William Archer America To-day, Observations and Reflections 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 1 
 R.M.S. _Lucania_. 
   
 The Atlantic Ocean is geographically a misnomer, socially and 
 politically a dwindling superstition. That is the chief lesson one 
 learns--and one has barely time to take it in--between Queenstown and 
 Sandy Hook. Ocean forsooth! this little belt of blue water that we cross 
 before we know where we are, at a single hop-skip-and-jump! From north 
 to south, perhaps, it may still count as an ocean; from east to west we 
 have narrowed it into a strait. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 2 
   
 Why, even for the seasick (and on this 
 point I speak with melancholy authority) the Atlantic has not half the 
 terrors of the Straits of Dover; comfort at sea being a question, not of 
 the size of the waves, but of the proportion between the size of the 
 waves and the size of the ship. Our imagination is still beguiled by the 
 fuss the world made over Columbus, whose exploit was intellectually and 
 morally rather than physically great. The map-makers, too, throw dust 
 in our eyes by their absurd figment of two "hemispheres," as though 
 Nature had sliced her orange in two, and held one half in either hand. 
 We are slow to realise, in fact, that time is the only true measure of 
 space, and that London to-day is nearer to New York than it was to 
 Edinburgh a hundred and fifty years ago. The essential facts of the 
 case, as they at present stand, would come home much more closely to the 
 popular mind of both continents if we called this strip of sea the 
 Straits of New York, and classed our liners, not as the successors of 
 Columbus's caravels, but simply as what they are: giant ferry-boats 
 plying with clockwork punctuality between the twin landing-stages of the 
 English-speaking world. 
   
 To-morrow we shall be in New York harbour; it seems but yesterday that 
 we slipped out of the Cove of Cork. As I look at the chart on the 
 companion staircase, where our daily runs are marked off, I feel the 
 abject poverty of our verbs of speed. We have not rushed, or dashed, or 
 hurtled along--these words do grave injustice to the majesty of our 
 progress. I can think of nothing but the strides of some Titan, so vast 
 as to beggar even the myth-making imagination. It is not seven-league, 
 no, nor hundred-league boots that we wear--we do our 520, 509, 518, 530 
 knots at a stride.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 3 
   
 . Nor is it to be imagined that we are anywhere near 
 the limit of speed. Already the _Lucania's_ record is threatened by the 
 _Oceanic_; and the _Oceanic_, if she fulfils her promises, will only 
 spur on some still swifter Titan to the emprise.[A] Then, again, it is 
 hard to believe that the difficulties are insuperable which as yet 
 prevent us from utilising, as a point of arrival and departure, that 
 almost mid-Atlantic outpost of the younger world, Newfoundland--or at 
 the least Nova Scotia. By this means the actual waterway between the two 
 continents will be shortened by something like a third. What with the 
 acceleration of the ferry-boats and the narrowing of the ferry, it is 
 surely no visionary Jules-Vernism to look forward to the time when one 
 may set foot on American soil, within, say, sixty-five hours of leaving 
 the Liverpool landing-stage; supposing, that is to say, that steam 
 navigation be not in the meantime superseded. 
   
 As yet, to be sure, the Atlantic possesses a certain strategic 
 importance as a coal-consuming force. To contract its time-width we have 
 to expand our coal-bunkers; and the ship which has crossed it in six 
 days, be she ferryboat or cruiser, is apt to arrive, as it were, a 
 little out of breath. But even this drawback can scarcely be permanent. 
 Science must presently achieve the storage of motive-power in some less 
 bulky form than that of crude coal. Then the Atlantic will be as 
 extinct, politically, as the Great Wall of China; or, rather, it will 
 retain for America the abiding significance which the "silver streak" 
 possesses for England--an effectual bulwark against aggression, but a 
 highway to influence and world-moulding power. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 4 
 Think of the time when the _Lucania_ shall have fallen behind in the 
 race, and shall be plying to Boston or Philadelphia, while larger and 
 swifter hotel-ships shall put forth almost daily from Liverpool, 
 Southampton, and New York! Think of the growth of intercourse which even 
 the next ten years will probably bring, and the increase of mutual 
 comprehension involved in it! Is it an illusion of mine, or do we not 
 already observe in England, during the past year, a new interest and 
 pride in our trans-Atlantic service, which now ranks close to the Navy 
 in the popular affections? It dates, I think, from those first days of 
 the late war, when the _Paris_ was vainly supposed to be in danger of 
 capture by Spanish cruisers, and when all England was wishing her 
 god-speed. 
   
 For my own taste, this sumptuous hotel-ship is rather too much of a 
 hotel and too little of a ship. I resent the absolute exclusion of the 
 passengers from even the most distant view of the propelling and guiding 
 forces. Practically, the _Lucania_ is a ship without a deck; and the 
 deck is to the ship what the face is to the human being. The so-called 
 promenade-deck is simply a long roofed balcony on either side of the 
 hotel building. It is roofed by the "shade deck," which is rigidly 
 reserved "for navigators only." There the true life of the ship goes on, 
 and we are vouchsafed no glimpse of it. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 5 
   
 One is reminded of the 
 Chinaman's description of a three-masted screw steamer with two funnels: 
 "Thlee piecee bamboo, two piecee puff-puff, walk-along inside, no can 
 see." Here the "walk-along," the motive power, is "inside" with a 
 vengeance. I have not at this moment the remotest conception where the 
 engine-room is, or where lies the descent to that Avernus. Not even the 
 communicator-gong can be heard in the hotel. I have not set eyes on an 
 engineer or a stoker, scarcely on a sailor. The captain I do not even 
 know by sight. Occasionally an officer flits past, on his way up to or 
 down from the "shade deck"; I regard him with awe, and guess reverently 
 at his rank. The ship's company, as I know it, consists of the purser, 
 the doctor, and the army of stewards and stewardesses. The roof of the 
 promenade-deck weighs upon my brain. It shuts off the better half of the 
 sky, the zenith. In order even to see the masts and funnels of the ship 
 one has to go far forward or far aft and crane one's neck upward. Not a 
 single human being have I ever descried on the "shade-deck" or on the 
 towering bridge. The genii of the hundred-league boots remain not only 
 inaccessible but invisible. The effect is inhuman, uncanny. All the 
 luxury of the saloons and staterooms does not compensate for the lack of 
 a frank, straightforward deck. The _Lucania_, in my eyes, has no 
 individuality as a ship. It--I instinctively say "it," not "she"--is 
 merely a rather low-roofed hotel, with sea-sickness superadded to all 
 the comforts of home. But a first-class hotel it is: the living good 
 and plentiful, if not superfine, the service excellent, and the charges, 
 all things considered, remarkably moderate. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 6 
   
 What chiefly strikes one about the passengers is their homogeneity of 
 race. Apart from a small (but influential) Semitic contingent, the whole 
 body is thoroughly Anglo-Saxon in type. About half are British, I take 
 it, and half American; but in most cases the nationality is to be 
 distinguished only by accent, not by any characteristic of appearance or 
 of demeanour. The strongly-marked Semites always excepted, there is not 
 a man or woman among the saloon passengers who strikes me as a 
 foreigner, a person of alien race. I do not feel my sympathies chill 
 toward my very agreeable table-companion because he drinks ice-water at 
 breakfast; and he views my tea with an eye of equal tolerance. It is not 
 till one looks at the second-class passengers that one sees signs of the 
 heterogeneity of the American people; and then one remembers with 
 misgivings the emigrants who crowded on board at Queenstown, with their 
 household goods done up in bundles and gaping, ill-roped boxes. The 
 thought of them recalls an anecdote which was new to me the other day, 
 and may be fresh to some of my readers. In any case it will bear 
 repetition. An Irishman coming to America for the first time, found New 
 York gay with bunting as he sailed up the harbour. He asked an American 
 fellow-passenger the reason of the display, and was told it was in 
 honour of Evacuation Day. "And what's that?" he inquired. "Why, the day 
 the British troops evacuated New York." Presently an Englishman came up 
 to the Irishman and asked him if he knew what the flags were for. "For 
 Evacuation Day, to be sure!" was the reply. "What is Evacuation Day?" 
 asked the Sassenach. "The day we drove you blackguards out of the 
 country, bedad!" was the immediate reply. If not literally true, the 
 story is at least profoundly typical. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER I Pg 7 
   
 There is a light on our starboard bow: my first glimpse, for two and 
 twenty years, of America. It has been literally the dream of my life to 
 revisit the United States. Not once, but fifty times, have I dreamed 
 that the ocean (which loomed absurdly large even in my waking thoughts) 
 was comfortably crossed, and I was landing in New York. I can clearly 
 recall at this moment some of the fantastic shapes the city put on in 
 my dreams--utterly different, of course, from my actual recollections of 
  Well, that dream is now realised; the gates of the Western world are 
 
 opening to me. What experience awaits me I know not; but this I do know, 
 that the emotion with which I confront it is not one of idle curiosity, 
 or even of calmly sympathetic interest. It is not primarily to my 
 intelligence, but to my imagination, that the word "America" appeals. To 
 many people that word conveys none but prosaic associations; to me it is 
 electric with romance. Only one other word in existence can give me a 
 comparable thrill; the word one sees graven on a roadside pillar as one 
 walks down the southern slope of an Alpine pass: ITALIA. But that word 
 carries the imagination backward only, whereas AMERICA stands for the 
 meeting-place of the past and the future. What the land of Cooper and 
 Mayne Reid was to my boyish fancy, the land of Washington and Lincoln, 
 Hawthorne and Emerson, is to my adult thoughts. Does this mean that I 
 approach America in the temper of a romantic schoolboy? Perhaps; but, 
 bias for bias, I would rather own to that of the romantic schoolboy than 
 to that of the cynical Old-Worldling. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 8 
 [Footnote A: The _Oceanic_, it appears, is designed to break the record 
 in punctuality, not in speed. Nevertheless there are several indications 
 that our engineers are not resting on their oars, but will presently put 
 on another spurt. The very shortest Atlantic passage, I understand, has 
 been made by a German ship. Surely England and America cannot long be 
 content to leave the record for speed, of all things, in the hands of 
 Germany.] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 9 
   
 NEW YORK. 
   
 By way of making us feel quite at home, New-York receives us with a dank 
 Scotch mist. On the shores of Staten Island the leafless trees stand out 
 grey and gaunt against the whity-grey snow, a legacy, no doubt, from the 
 great blizzard.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 10 
   
 Though I keep a sharp look-out, I can descry no Liberty 
 Enlightening the World. Liberty (_absit omen!_) is wrapped away in grimy 
 cotton-wool. There, however, are the "sky-scraper" buildings, looming 
 out through the mist, like the Jotuns in Niflheim of Scandinavian 
 mythology. They are grandiose, certainly, and not, to my thinking, ugly. 
 That word has no application in this context. "Pretty" and "ugly"--why 
 should we for ever carry about these aesthetic labels in our pockets, and 
 insist on dabbing them down on everything that comes in our way? If we 
 cannot get, with Nietzsche, _Jenseits von Gut und Boese_, we might at 
 least allow our souls an occasional breathing-space in a region "Back of 
 the Beautiful and the Ugly," as they say in President's English. While I 
 am trying to formulate my feelings with regard to this deputation of 
 giants which the giant Republic sends down to the waterside to welcome 
 us, behold, we have crept up abreast of the Cunard wharf, and there 
 stands a little crowd of human welcomers, waving handkerchiefs and 
 American flags. An energetic tug-boat butts her head gallantly into the 
 flank of the huge liner, in order to help her round. She glides up to 
 her berth, the gangway is run out, and at last I set foot upon 
 American--lumber. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 11 
   
 What are my emotions? I have only one; single, simple, easily-expressed: 
 dread of the United States Custom House. Its terrors and its tyrannies 
 have been depicted in such lurid colours on the other side that I am 
 almost surprised to observe no manifest ogres in uniform caps, but only, 
 it would seem, ordinary human beings. And, on closer acquaintanceship, 
 they prove to be civil and even helpful human beings, with none of the 
 lazy superciliousness which so often characterises the European 
 toll-taker. At first the scene is chaotic enough, but, by aid of an 
 arrangement in alphabetical groups, cosmos soon emerges. The system by 
 which you declare your dutiable goods and are assigned an examiner, and 
 if necessary an appraiser, is admirably simple and free from red-tape. I 
 shall not describe it, for it would be more tedious in description than 
 in act. Enough that the whole thing is conducted, so far as I could see, 
 promptly, efficiently, and with perfect good temper. One brief 
 discussion I heard, between an official and an American citizen, who was 
 heavily assessed on some article or articles which he declared to have 
 been manufactured in America and taken out of the country by himself 
 only a few months before. The official insisted that there was no proof 
 of this; but just as the discussion threatened to become an altercation 
 (a "scrap" they would call it here) some one found a way out. The goods 
 were forwarded in bond to the traveller's place of residence (Hartford, 
 I think) where he declared that he could produce proof of their American 
 origin. For myself, I had to pay two dollars and a half on some 
 magic-lantern slides. I could have imported the lantern, had I owned 
 one, free of charge, as a philosophical instrument used in my 
 profession; but the courts have held, it appears, that though the 
 lantern comes under that rubric, the slides do not. I cannot pretend to 
 grasp the distinction, or to admire the system which necessitates it. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 12 
   
 But whatever the economic merits or demerits of the tariff, I take 
 pleasure in bearing testimony to the civility with which I found it 
 enforced. 
   
 My companion and I express our baggage to our hotel and jump on the 
 platform of a horse-car on West-street, skirting the wharves. The 
 roadway is ill paved, certainly, and the clammy atmosphere has congealed 
 on its surface into an oily black mud; while in the middle of the side 
 streets one can see relics of the blizzard in the shape of little grubby 
 glaciers slowly oozing away. The prospect is not enlivening; nor do the 
 low brick houses, given up to nondescript longshore traffic, and freely 
 punctuated with gilt-lettered saloons, add to its impressiveness. 
 Squalid it is without doubt, this particular aspect of New York; but 
 what is the squalor of West-street to that of Limehouse or Poplar? Are 
 our own dock thoroughfares always paved to perfection? And if we had a 
 blizzard like that of three weeks ago, how long would its vestiges 
 linger in the side-streets of Millwall? Even as I mark the grimness of 
 the scene, I am conscious of a sort of hyperaesthesia against which one 
 ought to be on guard. The note-taking traveller is very apt to forget 
 that the mere act of note-taking upsets his normal perceptivity. He 
 becomes feverishly observant, morbidly critical. He compares 
 incommensurables, and flies to ideal standpoints. He is so eager to 
 descry differences, that he overlooks similarities--nay, identities. 
 Thus only can I account for many statements about New York, occurring in 
 the pages of recent and reputable travellers, both French and English, 
 which I find to be exaggerated almost to the point of monstrosity.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 13 
   
 What 
 should we say of an American who should criticise the Commercial Road 
 from the point of view of Fifth Avenue? After a week's experience of New 
 York, I cannot but fancy that certain travellers I could mention have 
 been guilty of similar errors of proportion. 
   
 To return to our street-car platform. The conductor gathers from our 
 conversation that we have just landed from the English steamer, and he 
 at once overflows upon the one great topic of all classes in New York. 
 "I s'pose you've heard," he says, "that Kipling has been very ill?" Yes, 
 we had heard of his illness before we left England. "He's pulling 
 through now, though," says the conductor with heartfelt satisfaction. 
 That, too, we had ascertained on board. "He ought to be the next 
 poet-laureate," our friend continues eagerly; "_he_ don't follow no 
 beaten tracks. He cuts a road for himself, every time, right through; 
 and a mighty good road, too." He then proceeded to make some remarks, 
 which in the rattle of the street I did not quite catch, about 
 "carpet-bag knights." I gathered that he held a low opinion of the 
 present wearer of the bays, and confounded him (not inexcusably) with 
 one or other of his titled compeers. My companion and I were too much 
 taken aback to pursue the theme and ascertain our friend's opinions on 
 Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Meredith, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and Miss Marie Corelli. 
 Think of it! We have travelled three thousand miles to find a 
 tram-conductor whose eyes glisten as he tells us that Kipling is better, 
 and who discusses with a great deal of sense and acuteness the question 
 of the English poet-laureateship! Could anything be more marvellous or 
 more significant? Said I not well when I declared the Atlantic Ocean of 
 less account than the Straits of Dover? 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 14 
   
 This was indeed a welcome to the New World. Fate could not have devised 
 a more ingenious and at the same time tactful way of making us feel at 
 home; though at home, indeed, a Mile End 'bus conductor is scarcely the 
 authority one would turn to for enlightened views upon the Laureateship. 
 The mere fact of our friend's having heard of Mr. Kipling's existence 
 struck us as surprising enough, until we learned that the poet of Tommy 
 Atkins is at the present moment quite the most famous person in the 
 United States. When his illness was at its height, hourly bulletins were 
 posted in factories and workshops, and people meeting in the streets 
 asked each other, "How is he?" without deeming it necessary to supply an 
 antecedent to the pronoun. It was grammatically as well as spiritually a 
 case of "Kipling understood." 
   
 At a low music-hall into which I strayed one evening, one of the nigger 
 corner-men sang a song of which the nature may be sufficiently divined 
 from the refrain, "And the tom-cat was the cause of it all." This lyric 
 being loudly encored, the performer came forward, and, to my 
 astonishment, began to recite a long series of doggerel verses upon Mr. 
 Kipling's illness, setting forth how 
   
      "His strong will made him famous, and his strong will pulled him 
      through." 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 15 
   
 They were imbecile, they were maudlin, they were in the worst possible 
 taste. So far as the reciter was concerned, they were absolutely 
 insincere clap-trap. But the crowded audience received them with 
 rapture; and the very fact that an astute caterer should serve up this 
 particular form of clap-trap showed how the sympathy with Mr. Kipling 
 had permeated even the most un-literary stratum of the public. To an 
 Englishman, nothing can be more touching than to find on every hand this 
 enthusiastic affection for the poet of the Seven Seas--a writer, too, 
 who has not dealt over-tenderly with American susceptibilities, and has, 
 by sheer force of genius, lived down a good deal of unpopularity. 
   
 For the moment, neither President McKinley nor Mr. Fitzsimmons can vie 
 with him in notoriety. His sole rival as a popular hero is Admiral 
 Dewey, whose name is in every mouth and on every boarding. He is the one 
 living celebrity whom the Italian image-vendors admit to their pantheon, 
 where he rubs shoulders with Shakespeare, Dante, Beethoven, and the 
 Venus of Milo. It is related that, at a Camp of Exercise last year, 
 President McKinley chanced to stray beyond bounds, and on returning was 
 confronted by a sentry, who dropped his rifle and bade him halt. "I have 
 forgotten the pass-word," said Mr. McKinley, "but if you will look at 
 me you will see that I am the President." "If you were George Dewey 
 himself," was the reply, "you shouldn't get by here without the 
 pass-word." This anecdote has a flavour of ancient history, but it is 
 aptly brought up to date.[B] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 16 
   
 We bid adieu to our poetical conductor, take a cross-town car, and are 
 presently pushing at the revolving doors--a draught-excluding 
 plate-glass turn-stile--of a vast red-brick hotel, luxurious and 
 labyrinthine. A short colloquy with the clerk at the bureau, and we find 
 ourselves in a gorgeously upholstered elevator, whizzing aloft to the 
 thirteenth floor. Not the top floor--far from it. If you could slice off 
 the stories above the thirteenth, as you slice off the top of an egg, 
 and plant them down in Europe, they would of themselves make a biggish 
 hotel according to our standards. This first elevator voyage is the 
 prelude to how many others! For the past week I seem to have spent the 
 best part of my time in elevators. I must have travelled miles on miles 
 at right angles to the earth's surface. If all my ascensions could be 
 put together, they would out-top Olympus and make Ossa a wart. 
   
 This is the first sensation of life in New York--you feel that the 
 Americans have practically added a new dimension to space. They move 
 almost as much on the perpendicular as on the horizontal plane. When 
 they find themselves a little crowded, they simply tilt a street on end 
 and call it a sky scraper. This hotel, for example (the 
 Waldorf-Astoria), is nothing but a couple of populous streets soaring up 
 into the air instead of crawling along the ground. When I was here in 
 1877, I remember looking with wonder at the _Tribune_ building, hard by 
 the Post Office, which was then considered a marvel of architectural 
 daring. Now it is dwarfed into absolute insignificance by a dozen 
 Cyclopean structures on every hand. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER II Pg 17 
   
 Adelphi Terrace in contrast with the Hotel Cecil. I am credibly informed 
 that in some of the huge down-town buildings they run "express" 
 elevators, which do not stop before the fifteenth, eighteenth, twentieth 
 floor, as the case may be. Some such arrangement seems very necessary, 
 for the elevator _Bummelzugs_, which stop at every floor, take quite an 
 appreciable slice out of the average New York day. I wonder that 
 American ingenuity has not provided a system of pneumatic 
 passenger-tubes for lightning communication with these aerial suburbs, 
 these "mansions in the sky." 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES  Pg 18 
 [Footnote B: A similar story is told of the Confederate President. 
 Challenged by a sentinel, he said, "Look at me and you will see that I 
 am President Davis." "Well," said the soldier, "you _do_ look like a 
 used postage-stamp. Pass, President Davis!"] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 19 
 NEW YORK. 
   
 Many superlatives have been applied to New York by her own children, by 
 the stranger within her gates, and by the stranger without her gates, at 
 a safe distance. I, a newcomer, venture to apply what I believe to be a 
 new superlative, and to call her the most maligned city in the world. 
 Even sympathetic observers have exaggerated all that is uncouth, 
 unbeautiful, unhealthy in her life, and overlooked, as it seems to me, 
 her all-pervading charm. One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no 
 exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving 
 life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city, 
 stretching oceanward between her eastern Sound and her western estuary, 
 and roofed by a radiant dome of smokeless sky. "Upward-striving life," I 
 say, for everywhere and in every branch of artistic effort the desire 
 for beauty is apparent, while at many points the achievement is 
 remarkable and inspiriting. I speak, of course, mainly of material 
 beauty; but it is hard to believe that so marked an impulse toward the 
 good as one notes in architecture, painting, sculpture, and literature, 
 can be unaccompanied by a cognate impulse toward moral beauty, even in 
 relation to civic life. The New Yorker's pride in New York is much more 
 alert and active than the Londoner's pride in London; and this feeling 
 must ere long make itself effective and dominant. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 20 
   
 For the great 
 advantage, it seems to me, that America possesses over the Old World is 
 its material and moral plasticity. Even among the giant structures of 
 this city, one feels that there is nothing rigid, nothing oppressive, 
 nothing inaccessible to the influence of changing conditions. If the 
 buildings are Cyclopean, so is the race that reared them. The material 
 world seems as clay on the potter's wheel, visibly taking on the impress 
 of the human spirit; and the human spirit, as embodied in this superbly 
 vital people, seems to be visibly thrilling to all the forces of 
 civilisation. 
   
 One of the latest, and certainly one of the most keen-sighted, of 
 English travellers in America is Mr. G.W. Steevens, a master journalist 
 if ever there was one. I turn to his _Land of the Dollar_ and I find New 
 York writ down "uncouth, formless, piebald, chaotic." "Never have I 
 seen," says Mr. Steevens, "a city more hideous.... Nothing is given to 
 beauty; everything centres in hard utility." Mr. Steevens must forgive 
 me for saying that this is simply libellous. It is true, I do not quote 
 him fairly: I omit his laudatory antitheses. The truncated phrase in the 
 above passage reads in the original "more hideous or more splendid," and 
 after averring that "nothing is given to beauty," Mr. Steevens 
 immediately proceeds to celebrate the beauty of many New York buildings. 
 Are we to understand, then, that the architects thought of nothing but 
 "hard utility," and that it was some aesthetic divinity that shaped their 
 blocks, rough-hew them how they might? For my part, I cannot see how 
 truth is to result from the clash of contradictory falsehoods. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 21 
   
 There are 
 a few cities more splendid than New York; many more hideous. In point of 
 concentrated architectural magnificence, there is nothing in New York to 
 compare with the Vienna Ringstrasse, from the Opera House to the Votive 
 Church. 
   
