American Electioneering
streets poured into it, and followed in the line. Proceeding down Broadway and round the City Park, the procession returned along the parallel thoroughfare, called the Bowery, and the van had reached a point opposite to where we stood before the rear had left us. The effect of such a multitude of lights passing through the crowded streets was very fine."
The English observer, accustomed to election demonstrations on a lesser plan and in a milder tone, described with gusto how the public prints flowed over with panegyrics of their own candidates and violent diatribes against the opposite side, the "stumping" feats of public orators, the war of rival colours in the streets, the illuminated transparencies at the club-houses, the bonfires and the fireworks, and all the paraphernalia of a hot contest. Both parties expended "so much powder, fuss, and firing that the whole country became worked up into a fine pitch of excitement." Abraham Lincoln, however, Cassell observed, held aloof from it all.
Cassell's curiosity extended to every subject of popular interest or public controversy. He resumed his investigations into the slavery question; he touched the fringe of the "Woman's Rights" movement, then quite active in the States, but was not attracted to it; he became enthusiastic both for the American system of State education and for the public spirit of the individual citizens who endowed educational causes so generously. He met Peter Cooper, the founder of the Cooper Institution for "the instruction and improvement of the inhabitants of the United States in practical science and art," and expressed unstinted admiration of such work.
But his largest encomiums were reserved for the public school system; it was an honour to America that "every child is educated at the expense of the State" and that "to the children of America, knowledge is as free as the air they breathe." To all reforming Englishmen of sixty years ago the ideal of free and universal education, not realized in England for another forty years, was very
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