The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Letters from England by Elizabeth Davis Bancroft: liveried servants. The forms of society and the standard of dress,
too, are very like ours, except that a duchess or a countess has
more hereditary point lace and diamonds. The general style of
dress, perhaps, is not so tasteful, so simply elegant as ours. Upon
the whole I think more highly of our own country (I mean from a
social point of view alone) than before I came abroad. There is
less superiority over us in manners and all the social arts than I
could have believed possible in a country where a large and wealthy
class have been set apart from time immemorial to create, as it
were, a social standard of high refinement. The chief difference
that I perceive is this: In our country the position of everybody
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