 In the splendour which proceeds from ordered uniformity and 
 spaciousness, Paris is, of course, incomparable; while a Scotchman may 
 perhaps be excused for holding that, as regards splendour of situation, 
 Edinburgh is hard to beat. Nor is there any single prospect in New York 
 so impressive as the panorama of London from Waterloo Bridge, when it 
 happens to be visible--that imperial sweep of river frontage from the 
 Houses of Parliament to the Tower. Except in the new region, far up the 
 Hudson, New York shares with Dublin the disadvantage of turning her 
 meaner aspects to her river fronts, though the majesty of the rivers 
 themselves, and the grandiose outlines of the Brooklyn Bridge, largely 
 compensate for this defect. In the main, then, the splendour of New York 
 is as yet sporadic. It is emerging on every hand from comparative 
 meanness and commonplace. At no point can one as yet say, "This prospect 
 is finer than anything Europe can show." But everywhere there are purple 
 patches of architectural splendour; and one can easily foresee the time 
 when Fifth Avenue, the whole circuit of Central Park, and the up-town 
 riverside region will be magnificent beyond compare. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 22 
   
 As for the superlative hideousness attributed by Mr. Steevens to New 
 York, I can only inquire, in the local idiom: "What is the matter with 
 Glasgow?" Or, indeed, with Hull? or Newcastle? or the north-east regions 
 of London? No doubt New York contains some of the very worst slums in 
 the world. That melancholy distinction must be conceded her. But simply 
 to the outward eye the slums of New York have not the monotonous 
 hideousness of our English "warrens of the poor." In spite of her hard 
 winter, New York cannot quite forget that her latitude is that of Madrid 
 and Naples, not of London, or even of Paris. Her slums have a Southern 
 air about them, a variety of contour and colour--in some aspects one 
 might almost say a gaiety--unknown to Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. For 
 one thing, the ubiquitous balconies and fire escapes serve of themselves 
 to break the monotony of line, and lend, as it were, a peculiar texture 
 to the scene; to say nothing of the oportunities they afford for the 
 display of multifarious shreds and patches of colour. Then the houses 
 themselves are often brightly, not to say loudly, painted; so that in 
 the clear, sparkling atmosphere characteristic of New York, the most 
 squalid slum puts on a many-coloured Southern aspect, which suggests 
 Naples or Marseilles rather than the back streets of any English city. 
 Add to this that the inhabitants are largely of Southern origin, and are 
 apt, whenever the temperature will permit, to carry on the main part of 
 their daily lives out of doors; and you can understand that, appalling 
 as poverty may be in New York, the average slum is not so dank, dismal, 
 and suicidally monotonous as a street of a similar status in London. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 23 
   
 "The whole city," says Mr. Steevens, "is plastered, and papered, and 
 painted with advertisements;" and he instances the huge "H-O" (whatever 
 that may mean) which confronts one as one sails up the harbour, and the 
 omnipresent "Castoria" placards. Here Mr. Steevens shows symptoms of the 
 note-taker's hyperaesthesia. The facts he states are undeniable, but the 
 implication that advertisement is carried to greater excess in New York 
 than in London and other European cities seems to me utterly groundless. 
 The "H-O" advertisement is not one whit more monstrous than, for 
 instance, the huge announcements of cheap clothing-shops, &c., painted 
 all over the ends of houses, that deface the railway approaches to 
 Paris; nor is it so flagrant and aggressive as the illuminated 
 advertisements of whisky and California wines that vulgarise the august 
 spectacle of the Thames by night. It is true that the proprietors of 
 "Castoria" have occupied nearly every blank wall that is visible from 
 Brooklyn Bridge; but their advertisements are so far from garish that I 
 should scarcely have noticed them had not Mr. Steevens called my 
 attention to them. Sky-signs, as Mr. Steevens admits, are unknown in New 
 York; so are the flashing out-and-in electric advertisements which make 
 night hideous in London. One or two large steady-burning advertisements 
 irradiate Madison Square of an evening; but being steady they are 
 comparatively inoffensive. Twenty years ago, when I crossed the 
 continent from San Francisco, I noticed with disgust the advertisements 
 stencilled on every second rock in the canyons of Nevada, and defacing 
 every coign of vantage around Niagara. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 24 
   
 Whether this abuse continues I 
 know not; but I know that the pill placards and sauce puffs which 
 blossom in our English meadows along every main line of railway are 
 quite as offensive. Far be it from me to deny that advertising is 
 carried to deplorable excesses in America; but in picking this out as a 
 differentia, Mr. Steevens shows that his intentness of observation in 
 New York has for the moment dimmed his mental vision of London. It is a 
 case, I fancy, in which the expectation was father to the thought. 
   
 Similarly, Mr. Steevens notes, "No chiropodist worthy of the name but 
 keeps at his door a modelled human foot the size of a cab-horse; and 
 other trades go and do likewise." The "cab-horse" is a monumental 
 exaggeration; but it is true that some chiropodists use as a sign a foot 
 of colossal proportions--the size of a small sheep, let us say, if we 
 must adopt a zoological standard. So far good; but the implication that 
 the streets of New York swarm, like a scene in a harlequinade, with 
 similarly Brobdingnagian signs is quite unfounded. Thus it is, I think, 
 that travellers are apt to seize on isolated eccentricities or 
 extravagances (have we no monstrous signs in England?) and treat them as 
 typical. Mr. Steevens came to America prepared to find everything 
 gigantic, and the chiropodist's foot so agreeably fulfilled his 
 expectation that he thought it unnecessary to look any further--"ex pede 
 Herculem."[C] 
   
 The architecture of New York, according to Mr. Steevens, is "the 
 outward expression of the freest, fiercest individualism.... Seeing it, 
 you can well understand the admiration of an American for something 
 ordered and proportioned--for the Rue de Rivoli or Regent Street. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 25 
   
 ." I 
 heard this admiration emphatically expressed the other day by one of the 
 foremost and most justly famous of American authors; but, unlike Mr. 
 Steevens, I could not understand it. "What!" I said, "you would 
 Haussmannise New York! You would reduce the glorious variety of Fifth 
 Avenue to the deadly uniformity of the Avenue de l'Opera, where each 
 block of buildings reproduces its neighbour, as though they had all been 
 stamped by one gigantic die!" Such an architectural ideal is 
 inconceivable to me. It is all very well for a few short streets, for a 
 square or two, for a quadrant like that of Regent Street, or a crescent 
 or circus like those of Bath or Edinburgh. But to apply it throughout a 
 whole quarter of a city, or even throughout the endless vistas of a 
 great American street, would be simply maddening. Better the most 
 heaven-storming or sky-scraping audacity of individualism than any 
 attempt to transform New York into a Fourierist phalanstery or a model 
 prison. I do not doubt that there will one day be some legal restriction 
 on Towers of Babel, and that the hygienic disadvantages of the 
 microbe-breeding "well" or air-shaft will be more fully recognised than 
 they are at present. A time may come, too, when the ideal of an unforced 
 harmony in architectural groupings may replace the now dominant instinct 
 of aggressive diversity. But whatever developments the future may have 
 in store, I must own my gratitude to the "fierce individualism" of the 
 present for a new realisation of the possibilities of architectural 
 beauty in modern life. At almost every turn in New York, one comes 
 across some building that gives one a little shock of pleasure. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 26 
   
 Sometimes, indeed, it is the pleasure of recognising an old friend in a 
 new place--a patch of Venice or a chunk of Florence transported bodily 
 to the New World. The exquisite tower of the Madison Square Garden, for 
 instance, is modelled on that of the Giralda, at Seville; while the new 
 University Club, on Fifth Avenue, is simply a Florentine fortress-palace 
 of somewhat disproportionate height. But along with a good deal of sheer 
 reproduction of European models, one finds a great deal of ingenious 
 and inventive adaptation, to say nothing of a very delicate taste in the 
 treatment of detail. New York abounds, it is true, with monuments of 
 more than one bygone and detestable period of architectural fashion; but 
 they are as distinctly survivals from a dead past as is the wooden 
 shanty which occupies one of the best sites on Fifth Avenue, in the very 
 shadow of the new Delmonico's. I wish tasteless, conventional, and 
 machine-made architecture were as much of a "back-number" in England as 
 it is here. A practised observer could confidently date any prominent 
 building in New York, to within a year or two, by its architectural 
 merit; and the greater the merit the later the year. 
   
 In short, architecture is here a living art. Go where you will in these 
 up-town regions, you can see imagination and cultured intelligence in 
 the act, as it were, of impressing beauty of proportion and detail upon 
 brick and terra-cotta, granite and marble. And domestic or middle-class 
 architecture is not neglected. The American "master builders" do not 
 confine themselves to towers and palaces, but give infinite thought and 
 loving care to "homes for human beings. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 27 
   
 ." The average old-fashioned New 
 York house, so far as I have seen it, is externally unattractive (the 
 characteristic material, a sort of coffee-coloured stone, being truly 
 hideous), and internally dark, cramped, and stuffy. But modern houses, 
 even of no special pretensions, are generally delightful, with their 
 polished wood floors and fittings, and their airy suites of rooms. The 
 American architect has a great advantage over his English colleague in 
 the fact that in furnace-heated houses only the bedrooms require to be 
 shut off with doors. The halls and public rooms can be grouped so that, 
 when the curtains hung in their wide doorways are drawn back, two, 
 three, or four rooms are open to the eye at once, and charming effects 
 of space and light-and-shade can be obtained. Of this advantage the 
 modern house-planner makes excellent use, and I have seen more than one 
 quite modest family house which, without any sacrifice of comfort, gives 
 one a sense of almost palatial spaciousness. An architectural exhibition 
 which I saw the other day proved that equal or even greater care and 
 attention is being bestowed upon the country house, in which a 
 characteristically American style is being developed, mainly founded, I 
 take it, upon the suave and graceful classicism of Colonial 
 architecture. The wide "piazza" is its most noteworthy feature, and the 
 opportunity it offers for beautiful cloister-work is being utilised to 
 the full. Furthermore, the large attendance at the exhibition showed 
 what a keen interest the public takes in the art--a symptom of high 
 vitality. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER III Pg 28 
   
 In Philadelphia, too, where I spent some time last week, there is a good 
 deal of exquisite architecture to be seen. The old Philadelphia dwelling 
 house, "simplex munditiis," with its plain red-brick front and white 
 marble steps, has a peculiar charm for me; but it, of course, is not a 
 product of the present movement. I do not know the date of some lovely 
 white marble palazzetti scattered about the Rittenhouse Square region; 
 but the Art Club on Broad Street, and the Houston Club for Students of 
 the University of Pennsylvania, are both quite recent buildings, and 
 both very beautiful. I could mention several other buildings that are, 
 as they say here, "pretty good" (a phrase of high commendation); but I 
 had better get safely out of New York before I enlarge on the merits of 
 Philadelphia. There is only one city the New Yorker despises more than 
 Philadelphia, and that is Brooklyn. The New York schoolboy speaks of 
 Philadelphia as "the place the chestnuts go to when they die;" and to 
 the most popular wit in New York at this moment (an Americanised 
 Englishman, by the way) is attributed the saying, "Mr. So-and-so has 
 three daughters--two alive, and one in Philadelphia." Six different 
 people have related this gibe to me; it is only less admired than the 
 same gentleman's observation as he alighted from an electric car at the 
 further end of the Suspension Bridge, when he heaved a deep sigh, and 
 remarked, "In the midst of life we are in Brooklyn." Another favourite 
 anecdote in New York is that of the Philadelphian who went to a doctor 
 and complained of insomnia. The doctor gave him a great deal of sage 
 advice as to diet, exercise, and so forth, concluding, "If after that 
 you haven't better nights, let me see you again." "But you mistake, 
 doctor," the patient replied; "I sleep all right at night--it's in the 
 daytime I can't sleep!" 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 29 
 [Footnote C: One method of advertisement which I observed in Chicago has 
 not yet, so far as I know, been introduced into England. One of the 
 windows of a vast dry-goods store on State Street was fitted up as a 
 dentists parlour; and when I passed a young lady was reclining in the 
 operating-chair and having her teeth stopped, to the no small 
 delectation of a little crowd which blocked the side-walk.] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 30 
   
 NEW YORK. 
   
 Whatever turn her fiscal policy may take in the future, I hope America 
 will keep an absolutely prohibitive duty upon the import of red tape, 
 while at the same time discouraging the home manufacture of the article. 
 The absence of red tape is, to me, one of the charms of life in this 
 country. One gathers, indeed, that the art of running a Circumlocution 
 Office is carried to a high pitch in the political sphere. But there it 
 is exercised with a definite object; it is a means to an end, cunningly 
 devised and skillfully applied; it is not a mere matter of instinct, 
 inertia, and routine. The Tite Barnacles of Dickens's satire were 
 perfectly honest people according to their lights. They were sincerely 
 convinced that the British Empire would crumble to pieces the moment 
 its ligaments of red tape were in the slightest degree relaxed. Their 
 strength lay in the fact that they represented an innate tendency in the 
 nation, or at any rate in the dominant class at the period of which 
 Dickens wrote. In America there is no such innate tendency. The Tite 
 Barnacles do not imagine or pretend that they are saving the Republic; 
 they simply make use of a convenient political machinery to serve their 
 private ends. Therefore their position, however strong it may seem for 
 the moment, is insecurely founded. It rests upon no moral basis, it 
 finds no stronghold in the national character. Outsiders may think the 
 average American citizen strangely tolerant of abuses, and indeed I find 
 him smiling with placid amusement at things which, were I in his place, 
 would make my blood boil. But he is under no illusion as to the real 
 nature of these things. An abuse remains an abuse in his eyes, though he 
 may not for the moment see his way to rectifying it. The red tape which 
 is used to embarrass justice or "tie up" reform commands no reverence 
 even from the party that employs it. Cynicism may endure for the night, 
 but indignation ariseth in the morning. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 31 
 The American character, in a word, does not naturally run to red tape. 
 Observe, for instance, the system of transit in New York: it is 
 admirably successful in grappling with a very difficult problem, and its 
 success proceeds from the absence of by-laws and restrictions, the 
 omnipresence of good-nature and common-sense. The problem is rendered 
 difficult, not only by the enormous numbers to be conveyed, but by the 
 stocking-like configuration of Manhattan Island. The business quarter of 
 New York is in the foot, the residential quarters in the calf and knee. 
 Therefore there is a great rush of people down to the foot in the 
 morning and up to the knee in the afternoon. The business quarter of 
 London is like the hub of a wheel, from which the railway and omnibus 
 lines radiate like spokes. In New York there is very little radiation or 
 dispersion of the multitude. Practically the whole tide sets down a 
 narrow channel in the morning, and up again in the evening. At the time, 
 then, of these tidal waves, it is a flat impossibility that transit can 
 be altogether comfortable. The "elevated" trains and electric trolleys 
 are overcrowded, certainly; but you can always find a place in them, and 
 they carry you so rapidly that the discomfort is rendered as little 
 irksome as possible. A society has been formed, I see, to agitate 
 against this overcrowding; but it seems to me it will only waste its 
 pains. Let it agitate for an underground railway, by all means; and if, 
 as I gather, the underground railway scheme is obstructed by 
 self-seeking vested interests, let it do its best to break down the 
 obstruction. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 32 
   
 Until some altogether new means of transport are provided, 
 the attempt to restrict the number of passengers which a car or trolley 
 may carry is, I think, antisocial, and must prove futile. The force of 
 public convenience would break the red-tape barrier like a cobweb. The 
 trains and trolleys follow each other at the very briefest intervals; it 
 does not seem possible that a greater number should be run on the 
 existing lines; and, that being so, there is no alternative between 
 overcrowding and the far greater inconvenience of indefinite delay. 
 Fancy having to "take a number," as they do in Paris, and await your 
 turn for a seat! New York would be simply paralysed. It is needless to 
 point out, of course, that where steam or electricity is the motive 
 power there is no cruelty to animals in overcrowding. 
   
 The American people, rightly and admirably as it seems to me, choose the 
 lesser of two evils, and minimise it by good temper and mutual civility. 
 At a certain hour of every morning, the "L" railroad trains are as 
 densely packed as our Metropolitan trains on Boat-Race Day. There are 
 people clinging in clusters to each of the straps, and even the 
 platforms between the cars are crowded to the very couplings. It often 
 appears hopelessly impossible for any new-comer to squeeze in, or for 
 those who are wedged in the middle of a long car to force their way out. 
 Yet when the necessity arises, no force has to be applied. People manage 
 somehow or other to "welcome the coming, speed the parting guest." Every 
 one recognises that cantankerous obstructiveness would only make matters 
 worse, nay, absolutely intolerable. The first comer makes no attempt to 
 insist upon his position of advantage, because he knows that to-morrow 
 he may be the last comer. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 33 
   
 The sense of individual inconvenience is 
 swamped in the sense of general convenience. People laugh and rather 
 enjoy the joke when a too sudden start or an abrupt curve sends a whole 
 group of them cannoning up against one another. It must be remembered 
 that the transit is rapid, so that there is no irritating sense of 
 wasted time: and that the cars are brilliantly lighted, and, on the 
 whole, well ventilated, so that there is no fog, smoke, or sulphurous 
 air to get on the nerves and strain the temper. The scene as a whole, 
 even on a wet, disagreeable evening, is not depressing, but rather 
 cheerful. For my part, I regard it with positive pleasure, as a 
 manifestation of the national character. Less admirable, to be sure, is 
 the public acquiescence in the political manoeuvring, which blocks the 
 proposed underground railway. Yet the opponents of the scheme have 
 doubtless something to say on their side. It appears, at any rate, that 
 the profits of the "L" road are not exorbitant. It is said to be only 
 through overcrowding that it pays at all. The passengers it seats barely 
 suffice to cover expenses, and "the profits hang on to the straps." 
   
 Idealists hope that when the underground comes, the elevated will go; 
 but I, as an outsider, cannot share his hope. In the first place, I 
 don't see how the mere substitution of one line for another is to 
 relieve the congestion of traffic; in the second place, the elevated 
 seems to me an admirable institution, which it would be a great pity to 
 abolish.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 34 
   
 Even aesthetically there is much to be said for it. The road, 
 itself, to be sure, does not add to the beauty of the avenues along 
 which it runs, but it is not by any means the eyesore one might imagine; 
 and the trains, with their light, graceful, and elegantly-proportioned 
 cars, so different from our squat and formless railway carriages, seem 
 to me a positively beautiful feature of the city life. They are not very 
 noisy, they are not very smoky, and they will be smokeless and almost 
 noiseless when they are run by electricity. The discomfort they cause, 
 to dwellers on the avenues is, I am sure, greatly exaggerated. People 
 who do not live on the avenues suffer in their sympathetic imagination 
 much more than the actual martyrs to the "L" road suffer in fact. 
 Imagination makes cowards of us all. For my part, I endured agonies from 
 the rush, whirl and clatter of New York before I left London; but here I 
 find nothing that, to healthy nerves, is not rather enjoyable than 
 otherwise. Neither up town nor down town is the traffic so dense, the 
 roar and bustle so continuous, as that of London; while the service of 
 trains and cars is so excellent and so simply arranged that it costs 
 much less thought, effort, and worry to "get about" in Manhattan than in 
 Middlesex. In saying this I may perhaps offend American 
 susceptibilities. There is nothing we moderns are more apt to brag of 
 than the nervous overstrain of our life. But sincerity comes before 
 courtesy, and I must gently but firmly decline to allow New York a 
 monopoly of neurasthenia, or of the conditions that produce it. 
   
 One great difference is, I take it, that while New York exhausts it also 
 stimulates, whereas the days of the year when there is any positive 
 stimulus in the air of London may be counted on the ten fingers.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 35 
   
 . Muggy 
 and misty days do occur here, it is true; but though the natives tell me 
 that this month of March has been exceptionally unpleasant, the 
 prevailing impression I have received is that of a lofty and radiant 
 vault of sky, with keen, sweet, limpid air that one drank in eagerly, 
 like sparkling wine. More than once, after a slight snowfall, I have 
 seen the air full of dancing particles of light, like the gold leaf in 
 Dantzic brandy. One of the most impressive things I ever saw, though I 
 did not then realise its tragic significance, was the huge column of 
 smoke that rose into the clear blue air from the Windsor Hotel fire. I 
 happened to come out on Fifth Avenue, close to the Manhattan Club, just 
 as the tail of the St. Patrick's Day procession was passing; and, 
 looking up the avenue after it, I was ware of a gigantic white pillar 
 standing motionless, as it seemed to me, and cleaving the limitless blue 
 dome almost to the zenith. The procession moved quietly on; no one 
 appeared to take any notice; and as fires are ineffective in the 
 daylight, I turned down the avenue instead, of up, and saw no more of 
 the spectacle. But I shall never forget that "pillar of cloud by day," 
 standing out in the sunshine, white as marble or sea foam. 
   
 At night, again, under the purple, star-lit sky, street life in the 
 central region of New York is indescribably exhilarating. From Union 
 Square to Herald Square, and even further up, Broadway and many of the 
 cross streets flash out at dusk into the most brilliant illumination. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 36 
   
 Theatres, restaurants, stores, are outlined in incandescent lamps; the 
 huge electric trolleys come sailing along in an endless stream, 
 profusely jewelled with electricity; and down the thickly-gemmed vista 
 of every cross street one can see the elevated trains, like luminous 
 winged serpents, skimming through the air.[D] The great restaurants are 
 crowded with gaily-dressed merry-makers; and altogether there is a 
 sense of festivity in the air, without any flagrantly meretricious 
 element in it, which I plead guilty to finding very enjoyable. From the 
 moral, and even from the loftily aesthetic point of view, this gaudy, 
 glittering Vanity Fair is no doubt open to criticism. What reconciles me 
 to it aesthetically is the gemlike transparency of its colouring. Garish 
 it is, no doubt, but not in the least stifling, smoky, or lurid. The 
 application of electricity--light divorced from smoke and heat--to the 
 beautifying of city life is as yet in its infancy. Even the Americans 
 have scarcely got beyond the point of making lavish use of the raw 
 material. But the raw material is beautiful in itself, and in this 
 pellucid air (the point to which one always returns) it produces magical 
 effects. 
   
 The other night, at a restaurant, I sat at the next table to Mr. Edison, 
 and could not but look with interest and admiration at his furrowed, 
 anxious, typically American and truly beautiful face. Here, if you like, 
 was an example of nervous overstrain; but the soft and yet brilliant 
 light of the restaurant was in itself a sufficient reminder that the 
 overstrain had not been incurred for nothing. Electricity is the true 
 "white magic" of the future; and here, with his pallid face and silver 
 hair, sat the master magician--one of the great light-givers of the 
 world. A light-giver, I think, in more than a merely material sense.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 37 
   
 The 
 moral influence of the electric lamp, its effect upon the hygiene of the 
 soul, has not yet been duly estimated. But even in a merely material 
 sense, what has not the Edison movement, as it may be called, done for 
 this city of New York! Its influence is felt on every hand, in comfort, 
 convenience, and beauty. The lavish use of electricity, both as an 
 illuminant and as a motive power, combines with its climate, its 
 situation, and its architecture to make New York one of the most 
 fascinating cities in the world. Why, good Americans, when they die, 
 should go to Paris, is a theological enigma which more and more puzzles 
 me. 
   
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--Since my return to England, I have carefully reconsidered 
 my impression that the rush, whirl, and clamour of street life is 
 greater in London than in New York. Every day confirms it. On our main 
 thoroughfares, the stream of omnibuses is quite as unbroken as the 
 stream of electric and cable cars in New York; our van traffic is at 
 least as heavy; and we have in addition the host of creeping "growlers" 
 and darting hansoms, which is almost without counterpart in New York. I 
 know of no crossing in New York so trying to the nerves as Piccadilly 
 Circus or Charing Cross (Trafalgar Square). 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IV Pg 38 
 The intersection of 
 Broadway, Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street, at Madison Square, is the 
 nearest approach to these bewildering ganglia of traffic. It must be 
 owned, too, that the Bowery, with its two "elevated" tracks and four 
 lines of trolley-cars, is a place where one cannot safely let one's wits 
 go wool-gathering, especially on a rainy evening when the roadway is 
 under repair. Let me add that there is one place in New York where the 
 whirl of traffic ("whirl" in a literal sense) is unique and amazing. I 
 mean the covered area at the New York end of Brooklyn Bridge where the 
 transpontine electric cars, in an incessant stream, swoop down the 
 curves of the bridge and sweep round on their return journey. The scene 
 at night is indescribable. The air seems supersaturated with 
 electricity, flashing and crackling on every hand. One has a sense of 
 having strayed unwittingly into the midst of a miniature planetary 
 system in full swing, with the boom of the trolleys, in their mazy 
 courses, to represent the music of the spheres. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 39 
 [Footnote D: I find the same idea (a sufficiently obvious one) finely 
 expressed by Mr. Richard Hovey in his book of poems entitled _Along the 
 Trail_: 
   
   Look, how the overhead train at the Morningside curve 
   Loops like a sea-born dragon its sinuous flight. 
   Loops in the night in and out, high up in the air, 
   Like a serpent of stars with the coil and undulant reach of waves.] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 40 
 NEW YORK. 
   
