After examining the immense agricultural potential of the western country Trollope travels from Buffalo to New York and turns increasingly from physical travel to broader analysis of American institutions, attempting to explain to British readers why the Civil War has arisen and why the North believes the Union must be preserved, while in New York he studies both the life of the rapidly growing metropolis and the workings of the state constitution before continuing to Boston, Cambridge, and the industrial city of Lowell, where he compares intellectual culture, education, manufacturing, labor, and social organization, and he then devotes substantial attention to the position and rights of women, the strengths and weaknesses of American education, and the character of religious life before traveling south from Boston toward Washington with the continuing war providing the political background against which he judges both the achievements and contradictions of American democracy.
