It attacked slavery, the cruelty of the criminal law, which sent children to execution for the theft of a few pennies, the brutality of the prisons, the torpid indifference of the church to the needs of the masses.

New inventions were beginning the age of machinery.
The reform of Parliament, votes for the toiling masses, and a thousand other improvements were being urged.

It was a vigorous, rich, and arrogant England which Washington confronted.
It is sometimes said of Washington that he was an English country gentleman.

A gentleman he was, but with an experience and training quite unlike that of a gentleman in England.

The young heir to an English estate might or might not go to a university.