 It is four weeks to-day since I landed in New York, and, save for forty 
 hours in Philadelphia and four hours in Brooklyn, I have spent all that 
 time in Manhattan Island. Yet, to my shame be it spoken, I am not 
 prepared with any generalisation as to the American character. It has 
 been my good fortune to see a great deal of literary and artistic New 
 York, and, comparing it with literary and artistic London, I am inclined 
 to say "Pompey and Caesar berry much alike--specially Pompey!" The New 
 Yorker is far more cosmopolitan than the Londoner; of that there is no 
 doubt. He knows all that we know about current English literature. He 
 knows all that we do _not_ know about current American literature. He is 
 much more interested in and influenced by French literature and art 
 than the average educated Englishman--so much so that the leading French 
 critics, such as M. Brunetiere and M. Rod, lecture here to crowded and 
 appreciative audiences. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 41 
   
 Moreover an excellent German theatre permanently 
 established in the city keeps the literary world well abreast of 
 cosmopolitanism of the educated New Yorker the dramatic movement in 
 Germany. But the merely means that he has everything in common with the 
 educated Londoner--and a little over. His traditions are ours, his 
 standards are ours, his ideals are ours. He is busied with the same 
 problems of ethics, of aesthetics, of style, even of grammar. I had not 
 been three days in New York when I found myself plunged in a hot 
 discussion of the "split infinitive," in which I was ranged with two 
 Americans against a recreant Briton who defended the collocation. "It is 
 a mistake to regard it is an Americanism," said one of the Americans. 
 "It is as old as the English language, or at least as old as Wickliff. 
 But it is unnecessary, and the best modern practice discountenances it." 
 I felt like falling on the neck of an ally of half an hour's standing, 
 and swearing eternal friendship. What matters Alaska, or Venezuela, or 
 Nicaragua, "or all the stones of stumbling in the world," so long as we 
 have a common interest in (and some of us a common distaste for) the 
 split infinitive? To put the matter briefly, while the outlook of the 
 New Yorker is wider than ours, his standpoint is the same. We gather 
 from a well-known anecdote that some, at least, of the cultivated 
 Americans of Thackeray's time were inclined to "think of Tupper." To-day 
 they do not "think of Tupper" any more than we do--and by Tupper I mean, 
 of course, not the veritable Martin Farquhar, but the Tuppers of the 
 passing hour. In America as in England, no doubt, there is a huge 
 half-educated public, ravenous for doughnuts of romance served up with 
 syrup of sentiment.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 42 
   
 The enthusiasms of the American shopgirl, I take it, 
 are very much the same as those of her English sister. But the line of 
 demarkation between the educated and the half-educated is just as clear 
 in New York as in London. For the cultivated American of to-day, the 
 Boomster booms and the Sibyl sibyllates in vain. I find no 
 justification, in this city at any rate, for the old saying which 
 described America as the most common-schooled and least educated country 
 in the world. If we must draw distinctions, I should say that the effect 
 of the American system of university education was to raise the level 
 of general culture, while lowering the standard of special scholarship. 
 I believe that the general American tendency is to insist less than we 
 do on sheer mental discipline for its own sake, whether in classics or 
 mathematics, to allow the student a wider latitude of choice, and to 
 enable him to specialise at an earlier point in his curriculum upon the 
 studies he most affects, or which are most likely to be directly useful 
 to him in practical life. Thus the American universities, probably, do 
 not turn out many men who can "read Plato with their feet on the hob," 
 but many who can, and do, read and understand him as Colonel Newcome 
 read Caesar--"with a translation, sir, with a translation." The width of 
 outlook which I have noted as characteristic of literary New York is 
 deliberately aimed at in the university system, and most successfully 
 attained. The average young man of parts turned out by an American 
 university has a many-sided interest in, and comprehension of, European 
 literature and the intellectual movement of the world, which may go far 
 to compensate for his possible or even probable inexpertness in Greek 
 aorists and Latin elegiacs. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 43 
   
 The academic and literary New Yorker, I am well aware, is not "the 
 American." But who is "the American?" I turn to Mr. G.W. Steevens, and 
 find that "the American is a highly electric Anglo-Saxon. His 
 temperament is of quicksilver. There is as much difference in vivacity 
 and emotion between him and an Englishman as there is between an 
 Englishman and an Italian." Well, Mr. Steevens is a keener observer than 
 I; when he wrote this, he had been two months in America to my one; and 
 he had travelled far and wide over the continent. I am not rash enough, 
 then, to contradict him; but I must own that I have not met this 
 "American," or anything like him, in the streets, clubs, theatres, 
 restaurants, or public conveyances of New York. On the contrary, as I 
 take my walks abroad between Union Square and Central Park, or hang on 
 to the straps of an Elevated train or cable car, I am all the time 
 occupied in trying--and failing--to find marked differences of 
 appearance and manners between the people I see here and the people I 
 should expect to see under similar circumstances in London. Differences 
 of dress and feature there are, of course--but how trifling! Difference 
 of manners there is none, unless it lie in the general good-nature and 
 unobtrusive politeness of the American crowd, upon which I have already 
 remarked. We all know that there is a distinctively American physical 
 type, recognisable especially in the sex which aims at self-development, 
 instead of self-suppression, in its attire. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 44 
   
 When one meets her in 
 Bloomsbury (where she abounds in the tourist season) one readily 
 distinguishes the American lady; but here specific distinctions are 
 obsorbed in generic identity, and the only difference between American 
 and English ladies of which I am habitually conscious lies in the added 
 touch of Parisian elegance which one notes in the costumes on Fifth 
 Avenue. The average of beauty is certainly very high in New York. I will 
 not say higher than in London, for there too it is remarkable; but this 
 I will say, that night after night I have looked round the audiences in 
 New York theatres, and found a clear majority of notably good-looking 
 women. There are few European cities where one could hope to make the 
 same observation. It is especially to be noted, I think, that the 
 American lady has the art of growing old with comely dignity. She loses 
 her complexion, indeed, but only to put on a new beauty in the contrast 
 between her olive skin and her silvering or silver hair. This contrast 
 may almost be called the characteristic feature of the specially 
 American type, which is much more clearly discernible in middle-aged and 
 old than in young women. 
   
 As for the men, what strikes one in New York is the total absence of the 
 traditional "Yankee" type. It must have a foundation in fact, since the 
 Americans themselves have accepted it in political caricature. No doubt 
 I shall find it in its original habitat--New England. It has certainly 
 not penetrated into New York. On close examination, the average 
 man-in-the-street is distinguishable from his fellow in London by 
 certain trifling differences in "the cut of his jib"--his fashion in 
 hats, in moustaches, in neckties.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 45 
   
 But the intense electricity that Mr. 
 Steevens discovers in him has totally eluded my observation. The fault 
 may be mine, but assuredly I have failed to "faire jaillir l'etincelle." 
 I have looked in vain for any symptom of the "temperament of 
 quicksilver." Mr. Steevens, it is true, made his observations during the 
 last Presidential election. Perhaps the quicksilver is generated in the 
 American citizen by political excitement, and when that is over "runs 
 out at the heels of his boots." 
   
 But, surely, it is a monstrous exaggeration to state in general terms 
 that the difference in "vivacity and emotion" between the average 
 American and the average Englishman is as great as the difference 
 between an Englishman and an Italian. By what inconceivable error, does 
 it happen, then, that the American of fiction and drama--English, 
 Continental, and American to boot--is always represented as outdoing 
 John Bull himself in Anglo-Saxon phlegm? In the courts of ethnology, I 
 shall be told, "what the caricaturist says is not evidence;" but no 
 caricature could ever have gained such world-wide acceptance without a 
 substratum of truth to support it. The probabilities of the case are 
 greatly against the development of any special "vivacity" of 
 temperament, for though there has no doubt been a large Keltic admixture 
 in the Anglo-Saxon stock, there has been a large Teutonic infusion 
 (German and Scandinavian) to counterbalance it. Simply as a matter of 
 observation, the differences between English and Italian manners hit you 
 in the eye, while the differences between American and English manners 
 are really microscopic; and manners, I take it, are the outward and 
 visible signs of temperament.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 46 
   
 A Scotchman by birth, a Londoner by habit, 
 I walk the streets of New York undetected, to the best of my belief, 
 until I begin to speak; in Rome, on the contrary, every one recognises 
 me at a glance as an "Inglese," unless they mistake me for an 
 "Americano." To me it is amazing how inessential is the change produced 
 by the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament by influences of climate and 
 admixture of foreign blood. There are great foreign cities in New 
 York--German, Italian, Yiddish, Bohemian, Hungarian, Chinese--but the 
 New York of the New Yorker is scarcely, to the Englishman, a foreign 
 city. 
   
 The other day I heard an Englishman, who has lived for twenty-five years 
 in America, maintaining very emphatically that the chief difference 
 between England and America lay in the greater laxity of the family bond 
 on this side of the Atlantic. He declared that, in the main, "home" 
 meant less to the American than to the Englishman, and especially that 
 the American boy between thirteen and twenty was habitually insurgent 
 against home influences. It would be ludicrous, of course, to set up the 
 observations of a month against the experience of a quarter of a 
 century; yet I cannot but feel that either I have been miraculously 
 fortunate in the glimpses I have obtained of American home life, or else 
 there is something amiss with my friend's generalisation. Perhaps he 
 brought away with him from England in the early seventies a conception 
 of the "patria potestas" which he would now find out of date there as 
 well as here. No doubt the migratory habit is stronger in America than 
 in England, and family life is not apt to flourish in hotels or 
 boarding-houses. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 47 
   
 The Saratoga trunk is not the best cornerstone for the 
 home: so much we may take for granted. But the American families who are 
 content to go through life without a threshold and hearthstone of their 
 own must, after all, be in a vanishing minority. They very naturally cut 
 a larger figure in fiction than in fact. It has been my privilege to see 
 something of the daily life of a good many families living under their 
 own roof-tree, and in every case without exception I have been struck 
 with the beauty and intimacy of the relation between parents and 
 children. When my friend laid down his theory of the intractable 
 American boy, I could not but think of a youth of twenty whom I had seen 
 only two days before, whose manner towards his father struck me as an 
 ideal blending of affectionate comradeship with old-fashioned 
 respect.[E] True, this was in Philadelphia, "the City of Homes," and 
 even there it may have been an exceptional case. I am not so illogical 
 as to pit a single observation against (presumably) a wide induction; I 
 merely offer for what it is worth one item of evidence. 
   
 Again, it has been my good fortune here in New York to spend an evening 
 in a household which suggested a chapter of Dickens in his tenderest and 
 most idyllic mood. It was the home of an actor and actress. Two 
 daughters, of about eighteen and twenty, respectively, are on the stage, 
 acting in their father's company; but the master of the house is a 
 bright little boy of seven or eight, known as "the Commodore. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 48 
   
 ." As it 
 happened, the mother of the family was away for the day; yet in the 
 hundred affectionate references made to her by the father and daughters, 
 not to me, but to each other, I read her character and influence more 
 clearly, perhaps, than if she had been present in the flesh. A more 
 simple, natural, unaffectedly beautiful "interior" no novelist could 
 conceive. If the family tie is seriously relaxed in America, it seems an 
 odd coincidence that I should in a single month have chanced upon two 
 households where it is seen in notable perfection, to say nothing of 
 many others in which it is at least as binding as in the average English 
 home. 
   
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--The American university system is a very large subject, to 
 which none but a specialist could do justice, and that in a volume, not 
 a postscript. Nevertheless I should like slightly to supplement the 
 above allusion to it. In the first place, let me quote from the 
 _Spectator_ (February 12, 1898) the following passage:-- 
   
      "Some of the American Universities, in our judgment, come nearer to 
      the ideal of a true University than any of the other types. 
      Beginning on the old English collegiate system, they have broadened 
      out into vast and splendidly endowed institutions of universal 
      learning, have assimilated some German features, and have combined 
      successfully college routine and discipline with mature and 
      advanced work. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 49 
 Harvard and Princeton were originally English 
      colleges; now, without entirely abandoning the college system, 
      they are great semi-German seats of learning. Johns Hopkins at 
      Baltimore is purely of the German type, with no residence and only 
      a few plain lecture rooms, library, and museums. Columbia, 
      originally an old English college (its name was King's, changed to 
      Columbia at the Revolution), is now perhaps the first University in 
      America, magnificently endowed, with stately buildings, and with a 
      school of political and legal science second only to that of Paris. 
      Cornell, intended by its generous founder to be a sort of cheap 
      glorified technical institute, has grown into a great seat of 
      culture. The quadrangles and lawns of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton 
      almost recall Oxford and Cambridge; their lecture-rooms, 
      laboratories, and post-graduate studies hint of Germany, where 
      nearly all American teachers of the present generation have been 
      educated." 
   
 Some authorities, however, deplore the Germanising of American 
 education. A Professor of Greek, himself trained in Germany, and 
 recognised as one of the foremost of American scholars, confessed to me 
 his deep dissatisfaction with the results achieved in his own teaching. 
 His students did good work on the scientific and philological side, but 
 their relation to Greek literature as literature was not at all what he 
 could desire. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 50 
   
 This bears out the remark which I heard another authority 
 make, to the effect that American scholarship was entirely absorbed in 
 the counting of accents, and the like mechanical details; while it seems 
 to run counter to the above suggestion that the university system tends 
 to raise the level of culture while lowering the standard of erudition. 
 At the same time there can be no doubt that the immense width of the 
 field covered by university teaching in America must, in some measure, 
 make for "superficial omniscience" rather than for concentration and 
 research. The truth probably is that the system cuts both ways. The 
 average student seeks and finds general culture in his university 
 course, while the born specialist is enabled to go straight to the study 
 he most affects and concentrate upon it. 
   
 To exemplify the latitude of choice offered to the American student, let 
 me give a list of the "course" in English and Literature at Columbia 
 University, New York, extracted from the Calendar for 1898-99: 
   
      RHETORIC AND ENGLISH COMPOSITION 
   
      COURSES 
   
  English Composition. Lectures, daily themes, and fortnightly 
 
      essays. Professor G.R. CARPENTER. Three hours[F] first half-year. 
   
  English Composition. Essays, lectures, and discussions in regard 
 
      to style. Professor G.R. CARPENTER. Three hours, second half-year. 
   
  English Composition, Advanced Course. Essays, lectures and 
 
      consultations. Dr. ODELL. Two hours. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 51 
   
  Elocution. Lectures and Exercises. Mr. PUTNAM. Two hours. 
 
   
      [5. The Art of English Versification. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
      _Not given in 1898-9_.] 
   
  Argumentative Composition. Lectures, briefs, essays, and oral 
 
      discussions. Mr. BRODT. Three hours. 
   
  Seminar. The topics discussed in 1898-9 will be: Canons of 
 
      rhetorical propriety (first half-year); the teaching of formal 
      rhetoric in the secondary school (second half-year). Professor 
      G.R. CARPENTER. 
   
   
      ENGLISH AND LITERATURE 
   
      COURSES 
   
      1 and 2. Anglo-Saxon Language and Historical English Grammar. Mr. 
      SEWARD. Two hours. 
   
  Anglo-Saxon Literature: Poetry and Prose. Professor JACKSON. Two 
 
      hours. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 52 
   
  Chaucer's Language, Versification, and Method of Narrative 
 
      Poetry. Professor JACKSON. Two hours. 
   
      [5. English Language and Literature of the Eleventh, Twelfth, and 
      Thirteenth Centuries. Professor PRICE. _Not given in 1898-9._] 
   
      [6. English Language and Literature of the Fourteenth Century, 
      exclusive of Chaucer, and of the Fifteenth Century; Reading of 
      authors, with investigation of special questions and writing of 
      essays. Professor Price. _Not given in 1898-9._] 
   
  English Language and Literature of the Sixteenth Century; 
 
      Reading of authors, with investigation of special questions and 
      writing of essays. Professor Jackson. Two hours. 
   
      Courses 5, 6, and 7 are designed for the careful study of the 
      language and literature of Early and Middle English periods: Course 
      6 was given in 1897-8. 
   
      [8. Anglo-Saxon Prose and Historical English Syntax. Investigation 
      of special questions and writing of essays. Professor Price. _Not 
      given in 1898-9. To be given in 1899-1900._] 
   
      [10. English Verse-Forms: Study of their historical development. 
      Professor Price. _Not given in 1898-9._] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 53 
   
  History of English Literature from 1789 to the death of 
 
      Tennyson: Lectures. Professor Woodberry. Three hours. 
   
  History of English Literature from 1660 to 1789: Lectures. Mr. 
 
      Kroeber. Three hours. 
   
      [13. History of English Literature from the birth of Shakespeare to 
      1660, with special attention to the origin of the drama in England 
      and to the poems of Spenser and Milton. Professor Woodberry. _Not 
      given in 1898-9._] 
   
      Courses 12 and 13 are given in alternate years. 
   
      [14. Pope: Language, Versification, and Poetical Method. Professor 
      Price. _Not given in 1898-9._] 
   
  Shakespeare: Language, Versification, and Method of Dramatic 
 
      Poetry. Text: Cambridge Text of Shakespeare. Professor JACKSON. Two 
      hours. 
   
  American Literature. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. Two hours. 
 
   
      [17. The Poetry, Lyrical, Narrative, and Dramatic, of Tennyson, 
      Browning, and Arnold. Professor PRICE. _Not given in 1898-9._] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 54 
   
 LITERATURE. 
   
      COURSES. 
   
  The History of Modern Fiction. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. Two 
 
      hours. 
   
  The Theory, History, and Practice of Criticism, with special 
 
      attention to Aristotle, Boileau, Lessing, and English and later 
      French writers, and a study of the great works of imagination. 
      Professor WOODBERRY. Three hours. 
   
      [3. Epochs of the Drama. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. _Not given in 
      1898-9._] 
   
  Dramatists of the Nineteenth Century. Professor BRANDER 
 
      MATTHEWS. Two hours. 
   
      [5. Moliere and Modern Comedy. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. _Not 
      given in 1898-9._] 
   
      [6. The Evolution of the Essay. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. _Not 
      given in 1898-9._] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 55 
   
  Studies in Literature, mainly Critical: Selected Works, in Prose 
 
      and Verse, illustrating the Character and Development of Natural 
      Literature. Lectures. Professor WOODBERRY. Three hours. 
   
  Studies in Literature, mainly Historical: Narrative Poetry of 
 
      the Middle Ages. Lectures and Conferences. Mr. TAYLOR. Two hours. 
   
      [9. The Lyrical Poetry of the Middle Ages. Professor G.R. 
      CARPENTER. _Not given in 1898-9._] 
   
  Hellenism: Its Origin, Development, and Diffusion with some 
 
      account of the Civilisations that preceded it. Lectures and 
      Conferences. Mr. TAYLOR Three hours. 
   
  Literary Phases of the Transition from Paganism to 
 
      Christianity, with illustrations from the other Arts of Expression. 
      Lectures and Conferences. Mr. TAYLOR. One hour. 
   
      Seminar in Literature. Professor WOODBERRY. Seminar in the History 
      of the Drama. Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS. 
   
 A "seminar" is an institution borrowed from Germany. The professor and a 
 small number of students (six or eight at the outside) sit together 
 round a table, with their books at hand, and pass an hour in 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER V Pg 56 
   
 co-operative study and discussion. In going through the noble library of 
 Columbia University, I came upon an alcove devoted to Scandinavian 
 literature, with a table on which lay some Danish books. The gentleman 
 who was guiding me round happened to be an instructor in the 
 Scandinavian languages. He pointed to the books and said, "I have just 
 been having a seminar here, in Danish literature." Seeing on the shelves 
 an edition of Holberg, I asked him if he had ever considered the 
 question why Holberg's comedies, so delightful in the original, 
 appeared to be totally untranslatable into English. "One of my 
 students," he said, "put the same question to me only to-day." One could 
 scarcely desire a better example of the all-embracing range of the 
 studies which an American University provides for and encourages. I have 
 heard it said, with a sneer, that "You can take an honours degree in 
 Marie Corelli." If you can graduate with honours in Holberg, your time, 
 in so far, has certainly not been misemployed. 
   
 Whatever the drawbacks of the German influence which is so marked in 
 America, I cannot doubt that in one thing, at any rate, the Americans 
 are far ahead of us--in the careful study they devote to the science of 
 education. No fewer than twenty courses of lectures on the theory and 
 practice of education were given in Columbia College during 1898-99. 
 Teaching, I take it, is an art founded upon, and intimately associated 
 with, the science of psychology. Why should we be content with 
 antiquated and rule-of-thumb methods, instead of going to the root of 
 the thing, studying its principles, and learning to apply them to the 
 best advantage? 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 57 
 [Footnote E: "Affectionate comradeship" rather than "old-fashioned 
 respect" is exemplified in the following anecdote of young America. A 
 Professor of Pedagogy in a Western university brings up his children on 
 the most advanced principles. Among other things, they are encouraged to 
 sink the antiquated terms "father" and "mother," and call their parents 
 by their Christian names. On one occasion, the children, playing in the 
 bathroom, turned on the water and omitted to turn it off again. 
 Observing it percolating through the ceiling of his study, their father 
 rushed upstairs to see what was the matter, flung open the bathroom 
 door, and was greeted by the prime mover in the mischief, a boy of six, 
 with the remark, "Don't say a word, John--bring the mop!"] 
   
 [Footnote F: That is, three hours a week; so, too, in all subsequent 
 instances.] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 58 
   
 WASHINGTON. 
   
 To profess oneself disappointed with Washington in this first week of 
 April, 1899, would be like complaining of the gauntness of a rosebush in 
 December. What would you have? It is not the season, either politically 
 or atmospherically. Congress is gone, and spring has not come. In the 
 city of leafy avenues there is not a leaf to be seen, and, except the 
 irrepressible crocus, not a flower. A fortnight hence, as I am assured, 
 the capital of the Great Republic will have put on a regal robe of 
 magnolia and other blossoms, that will "knock spots out of" Solomon in 
 all his glory. In the meantime, the trees line the avenues in skeleton 
 rows, like a pyrotechnic set-piece before it is ignited. It is useless 
 to pretend, then, that I have seen Washington. The trumpet of March has 
 blown, the pennon of May is not yet unfurled; and even the cloudless 
 sunshine of the past two days has only reduplicated the skeleton trees 
 in skeleton shadows. Washington is not responsible for the tardiness of 
 the spring. It would be unjust to take umbrage at the city because one 
 finds none in its avenues. 
   
 Yet I cannot but feel that I have, so to speak, found Washington out.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 59 
   
 I 
 have chanced upon her without her make-up, and seen the real face of the 
 city divested of its wig of leafage and rouge of blossoms. Here, for the 
 first time, at any rate, I am impressed by that sense of rawness and 
 incompleteness which is said to be characteristic of America. Washington 
 will one day be a magnificent city, of that there is no doubt; but for 
 the present it is distinctly unfinished. The very breadth of its 
 avenues, contrasted with the comparative lowness of the buildings which 
 line them, gives it the air rather of a magnified and glorified frontier 
 township than of a great capital on the European scale. Here, for the 
 first time, I am really conscious of the newness of things. The eastern 
 cities--Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore--are, in effect, not a 
 whit newer than most English towns. Oxford and Cambridge, no doubt, and 
 a few cathedral cities, give one a habitual consciousness of dwelling 
 among the relics of the past. They are our Nuremburg or Prague, Siena or 
 Perugia. In most English cities, on the other hand, as in London itself, 
 one has no habitual sense of the antiquity of one's surroundings. Apart 
 from a few tourist-haunted monuments, which the resident passes with 
 scarcely a glance, the general run of buildings and streets, if not 
 palpably modern, can at most lay claim to a respectable, or 
 disreputable, middle-age. Now, an eminently respectable middle-age is 
 precisely the characteristic of the central regions of Philadelphia and 
 Baltimore; while in New York both reputable and disreputable middle-age 
 are amply represented. One may almost say that these Eastern cities are 
 fundamentally old-fashioned, and that all their modern mechanism of 
 electric cars, telephone wires, and what not, is but a thin and 
 transparent outer network, through which the older order of things is 
 everywhere peering. And from this very contrast between the old and the 
 new, this sense of visible time-strata in the structure of a city, there 
 results a very real effect of age. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 60 
   
 Here, in Washington, one instinctively craves for something of that 
 uniformity which one instinctively deprecates as an ideal for New York. 
 The buildings on the main streets are too haphazard, like the books on 
 an ill-arranged shelf: folios, quartos, and duodecimos huddled pell-mell 
 together. But when some approach to a definite style is achieved, how 
 noble will be the radiating vistas of this spacious city! The plan of 
 the avenues and streets, as has been aptly said, suggests a cartwheel 
 superimposed upon a gridiron--an arrangement, by the way, which may be 
 studied on a small scale in Carlsruhe. The result is dire bewilderment 
 to the traveller; my bump of locality, usually not ill-developed, seems 
 to shrink into a positive indentation before the problems presented in 
 such formulas as "K Street, corner of 13th Street, N.E." But from the 
 Capitol, whence most of the avenues spread fanwise, the views they offer 
 are superb; and Pennsylvania Avenue, leading to the Government offices 
 and the White House, will one day, undoubtedly, be one of the great 
 streets of the world. For the present its beauty is not heightened by 
 the new Postal Department, a massive but somewhat forbidding structure 
 in grey granite, which dominates and frowns upon the whole street. From 
 certain points of view, it seems almost to dwarf the Washington Obelisk, 
 the loftiest stone structure in the world. It is a pity that this fine 
 monument should be placed in such a low situation, on the very shore of 
 the Potomac. From the central parts of the city it loses much of its 
 effect, but seen from the distance it stands forth impressively. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 61 
   
 People are discontented, it would seem, with the White House, and talk 
 of replacing it with a larger and showier edifice. The latter change, at 
 any rate, would be a change for the worse. There could not be a more 
 appropriate and dignified residence for the Chief Magistrate of a 
 republic. On the other hand, one cannot but foresee a gradual enrichment 
 and ennoblement of the interior of the Capitol. Externally it is 
 magnificent, especially now that the side towards the city has been 
 terraced and balustraded; but internally its decorations are quite 
 unworthy of modern America. The floors, the doors, the cornices and 
 mouldings are cheap in material, dingily garish in colour. Especially 
 painful are the crude blue-and-yellow mosaic tiles of the corridors. The 
 mural decorations belong to several artistic periods, all equally 
 debased. On the whole, it is inconceivable that Congress should for long 
 content itself with an abode which, without being venerable, is simply 
 out of date. The main architectural proportions of the interior are 
 dignified enough. What is wanted is merely the transmutation of stucco 
 into marble, painted pine into oak, and pseudo-Italian arabesques into 
 American frescoes and mosaics. Why should Congress itself be more meanly 
 housed than its Library? 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 62 
   
 This new Library of Congress is certainly the crown and glory of the 
 Washington of to-day. It is an edifice and an institution of which any 
 nation might justly boast. It is simple in design, rich in material, 
 elaborate, and for the most part beautiful, in decoration. The general 
 effect of the entrance hall and galleries is at first garish, and some 
 details of the decoration will scarcely bear looking into. Yet the 
 building is, on the whole, in fresco, mosaic, and sculpture, a veritable 
 treasure-house of contemporary American art. Even in this clear Southern 
 climate, the effect of gaudiness will in time pass off. Fifty years 
 hence, perhaps, when there are no living susceptibilities to be hurt, 
 some of the less successful panels and medallions may be "hatched over 
 again, and hatched different." But many of the decorations, I am 
 convinced, will prove possessions for ever to the American people. As 
 for the Rotunda Reading Room, it is, I think, almost above criticism in 
 its combination of dignity with splendour. Far be it from me to 
 belittle that great and liberal institution, the British Museum Reading 
 Room. It is considerably larger than this one; it is no less imposing in 
 its severe simplicity; and it offers the serious student a vaster quarry 
 of books to draw upon, together with wider elbow-room and completer 
 accommodations. But the Library of Congress is still more liberal, for 
 it admits all the world without even the formality of applying for a 
 ticket; and it substitutes for the impressiveness of simplicity the 
 allurements of splendour. It is impossible to conceive a more brilliant 
 spectacle than this Rotunda when it is lighted at night by nearly 
 fifteen-hundred incandescent lamps. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 63 
   
 Nor is it possible for me to 
 describe in this place the mechanical marvels of the institution--the 
 huge underground boiler-house, with its sixteen boilers; the 
 electrician's room, clean and bright as a new dollar, with its "purring 
 dynamos" and its immense switch-board; the tunnel through which books 
 are delivered by electric trolley to the legislators in the Capitol, 
 within eight minutes of the time they are applied for; and, most 
 wonderful of all, the endless chain, with its series of baskets, whereby 
 books are not only brought down to the reading room, but re-delivered, 
 at the mere touch of a button on whatever "deck" of the nine-storied 
 "book-stacks" they happen to belong to. So ingenious is this triumph of 
 mechanism that the baskets seem positively to go through complex 
 processes of thought and selection. Talking of thought and selection, by 
 the way, every one connected with the library speaks with enthusiasm of 
 President McKinley's wise and public-spirited choice of the new chief 
 librarian. Mr. Herbert Putnam, late of the Boston Public Library, is the 
 ideal man for the post, and his appointment was made, not only without 
 suspicion of jobbery, but in the teeth of strong political influence. 
 Mr. McKinley's action in this matter is considered to be not only right 
 in itself, but an invaluable precedent. 
   
