If the poor duchess and her lady allies had been fiends, there could scarcely have been more indignation at her "presumptuous interference" and "mock humility." Her "sisters, indeed! as if she would not be too proud to stretch out her hand to any one of them," &c.

Then another would break out with, "I should like to know by what right she presumes to interfere with us and offer advice?
If she wants to do good, she has opportunities enough of exercising her charity in London.

Let any one read _The Times_, and then visit a plantation here, and say whether the negroes are not happier and better off than one-half of the lower classes in England," &c.

If every animadversion which the duchess and her colleagues' kind intentions and inoffensive wording of them called forth in America had been a pebble, and if they had all been gathered together, the monument of old Cheops at Ghizeh would have sunk into insignificance when contrasted with the gigantic mass; in short, no one unacquainted with the sensitiveness of the American character can form a conception of the violent state of indignation which followed the perusal of the proceedings of that small conclave of English lady philanthropists.

Mrs.Jones, Smith, Adams, and Brown might have had their meeting on the same subject without producing much excitement; but when the aristocratic element was introduced, it acted as a spark in a barrel of gunpowder.