What I saw on the west coast of South and North America, and at the Hawaiian Islands.: By H. Willis Baxley, M.D.

PUBLIC 3O1RALS.
American residents form a distinct social community, c}ierish ing their peculiar characteristics, promoting each other's happi ness and improvement by the cultivation of literature, accomplishrments, and amusements of a higher civilization; and contrilbuting by their example of good order, industry, alnd peaceful pursuit of the means of happiness, to elevate the native
standard of progress. This happy result of foreign and native
intercourse in Valparaiso none can fail to perceive, who have
mingled with Chilean families of the higher class, among whom
xvill be found examples of rare moral excellence, intelligence,
accomplishment, and refinement, however immoral, vicious, ignorant, and degraded the vulgar masses.
But the enlightened and accomplished few, and the occasional examples of domestic and social virtues, should not be
reg,arded as furnishing the standard of pub7ic intelligence and
morals. It would be equally just to involve partial excellences
in the condemnation of the vices of the many. However painfully national sensitiveness may feel the judgment, yet truth
demands the acknowledgment that publc virtue is neither a
sentiment nor an observance in Valparaiso; an opinion common among travellers, and generally entertained by foreign residents; who recognize in the frequent abandonment of the domestic circle, by old men and young, either a greater love of
v-icious indulgences elsewhere, or a want of attraction at home;
who see in the stern discipline of the mother who miarchles her
daughters in single file before her on the street, watchful of
their every movement and look, a want of confidence in them
and in others, sadly indicative of her unLfavorable opinionof
filial and of public morality; who infer from the refusal to entrust sisters to the care and protection of their own brothers, or
of other near kindred, a deplorable evidence of lost faith and
of profligacy in those best known to them; who perceive in the
separate apartments of a large number of females without visible means of support, reasonable presumption of abandoned
habits; who behold in the atrocious excesses, robberies, and
murders of the soldiery, during revolutionary outbreaks, and
the indulgence by them of licentious and savage passions, proofs
of depravity, originating in an education of infamy, or in
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