 Let me not be understood, I beg, to make light of the National Capital. 
 I merely say that to the outward eye it is not yet the city it is 
 manifestly destined to become. Its splendid potentialities do some wrong 
 to its eminently spacious and seemly actuality. But to the mind's eye, 
 to the ideal sense, it has the imperishable beauty of absolute fitness. 
 Omniscient Baedeker informs us that when it was founded there was some 
 thought of calling it "Federal City. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VI Pg 64 
   
 ." How much finer, in its heroic and 
 yet human associations, is the name it bears! Since Alfred the Great, 
 the Anglo-Saxon race has produced no loftier or purer personality than 
 George Washington, and his country could not blazon on her shield a more 
 inspiring name. Carlyle's treatment of Washington is, perhaps, the most 
 unpardonable of his many similar offences. One almost wonders at the 
 forgiving spirit in which the decorators of the Library of Congress have 
 inscribed upon the walls of the new building certain maxims from the 
 splenetic Sage. And if the city is named with exquisite fitness, so are 
 its radiating avenues. Each of them takes its name from one of the 
 States of the Union--names which, as Stevenson long ago pointed out, 
 form an unrivalled array of "sweet and sonorous vocables." In its whole 
 conception, Washington is an ideal capital for the United States--not 
 least typical, perhaps, in its factitiousness, since this Republic is 
 not so much a product of natural development as a deliberate creation of 
 will and intelligence. It represents the struggle of an Idea against the 
 crude forces of nature and human nature. The Capitol, with its clear and 
 logical design, is as aptly symbolic of its history and function as are 
 our Houses of Parliament, with their bewildering but grandiose 
 agglomeration of shafts and turrets, spires and pinnacles; and the two 
 buildings should rank side by side in the esteem of the English-speaking 
 peoples, as the twin foci of our civilisation. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 65 
 BOSTON. 
   
 Much has been said of American hospitality; too much cannot possibly be 
 said. Here am I in Boston, the guest of one of the foremost clubs of the 
 city. I sit, as I write, at my bedroom window, with a view over the 
 whole of Boston Common, and the beautiful spires of the Back-Bay region 
 beyond. I step out on my balcony, and the gilded dome of the State 
 House--"the Hub of the Universe"--is but a stone's-throw off. Through 
 the leafless branches of the trees I can see the back of St. Gaudens' 
 beautiful Shaw Monument, and beyond it the graceful dip of upper 
 Beacon-street. My room is as spacious and luxurious as heart can desire, 
 lighted by half a dozen electric lamps, and with a private bath-room 
 attached, which is itself nearly as large as the bedroom assigned me in 
 the "swagger" hotel of New York--an establishment, by the way, of which 
 it has been wittily said that its purpose is "to provide exclusiveness 
 for the masses. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 66 
   
 ." All the comforts of the club are at my command; the 
 rooms are delightful, the food and service excellent. In short, I could 
 not be more conveniently or agreeably situated. Of course I pay the club 
 charges for my room and meals, but it is mere hospitality to allow me to 
 do so. And how do I come to be established in these quarters? The little 
 story is absolutely commonplace, but all the more typical. 
   
 In Washington I made the acquaintance of a gentleman who invited me to 
 lunch at the leading diplomatic and social club. I had no claim upon him 
 of any sort, beyond the most casual introduction. He regaled me with 
 little-neck clams, terrapin, and all the delicacies of the season, and 
 invited to meet me half a dozen of the most interesting men in the city, 
 all of them strangers to me until that moment. I found myself seated 
 next an exceedingly amiable man, whose name I had not caught when we 
 were introduced. One of the first things he asked me was--not "What did 
 I think of America?" no one ever asked me that--but "Where was I going 
 next?" To Boston. 
   
 "Where was I going to put up?" I thought of going to the T---- Hotel. 
 "Much better go to the U---- Club," he replied; "I've no doubt they will 
 be able to give you a room. As soon as lunch is over, I shall telegraph 
 to the club and make sure that everything is ready for you." I, of 
 course, thanked him warmly. "But what credentials shall I present?" "You 
 don't require any--just present your card. I shall make it all right for 
 you." This was a man whom I had met ten minutes before, whose name I did 
 not know, and to whom I had been introduced by a man whom I barely knew! 
 It did not appear that he, on his side, knew or cared about anything I 
 had said or done in the world. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 67 
   
 . He simply obeyed the national instinct of 
 courtesy and helpfulness. And he was as good as his word. Arriving in 
 Boston at a somewhat unearthly hour in the morning, I found my room 
 allotted me and the club servants ready to receive me with every 
 attention. I felt like the Prince in the fairy tale, only that I had 
 done nothing whatever to oblige the good fairy. 
   
 Another example. I had a letter of introduction to the Governor of one 
 of the States of the Union, probably (what does not always happen) the 
 most universally respected man in the State, and a member of one of its 
 oldest and most distinguished families. I left the letter, with my card, 
 at this gentleman's house, and in the course of a few hours received a 
 note from his wife, telling me that, owing to a death in the family, 
 they were not then entertaining at all, but saying that the Governor 
 would call upon me to offer me any courtesy or assistance in his power. 
 And so he did. He called, not once, but twice. He presented me with a 
 card for one of the leading clubs of the city, and if my time had 
 allowed me to avail myself of his courtesy, he would have put me in the 
 way of seeing any or all of the State institutions to the best 
 advantage. The governorship of an American State, let me add, is no 
 ornamental sinecure. This was not only a man in high position, but a 
 very busy man. Is there any other country where a mere letter of 
 introduction is so generously honoured? If so, it is to me an 
 undiscovered country. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 68 
   
 These are but two cases out of a hundred. The Americans are said to be 
 the busiest people in the world (I have my doubts on that point), but 
 they have always leisure to give a stranger "a good time." Even, be it 
 noted, during the working hours of the day. My evenings being occupied 
 with theatre-going, I could not accept invitations to dinner; wherefore 
 those who were hospitably inclined towards me had to invite me to lunch; 
 and a luncheon party in America invariably absorbs the best part of an 
 afternoon. A score of these delightful gatherings will always remain in 
 my memory. The "bright" American is, to my thinking, the best talker in 
 the world--certainly the best talker in the English language. A light 
 and facile humour, a power of giving a pleasant little sparkle even to 
 sufficiently commonplace sayings, is in this country the rule and not 
 the exception. I must have met at these luncheon parties, and actually 
 conversed with, at least a hundred different men of all ages and 
 occupations, and I do not remember among them a single dull, pompous, 
 morose, or pedantic person. The parties did not usually exceed six or 
 eight in number, so that there was no necessity for breaking up into 
 groups. The shuttlecock of conversation was lightly bandied to and fro 
 across the round table. Each took his share and none took more. All 
 topics--even the, burning question of "expansion"--were touched upon 
 gaily, humorously, and in perfect good temper. 
   
 It is said that American conversation among men tends to degenerate into 
 a mere exchange of anecdotes. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 69 
 . I can remember only one party which was 
 in the least degree open to this reproach; and there the anecdotes were 
 without exception so good, and so admirably told, that I, for one, 
 should have been sorry to exchange them for even the loftiest discourse 
 on Shakespeare and the musical glasses. Here, for instance, is an 
 example of the American gift of picturesque exaggeration. On board one 
 of the Florida steamboats, which have to be built with exceedingly light 
 draught to get over the frequent shallows of the rivers, an Englishman 
 accosted the captain with the remark, "I understand, captain, that you 
 think nothing of steaming across a meadow where there's been a heavy 
 fall of dew." "Well, I don't know about that," replied the captain, "but 
 it's true we have sometimes to send a man ahead with a watering-pot!" Or 
 take, again, the story of the Southern colonel who was conducted to the 
 theatre to see Salvini's Othello. He witnessed the performance gravely, 
 and remarked at the close, "That was a mighty good show, and I don't see 
 but the coon did as well as any of 'em." A third anecdote that charmed 
 me on this occasion was that of the man who, being invited to take a 
 drink, replied, "No, no, I solemnly promised my dear dead mother never 
 to touch a drop; besides, boys, it's too early in the morning; besides, 
 I've just had one!" 
   
 Furthermore, as I recall the party in question, I feel that I am wrong 
 in implying that the conversation was mainly composed of anecdotes. It 
 was mainly composed of narratives; but that is a different matter. There 
 is a clear distinction between the mere story-teller and the narrator. 
 Two or three of the party were brilliant narrators, and delighted us 
 with accounts of personal experiences, quaint character-sketches, novels 
 in a nutshell. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 70 
   
 One of the guests was, without exception, the most 
 ready-witted man I ever met. His inexhaustible gift of lightning 
 repartee I saw illustrated on another occasion, when he presided at the 
 midnight "gambol" of a Bohemian club, at which it needed the utmost tact 
 and presence of mind to "ride the whirlwind and direct the storm." At 
 the luncheon party, he related several episodes from his chequered 
 journalistic career in a style so easy and yet so graphic that one felt, 
 if they could have been taken down in shorthand, they would have been 
 literature ready-made. It is a clear injustice to confound such talk as 
 this with a mere bandying of Joe-Millers. 
   
 The one drawback to American hospitality is that it is apt to be too 
 profuse. I have more than once had to offer a mild protest against being 
 entertained by a hard-working brother journalist on a scale that would 
 have befitted a millionaire. The possibility of returning the compliment 
 in kind affords the canny Scot but poor consolation. A dinner three 
 times more lavish and expensive than you want is not sweetened by the 
 thought that you may, in turn, give your host a dinner three times more 
 expensive and lavish than _he_ wants. Both parties, on this system, 
 suffer in digestion and in pocket, while only Delmonico is the gainer. 
 It seems to me, on the whole, that in this country the millionaire is 
 too commonly allowed to fix the standard of expenditure. Society would 
 not be less, but more, agreeable if, instead of always emulating the 
 splendours of Lucullus, people now and then studied the art of Horatian 
 frugality. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 71 
   
 And I note that in club life, if the plutocrat sets the 
 standard of expenditure, the aristocrat looks to the training of the 
 servants. Their obsequiousness is almost painful. There is not the 
 slightest trace of democratic equality in their dress, their manners, or 
 their speech. 
   
 Take it all and all, America is a trying place of sojourn for the 
 aforesaid canny Scot--the man who without being stingy (oh, dear, no!) 
 has "all his generous impulses under perfect control." The sixpences do 
 not "bang" in this country: they crepitate, they crackle, as though shot 
 from a Maxim quick-firer. For instance, the lowest electric-trolley fare 
 is twopence-halfpenny. It is true that for five cents you can, if you 
 wish it, ride fifteen or twenty miles; but that advantage becomes 
 inappreciable when you don't want to ride more than half a mile. Take, 
 again, the harmless, necessary operation of shaving. In a good English 
 barber's shop it is a brief and not unpleasant process; in an American 
 "tonsorial parlour" it is a lingering and costly torture. One of the 
 many reasons which lead me to regard the Americans as a leisurely people 
 rather than a nation of "hustlers" is the patience with which they 
 submit to the long-drawn tyranny of the barber. In England, one grudges 
 five minutes for a shave, and one pays from fourpence to sixpence; in 
 America one can hardly escape in twenty-five minutes, and one pays (with 
 the executioner's tip)[G] from a shilling to eighteenpence. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 72 
   
 . The charge 
 would be by no means excessive if one wanted or enjoyed all the endless 
 processes to which one is subjected; but for my part I would willingly 
 pay double to escape them. The essential part of the business, the 
 actual shaving, is, as a rule, badly performed, with a heavy hand, and a 
 good deal of needless pawing-about of the patient's head. But when the 
 shave is over the horrors are only beginning. First, your whole face is 
 cooked for several minutes in relays of towels steeped in boiling water. 
 Then a long series of essences is rubbed into it, generally with the 
 torturer's naked hand. The sequence of these essences varies in 
 different "parlours," but one especially loathsome hell-brew, known as 
 "witchhazel" is everywhere inevitable. Then your wounds have to be 
 elaborately doctored with stinging chemicals; your hair, which has been 
 hopelessly touzled in the pawing process, has to be drenched in some 
 sickly-smelling oil and brushed; your moustache has to be lubricated 
 and combed; and at last you escape from the tormentor's clutches, 
 irritated, enervated, hopelessly late for an important appointment, and 
 so reeking with unholy odours that you feel as though all great 
 Neptune's ocean would scarcely wash you clean again. Only once or twice 
 have I submitted, out of curiosity, to the whole interminable process. I 
 now cut it short, not without difficulty, before the "witchhazel" stage 
 is reached, and am regarded with blank astonishment and disapproval by 
 the tonsorial professor, who feels his art and mystery insulted in his 
 person, and is scarcely mollified by a ten-cent tip. Americans, on the 
 other hand, go through all these processes, and more, with stolid and 
 long-suffering patience. Yet this nation is credited with having 
 invented the maxim "Time is money," and is supposed to act up to it with 
 feverish consistency! 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 73 
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--As I have said a good deal about clubs in this letter, let 
 me add to it a word as to the influence of club life in keeping America 
 in touch with England. At all the leading clubs one or two English daily 
 papers and all the more important weekly papers are taken as a matter of 
 course; so that the American club-man has not the slightest difficulty 
 in keeping abreast of the social, political, and literary life of 
 England. As a matter of fact, the educated American's knowledge of 
 England every day puts to shame the Englishman's ignorance of America. 
 Reciprocity in this matter would be greatly to the advantage of both 
 countries. I am much mistaken if there is a single club in London where 
 American periodicals are so well represented on the reading-room table 
 as are English periodicals in every club in New York. Yet there is 
 assuredly no dearth of interesting weekly papers in America, some 
 connected with daily papers, others independent. It may be said that 
 they are not taken at English clubs because they would not be read. If 
 so, the more's the pity; but I do not think it is so; for this is a case 
 in which supply would beget demand. At any rate, there must be numbers 
 of people in London who would be glad to keep fairly in touch with 
 American life, if they could do so without too much trouble. Why should 
 there not be an Anglo-American social club, organised with the special 
 purpose of bringing America home (in a literal sense) to London and 
 England? Why should not (say) the Century Club of New York be reproduced 
 in London, with American periodicals as fully represented in its 
 news-room and reading-room as are English periodicals in an American 
 club of the first rank? 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VII Pg 74 
   
 Interest in and sympathy with America would be 
 the implied condition of membership; and by a judiciously-devised system 
 of non-resident membership, American visitors to London would be enabled 
 to read their home newspapers in greater comfort than at the existing 
 American reading-rooms, and would, moreover, come into easy contact with 
 sympathetically-minded Englishmen, to their mutual pleasure and profit. 
 Such a club might, in process of time, become a potent factor in 
 international relations, and form a new bond of union, of quite 
 appreciable strength, between the two countries. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 75 
 [Footnote G: I had read or been told that the tip system did not obtain 
 in America, except in the case of negroes and waiters. A very few days 
 in New York undeceived me. I went twice to a barber's shop in the 
 basement of the house in which I lived, paid fifteen cents to be shaved, 
 and gave the operator nothing; but at my second visit I found myself so 
 lowered upon by that portly and heavy-moustached citizen that I never 
 again ventured to place myself under his razor, but went to a more 
 distant establishment and tipped from the outset. There are, indeed, 
 certain classes of people--railroad conductors for instance--who do not 
 expect the tips which in England they consider their due; but, according 
 to my experience, the safe rule in America is, "when in doubt--tip."] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 76 
 CHICAGO. 
   
 The luxury of my quarters in Boston seduced me into a disquisition on 
 American hospitality which would have come in equally well with 
 reference to any other city. Were I to search very deeply into my soul 
 (an exercise much in vogue in Boston), I might perhaps find reasons for 
 my rambling off. To say that Boston did not interest me would be the 
 reverse of the truth. It interested me deeply; but it did not excite me 
 with a sense of novelty or vastness. One can only repeat the obvious 
 truth that it is like an exceptionally dignified and stately English 
 town. One instinctively looks around for a cathedral, and finds the 
 State House in its stead. To the founders of this city, the glory of God 
 was not a thing to be furthered, or even typified, by any work of men's 
 hands; but the salvation of men's souls, they thought, could be best 
 achieved in a well-ordered democratic polity. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 77 
   
 Their descendants have of 
 late years taken to decorating their places of worship, and Trinity 
 Church (by H.H. Richardson), and the new Old South Church, are ambitious 
 and beautiful pieces of ecclesiastical architecture. But the old Old 
 South Meeting-House, the ecclesiastical centre of the city, is the flat 
 and somewhat sour negation of all that is expressed or implied in an 
 English cathedral. Let me not be understood to disparage the Old South 
 or the spirit which fashioned it. In my eyes, minster and meeting-house 
 are equally interesting historic monuments, and to my hereditary 
 instincts the latter is the more sympathetic. I merely note the fact 
 that the most conspicuous edifice in Boston, its Duomo, its St. Peter's 
 or St. Paul's, is dedicated, not to the glory of God, but to the 
 well-being of man. 
   
 Not physically, of course, but intellectually, Boston has been likened 
 to Edinburgh. The parallel is fair enough, with this important 
 reservation, that the theological element in the atmosphere is not 
 Presbyterian but Unitarian. The Boston of to-day, it must be added, 
 especially resembles Edinburgh in the fact that its pre-eminence as an 
 intellectual centre has virtually departed. The _Atlantic Monthly_ 
 survives, as _Blackwood_, survives, a relic of the great days of old; 
 but Boston has no Scott Monument to bear visual testimony to her 
 spiritual achievement. She ought certainly to treat herself to a worthy 
 Emerson Monument on the Common, whither the boy Emerson used to drive 
 his mother's cows: not, of course, a Gothic pile like that which 
 commemorates the genius of Scott, but a statue by the incomparable St. 
 Gaudens, under a modest classic canopy. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 78 
   
 But if, or when, such a monument is erected, it will absolve no one of 
 the duty of making a pilgrimage to Concord. Even if it had no historic 
 or literary associations, this simple, dignified, beautiful New England 
 village, with its plain frame houses and its stately elm avenues, would 
 be well worth a visit. Village I call it, but township would be a better 
 word. Let no one go there with less than half a day to spare, for the 
 places of interest are widely scattered. My companion and I went first 
 to Walden Pond, then to the Emerson and Hawthorne houses, then to that 
 ideal burying-place, Sleepy Hollow, where Emerson and Hawthorne and 
 Thoreau rest side by side, and finally to the bridge-- 
   
   Where once the embattled farmers stood, 
   And fired the shot heard round the world. 
   
 Everything here is beautifully appropriate. The commemorative statue of 
 the "minute-man" with his musket is simple and expressive, and the four 
 lines of Emerson's hymn graven on the pedestal are the right words 
 written by the right man, entwining, as it were, the historical and 
 literary associations of the place. An exquisite appropriateness, too, 
 presides over the Poets' Corner of Sleepy Hollow. The grave of Emerson 
 is marked by a rough block of pure white quartz, in which is inserted a 
 bronze tablet bearing the words:-- 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 79 
 The passive master lent his hand 
   To the vast soul that o'er him planned. 
   
 Altogether, among the places of pilgrimage of the English-speaking race, 
 there is none more satisfactory or more inspiring than Concord, Mass. 
   
 If Boston is no longer a great centre of literary production, it 
 remains, with its noble public library in its midst, and with Harvard 
 University on its outskirts, a great centre of culture. I shall always 
 remember a luncheon party at Harvard, where I was the guest of an 
 eminent Shakespearean critic, and had for my fellow guests a very 
 learned Dante scholar (one of the most delightful talkers imaginable), a 
 famous psychologist, a political economist, and a lecturer on English 
 literature. The talk fell upon the depopulation of New England, or 
 rather the substitution of an alien race for (I had almost said) the 
 indigenous Yankee stock. There was some discussion as to whether the 
 Yankee was really dying out, or had merely spread throughout the West, 
 taking with him and disseminating the qualities which had made the 
 greatness of New England. It was not denied, of course, that westward 
 emigration has much to do with the matter. The New England farmer, 
 unable to stand up against the competition of the prairies, has betaken 
 himself to the prairies so as to compete on the winning side. But one of 
 the company maintained that this did not account for the whole 
 phenomenon. "The real key to it," he said, "lies in such a family 
 history as mine. My grandmother was the youngest of thirteen children; 
 my mother was the eldest of five; my brother and I are two; and we are 
 unmarried." 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 80 
 I am inclined to think that this story of a dwindling stock is typical, 
 not for New England alone, but for other parts of the Union. It seems as 
 though the pressure of life in the Eastern States, and perhaps some 
 subtle influence of climate upon temperament, were rendering the people 
 of old Teutonic blood--British, Dutch, and German--unwilling to face the 
 responsibility of large families, and so were giving the country over to 
 the later and usually inferior immigrant and his progeny. I am not sure 
 that it might not be well to cultivate a new sense of social duty in 
 this matter. Is it Utopian to suggest a policy of "America for the 
 Americans"--some effectual restriction of immigration before it is too 
 late, so as to leave room for the natural increase of the American 
 people? This is an "expansion," a "taking up of the white man's burden," 
 which would command my warmest sympathy. It is to the interest of the 
 whole world that the America of the future should be peopled by "white 
 men" in every sense of the word. 
   
 New England, however, cannot be utterly depopulated of its old stocks, 
 for at every turn you come up against those good old Puritan names which 
 bespeak a longer ancestry than many an English peer can claim. I find 
 among the signatures to a petition against the reinstatement of an 
 elevated railroad in Boston, such names as Adams, Morse, Lowell, 
 Emerson, Bowditch, Lothrop, Storey, Dabney, Whipple, Ticknor, and Hale. 
 Of the fifty signatures, only three (or, at the outside five, if we 
 include two doubtful cases) are of other than English origin. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 81 
   
 . In 
 contrast to this I may mention another list of names which came under my 
 notice at the same time--a list of the purchasers at a sale by auction 
 of seats for a New York first-night. Here twenty-six names out of forty 
 are obviously of non-English origin, while several of the remaining 
 fourteen have a distinctly Hebraic ring. 
   
 Though very much smaller than New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, 
 Boston is essentially a great city, with a very animated street life, 
 and nothing in the least provincial about it. But it is not in these 
 great capitals, not even in this marvellous Chicago where I am now 
 writing, that one most clearly realises the bewildering potentialities 
 of the United States. It is precisely in the minor, the provincial 
 cities, which to us in Europe are no more than names--perhaps not so 
 much. For instance, what does the average Englishman know of Detroit?[H] 
   
 What State is it in? Is it in the North or the South, the East or the 
 West? For my part I knew in a general way, having been there before, 
 that Detroit was situated somewhere between Chicago and Niagara Falls, 
 but until a few days ago I should have been puzzled to describe its 
 situation more precisely. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 82 
   
 Well, I arrive in this obscure, insignificant 
 place, and find it a city of considerably more than a quarter of a 
 million inhabitants, beautifully laid out, magnificently paved and 
 lighted, its broad and noble avenues lined with handsome commercial 
 houses and roomy if not always beautiful villas, trees shading its 
 sidewalks, electric cars swimming in an endless stream along its 
 bustling thoroughfares, its imposing public library swarming with 
 readers, its theatres crowded, its parks alive with bicyclists, an eager 
 activity, whether in business, culture, or recreation, manifesting 
 itself on every hand. Or take, again, Buffalo, somewhat larger than 
 Detroit, but still by no means a city of the first rank. Everything that 
 I have said of Detroit applies to it, with the addition that some of 
 its commercial buildings are not only palatial in their dimensions, but 
 original and impressive in their architecture. An afternoon stroll along 
 Woodward-avenue, Detroit, or Main-street, Buffalo, reassures one as to 
 the future--the physical, at any rate--of the American people. The 
 prevailing type is, if not definitely Anglo-Saxon, at any rate Teutonic, 
 and the average of physical development is very high, especially among 
 the women. It may have some bearing upon what I have been saying above 
 to note that, in point of stature and beauty, the Bostonian woman, as a 
 rule, seemed to me to fall far short of her sisters in the other cities 
 I have visited. I have before my mind's eye many distinguished and 
 delightful exceptions to this rule; but, postponing gallantry to 
 sociological candour, I state my general impression for what it is 
 worth. 
   
