The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

558

THE STORY OF MY LIFE.

seat throughout that island garden. The fierce heat of our
summers, and the rigor of our long winters forbid such perennial verdure. There are no waste places in England, such
as we have in America, no long stretches of wild forest,
hacked and hewed in recklessness, and then burned over
from sheer prodigality,- no hillsides gashed with deep fissures,- nor is the earth upheaved in mighty billows, as if
Titans were disemboweling it, every few miles of one's
progress through the beautiful country. The small territory of England is in the hands of a comparatively few gentlemen, who keep it neat and orderly, and give to it care
and culture.
One cannot avoid observing the evil effects of the unequal distribution of wealth, that prevails in England. She
has not suffered from a war of invasion for eight hundred
years, and has not had a civil war for two centuries. Her
acquired wealth is immense, and this, added to her increased
power of producing and amassing, has made her the richest
nation of the world, until within a few years, when our
country has outstripped her in the race for wealth. The
real estate of England, by right of primogeniture, descends
to the eldest son, and the rest of the children must shirk
for themselves, so that in the course of years, the landed
estates of England have passed into the possession of a relatively small number. This, with other unfair advantages in
favor of the wealthy, has really locked up the enormous
property of the "mother country" in the hands of a few,
rendering the poor, poorer, year by year, and constantly
increasing their number. One sees such poverty in England, and in London especially, as makes the poverty of
America almost competence. While the excessive drinking
of the English people, surpassing what we see in our own
country, almost minimizes the inebriety of America into