishment of the Irish Church in the United Kingdom. The title of the book might more truly have been "The Old World Compared with the New," as what is described of America is mainly meant to arrest attention and fix the eye upon the successive European institutions; but the book will read either way, and it is not impossible that an Englishman might take it up and compare our civilization with his. The inquiry was so profitable to myself that I felt almost chagrin when I came abruptly to the limit of the volume, and, reading it over now, I remember much that I had intended to tell, sacrificed in the consciousness that one cannot bind the globe into a book. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.