 Here, in Chicago, gallantry and candour go hand in hand. A legend of the 
 envious East represents that a Chicago young man travelling in Louisiana 
 wrote to his sweetheart: "DEAR MAMIE,--I have shot an alligator. When I 
 have shot another, I will send you a pair of slippers. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER VIII Pg 83 
  The implication 
 is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, a base and baseless 
 calumny. New York itself does not present a higher average of female 
 beauty than Chicago, and that is saying a great deal. But I must not 
 enlarge on this fascinating topic. A Judgment of Paris is always a 
 delicate business, and I am in nowise called upon to make the invidious 
 award. Were I compelled to undertake it, I could only distribute the 
 apple, and my homage, in equal shares to the goddesses of the East, the 
 South, and the Middle West. 
   
 When I was in Chicago in '77, it was the metropolis of the West, without 
 qualification. Now it is merely the frontier city of the Middle West. 
 From the standpoint of Omaha and Denver, it seems to fill the Eastern 
 horizon, and shut out the further view. Many stories are told to show 
 how absolutely and instinctively your true Westerner ignores the Eastern 
 States and cities. Here is one of the most characteristic. A little girl 
 came into the smoking car of a train somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska, 
 and stood beside her father, who was in conversation with another man. 
 The father put his arm round her and said to his companion, "She's been 
 a great traveller, this little girl of mine. She's only ten years old, 
 and she's been all over the United States." 
   
 "You don't say!" replied the other; "all over the United States?" 
   
 "Yes, sir; all over the United States," said the proud father; and then 
 added, as though the detail was scarcely worth mentioning, "except east 
 of Chicago." 
   
 Chicago, unfortunately, marks the limit of my wanderings; so I shall 
 return to England without having seen anything of the United States, 
 except for a sort of Pisgah-glimpse from the tower of the Auditorium. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 84 
 [Footnote H: My own visit to Detroit illustrated this vagueness of the 
 average Englishman. I was anxious to see Mr. James A. Herne's famous 
 play, _Shore Acres_, and learned from Mr. Herne that it would be played 
 by a travelling company at Buffalo on a certain date. I carefully noted 
 the place and day, but contrived to mix up Buffalo and Detroit in my 
 mind, and arrived on the appointed day in Detroit--nearly two hundred 
 and fifty miles from the appointed place! It was as though, having 
 arranged to be in Brighton at a certain time, one should go instead to 
 Scarborough.] 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 85 
   
 CHICAGO. 
   
 When I was in America twenty-two years ago, Chicago was the city that 
 interested me least. Coming straight from San Francisco--which, in the 
 eyes of a youthful student of Bret Harte, seemed the fitting metropolis 
 of one of the great realms of romance--I saw in Chicago the negation of 
 all that had charmed me on the Pacific slope. It was a flat and grimy 
 abode of mere commerce, a rectilinear Glasgow; and to an Edinburgh man, 
 or rather boy, no comparison could appear more damaging. How different 
 is the impression produced by the Chicago of to-day! In 1877 the city 
 was extensive enough, indeed, and handsome to boot, in a commonplace, 
 cast-iron fashion. It was a chequer-board of Queen-Victoria-streets. 
 To-day its area is appalling, its architecture grandiose. It is the 
 young giant among the cities of the earth, and it stands but on the 
 threshold of its destiny. It embraces in its unimaginable amplitude 
 every extreme of splendour and squalor. Walking in Dearborn-street or 
 Adams-street of a cloudy afternoon, you think yourself in a frowning and 
 fuliginous city of Dis, piled up by superhuman and apparently sinister 
 powers. Cycling round the boulevards of a sunny morning, you rejoice in 
 the airy and spacious greenery of the Garden City.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 86 
   
 . Driving along the 
 Lake Shore to Lincoln Park in the flush of sunset, you wonder that the 
 dwellers in this street of palaces should trouble their heads about 
 Naples or Venice, when they have before their very windows the 
 innumerable laughter, the ever-shifting opalescence, of their 
 fascinating inland sea. Plunging in the electric cars through the river 
 subway, and emerging in the West Side, you realise that the slums of 
 Chicago, if not quite so tightly packed as those of New York or London, 
 are no whit behind them in the other essentials of civilised barbarism. 
 Chicago, more than any other city of my acquaintance, suggests that 
 antique conception of the underworld which placed Elysium and Tartarus 
 not only on the same plane, but, so to speak, round the corner from each 
 other. 
   
 As the elephant (or rather the megatherium) to the giraffe, so is the 
 colossal business block of Chicago to the sky-scraper of New York. There 
 is a proportion and dignity in the mammoth buildings of Chicago which is 
 lacking in most of those which form the jagged sky-line of Manhattan 
 Island. For one reason or another--no doubt some difference in the 
 system of land tenure is at the root of the matter--the Chicago 
 architect has usually a larger plot of ground to operate on than his New 
 York colleague, and can consequently give his building breadth and depth 
 as well as height. Before the lanky giants of the Eastern metropolis, 
 one has generally to hold one's aesthetic judgment in abeyance. They are 
 not precisely ugly, but still less, as a rule, can they be called 
 beautiful. They are simply astounding manifestations of human energy and 
 heaven-storming audacity. They stand outside the pale of aesthetics, like 
 the Eiffel Tower or the Forth Bridge. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 87 
 But in Chicago proportion goes 
 along with mere height, and many of the business houses are, if not 
 beautiful, at least aesthetically impressive--for instance, the grim 
 fortalice of Marshall Field & Company, the Masonic Temple, the Women's 
 Temperance Temple (a structure with a touch of real beauty), and such 
 vast cities within the city as the Great Northern Building and the 
 Monadnock Block. The last-named edifice alone is said to have a daily 
 population of 6000. A city ordinance now limits the height of buildings 
 to ten stories; but even that is a respectable allowance. Moreover, it 
 is found that where giant constructions cluster too close together, they 
 (literally) stand in each other's light, and the middle stories do not 
 let. Thus the heaven-storming era is probably over; but there is all the 
 more reason to feel assured that the business centre of Chicago will ere 
 long be not only grandiose but architecturally dignified and 
 satisfactory. A growing thirst for beauty has come upon the city, and 
 architects are earnestly studying how to assuage it. In magnificence of 
 internal decoration, Chicago can already challenge the world: for 
 instance, in the white marble vestibule and corridors of The Rookery, 
 and the noble hall of the Illinois Trust Bank. 
   
 At the same time, no account of the city scenery of Chicago is complete 
 without the admission that the gorges and canyons of its central 
 district are exceedingly draughty, smoky, and dusty. Even in these 
 radiant spring days, it fully acts up to its reputation as the Windy 
 City. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 88 
   
 This peculiarity renders it probably the most convenient place in 
 the world for the establishment of a Suicide Club on the Stevensonian 
 model. With your eyes peppered with dust, with your ears full of the 
 clatter of the Elevated Road, and with the prairie breezes playfully 
 buffeting you and waltzing with you by turns, as they eddy through the 
 ravines of Madison, Monroe, or Adams-street, you take your life in your 
 hand when you attempt the crossing of State-street, with its endless 
 stream of rattling waggons and clanging trolley-cars. New York does not 
 for a moment compare with Chicago in the roar and bustle and 
 bewilderment, of its street life. This remark will probably be resented 
 in New York, but it expresses the settled conviction of an impartial 
 pedestrian, who has spent a considerable portion of his life during the 
 past few weeks in "negotiating" the crossings of both cities. 
   
 On the other hand, I observe no eagerness on the part of New York to 
 contest the supremacy of Chicago in the matter of smoke. In this 
 respect, the eastern metropolis is to the western as Mont Blanc to 
 Vesuvius. The smoke of Chicago has a peculiar and aggressive 
 individuality, due, I imagine, to the natural clearness of the 
 atmosphere. It does not seem, like London smoke, to permeate and blend 
 with the air. It does not overhang the streets in a uniform canopy, but 
 sweeps across and about them in gusts and swirls, now dropping and now 
 lifting again its grimy curtain. You will often see the vista of a 
 gorge-like street so choked with a seeming thundercloud that you feel 
 sure a storm is just about to burst upon the city, until you look up at 
 the zenith and find it smiling and serene. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 89 
   
 Again and again a sudden 
 swirl of smoke across the street (like that which swept across 
 Fifth-avenue when the Windsor Hotel burst into flames) has led me to 
 prick up my ears for a cry of "Fire!" But Chicago is not so easily 
 alarmed. It is accustomed to having its airs from heaven blurred by 
 these blasts from hell. I know few spectacles more curious than that 
 which awaits you when you have shot up in the express elevator to the 
 top of the Auditorium tower--on the one hand, the blue and laughing 
 lake, on the other, the city belching volumes of smoke from its thousand 
 throats, as though a vaster Sheffield or Wolverhampton had been 
 transported by magic to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. What a 
 wonderful city Chicago will be when the commandment is honestly 
 enforced which declares, "Thou shalt consume thine own smoke!" 
   
 What a wonderful city Chicago will be! That is the ever-recurring burden 
 of one's cogitations. For Chicago is awake, and intelligently awake, to 
 her destinies; so much one perceives even in the reiterated complaints 
 that she is asleep. Discontent is the condition of progress, and Chicago 
 is not in the slightest danger of relapsing into a condition of inert 
 self-complacency. Her sons love her, but they chasten her. They are 
 never tired of urging her on, sometimes (it must be owned) with most 
 unfilial objurgations; and she, a quite unwearied Titan, is bracing up 
 her sinews for the great task of the coming century. I have given myself 
 a rendezvous in Chicago for 1925, when air-ships will no doubt make the 
 transit easy for my septuagenarian frame. Nowhere in the world, I am 
 sure, does the "to be continued in our next" interest take hold on one 
 with such a compulsive grip. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 90 
   
 Culture is pouring into Chicago as rapidly as pork or grain, and Chicago 
 is insatiate in asking for more. In going over the Public Library (a not 
 quite satisfactory building, though with some beautiful details) I was 
 most of all impressed by the army of iron-bound boxes which are 
 perpetually speeding to and fro between the library itself and no fewer 
 than fifty-seven distributing stations scattered throughout the city. "I 
 thought the number was forty-eight," said a friend who accompanied me. 
 "So it was last year," said the librarian. "We have set up nine more 
 stations during the interval." The Chicago Library boasts (no doubt 
 justly) that it circulates more books than any similar institution in 
 the world. Take, again, the University of Chicago: seven years ago (or, 
 say, at the outside ten) it had no existence, and its site was a dismal 
 swamp; to-day it is a handsome and populous centre of literary and 
 scientific culture. Observe, too, that it is by no means an oasis in the 
 desert, but is thoroughly in touch with the civic life around it. For 
 instance, it actively participates in the admirable work done by the 
 Hull House Settlement in South Halsted-street, and in the vigorous and 
 wide-spreading University Extension movement. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 91 
   
 At the present moment, Chicago is not a little resentful of the sharp 
 admonitions addressed to her by two of her aforesaid loving but exacting 
 children. One, Professor Charles Zueblin, has been telling her that "in 
 the arrogance of youth she has failed to realise that instead of being 
 one of the progressive cities of the world, she has been one of the 
 reckless, improvident, and shiftless cities." Professor Zueblin is not 
 content (for example) with her magnificent girdle of parks and 
 boulevards, but calls for smaller parks and breathing spaces in the 
 heart of her most crowded districts. He further maintains that her great 
 new sewage canal is a gigantically costly blunder; and indeed one cannot 
 but sympathise with the citizens of St. Louis in inquiring by what right 
 Chicago converts the Mississippi into her main sewer. But if Professor 
 Zueblin chastises Chicago with whips, Mr. Henry B. Fuller, it would 
 seem, lashes her with scorpions. Mr. Fuller is one of the leading 
 novelists of the city--for Chicago, be it known, had a nourishing and 
 characteristic literature of her own long before Mr. Dooley sprang into 
 fame. The author of _The Cliff-Dwellers_ is alleged to have said that 
 the Anglo-Saxon race was incapable of art, and that in this respect 
 Chicago was pre-eminently Anglo-Saxon. "Alleged," I say, for reports of 
 lectures in the American papers are always to be taken with caution, and 
 are very often as fanciful as Dr. Johnson's reports of the debates in 
 Parliament. The reporter is not generally a shorthand writer. He jots 
 down as much as he conveniently can of the lecturer's remarks, and 
 pieces them out from imagination. Thus, I am not at all sure what Mr. 
 Fuller really said; but there is no doubt whatever of the indignation 
 kindled by his diatribe. Deny her artistic capacities and sensibilities, 
 and you touch Chicago in her tenderest point. Moreover, Mr. Fuller's 
 onslaught encouraged several other like-minded critics to back him up, 
 so that the city has been writhing under the scourges of her 
 epigrammatists.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 92 
   
 . I have before me a letter to one of the evening papers, 
 written in a tone of academic sarcasm which proves that even the 
 supercilious and "donnish" element is not lacking in Chicago culture. "I 
 know a number of artists," says the writer, "who came to Chicago, and 
 after staying here for a while, went away and achieved much success in 
 New York, London, and Paris. The appreciation they received here gave 
 them the impetus to go elsewhere, and thus brought them fame and 
 fortune." Whatever foundation there may be for these jibes, they are in 
 themselves a sufficient evidence that Chicago is alive to her 
 opportunities and responsibilities. She is, in her own vernacular, 
 "making, culture hum." Mr. Fuller, I understand, reproached her with her 
 stockyards--an injustice which even Mr. Bernard Shaw would scarcely 
 have committed. Is it the fault of Chicago that the world is 
 carnivorous? Was not "Nature red in tooth and claw" several aeons before 
 Chicago was thought of? I do not understand that any unnecessary cruelty 
 is practised in the stockyards; and apart from that, I fail to see that 
 systematic slaughter of animals for food is any more disgusting than 
 sporadic butchery. But of the stockyards I can speak only from hearsay. 
 I shall not go to see them. If I have any spare time, I shall rather 
 spend it in a second visit to St. Gaudens' magnificent and magnificently 
 placed statue of Abraham Lincoln, surely one of the great works of art 
 of the century, and of the few entirely worthy monuments ever erected to 
 a national hero. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 93 
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--The above-mentioned Hull House Settlement in South 
 Halsted-street, under the direction of Miss Jane Addams, is probably the 
 most famous institution of its kind in America; but it is only one of 
 many. There is no more encouraging feature in American life than the 
 zeal, energy, and high and liberal intelligence with which social 
 service of this sort is being carried on in all the great cities. This 
 is a line of activity on which England and America are advancing hand 
 in hand, and however much one may deplore the necessity for such work, 
 one cannot but see in the common impulse which prompts and directs it a 
 symptom of the deep-seated unity of the two peoples. Nothing I saw in 
 America impressed me more than the thorough practicality as well as the 
 untiring devotion which was apparent in the work carried on by Miss 
 Addams in Chicago and Miss Lillian D. Wald in Henry-street, New York. 
 And in both Settlements I recognised the same atmosphere of culture, the 
 same spirit of plain living, hard working, and high thinking, that 
 characterises the best of our kindred institutions in England. A lady 
 connected with the University of Chicago, who is also a worker at the 
 Hull House Settlement, told me a touching little story which illustrates 
 at once the need for such work in Chicago, and the unexpected response 
 with which it sometimes meets. She had been talking about the beauties 
 of nature to a group of women from the slums, and at the end of her 
 address one of her hearers said, "I ain't never been outside of Chicago, 
 but I know it's true what the lady says. There's two vacant lots near 
 our place, an' when the spring comes, the colours of them--they fair 
 makes you hold your breath. An' then there's the trees on the Avenoo. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 94 
   
 An' then there's all the sky." On another occasion the same lady met 
 with an "unexpected response" of a different order. She was showing a 
 boy from the slums some photographs of Italian pictures, when they came 
 upon a Virgin and Child. "Ah," said the boy at once, "that's Jesus an' 
 his Mother: I allus knows _them_ when I sees 'em." "Yes," said Miss 
 R----, "there is a purity and grandeur of expression about them, isn't 
 there--" "Tain't that," interrupted the boy, "it's the rims round their 
 heads as gives 'em away!" 
   
 Apart from the Settlements, there are many energetically-conducted 
 Societies in America for the social and political enlightenment of the 
 masses. I have before me, for instance, a little bundle of most 
 excellent leaflets issued by the League for Social Service of New York. 
 They deal with such subjects as _The Duties of American Citizenship, The 
 Value of a Vote, The Duty of Public Spirit, The Co-operative City_, &c. 
 They include an admirable abstract in twenty-four pages, of _Laws 
 Concerning the Welfare of Every Citizen of New York_, and the same 
 Society issues similar abstracts of the laws of other States. They have 
 a large and well-equipped lecture organisation, and they issue 
 excellent practical _Suggestions for Conferences and Courses of Study_. 
 The problem to be grappled with by this Society and others working on 
 similar lines is no doubt one of immense difficulty. It is nothing less 
 than the education in citizenship of the most heterogeneous, polyglot, 
 and in some respects ignorant and degraded population ever assembled in 
 a single city, since the days of Imperial Rome. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER IX Pg 95 
   
 The spread of political 
 enlightenment in New York and other cities cannot possibly be very 
 rapid; but no effort is being spared to accelerate it. I sometimes 
 wonder whether the obvious necessity for political education in America 
 may not, in the long run, prove a marked advantage to her, as compared, 
 for instance, with England. Dissatisfaction, as I have said above, is 
 the condition of progress. We are apt to assume that every Briton is 
 born a good citizen; and in the lethargy begotten of that assumption, it 
 may very well happen that we let the Americans outstrip us in the march 
 of enlightenment. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 96 
 NEW YORK. 
   
 It is with a curious sensation of home-coming that I find myself once 
 more in New York. Spring has arrived before me. The blue dome of sky has 
 lost its crystalline sparkle, and the trees in Madison-square have put 
 on a filmy veil of green. Going to a luncheon party in the Riverside 
 region, I determine, for the sheer pleasure and exhilaration of the 
 thing, to walk the whole way, up Fifth-avenue and diagonally across 
 Central Park. What a magnificent pleasure ground, vast, various, and 
 seductive! A peerless emerald on the finger of Manhattan! If I were not 
 bound by solemn oaths to present myself at West-End-avenue at half-past 
 one, I could loaf all the afternoon by the superb expanse of the Croton 
 Reservoir, looking out over the giant city of sunshine, with the white 
 dome of Columbia College and the pyramid of Grant's Monument on the 
 northern horizon, and far to the eastward the low hills of Long Island. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 97 
   
 Passing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I am reminded, not only that I 
 have never been inside it, but that in all the cities I have visited I 
 have not gone to a single show-place, museum, or picture-gallery, save 
 one remarkable private collection in Baltimore. Of course I must also 
 except (a large exception!) the public libraries of Washington, Boston, 
 and Chicago, which are, in a very eminent sense, "show-places." Still, 
 it seems somewhat remarkable (does it not?) that in a country which is 
 understood in Europe to be monotonous and unattractive to travellers, I 
 should have spent two months not only of intellectual interest but of 
 aesthetic enjoyment, without once, except in a chance moment of idleness, 
 feeling the least inclination to fall back upon, the treasures of 
 European art which it undoubtedly contains. I have even ignored the 
 marvels of nature. I passed within twenty miles of Niagara; I saw the 
 serried icefloes sweeping down from Lake Erie to the cataract; and I did 
 not go to see them plunge over. In the first place, I had been there 
 before; in the second place, I should have had to sacrifice six hours 
 of Chicago, where I wanted, not six hours less, but six weeks more. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 98 
 Before saying farewell--a fond farewell!--to New York, let me supplement 
 my first impressions with my last. The most maligned of cities, I called 
 it; and truly I said well. Here is even the judicious Mr. J.F. Muirhead 
 of "Baedeker," betrayed by his passion for antithesis into describing 
 New York as "a lady in ball costume, with diamonds in her ears and her 
 toes out at her boots." This was written, to be sure, in 1890, and may 
 have been true in its day; for it takes an American city much less than 
 a decade to belie a derogatory epigram. Now, at any rate, New York has 
 had her shoes mended to some purpose. She is not the best paved city in 
 the world, or even in America, but neither is she by any means the 
 worst; and her splendid system of electric and elevated railroads 
 renders her more independent of paving than any European city. 
 Fifth-avenue is paved to perfection; Broadway and Sixth-avenue are not; 
 but at any rate the streets are not for ever being hauled up and laid 
 down again, like some of our leading London thoroughfares. Holborn, for 
 example, may be ideally paved on paper, but its roadway is subject to 
 such incessant eruptions of one sort or another that it is in practice 
 a much more uncomfortable thoroughfare than any of the New York avenues.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 99 
   
 For the rest, New York has a copious and excellent water supply, which 
 London has not; it has a splendidly efficient fire-brigade; it has an 
 admirable telephone system, with underground wires; and even its 
 electric trolleys get their motive-power from underneath, whereas in 
 Philadelphia the overhead wires are, I regret to say, killing the trees 
 which lend the streets their greatest charm. Altogether, Tammany or no 
 Tammany, New York cannot possibly be described as an ill-governed city. 
 Its government may be wasteful and worse; inefficient it is not. Even 
 the policemen seem to be maligned. I never found them rude or needlessly 
 dictatorial. 
   
 In one of the essential conveniences of modern life, New York is far 
 behind London; but the blame lies, not with the city, but with the 
 United States. Its postal arrangements are at best erratic, at worst 
 miserable. Letters which would be delivered in London in three or four 
 hours take in New York anywhere from six to sixteen hours. It was a long 
 time before I realised and learned to allow for the slowness of the 
 postal service. At first I used mentally to accuse my correspondents of 
 great dilatoriness in attending to notes that called for an immediate 
 reply. On one occasion I posted in Madison Square at 3 P.M. a letter 
 addressed to the Lyceum Theatre, not a quarter of a mile away, 
 suggesting an appointment for the same evening after the play. The 
 appointment was not kept, for the letter was not delivered till the 
 following morning! To ensure its delivery the same evening, I ought to 
 have put a special-delivery stamp on it--price fivepence--in addition to 
 the ordinary two-cent stamp. No doubt it is the universal employment of 
 the telephone in American cities that leads people to put up with such 
 defective postal arrangements. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 100 
   
 But it is not only within city limits that the United States Post Office 
 functions with a dignified deliberation. The ordinary time that it takes 
 to write (say) from New York to Chicago, and receive an answer, might be 
 considerably reduced without any acceleration of the train service. It 
 sounds incredible, but it is, I believe, the case, that the simple and 
 eminently time-saving device of a letter-box in the domestic front-door 
 is practically unknown in America. I did observe one, in Boston, so 
 small that a fair sized business letter would certainly have stuck in 
 its throat. One evening I was sitting at dinner in a fashionable street 
 in New York, close to Central Park, when I was startled by a distinctly 
 burglarious noise at the window. My host smiled at my look of 
 bewilderment, and explained that it was only the letter-carrier; and, 
 sure enough, when the servant came into the room she picked up three or 
 four letters from the floor. The postman was somehow able to reach the 
 front window from the "stoop," open it, and throw in the evening's 
 mail--a primitive arrangement, more suggestive of the English than of 
 the American Gotham. Even the gum on the United States postage-stamps 
 is apt to be ineffectual. When you are stamping letters in hot haste 
 to catch the European mail, you are as likely as not to find that 
 the head of President Grant has curled up and refuses--most 
 uncharacteristically--to stick to its post. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 101 
   
 The conveniences of the express system, again, are, in my judgment, 
 greatly overrated. It is often slow and always expensive. It seems to 
 have been devised by the makers of Saratoga trunks, for it puts a 
 premium upon huge packages and a tax upon those of moderate size. I 
 speak feelingly, for I have just paid, eight shillings for the 
 conveyance of five packages from my room to the wharf, a distance of 
 about a mile and a half. A London growler would have taken them and 
 myself to boot for eighteenpence, three of the packages going outside, 
 and two, with their owner, inside. It is true that had I packed all my 
 belongings in one huge box the same company would have conveyed them to 
 the steamer for one and eightpence, which is the regular charge per 
 package. But I could not have taken this box into my state-room; I must 
 in any case have had a cabin trunk; and for an ocean voyage, a bundle of 
 rugs is, to say the least of it, advisable. Thus I could not have 
 escaped paying four and tenpence for the conveyance of my baggage 
 alone--rather more than three times as much as it would have cost to 
 convey my baggage and myself the same distance in London. It must not be 
 forgotten, of course, that the New York Express Company would, if 
 necessary, have carried the goods much further for the same charge of 
 forty cents a package. The limit of distance I do not know: it is 
 probably something like twenty miles. But a potential ell does not 
 reconcile me to paying an exorbitant price for the actual inch which is 
 all I have any use for. This method of simplification--fixing the 
 minimum payment on the basis of the maximum bulk, weight, and 
 distance--seems to me essentially irrational. In some cases, indeed, it 
 cuts against the Express Company.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 102 
   
 When I first had occasion to move from 
 one abode to another in New York--a distance of about a quarter of a 
 mile--I thought with glee "Now the famous express system will save me 
 all trouble." But I found that it would cost two dollars to express my 
 belongings, whereas even the notoriously extortionate New York cabman 
 would convey me and all my goods and chattels for half that sum. So the 
 Express Company's loss was cabby's gain. 
   
 "The ship is cheered, the harbour cleared," and none too merrily are we 
 dropping down by the Statue of Liberty to Sandy Hook and the Atlantic. 
 (There is a point, by the way, a little below the Battery, from which 
 New York looks mountainous indeed. Its irregularly serrated profile is 
 lost, and the sky-scrapers fall into position one behind the other, like 
 an artistically grouped cohort of giants. "Hills peep o'er hills, and 
 Alps on Alps arise," while in the background the glorious curve of the 
 Brooklyn Bridge seems to span half the horizon. I could not but think of 
 Valhalla and the Bridge of the Gods in the _Rheingold_. Elevator 
 architecture necessarily sends one to Scandinavian mythology in quest of 
 similitudes.) It is with acute regret that I turn my back upon New York, 
 or, rather, turn my face to see it receding over the steamer's wake. Not 
 often in this imperfect world are high anticipations overtopped, as the 
 real American has overtopped my half-reminiscent dream of it. "The real 
 America?" That, of course, is an absurd expression. I have had only a 
 superficial glimpse of one corner of the United States. It is as though 
 one were to glance at a mere dog-ear on a folio page, and then profess 
 to have mastered its whole import.  
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 103 
   
 But I intend no such ridiculous 
 profession. I have seen something of the outward aspect of five or six 
 great cities; I have looked into one small facet of American social 
 life; and I have faithfully reported what I have seen--nothing more. At 
 the same time my observations, and more especially my conversations with 
 the scores of "bright" and amiable men it has been my privilege to meet, 
 have suggested to me certain thoughts, certain hopes and apprehensions, 
 respecting the future of America and the English-speaking world, which I 
 shall try to formulate elsewhere. For the present, let me only sum up 
 my personal experiences in saying that all the pleasant expectations I 
 brought with me to America have been realised, all the forebodings 
 disappointed. Even the interviewer is far less terrible than I had been 
 led to imagine. He always treated me with courtesy, sometimes with 
 comprehension. One gentleman alone (not an American, by the way) set 
 forth to be mildly humorous at my expense; and even he apologised in 
 advance, as it were, by prefixing his own portrait to the interview, as 
 who should say, "Look at me--how can I help it?" Again, I had been led 
 rather to fear American hospitality as being apt to become importunate 
 and exacting. I found it no less considerate than cordial. Probably I 
 was too small game to bring the lion-hunters upon my trail. The alleged 
 habit of speech-making and speech-demanding on every possible occasion I 
 found to be merely mythical. Three times only was I called upon to "say 
 something," and on the first two occasions, being taken unawares, I said 
 everything I didn't want to say. The third time, having foreseen the 
 demand, I had noted down in advance the heads of an eloquent harangue; 
 but when the time came I felt the atmosphere unpropitious, and 
 suppressed my rhetoric. 
 
 
 
 PART I  (OBSERVATIONS)_LETTER X Pg 104 
   
 The proceedings opened with an iced beverage, 
 called, I believe, a "Mississippi toddy," probably as being the longest 
 toddy on record, the father of (fire) waters; and on its down-lapsing 
 current my eloquence was swept into the gulf of oblivion. The meeting, 
 fortunately, did not know what it had lost, and its serenity remained 
 unclouded. But it is not to the Mississippi toddies and other creature 
 comforts of America that I look back with gratitude and affection. It is 
 to the spontaneous and unaffected human kindness that met me on every 
 hand; the will to please and to be pleased in daily intercourse; and, in 
 the spiritual sphere, the thirst for knowledge, for justice, for beauty, 
 for the larger and the purer light. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH I Pg 104 
   
 In Washington, on the 6th of April last, business was suspended from 
 mid-day onwards, while President McKinley and all the high officers of 
 State attended the public funeral at Arlington Cemetery of several 
 hundred soldiers, brought home from the battlefields of Cuba. The burial 
 ground on the heights of Arlington--the old Virginian home, by the way, 
 of the Lee family--had hitherto been known as the resting-place of 
 numbers of Northern soldiers, killed in the Civil War. But among the 
 bodies committed to earth that afternoon were those of many Southerners, 
 who had stood and fallen side by side with their Northern comrades at El 
 Caney and San Juan. The significance of the event was widely felt and 
 commented upon. "Henceforth," said one paper, "the graves at Arlington 
 will constitute a truly national cemetery;" and the same note was struck 
 in a thousand other quarters. Poets burst into song at the thought of 
 their 
   
   "Resting together side by side, 
     Comrades in blue and grey! 
   
   "Healed in the tender peace of time, 
     The wounds that once were red 
   With hatred and with hostile rage, 
     While sanguined brothers bled. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH I Pg 105 
   
   "They leaped together at the call 
     Of country--one in one, 
   The soldiers of the Northern hills, 
     And of the Southern sun! 
   
   "'Yankee' and 'Rebel,' side by side, 
     Beneath one starry fold-- 
   To-day, amid our common tears, 
     Their funeral bells are tolled." 
   
 The artlessness of these verses renders them none the less significant. 
 They express a popular sentiment in popular language. But, as here 
 expressed, it is clearly the sentiment of the North: how far is it 
 shared and acknowledged by the South? Happening to be on the spot, I 
 could not but try to obtain some sort of answer to this question. 
   
 Again, as I stood on the terrace of the Capitol that April afternoon, 
 and looked out across the Potomac to the old Lee mansion at Arlington, 
 while all the flags of Washington drooped at half-mast, a very 
 different piece of verse somehow floated into my memory: 
   
     "Walk wide o' the Widow at Windsor, 
       For 'alf o' Creation she owns: 
   We 'ave bought 'er the same with the sword and the flame, 
       And salted it down with our bones. 
     (Poor beggars!--it's blue with our bones!)" 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH I Pg 106 
   
 The association was obvious: how the price of lead would go up if 
 England brought home all her dead "heroes" in hermetically-sealed 
 caskets! My thought (so an anti-Imperialist might say) was like the 
 smile of the hardened freebooter at the amiable sentimentalism of a 
 comrade who was "yet but young in deed." But why should Mr. Kipling's 
 rugged lines have cropped up in my memory rather than the smoother 
 verses of other poets, equally familiar to me, and equally well fitted 
 to point the contrast?--for instance, Mr. Housman's:-- 
   
   "It dawns in Asia, tombstones show, 
     And Shropshire names are read; 
   And the Nile spills his overflow 
     Beside the Severn's dead." 
   
 Or Mr. Newbolt's: 
   
   "_Qui procul hinc_--the legend's writ, 
     The frontier grave is far away; 
   _Qui ante diem periit, 
     Sed miles, sed fro patria_." 
   
 The reason simply was that during the month I had spent in America the 
 air had been filled with Kipling. His name was the first I had heard 
 uttered on landing--by the conductor of a horse-car.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH I Pg 107 
   
 Men of light and 
 leading, and honourable women not a few, had vied with each other in 
 quoting his refrains; and I had seen the crowded audience at a low 
 music-hall stirred to enthusiasm by the delivery of a screed of maudlin 
 verses on his illness. He, the rhapsodist of the red coat, was out and 
 away the most popular poet in the country of the blue, and that at a 
 time when the blue coat in itself was inimitably popular. Nor could 
 there be any doubt that his _Barrack-room Ballads_ were the most popular 
 of his works. Not a century had passed since the Tommy Atkins of that 
 day had burnt the Capitol on whose steps I was standing (a shameful 
 exploit, to which I allude only to point the contrast); and here was the 
 poet of Tommy Atkins so idolised by the grandsons of the men of 1812 and 
 1776, that I, a Briton and a staunch admirer of Kipling, had almost come 
 to resent as an obsession the ubiquity of his name! 
   
 It seemed then, that the rancour of the blue coat against the red must 
 have dwindled no less significantly than the rancour of the grey coat 
 against the blue. Into the reality of this phenomenon, too, I made it 
 my business to inquire. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 108 
 There can be no doubt that the Spanish War has done a great deal to 
 bring the North and the South together. It has not in any sense created 
 in the South a feeling of loyalty to the Union, but it has given the 
 younger generation in the South an opportunity of manifesting that 
 loyalty to the Union which has been steadily growing for twenty years. 
 Down to 1880, or thereabouts, the wound left by the Civil War was still 
 raw, its inflammation envenomed rather than allayed by the measures of 
 the "reconstruction" period. Since 1880, since the administration of 
 President Hayes, the wound has been steadily healing, until it has come 
 to seem no longer a burning sore, but an honourable cicatrice. 
   
 Every one admits that the heaviest blow ever dealt to the South was that 
 which laid Abraham Lincoln in the dust. He, if any one, could have 
 averted the mistakes which delayed by fifteen years the very beginning 
 of the process of reconciliation. His wise and kindly influence 
 removed, the North committed what is now recognised as the fatal blunder 
 of forcing unrestricted negro suffrage on the South. This measure was 
 dictated partly, no doubt, by honest idealism, partly by much lower 
 motives. Then the horde of "carpet-baggers" descended upon the 
 "reconstructed" States, and there ensued a period of humiliation to the 
 South which made men look back with longing even to the sharper agonies 
 of the war. Coloured voters were brought in droves, by their Northern 
 fuglemen, to polling-places which were guarded by United States troops. 
 Utterly illiterate negroes crowded the benches of State legislatures. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 109 
 . A 
 Northerner and staunch Union man has assured me that in the Capitol of 
 one of the reconstructed States he has seen a coloured representative 
 gravely studying a newspaper which he held upside down. The story goes 
 that in the legislature of Mississippi a negro majority, which had 
 opposed a certain bill, was suddenly brought round to it in a body by a 
 chance allusion to its "provisions," which they understood to mean 
 something to eat! This anecdote perhaps lacks evidence; but there can be 
 no doubt that the freedmen of 1865 were, as a body, entirely unfitted to 
 exercise the suffrage thrust upon them. A degrading and exasperating 
 struggle was the inevitable result--the whites of the South striving by 
 intimidation and chicanery to nullify the negro vote, the professional 
 politicians from the North battling, with the aid of the United States 
 troops, to render it effectual. Such a state of things was demoralising 
 to both parties, and in process of time the common sense of the North 
 revolted against it. United States troops no longer stood round the 
 ballot-boxes, and the South was suffered, in one way and another, to 
 throw off the "Dominion of Darkness." Different States modified their 
 constitutions in different ways. Many offices which had been elective 
 were made appointive. The general plan adopted of late years has been to 
 restrict the suffrage by means of a very simple test of intelligence, 
 the would-be voter being required to read a paragraph of the State 
 constitution and explain its meaning. The examiner, if one may put it 
 so, is the election judge, and he can admit or exclude a man at his 
 discretion. Thus illiterate whites are not necessarily deprived of the 
 suffrage. They may be quite intelligent men and responsible citizens, 
 who happened to grow to manhood precisely in the years when the war and 
 its sequels upset the whole system of public education in the South. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 110 
   
 . At 
 any rate (it is argued), the illiterate white is a totally different man 
 from the illiterate negro. How far such modifications of the State 
 constitutions are consistent with the Constitution of the United States, 
 is a nice question upon which I shall not attempt to enter. The 
 arguments used to reconcile this test of intelligence with Amendments 
 XIV. and XV. of the United States Constitution seem to me more ingenious 
 than convincing. But, constitutional or not, the compromise is 
 reasonable; and though people in the South still feel, as one of them 
 put it to me, that the Republican party "may yet wield the flail of the 
 negro over them," the flail has been laid aside long enough to permit 
 the South, in the main, to recover its peace of mind and its 
 self-respect. The negro problem is still difficult enough, as many 
 tragic evidences prove; but there is no reason to despair of its 
 ultimate solution. 
   
 Meanwhile material prosperity has been returning to the South; 
 agriculture has revived, and manufactures have increased. Social 
 intercourse and intermarriage have done much to promote mutual 
 comprehension between North and South, and to wipe out rankling 
 animosities. Each party has made a sincere effort to understand the 
 other's "case," and the war has come to seem a thing fated and 
 inevitable, or at any rate not to have been averted save by superhuman 
 wisdom and moderation on both sides. With mutual comprehension, mutual 
 admiration has gone hand in hand.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 111 
   
 The gallantry and tenacity of the 
 South are warmly appreciated in the North, and it is felt on both sides 
 that the very qualities which made the tussle so long and terrible are 
 the qualities which ensure the greatness of the reunited nation. But 
 changes of sentiment are naturally slow and, from moment to moment, 
 imperceptible. It needs some outside stimulus or shock to bring them 
 clearly home to the minds of men. Such a stimulus was provided by the 
 conflict with Spain. It did not create a new sense of solidarity between 
 the North and the South, but rather brought prominently to the surface 
 of the national consciousness a sense of solidarity that had for years 
 been growing and strengthening, more or less obscurely and 
 inarticulately, on both sides of Mason and Dixon's line. It consummated 
 a process of consolidation which had been going on for something like 
 twenty years. 
   
 Furthermore, the Spanish War deposed the Civil War from its position as 
 the last event of great external picturesqueness in the national 
 history. However sincere may be our love of peace, war remains 
 irresistibly fascinating to the imagination; and the imagination of 
 young America has now a foreign war instead of a civil war to look back 
 upon. The smoke of battle, in which the South stood shoulder to shoulder 
 with the North, has done more than many years of peace could do to 
 soften in retrospect the harsh outlines of the fratricidal struggle. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 112 
   
 At the same time, there is another side to the case which ought not to 
 be overlooked. The South is proud, very proud; and the older generation, 
 the generation which fought and agonised through the terrible years from 
 '61 to '65, is more than a little inclined to resent what it regards as 
 the condescending advances of the North. This feeling is not confined to 
 those out-of-the-way corners where, as the saying goes, they have not 
 yet heard that the war--the Civil War--is over. It is not confined to 
 the old families, ruined by the war, whom the tide of returning 
 prosperity has not reached, and never will reach. It is strong among 
 even the most active and progressive of the veterans of '65. They smile 
 a grim smile in their grizzled beards at the fuss which has been made 
 over this "picayune war," as they call it. They, who came crushed, 
 impoverished, heartbroken, out of the duel of the Titans--they, who know 
 what it really means to sacrifice everything, everything, to a patriotic 
 ideal--they, to whom their cause seems none the less sacred because they 
 know it irrevocably lost--how can they be expected to toss up their caps 
 and help the party which first vanquished, and then, for many bitter 
 years, oppressed them, to make political capital out of what appears, in 
 their eyes, a more or less creditable military picnic? It is especially 
 the small scale of the conflict that excites their derision. "Did you 
 ever hear of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House?" one of them said to 
  I confessed that I had not. "No," he said, "nor has any one else 
 
 heard of the battle of Dinwiddie Court-House. It was one of the most 
 insignificant fights in the war. But there were more men killed in half 
 an hour in that almost forgotten battle, than in all this mighty war we 
 hear so much about. Ah!" he continued, "they think we are vastly 
 gratified when they 'fraternise' with us on our battlefields and 
 decorate the graves of our dead.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 113 
   
 I don't know but I prefer the 'waving 
 of the bloody shirt' to this flaunting of the olive-branch. They have 
 their victory; let them leave us our graves." 
   
 An intense loyalty, not only to the political theories of the South, but 
 to the memory of the men who died for them--"qui bene pro patria cum 
 patriaque jacent"--still animates the survivors of the war. With a 
 confessed but none the less pathetic illogicality, they feel as though 
 Death had not gone to work impartially, but had selected for his prey 
 the noblest and the best. One of these survivors, in a paper now before 
 me, quotes from _Das Siegesfest_ the line-- 
   
   "Ja, der Krieg verschlingt die Besten!" 
   
 and then remarks: "Still, when Schiller says:-- 
   
   'Denn Patroklus liegt begraben, 
     Und Thersites kommt zurueck,' 
   
 his illustration is only half right. The Greek Thersites did not return 
 to claim a pension." 
   
 The dash of bitterness in this remark must not be taken too seriously. 
 The fact remains, however, that among the veterans of the South there 
 prevails a certain feeling of aloofness from the national jubilation 
 over the Spanish War. They "don't take much stock in it." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 114 
 The feeling is 
 widespread, I believe, but not loud-voiced. If I represented it as 
 surly or undignified, I should misrepresent it grossly. It is simply the 
 outcome of an ancient and deep-seated sorrow, not to be salved by 
 phrases or ceremonies--the most tragic emotion, I think, with which I 
 ever came face to face. But it prevails almost exclusively among the 
 older generation in the South, the men who "when they saw the issue of 
 the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause." 
 To the young, or even the middle-aged, it has little meaning. I met a 
 scholar-soldier in the South who had given expression to the sentiment 
 of his race and generation in an essay--one might almost say an 
 elegy--so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it 
 moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it at a public library, I found 
 myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbour at the desk glanced 
 at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together. Yet the 
 writer of this essay told me that when he gave it to his son to read, 
 the young man handed it back to him, saying, "All this is a sealed book 
 to me. I can not feel these things as you do." 
   
 More important, perhaps than the sentiment of the veterans is the 
 feeling, which has been pretty generally expressed, that the South was 
 slighted in the actual conduct of the late war--that Southern regiments 
 and Southern soldiers (notably General Fitzhugh Lee) were unduly kept in 
 the background. Still, there is every reason to believe that the general 
 effect of the war has been one of conciliation and consolidation. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 115 
   
 From 
 the ultra-Southern point of view, the North seems merely to have seized 
 the opportunity of making honourable amends for the "horrors of 
 reconstruction;" but even those who take this view admit that the North 
 _has_ seized the opportunity, and that gladly. As a matter of fact the 
 good-will of the North, and its desire to let bygones be bygones, are 
 probably very little influenced by any such recondite motive. It is in 
 most cases quite simple and instinctive. "There are no rebels now," said 
 the commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he gave orders to delete 
 the fourth word of the inscription "Taken from the rebel ram 
 _Mississippi_" over a trophy of the Civil War displayed outside of his 
 quarters. Admiral Philips had probably no thought of "reconstruction" or 
 of "making amends;" he simply obeyed a spontaneous and general 
 sentiment. The Southern heroes of the Civil War, moreover, are freely 
 admitted, and enthusiastically welcomed, into the national Pantheon. 
   
 When the thirty-fourth anniversary of "Appomattox Day," which brought 
 the war to an end, was celebrated in Chicago on April 10 last (Governor 
 Roosevelt being the guest of honour), the memory of Lee was eulogised 
 along with that of Grant, and the oration in his honour was received 
 with equal applause. Finally, it is admitted even by those who are most 
 inclined to make light of the sentiment elicited by the late war, that 
 all the States of the Atlantic seaboard are instinctively drawing 
 together to counterpoise the growing predominance of the West. This 
 substitution of a new line of cleavage for the old one may seem a 
 questionable matter for rejoicing. But in any great community, conflicts 
 of interest must always arise.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH II Pg 116 
   
 The recognition of the problems which 
 await the Republic in the near future does not imply any doubt of her 
 ability to arrive at a wise and just solution of them. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH III Pg 117 
 The most loyal of the Southern veterans, I have said, recognise that the 
 cause of the South is irrevocably lost. By the cause of the South I do 
 not, of course, mean slavery. There is probably no one in the South who 
 would advocate the reinstatement of that "peculiar institution," even if 
 it could be effected by the lifting of a finger. "The cause we fought 
 for and our brothers died for," says Professor Gildersleeve of 
 Baltimore, "was the cause of civil liberty, not the cause of human 
 slavery.... If the secrets of all hearts could have been revealed, our 
 enemies would have been astounded to see how many thousands and tens of 
 thousands in the Southern States felt the crushing burden and the awful 
 responsibility of the institution which we were supposed to be defending 
 with the melodramatic fury of pirate kings." 
   
 What was it, then, that the South fought for? In what sense was its 
 cause the cause of "civil liberty?" A brief inquiry into this question 
 may be found to have more than a merely historic interest--to have a 
 direct bearing, indeed, upon the problems of the future, not only for 
 America, but for the English-speaking world. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH III Pg 118 
   
 Let me state at once the true inwardness of the matter, as I have been 
 led to see it. The cause of the South was the cause of small against 
 large political aggregations; and the world regards the defeat of the 
 South as righteous and inevitable, because instinct tells it that the 
 welfare of humanity is to be sought in large political aggregations, and 
 not in small. Providence, in a word, is on the side of the big (social) 
 battalions. 
   
 From the point of view of pure logic, of academic argument, the case of 
 the South was enormously strong. Consequently, the latter-day apologists 
 of the Confederacy devote themselves with pathetic fervour, and often 
 with great ingenuity, to what the impartial outsider cannot but feel to 
 be barren discussions of constitutional law. They point out that the 
 States--that is, the thirteen original States--preceded the Federal 
 Union, and voluntarily entered into it under clearly-defined conditions; 
 that the Federal Government actually derived its powers from the 
 consent of the States, and could have none which they did not confer 
 upon it; that the maintenance of slavery in the Southern States, and the 
 right to claim the extradition of fugitive slaves, were formally 
 safeguarded in the Constitution; that it was in reliance upon these 
 provisions that the Southern States consented to enter the Union; that 
 the right of secession had been openly and repeatedly asserted by 
 leading politicians and influential parties in several Northern States, 
 and was therefore no novel and treasonable invention of the South; and, 
 finally, that the right to enter into a compact implied the right to 
 recede from it when its provisions were broken, or obviously on the 
 point of being broken, by the other party or parties to the agreement. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH III Pg 119 
   
 All this is logically and historically indisputable. The Southerners 
 were the conservative party, and had the letter of the Constitution on 
 their side; the Northerners were the reformers, the innovators. 
 Entrenched in the theory of State Sovereignty, the South denied the 
 right of the North, acting through the Central Government, to interfere 
 with its "peculiar institution;" and even those who deplored the 
 existence of slavery felt themselves none the less bound to assert and 
 defend the right of their respective States to manage their own 
 affairs.[I] It was a conflict as old as the Revolution--and even, in its 
 germs, of still older date--between centripetal and centrifugal forces, 
 between national and local patriotism. The makers of the Constitution 
 had tried to hold the scales justly, but in their natural jealousy of a 
 strong central power, they had allowed the balance to deflect unduly on 
 the side of local independence. The North, the national majority, felt, 
 obscurely and reluctantly, that a revision of the Constitution in the 
 matter of slavery was essential to the national welfare.[J] The South 
 maintained that the States were antecedent and superior to the Nation, 
 and said, "If your Nation, in virtue of its mere majority vote, insists 
 on encroaching on State rights which we formally reserved as a condition 
 of entering the Nation, why then, we prefer to withdraw from this Nation 
 and set up a nation of our own, in which the true principles of the 
 Constitution shall be preserved." Thereupon the North retorted, "We 
 deny your right to withdraw," and the battle was joined. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH III Pg 120 
   
 The North said, "You have no right to withdraw," but it meant, I think, 
 something rather different. It threw overboard the question of abstract, 
 formal, technical right, and fought primarily, no doubt, for a 
 humanitarian ideal, but fundamentally to enforce its instinct of the 
 highest political expediency. The right interpretation of a state-paper, 
 however venerable, would not have been a question worthy of such 
 terrible arbitrament. Even the emancipation of the negro, had that been 
 the sole object of the contest, would have been too dearly paid for in 
 blood and tears. The question at issue was really this: What is the 
 ideal political unit? The largest possible? or the smallest convenient? 
 What mattered abstract argument as to the _right_ to secede? Once grant 
 the _power_ to secede, once suffer the precedent to be established, and 
 the greatest democracy the world had ever seen was bound to break up, 
 not only into two, but ultimately into many petty republics, wrangling 
 and jangling like those of Spanish America. To this negation of a great 
 ideal the North refused its consent. National patriotism had outgrown 
 local patriotism. It had become to all intents and purposes a fiction 
 that the Federal Government derived its powers from the States; Thirteen 
 of them, indeed, had sanctioned the Federal Government, but the Federal 
 Government had sanctioned and admitted to the Union twenty-one more. In 
 these the sentiment of priority to the Union could not exist, while 
 State Sovereignty was a doctrine limited by considerations of 
 expediency, rather than a patriotic dogma. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH III Pg 121 
   
 . Immigration, and westward 
 migration from the north-eastern States, had produced a race of men and 
 women whose patriotism was divorced, so to speak, from any given patch 
 of soil, but was wedded to the all-embracing idea of the United States, 
 with the emphasis on the epithet. They thought of themselves first of 
 all as American citizens, and only in the second place as citizens of 
 this State or of that. This habit or instinct is still incomprehensible, 
 and almost contemptible, to the Southerner of the older generation; but 
 the Time-Spirit was clearly on its side. 
   
 Thus, then, I interpret the fundamental feeling which impelled the North 
 to take up arms: "Better one stout tussle for the idea of Unity, than a 
 facile acquiescence in the idea, of Multiplicity, with all its sequels 
 of instability, distrust, rivalry, and rancour. Better for our 
 children, if not for us, one great expenditure of blood and gold, than 
 never-ending threats and rumours of war, commercial conflicts, political 
 complications, frontiers to be safeguarded, bureaucracies to be 
 financed." Of course I do not put this forward as a new interpretation 
 of the question at issue. It is old and it is obvious. But though the 
 national significance of the struggle has long been recognised, I am not 
 sure that its international, its world-historic significance, has been 
 sufficiently dwelt upon. We Europeans have been apt to think that, 
 because the theatre of conflict was so distant, we had only a 
 spectacular, or at most an abstract-humanitarian, interest in it. There 
 could not be a greater mistake. The whole world, I believe, will one day 
 come to hold Vicksburg and Gettysburg names of larger historic import 
 than Waterloo or Sedan. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 122 
 [Footnote I: "Submission to any encroachment," says Professor 
 Gildersleeve, "the least as well as the greatest, on the rights of a 
 State, means slavery;" this remark occurring early in an article of 
 twenty-five columns, in which _negro_ slavery is not so much as 
 mentioned until the twenty-first column.] 
   
 [Footnote J: See _Postscript_ to this article.] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 123 
   
 The iconoclast of to-day is full of scorn for patriotism, which he holds 
 the most retrograde of emotions. He may as usefully declaim against 
 friendship, comradeship, the love of man for woman or of mother for 
 child. The lowest savage regards himself, and cannot but regard himself, 
 as a member of some sort of political aggregation. This feeling is one 
 of the primal instincts of humanity, and as such one of the permanent 
 data of the problem of the future. It is folly to denounce or seek to 
 eradicate it. The wise course is to give it large and noble instead of 
 petty and parochial concepts to which to attach itself. Rightly esteemed 
 and rightly directed, patriotism is not a retrograde emotion, but one of 
 the indispensable conditions of progress. 
   
 "Nothing is," says Hamlet, "but thinking makes it so." It is not oceans, 
 straits, rivers, or mountain-barriers, that constitute a Nation, but the 
 idea in the minds of the people composing it. Now, the largest 
 political idea that ever entered the mind--not of a man--not of a 
 governing class--but of a people, is the idea of the United States of 
 America. The "Pax Romana" was a great idea in its day, but it was 
 imposed from without, and by military methods, upon a number of subject 
 peoples, who did not realise and intelligently co-operate in it, but 
 merely submitted to it. It has its modern analogue in the "Pax 
 Britannica" of India. The idea of the United States, on the other hand, 
 gives what may be called psychological unity to one of the largest 
 political aggregates, both in territory and population, ever known to 
 history. In the modern world, there are only two political aggregates in 
 any wise comparable to it: the British Empire, whereof the idea is not 
 as yet quite clearly formulated; and the Russian Empire, whereof the 
 idea, in so far as it belongs to the people at all, is a blind and 
 slavish superstition.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 124 
   
 Holy Russia is a formidable idea, Greater Britain 
 is a picturesque and pregnant idea; but the United States is a 
 self-conscious, clearly defined and heroically vindicated idea, in whose 
 further vindication the whole world is concerned. It is only an 
 experiment, say some--an experiment which, thirty years ago, trembled 
 on the brink of disastrous failure, and which may yet have even greater 
 perils to encounter. This is true in a sense, but not the essential 
 truth. Let us substitute for "experiment" another word which means the 
 same thing--with a difference. The United States of America, let us say, 
 is a rehearsal for the United States of Europe, nay, of the world. It is 
 the very difficulties over which the croakers shake their heads that 
 make the experiment interesting, momentous. The United States is a 
 veritable microcosm: it presents in little all the elements which go to 
 make up a world, and which have hitherto kept the world, almost 
 unintermittently, in a state of battle and bloodshed. There are wide 
 differences of climate and of geographical conditions in the United 
 States, with the resulting conflict of material interest between 
 different regions of the country. There are differences of race and even 
 of language to be overcome, extremes of wealth and poverty to be dealt 
 with. As though to make sure that no factor in the problem of 
 civilisation should be omitted, the men of last century were at pains to 
 saddle their descendants with the burden of the negro--a race incapable 
 of assimilation and yet tenacious of life. In brief, a thousand 
 difficulties and temptations to dissension beset the giant Republic: in 
 so far as it overcomes them, and carries on its development by peaceful 
 methods, it presents a unique and invaluable object-lesson to the world. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 125 
   
 The idea of unity, annealed in the furnace of the Civil War, has as yet 
 been stronger than all the forces of disintegration; and there is no 
 reason to doubt that it will continue to be so. When France falls out 
 with Germany, or Russia with Turkey, there is nothing save a purely 
 material counting of the cost to hinder them from flying at each other's 
 throats. The abstract humanitarianism of a few individuals is as a 
 feather on the torrent. Such sentiment as comes into play is all on the 
 side of bloodshed. It takes very little to make a Frenchman and a German 
 feel that they are in a state of war by nature, and that peace between 
 them is an artificial and necessarily unstable condition. But in 
 America, should two States or two groups of States fall out, there is a 
 strong, and we may hope unconquerable, sentiment of unity to be overcome 
 before the dissentients even reach the point of counting the material 
 cost of war. Men feel that they are in a state of peace by nature, and 
 that war between them, instead of being a hereditary and almost 
 consecrated habit, would be a monstrous and almost unthinkable crime. 
 The National Government, as established by the Constitution, is in fact 
 a permanent court of arbitration between the States; and the 
 common-sense of all may be trusted to "hold a fractious State in awe." 
 "Did not people say and think the same thing in 1859," it may be asked, 
 "on the eve of the greatest Civil War in history?" Possibly; but that 
 war was precisely what was needed to ratify the Union, and lift it out 
 of the experimental stage. "Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft," and it is 
 sometimes necessary that other pacts than those of hell should be 
 written in blood, before the world recognises their full validity. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 126 
   
 Heaven forbid that the Deed of Union of the United States should require 
 a second time to be retraced in red! 
   
 But it is an illusion, though a salutary one, that civil war is any more 
 barbarous than international war. What the world wants is the 
 realisation that every war is a civil war, a war between brothers, 
 justifiable only for the repression of some cruelty more cruel than war 
 itself, some barbarism more barbarous. Towards this realisation the 
 United States is leading the way, by showing that, under the conditions 
 of modern life, an effective sense of brotherhood, a resolute loyalty 
 to a unifying idea, may be maintained throughout a practically unlimited 
 extent of territory. 
   
 But, while enumerating the difficulties which the Republic has to 
 overcome, I have said nothing of the one great advantage it enjoys--a 
 common, or at any rate a dominant, language. The diversity of tongues 
 which prevails in Europe is doubtless one of the chief hindrances to 
 that "Federation of the World" of which the poet dreamed. But if the 
 many tongues of Europe retard its fusion into what I have called a 
 political aggregate, there exists in the world a political aggregate 
 larger in extent than either Europe or the United States, which 
 possesses, like the United States, the advantage of one dominant 
 language. I mean, of course, the British Empire; and surely it is, 
 on the face of it, a fact of good augury for the world that the 
 dominant language of these two vast aggregations of democracies should 
 happen to be one and the same. The hopes--and perhaps, too, some 
 apprehensions--arising from this unity of speech will form the subject 
 of another article. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 127 
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--My representation of the South as the conservative and the 
 North as the innovating party is the only point in this article to 
 which (so far as I know) serious objection has been made. A very able 
 and courteous critic--Mr. Norman Hapgood--writes to me as follows: "I 
 think the history of the Kansas-Nebraska trouble, in which the 
 preliminary conflict centred, the speeches of the time, North and South, 
 the party platforms, all proved that the North said, 'Slavery shall keep 
 its rights and have no further extension,' while the South said, 'It 
 shall go into any newly-acquired territory it chooses.' In 1860 the 
 slave interest was more protected and extended by law than ever before 
 in the history of the country. It had simply made a new claim which the 
 North could not allow. The abolitionists were few; the Northerners who 
 said that slavery should not be _extended_ were many.... I don't believe 
 there is an American historian of standing who does not say that the 
 propositions of the South, on which the North took issue in 1861, were 
 these: (1) Slavery shall go into all territory hereafter acquired; (2) 
 We will secede if this is not allowed." 
   
 It was inevitable that this protest should be raised, since, in the 
 limited space at my command, I had imperfectly expressed my meaning.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 128 
   
 My 
 reply to Mr. Hapgood puts it, I hope, more clearly. It ran as 
 follows:".... What I was trying to do was not so much to summarise 
 conscious motives as to present my own interpretation (right or wrong) 
 of the sub-conscious, the unconscious forces that were at work. I go 
 behind the declarations of Northern statesmen, and what, I have no 
 doubt, was the sincere sentiment of the majority in the North, against 
 interference with slavery in the existing slave States. I have tried to 
 allow to this sentiment what weight it deserves, in saying that the 
 North '_obscurely and reluctantly_ felt a revision of the Constitution 
 essential to the national welfare.' But my view is that whatever they 
 said, and whatever, on the surface of their minds, they thought, the 
 people of the North knew, even if they denied it to themselves, that 
 chattel slavery was impossible in the modern world; and furthermore that 
 the people of the South were justified in that instinct which told them 
 that the institution, fatally menaced, was to be saved only by 
 secession. The kernel of the matter, to my thinking, lay in the fugitive 
 slave question. The provision of the Constitution for the return of 
 fugitive slaves, though it may seem a matter of detail, was, I think, in 
 reality the keystone of the arch. Make it inoperative, and the 
 institution was doomed. Now many of the Northern States, by 'personal 
 liberty laws' and the like, had long been picking at that keystone. 
 Whatever were the professions of politicians and people as to 
 non-interference, they shrank from the logical corollary, which would 
 have been the sincere, whole-hearted and cheerful carrying out of 
 Article IV., Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_NORTH AND SOUTH IV Pg 129 
   
 They were even, 
 I think, logically bound to accept loyally the Dred Scott decision, 
 which was absolutely constitutional. To protest against it, to seek to 
 evade it, was to insist on a revision of the Constitution. But it was 
 inconceivable that a civilised community, not blinded by local Southern 
 prejudice, could loyally accept the Dred Scott decision, or could 
 cheerfully assist the Southern slaveholder to capture and carry off from 
 their own hearthstones, as it were, his runaway chattel. Therefore, the 
 position and the protestations of the North were mutually contradictory. 
 It was a case of trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; 
 and the North was bound to the hare by fundamental considerations of 
 humanity and self-interest, to the hounds, only by a compact accepted at 
 a time when its consequences could not possibly be foreseen. I do not 
 doubt that the North, on the surface of its will, sincerely desired to 
 keep this compact; but the South, with an instinct which was really that 
 of self-preservation, looked, as I am trying to look, beneath the 
 conscious surface to the unconscious sweep of current. It is not with 
 reference to the struggle for Western expansion that I call the South 
 the conservative and constitutional party. There, as it seems to me, the 
 question was entirely an open one, the power of Congress over 
 territories being undefined in the Constitution; and no doubt the South, 
 in the course of the struggle, often took up violent and extravagant 
 positions. My argument is that the attitude of the North, whatever its 
 protestations, virtually threatened the institution of slavery in the 
 old slave States, and that therefore the South had virtual, if not 
 formal, justification for holding the constitutional compact broken." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE I Pg 130 
 Though one of the main objects which I proposed to myself in visiting 
 America was to take note of American feeling towards England as affected 
 by the Spanish War, I soon found that, so far as the gathering of 
 information by way of question and answer was concerned, I might almost 
 as well have stayed at home. A curious diffidence beset me from the 
 first. I shrank from recognising that there was any question as to the 
 good feeling between the two countries, and still more from seeming to 
 appeal to a non-existent or a grudging sense of kinship. It seemed to me 
 tactless and absurd for an Englishman to lay any stress on the war as 
 affecting the relations between the two peoples. What had England done? 
 Nothing that had cost her a cent or a drop of blood. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE I Pg 131 
   
 The British people 
 had sympathised with the United States in a war which it felt to be, in 
 the last analysis, a part of the necessary police-work of the world; it 
 had applauded in American soldiers and sailors the qualities it was 
 accustomed to admire in its own fighting men; and the British 
 Government, giving ready effect to the instinct of the people, had, at a 
 critical moment, secured a fair field for the United States, and broken 
 up what might have been an embarrassing, though scarcely a very 
 formidable, anti-American intrigue on the part of the Continental 
 Powers. What was there in all this to make any merit of? Nothing 
 whatever. It was the simplest matter in the world--we had merely felt 
 and done what came natural to us. The really significant fact was that 
 any one in America should have been surprised at our attitude, or should 
 have regarded it as more friendly than they had every right and reason 
 to expect. In short, I felt an irrational but I hope not unnatural 
 disinclination to recognise as matter for question and remark a state of 
 feeling which, as it seemed to me, ought to "go without saying." 
   
 Above all was I careful to avoid the word "Anglo-Saxon." I heard it and 
 read it with satisfaction, I uttered it, never. It is for the American 
 to claim his Anglo-Saxon birthright, if he feels so disposed; it is not 
 for the Briton to thrust it upon him. To cheapen it, to send it 
 a-begging, were to do it a grievous wrong. Besides, the term 
 "Anglo-Saxon" is inaccurate, and, so to speak, provisional. Rightly 
 understood, it covers a great idea; but if one chooses to take it in a 
 strict ethnological sense, it lends itself to caricature. The truth is, 
 it has no strict ethnological sense--it may rather be called an 
 ethnological countersense, no less in England than in America. It 
 represents an historical and political, not an ethnological, concept. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE I Pg 132 
   
 The Anglo-Saxon was already an infinitely composite personage--Saxon, 
 Scandinavian, Gaul, and Kelt--before he set foot in America; and America 
 merely proves her deep-rooted Anglo-Saxonism in accepting and absorbing 
 all sorts of alien and semi-alien race-elements. But when we have to go 
 so far behind the face-value of a word to bring it into consonance with 
 obvious facts, it is safest to use that word sparingly. 
   
 In brief, I did not wear my Anglo-Saxon heart on my sleeve, or go about 
 inviting expressions of gratitude to England for having, like Mr. 
 Gilbert's House of Lords, 
   
   Done nothing in particular, 
     And done it very well. 
   
 Yet evidences of a new tone of feeling towards England met me on every 
 hand, both in the newspapers and in conversation. The subject which I 
 shrank from introducing was frequently introduced by my American 
 acquaintances. It was evident that the change of feeling, though far 
 from universal, was real and wide-spread. Americans who had recently 
 returned to their native land, after passing some years abroad, assured 
 me that they were keenly conscious of it. Many of my acquaintances were 
 opposed to the policy which brought about the Spanish War, and declared 
 the better mutual understanding between England and America to be its 
 one good result. Others adopted the view to which Mr. Kipling had given 
 such far-echoing expression, and frankly rejoiced in the sympathy with 
 which England regarded America's determination to "take up the white 
 man's burden."  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE I Pg 133 
   
 ." In the Kipling craze as a whole, after making all 
 deductions, I could not but see a symptom of real significance. It was 
 partly a mere literary fashion, partly a result of personal and 
 accidental circumstances; but it also arose in no small degree from a 
 novel sense of kinship with the men, and participation in the ideals, 
 celebrated by the poet of British Imperialism. 
   
 The change, moreover, extended beyond the book-reading class, wide as 
 that is in America. It was to be noted even in the untravelled and 
 unlettered American, the man whose spiritual horizon is bounded by his 
 Sunday newspaper, the man in the street and on the farm. The events of 
 the past year had taught him--and he rubbed his eyes at the 
 realisation--that England was not an "effete monarchy," evilly-disposed 
 towards a Republic as such,[K] and dully resentful of bygone 
 humiliations by land and sea, but a brotherly-minded people, remembering 
 little (perhaps _too_ little) of those "old, unhappy, far-off things," 
 willing to be as helpful as the rules of neutrality permitted, and eager 
 to applaud the achievements of American arms. 
   
 Millions of people who had hitherto felt no touch of racial sympathy, 
 and had been conscious only of a vague historic antipathy, learned with 
 surprise that England was in no sense their natural enemy, but rather, 
 among all the nations of Europe, their natural friend. Anglophobes, no 
 doubt, were still to be found in plenty; but they could no longer reckon 
 on the instant popular response which, a few years ago, would almost 
 certainly have attended any movement of hostility towards England. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE I Pg 134 
   
 An 
 American publicist, who has perhaps unequalled opportunities for keeping 
 his finger on the pulse of national feeling, said to me, "It is only 
 three or four years since I heard a Federal judge express an earnest 
 desire for war with England, as a means of consolidating the North and 
 South in a great common enthusiasm. Of course this was pernicious talk 
 at any time," he added; "but it would then have found an echo which it 
 certainly would not find to-day." 
   
 This puts the international situation in a nutshell, so far as to-day is 
 concerned. But what about to-morrow? 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 135 
 [Footnote K: See _Postscript_ to this article.] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 136 
   
 When people spoke to me of the sudden veering of popular sympathy from 
 France and Russia, and towards England, I could not help asking, now and 
 again, "When is the reaction coming?" "There is no reaction coming," I 
 was told with some confidence.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 137 
   
 . For my part, I hope and believe that a 
 permanent advance has been made, and that any reaction that may set in 
 will be trifling and temporary. But to ensure this result there is still 
 the most urgent need for the exercise of wisdom and moderation on both 
 sides. The misunderstandings of more than a century are not to be wiped 
 out in two or three months of popular excitement. What we have arrived 
 at is not a complete mutual understanding, but merely the attitude of 
 mind which may, in course of time, render such an understanding 
 possible. That, to be sure, is half the battle; but the longer and more 
 tedious half is before us. 
   
 The Englishman who visits America for pleasure, and enjoys the 
 inexhaustible hospitality of New York, Boston, and Washington, must be 
 careful not to imagine that he gets really in touch with the sentiment 
 of the American nation. His circle of acquaintance is almost certain to 
 be composed mainly of people whom he, or friends of his, have met in 
 Europe, people of more or less clearly remembered British descent, who 
 know England well, have many English friends and possibly relatives, and 
 are conscious of a distant sentimental attachment to "the Old Country." 
 They are almost without exception people of culture, as well read as he 
 himself in the English classics, ancient and modern. They show their 
 Americanism not in that they love English literature less, but that very 
 probably they love French literature more, than he does. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 138 
   
 . Further, they 
 are an exceedingly polite people, and, sensitive themselves on points of 
 national honour, they instinctively keep in the background all topics on 
 which a too free interchange of opinions might be apt to wound the 
 susceptibilities of their guest. Thus he loses entirely his sense of 
 being in a foreign country, because he moves among people most of whom 
 have an affection for England almost as deep as his own, while all are 
 courteous enough to respect his prejudices. This class is large in 
 actual numbers, no doubt, but in proportion to the whole American 
 people it is infinitesimal, and would be a mere featherweight in the 
 scale at any moment of crisis. Its voice is clearly audible in 
 literature and even in journalism, but at the polls it would be as a 
 whisper to the thunder of Niagara. The traveller who has "had a good 
 time" in literary, artistic, university circles in the Eastern cities, 
 has not felt the pulse of America, but has merely touched the fringe of 
 the fringe of her garment. 
   
 We deceive ourselves if we imagine that there is, or at any rate that 
 there was until recently, the slightest sentimental attachment to 
 England in the heart of the American people at large. Among the 
 "hyphenated Americans," as they are called--Irish-Americans, 
 German-Americans, and so forth--it would be folly to look for any such 
 feeling.[L] The conciliation of America will never be complete until we 
 have achieved the conciliation of Ireland. It is evident, indeed, from 
 many symptoms, that Irish-American hostility to England is declining, if 
 not in rancour, at any rate in influence. Still, a popular New York 
 paper, on St. Patrick's Day, thinks it worth while to propitiate "The 
 Powerful Race of Ireland" by a leader under that heading, and to this 
 effect: 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 139 
   
      "The Irish race is famous as producing the best fighters and poets 
      among men, and the most beautiful and most virtuous of women. 
   
      "Such a reputation should suffice for any nation. 
   
      "And note that Ireland still is and always will be a NATION. There 
      is no Anglomania in that fair land, no yearning for reciprocity for 
      the sake of a few dollars, no drinking of the Queen's health 
      first.... 
   
      "Noble patriots like John Dillon and William O'Brien fight for them 
      in the House of Commons, and they are good fighters everywhere, 
      from the glass-covered room in Westminster Abbey (!) to the 
      prize-ring, where a Sullivan, of pure Irish blood, forbids any man 
      to stand three rounds before him. 
   
      "The English whipped the Irish at the battle of the Boyne--true. 
      But the English on that occasion had the good luck to be led by a 
      Dutchman, and the Irish--sorra the day--had an English King for a 
      leader. The English King was running fast while the Irish were 
      still fighting the Dutchman. 
   
      "Wellington, of Irish blood, beat Napoleon; Sheridan, of Irish 
      blood, fought here most delightfully. 
   
      "Here's to the Irish!" 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 140 
 This spirited performance no doubt represents fairly enough the 
 political philosophy of the thousands composing the league-long 
 procession which filed stolidly up Fifth Avenue on the day of its 
 appearance. 
   
 But even among unhyphenated Americans--Americans pure and simple--the 
 tendency to regard England as a hereditary foe, though sensibly weakened 
 by recent events, remains very strong. A good example of this frame of 
 mind and habit of speech is afforded by the following passage from an 
 address delivered by Judge Van Wyck at the Democratic Club's Jefferson 
 Dinner in New York on April 13 last. Referring to England, the speaker 
 said:-- 
   
      "Let us be influenced by the natural as well as the fixed policy of 
      that nation toward us for a century and a half, rather than by 
      their profuse expressions of friendship during the Spanish War. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 141 
   
 England's policy has been one of sharp rivalry and competition 
      with America; it impelled the Revolution of 1776, fought for 
      business as well as political independence; brought on the war of 
      1812, waged against the insolent claim of England for the right to 
      search our ships of commerce while riding the highways of the 
      ocean; caused her to contest every inch of our northern boundary 
      line from ocean to ocean; made her encourage our family troubles 
      from 1860 to 1865, for which she was compelled to pay us millions 
      and admit her wrong; and actuated her, in violation of the Monroe 
      doctrine, to attempt an unwarrantable encroachment on the territory 
      of Venezuela, until ordered by the American Government to halt." 
   
 Apart from the obvious begging of the question with reference to 
 Venezuela, there is nothing in this invective that has not some 
 historical foundation. It is the studiously hostile turn of the 
 phraseology that renders the speech significant. Everything--even the 
 honourable amends made for the _Alabama_ blunder--is twisted to 
 England's reproach. She is "compelled" to do this, and "ordered" to do 
 that. There is here no hint of good feeling, no trace of international 
 amenity, but sheer undisguised hatred and desire to make the worst of 
 things. And this address, be it noted, was the speech of the evening at 
 a huge and representative gathering of the dominant party in New York 
 municipal politics. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 142 
   
 I need scarcely adduce further evidence of the fact that Anglophobia is 
 still a power in the land, if not the power it once was. But active and 
 aggressive Anglophobia is, I think, a less important factor in the 
 situation than the sheer indifference to England, with a latent bias 
 towards hostility, which is so widespread in America. To the English 
 observer, this indifference is far more disconcerting than hatred. The 
 average Briton, one may say with confidence, is not indifferent towards 
 America. He may be very ignorant about it, very much prejudiced against 
 certain American habits and institutions, very thoughtless and tactless 
 in expressing his prejudices; but the United States is not, to him, a 
 foreign country like any other, on the same plane with France, Germany, 
 or Russia. But that is precisely what England is to millions of 
 Americans--a foreign country like any other. We see this even in many 
 travelling Americans; much more is it to be noted in multitudes who stay 
 at home. Many Americans seem curiously indifferent even to the comfort 
 of being able to speak their own language in England; probably because 
 they have less false shame than the average Englishman in adventuring 
 among the pitfalls of a foreign tongue. They--this particular class of 
 travellers, I mean--land in England without emotion, visit its shrines 
 without sentiment, and pass on to France and Italy with no other feeling 
 than one of relief in escaping from the London fog. These travellers, 
 however, are but single spies sent forth by vast battalions who never 
 cross the ocean. To them England is a mere name, and the name, moreover, 
 of their fathers' one enemy in war, their own chief rival in trade. They 
 have no points of contact with England, such as almost every Englishman 
 has with America. We make use every day of American inventions and 
 American "notions": English inventions and "notions," if they make their 
 way to America at all, are not recognised as English. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 143 
   
 There are few 
 Britishers, high or low, that have not friends or relatives settled in 
 America, or have not formed pleasant acquaintanceships with Americans on 
 this side. But there are innumerable families in America who, even if 
 they be of British descent, have lost all vital recollection of the 
 fact; who (as the tide of emigration has not yet turned eastwards) have 
 no friends or relatives settled in England; and who, in their American 
 homes, are far more apt to come in contact with men of almost every 
 other nationality than with Englishmen. "But surely English 
 literature," it may be said, "brings England home even to people of this 
 class, and differentiates her from France or Germany." In a measure, 
 doubtless; but I think it will be found that the lower strata of the 
 reading public (not in America alone, of course) are strangely 
 insensitive to local colour. To people of culture, the bond of 
 literature is a very strong one; but the class of which I am speaking is 
 not composed of people of culture. They read, it is true, and often 
 greedily; but generally, I think, without knowing or greatly caring 
 whether a book is English or American, and at all events with no such 
 clear perception of the distinctive qualities of English work as could 
 beget in them any imaginative realisation of, or affection for, England. 
 Let us make no mistake--in the broad mass of the American people no such 
 affection exists. They are simply indifferent to England, with, as I 
 have said, a latent bias towards hostility. 
   
 Thus the scale of American feeling towards England, while its gradations 
 are of course infinite, may be divided into three main sections. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE II Pg 144 
   
 At one 
 end of the scale we have the cultured and travelled classes, especially 
 in the Eastern States, conscious for the most part of British descent, 
 alive to the historical relationship between the two countries, valuing 
 highly their birthright in the treasures of English literature, knowing, 
 and (not uncritically) understanding England and her people, and 
 clinging to a kinship of which, taking one thing with another, they have 
 no reason to be ashamed. This class is intellectually influential, but 
 its direct weight in politics is small. It is, with shining exceptions, 
 a "mugwump" class. At the other end of the scale we have the hyphenated 
 Americans, who have imported or inherited European rancours against 
 England, and those unhyphenated Americans whose hatred of England is 
 partly a mere plank in a political platform, designed to accommodate her 
 hyphenated foe-men, partly a result of instinctive and traditional 
 chauvinism, reinforced by a (in every sense) partial view of 
 Anglo-American history. Finally, between these two extremes, we have the 
 great mass of the American people, who neither love nor hate England, 
 any more than they love or hate (say) Italy or Japan, but whose 
 indifference would, until recently, have been much more easily deflected 
 on the side of hatred than of love. The effect of the Spanish War has 
 been in some measure to alter this bias, and to differentiate England, 
 to her advantage, from the other nations of Europe. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 145 
 [Footnote L: A very distinguished American authority writes to me as 
 follows with regard to this passage: "I hardly think you lay enough 
 weight upon the fact that in two or three generations the great bulk of 
 the descendants of the immigrants of non-English origin become 
 absolutely indistinguishable from other Americans, and share their 
 feelings. This is markedly so with the Scandinavians, and most of the 
 Germans of the second, and all the Germans of the third, generation, who 
 practically all, during 1898, felt toward Germany and England just 
 exactly as other Americans did.... Twice recently I have addressed huge 
 meetings of eight or ten thousand people, each drawn, as regards the 
 enormous majority, from exactly that class which you pointed out as 
 standing between the two extremes. In each case the men who introduced 
 me dwelt upon the increased good feeling between the English-speaking 
 peoples, and every complimentary allusion to England was received with 
 great applause." At the same time my correspondent adds: "Your division 
 of the American sentiment into three classes is exactly right; also your 
 sense of the relative importance of these three classes."] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 146 
   
 It is commonly alleged that the anti-English virulence of the ordinary 
 school history of the United States is mainly responsible for this bias 
 towards hostility in the mind of the average American. Mr. Goldwin 
 Smith, a high authority, has contested this theory; and I must admit 
 that, after a good deal of inquiry, I have been unable to find the 
 American school historians guilty of any very serious injustices to 
 England. Some quite modern histories which I have looked into (yet 
 written before the Spanish War) seem to me excellently and most 
 impartially done. The older histories are not well written: they are apt 
 to be sensational and chauvinistic in tone, and to encourage a somewhat 
 cheap and blusterous order of patriotism; but that they commonly malign 
 character or misrepresent events I cannot discover. They are perhaps a 
 little too much inclined to make "insolent" the inseparable epithet of 
 the British soldier; but there is no reason to doubt that in many cases 
 it was amply merited. I have not come across the history in which Mr. 
 G.W. Steevens discovered the following passages: 
   
      "The eyes of the soldiers glared upon the people like hungry 
      bloodhounds. The captain waved his sword. The red-coats pointed 
      their guns at the crowd. In a moment the flash of their muskets 
      lighted up the street, and eleven New England men fell bleeding 
      upon the snow.... Blood was streaming upon the snow; and though 
      that purple stain melted away in the next day's sun, it was never 
      forgotten nor forgiven by the people.... A battle took place 
      between a large force of Tories and Indians and a hastily organised 
      force of patriotic Americans.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 147 
   
 . The Americans were defeated with 
      horrible slaughter, and many of those who were made prisoners were 
      put to death by fiendish torture.... More than six thousand 
      American sailors had been seized by British warships and pressed 
      into the hated service of a hated nation." 
   
 These passages are certainly not judicial or even judicious in tone; but 
 I fancy that the book or books from which Mr. Steevens culled them must 
 be quite antiquated. In books at present on the educational market I 
 find nothing so lurid. What I do find in some is a failure to 
 distinguish between the king's share and the British people's share in 
 the policy which brought about and carried on the Revolutionary War. 
 For instance, in Barnes's _Primary History of the United States_ 
 (undated, but brought down to the end of the Spanish War) we read: 
   
      "_The English people_ after a time became jealous of the prosperity 
      of the colonists, and began to devise plans by which to grasp for 
      themselves a share of the wealth that was thus rolling in.... 
      Indeed, _the English people_ acted from the first as if the 
      colonies existed only for the purpose of helping them to make 
      money." 
   
 George III. and his Ministers are not so much as mentioned, and the 
 impression conveyed to the ingenuous student is that the whole English 
 nation was consciously and deliberately banded together for purposes of 
 sheer brigandage. The same history is delightfully chauvinistic in its 
 account of the Colonial Wars. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 148 
   
 The British officers are all bunglers and 
 poltroons; if disasters are averted or victories won, it is entirely by 
 the courage and conduct of the colonists: 
   
      "When Johnson reached the head of Lake George he met the French, 
      and a fierce battle was fought. Success seemed at first to be 
      altogether with the French; but after a while Johnson was slightly 
      wounded, when General Lyman, a brave colonial officer, took 
      command, and beat the French terribly.... Abercrombie's defeat was 
      the last of the English disasters. The colonists now had arms 
      enough, and were allowed to fight in their own way, and a series of 
      brilliant victories followed.... By the energy, courage, and 
      patriotism of her colonies, England had now acquired a splendid 
      empire in the New World. And while she reaped all the glory of the 
      war and its fruits, it was the hardy colonists who had throughout, 
      borne the brunt of the conflict." 
   
 The child who learns his history from Mr. Barnes may not hate England, 
 but will certainly despise her. 
   
 Text-books of this type, however, are already obsolescent. A committee 
 of the New England History Teachers' Association published in the 
 _Educational Review_ for December 1898 a careful survey of no fewer than 
 nineteen school histories of the United States, and summed up the 
 results as follows: 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 149 
   
      "In discussing the causes of the Revolution, text-book writers have 
      sounded pretty much the whole scale of motives. England has been 
      pictured, on the one hand, as an arbitrary oppressor, and, on the 
      other, as the helpless victim of political environment. Under the 
      influence of deeper study and a keener sense of justice, however, 
      the element of bitterness, which so often entered into the 
      discussion of this subject, has largely disappeared; and while the 
      treatment of the Revolution in the text-books still leaves much to 
      be desired, it is now seldom dogmatic and unsympathetic." 
   
 The fact remains, however, that we have still to live down our wars 
 with the United States, in which there was much that was galling to the 
 just pride of the American people, and much, too, that was perhaps 
 over-stimulating to their self-esteem. There is no doubt, on the one 
 hand, that we were inclined to adopt a supercilious and contemptuous 
 attitude towards the "rebel colonists" of 1775, the new-made nation of 
 1815; no doubt, on the other hand, that they made a splendid fight 
 against us, and taught our superciliousness a salutary lesson. They feel 
 to this day the humiliation of having been despised, and the exultation 
 of having put their despisers to shame. These wars, which were, until 
 1861, almost the whole military history of the United States, were but 
 episodes in our history, and one of them a trifling episode. Therefore, 
 while the average Englishman has not studied them sufficiently to 
 realise how much he ought to deplore them, the average American has been 
 taught to dwell upon them as the glorious struggles in which his nation 
 won its spurs.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 150 
   
 To the juvenile imagination, battles are always the oases 
 in the desert of history, and the schoolboy never fails to take sides 
 fiercely and uncompromisingly, exaggerating, with the histrionic 
 instinct of youth, his enthusiasm and his hatreds. Thus the insolent 
 Britisher became the Turk's-head or Guy Fawkes, so to speak, of the 
 American boy, the butt of his bellicose humours; and a habit of mind 
 contracted in boyhood is not always to be eradicated by the sober 
 reflection of manhood, even in minds capable of sober reflection. The 
 Civil War, be it noted, did not depose the insolent Britisher from his 
 bad eminence in the schoolboy imagination. The Confederates were, after 
 all, Americans, though misguided Americans; and the fostering, the 
 brooding upon, intestine rancours was felt by teachers and pupils alike 
 to be impossible. But there is in the juvenile mind at any given moment 
 a certain amount of abstract combativeness, let us call it, which must 
 find an outlet somewhere. Hatred is a natural function of the human 
 mind, just as much as love; and the healthy boy instinctively exercises 
 it under the guise of patriotism, without clearly distinguishing the 
 element of sheer play and pose in his transports. England's attitude 
 during the Civil War certainly did nothing to endear her either to the 
 writers or the readers of school histories; and she remained after that 
 struggle, as she had been before, the one great historical adversary on 
 whom the abstract combativeness of young America could expend itself. 
 How strong this tendency is, or has been, in the American school, may be 
 judged from the following anecdote. A boy of unmixed English parentage, 
 whose father and mother had settled in America, was educated at the 
 public school of his district. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 151 
   
 On the day when Mr. Cleveland's Venezuela 
 message was given to the world, he came home from school radiant, and 
 shouted to his parents: "Hurrah! We're going to war with England! We've 
 whipped you twice before, and we're going to do it again." It is clear 
 that at this academy Anglomania formed no part of the curriculum; and 
 who can doubt that in myriads of cases these schoolboy animosities 
 subsist throughout life, either active, or dormant and easily awakened? 
   
 Let us admit without shrinking that the history of the United States 
 cannot be truthfully written in such a way as to ingratiate Great 
 Britain with the youth of America. There have been painful episodes 
 between the two nations, in which England has, on the whole, acted 
 stupidly, or arrogantly, or both. Nor can we shift the whole blame upon 
 George III. or his Ministers. They were responsible for the actual 
 Revolution; but after the Revolution, down even to the time of the 
 Civil War inclusive, the English people, though guiltless in the main of 
 active hostility to America, cannot be acquitted of ignorance and 
 indifference. It is not in the least to be desired that American history 
 should be written with a pro-English bias, and, as I have said, I do not 
 find the anti-English bias, even in inferior text-books, so excessive as 
 it is sometimes represented to be. The anti-English sentiment of 
 American schools is, as it seems to me, an inevitable phenomenon of 
 juvenile psychology, under the given conditions; and it is the 
 alteration in the actual conditions wrought by recent events, rather 
 than any marked change in the tone of the text-books, that may, I think, 
 be trusted to soothe the schoolboy's savage breast. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 152 
 England has now done 
 what she had never done before: shown herself conspicuously friendly to 
 the United States; and another European country has given occasion for 
 spirit-stirring manifestations of American prowess. Thus England is 
 deposed for the time, and we may trust for ever, from her position as 
 the one traditional arch-enemy. 
   
 But though the errors of commission in American history-books have been 
 exaggerated, I cannot but think that a common error of omission is 
 worthy of remark and correction. They begin American history too 
 late--with the discovery of America--and they do not awaken, as they 
 might, the just pride of race in the "unhyphenated" American boy. Long 
 before Columbus set sail from Palos, American history was a-making in 
 the shire-moots of Saxon England, at Hastings, and Runnymead, and 
 Bannockburn. In all the mediaeval achievements of England, in peace and 
 war--in her cathedrals, her castles, her universities, in Cressy, 
 Poictiers, and Agincourt--Americans may without paradox claim their 
 ancestral part. Why should the sons of the English who emigrated leave 
 to the sons of those who stayed at home the undivided credit of having 
 sent to the right-about the Invincible Armada? Nay, it is only the very 
 oldest American families that can disclaim all complicity in having, as 
 Lord Auchinleck put it, "garred kings ken that they had a lith in their 
 necks." Of course I do not mean that the American schoolboy should be 
 taken in detail through British history down to the seventeenth century 
 before, so to speak, he crosses the Atlantic. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE III Pg 153 
   
 But I do suggest that he 
 would be none the worse American for being encouraged to set a due value 
 on his rightful share in the achievements of earlier ancestors than 
 those who fought at Trenton or sailed with Decatur. Let him realise his 
 birthright in the glories of Britain, and he will perhaps come to take a 
 more magnanimous view of her errors and disasters. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 154 
 Britain has been too forgetful of the past, America, perhaps, too 
 mindful; and in the everyday relations of life Britain has often been 
 tactless and unsympathetic, America suspicious and supersensitive. There 
 is every prospect, I think, that such errors will become, in the future, 
 rarer and ever rarer; and it behoves us, on our side, to be careful in 
 guarding against them. We have not hitherto sufficiently respected 
 America,--that is the whole story. We have taken no pains to know and 
 understand her. We have too often regarded her with a careless and 
 supercilious good feeling, which she has not unnaturally mistaken for 
 ill feeling, and repaid in kind. The events of the past year seem to 
 have brought the two countries almost physically closer to each other, 
 and to have made them more real, more clearly visible, each to each. 
 America has won the respectful consideration of even the most 
 thoughtless and insular among us. She has come home to us, so to speak, 
 as a vast and vital factor in the problem of the future. 
 Superciliousness towards her is a mere anachronism. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 155 
   
 Many Englishmen, however, are still guilty of a thoughtless captiousness 
 towards America, which is none the less galling because it manifests 
 itself in the most trifling matters. A friend of my own returned a few 
 years ago from a short tour in the United States, declaring that he 
 heartily disliked the country, and would never go back again. Inquiry as 
 to the grounds of his dissatisfaction elicited no more definite or 
 damning charge than that "they" (a collective pronoun presumed to cover 
 the whole American people) hung up his trousers instead of folding 
 them--or _vice versa_, for I am heathen enough not to remember which is 
 the orthodox process. Doubtless he had other, and possibly weightier, 
 causes of complaint; but this was the head and front of America's 
 offending. Another Englishman of education and position, being asked why 
 he had never crossed the Atlantic, gravely replied that he could not 
 endure to travel in a country where you had to black your own boots! 
 Such instances of ignorance and pettiness may seem absurdly trivial, but 
 they are quite sufficient to act as grits in the machinery of social 
 intercourse. Americans are very fond of citing as an example of English 
 manners the legend of a great lady who, at an American breakfast, saw 
 her husband declining a dish which was offered to him, and called across 
 the table, "Take some, my dear--it isn't half as nasty as it looks." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 156 
 Three different people have vouched to me for the truth of this 
 anecdote, each naming the heroine, and each giving her a different name. 
 True or false, it is held in America to be typical; and it would 
 scarcely be so popular as it is unless people had suffered a good deal 
 from the tactlessness which it exemplifies. The same vice, in a more 
 insidious form, appears in a remark made to me the other day by an 
 Englishman of very high intelligence, who had just returned from a long 
 tour in America, and was, in the main, far from unsympathetic. "What I 
 felt," he said, "was the suburbanism of everything. It was all Clapham 
 or Camberwell on a gigantic scale." Some justice of observation may 
 possibly have lain behind this remark, though I certainly failed to 
 recognise it. But in the form of its expression it exemplified that 
 illusion of metropolitanism which is to my mind the veriest cockneyism 
 in disguise, and which cannot but strike Americans as either ridiculous 
 or offensive. 
   
 Englishmen who, as individuals, wish to promote and not impede an 
 international understanding, will do well to take some little thought to 
 avoid wounding, even in trifles, the just and inevitable 
 susceptibilities of their American acquaintances. Our own national 
 self-esteem is cased in oak and triple brass,[M] and we are apt to 
 regard American sensitiveness as a ridiculous foible. It is nothing of 
 the sort: it is a psychological necessity, deep-rooted in history and 
 social conditions. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 157 
   
 Again, there are certain misunderstandings which Englishmen, not as 
 individual human beings but as citizens of the British Empire, ought 
 carefully to guard against. Let us beware of speaking or thinking as 
 though friendship for England involved on the part of America any 
 acceptance of English political ideas or imitation of English methods. 
 In especial, let us carefully guard against the idea that an 
 Anglo-American understanding, however cordial, implies the adoption of 
 an "expansionist" policy by the United States, or must necessarily 
 strengthen the hands of the "expansionist" party. If America chooses to 
 "take up the white man's burden" in the Kiplingesque sense, it would ill 
 become England to object; but her doing so is by no means a condition of 
 England's sympathy. It might seem, indeed, that she had plenty of "white 
 man's burden" to shoulder within her own continental boundaries; but 
 that is a matter which she is entirely competent to determine for 
 herself. 
   
 Most of all must we beware of anything that can encourage an impression, 
 already too prevalent in America, that we find the "white man's burden" 
 too heavy for us, and are anxious to share it with the United States. 
 This suspicion is very generally felt and very openly expressed. Take, 
 for instance, this paragraph from an editorial in one of the leading 
 Chicago papers: 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 158 
   
 "It would be a strange thing to see Continental Europe take up arms 
      against Great Britain alone.... That it is a very reasonable 
      possibility, however, is generally recognised in Europe, and it 
      was doubtless a knowledge of this fact that induced Great Britain 
      to make such unusual exertions to ally itself with the United 
      States." 
   
 Here, again, is another journalistic straw floating on the stream: 
   
      "Referring to the fact that English and American officers had 
      fallen side by side in Samoa while promoting commercial interests, 
      Lord [Charles] Beresford expressed the hope that the two nations 
      would 'always be found working and fighting in unison.' This might 
      keep us pretty busy, your lordship." 
   
 In a rather low-class farce which I saw in a Chicago theatre, two men 
 wandered through the action, with the charming irrelevance 
 characteristic of American popular drama, attired, one as John Bull, the 
 other as Brother Jonathan. There came a point in the action where some 
 one had to be kicked out of the house. "You do it, Jonathan," said John 
 Bull; whereupon Jonathan retorted: "I know your game; you want me to do 
 your fighting for you, but _I don't do it_! See?" These are ridiculous 
 trifles, no doubt, but they might be indefinitely multiplied; and they 
 show the set of a certain current in American feeling. Let us beware of 
 lending added strength to this current by any appearance of 
 self-interested eagerness in our advances towards America. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 159 
   
 One thing we cannot too clearly realise, and that is that the true 
 American clings above everything to his Americanism. The status of an 
 American citizen is to him the proudest on earth, and that although he 
 may clearly enough recognise the abuses of American political life, and 
 the dangers which the Republic has to encounter. The feeling (which is 
 not to be confounded with an ignorant chauvinism, though in some cases 
 it may take that form) is the fundamental feeling of the whole nation; 
 and no emotion which threatened to encroach upon it, or compete with it 
 in any way, would have the least chance of taking a permanent place in 
 the American mind. The feeling which, as one may reasonably hope, is now 
 growing up between the two nations must be based on the mutual admission 
 of absolute independence and equality. The relation is new to history, 
 and must beget a new emotion. Strong as is the bond of mutual interest, 
 it must have a large idealism to reinforce it--a sentiment (shall we 
 say?) of mutual admiration--if the English-speaking peoples are to play 
 the great part in the drama of the future which Destiny seems to be 
 urging upon them. In order to stand together in perfect freedom and 
 dignity, it is essential that each of the brother-nations should be 
 incontestably able to stand alone. If we want to cement the 
 Anglo-American understanding, the first thing we have to do is to cement 
 the British Empire. 
   
 There is no more typical and probably no more widely respected American 
 at the present moment than Governor Roosevelt, of New York.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 160 
   
 Even those 
 who dissent from his "strenuous" ideal and his expansionist opinions, 
 admit him to be a model of political integrity and public spirit. In an 
 article on "The Monroe Doctrine," published in 1896, Mr. Roosevelt wrote 
 as follows: 
   
      "No English colony now stands on a footing of genuine equality with 
      the parent State. As long as the Canadian remains a colonist, he 
      remains in a position which is distinctly inferior to that of his 
      cousins, both in England and in the United States. The Englishman 
      at bottom looks down on the Canadian, as he does on any one who 
      admits his inferiority, and quite properly too. The American, on 
      the other hand, with equal propriety, regards the Canadian with the 
      good-natured condescension always felt by the freeman for the man 
      who is not free. A funny instance of the English attitude towards 
      Canada was shown after Lord Dunraven's inglorious fiasco last 
      September, when the Canadian yachtsman Rose challenged for the 
      America Cup. The English journals repudiated him on the express 
      ground that a Canadian was not an Englishman, and not entitled to 
      the privileges of an Englishman. In their comments, many of them 
      showed a dislike for Americans which almost rose to hatred. The 
      feeling they displayed for Canadians was not one of dislike. It was 
      one of contempt." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 161 
   
 There are several contestable points in this statement, and I quote it, 
 though it is but three years old, as a historical rather than a 
 contemporary utterance. At the same time it expresses an almost 
 universal American point of view, and indicates errors to be corrected, 
 dangers to be avoided. It is absurd, of course, that the American should 
 look down upon the Canadian as a "man who is not free"; but every shadow 
 of an excuse for such an attitude ought to be removed, and the citizen 
 of the British Empire ought to have as clearly defined a status as the 
 citizen of the American Republic. 
   
 Even if such unpleasant incidents should recur as those to which Mr. 
 Roosevelt alludes, we may trust with tolerable confidence that he would 
 now find no "hatred" for America, or "contempt" for Canada, in the tone 
 of the British Press. The years which have passed since 1896 have not 
 only created a new feeling between England and America, but have drawn 
 the Empire together. In this respect--in every respect--much remains to 
 be done. 
   
 But at least we can say with assurance that a good beginning has been 
 made towards that consolidation of the English-speaking countries on 
 which the well-being of the world so largely depends. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 162 
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--The notion of inevitable hostility between a constitutional 
 Monarchy and a Republic has been fostered by American writers in whom 
 one would have expected greater clearness of perception. We find Lowell, 
 for instance, writing in his well-known essay _On a Certain 
 Condescension in Foreigners_: "I never blamed her (England) for not 
 wishing well to democracy--how should she?" The more obvious question 
 is, How should not one democracy wish another well? There may have been 
 at the time when Lowell wrote, and there may even be to-day, a handful 
 of royalty-worshippers in England who regard a Republic as a vulgar, 
 unpicturesque form of government; but this is not a political opinion, 
 or even prejudice, but mere stolid snobbery. Whatever were England's 
 misdemeanours towards America at the time of the Civil War, they were 
 not prompted by any hatred of democracy. 
   
 I find the same misconception insisted on in a document much later than 
 Lowell's essay: a leaflet by the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, contributed 
 to a _Good Citizenship Series_ especially designed for the enlightenment 
 of the more ignorant class of American voters. The tract is called _The 
 Ruler of America_, and sets forth that the Ruler of America is "The 
 People with a very large P." Now, according to Dr. Hale, we benighted 
 Europeans are absolutely incapable of grasping this truth. He says: 
 "This is at bottom the trouble with the diplomatists of Europe, with 
 prime ministers, and with leaders of ''Er Majesty's Hopposition.'... 
 Even men of intelligence.... can make nothing of the central truth of 
 our system.... In my house, once, an English gentleman of great 
 intelligence told me that he had visited the White House, and was most 
 glad to pay his respects to 'the Ruler of our Great Nation.' Poor man! 
 he thought he would please me! But he saw his mistake soon enough. I 
 stormed out, 'Ruler of America? Who told you he was the ruler of 
 America? He never told you so. He is the First Servant of America.' And 
 I hope the poor traveller learned his lesson." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE REPUBLIC AND THE EMPIRE IV Pg 163 
   
 It is true that the poor traveller used a pompous and rather absurd 
 expression, but if he had had his wits about him he might have reminded 
 Dr. Hale that the President is much more effectively the Ruler of 
 America than the Queen is the Ruler of England. He rules by the direct 
 mandate of the People, but he rules none the less. It would greatly 
 conduce to a just understanding between America and England if the 
 political instructors of the American people would correct instead of 
 confirming the prevalent impression that they have a monopoly of 
 democracy. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 164 
   
   
 Great Britain and the United States are sister Commonwealths, enjoying 
 the advantages and exposed to the dangers of sisterhood. The dangers are 
 as real, though we trust not as great, as the advantages. Family 
 quarrels are apt to be bitterest; a chance word will seem unkind and 
 unbearable from a near kinsman, which, coming from a stranger, would 
 carry no sting at all. As Lowell very truly said, "The common blood, and 
 still more the common language, are fatal instruments of 
 misapprehension." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 165 
   
 But behind this statement there lies a far deeper 
 though still obvious truth. We misunderstand because we understand; and 
 it would be an extravagance of pessimism to doubt that, in the long run, 
 understanding will carry the day. Light may dazzle here and bewilder 
 there; but, after all, it is light and not darkness. We English and 
 Americans hold a talisman that makes us at home over half, and more than 
 half, the world; and we are not going to rob it of its virtue by 
 renouncing our ties, and wantonly declaring ourselves aliens to each 
 other. 
   
 Our unity of speech is such a commonplace that we scarcely notice it. 
 But, rightly regarded, it is a thing to be rejoiced in with a great joy, 
 and not without a certain sense of danger happily escaped. He would have 
 been a bold man who should confidently have prophesied at the Revolution 
 that American and English would remain the same tongue, and that at the 
 end of the nineteenth century there would not be the slightest 
 perceptible cleavage, or threat of ultimate divergence. No doubt there 
 were forces obviously tending to preserve the linguistic unity of the 
 two nations. There was the English Bible for one thing, and there was 
 the whole body of English literature. The Americans, it might have been 
 said, could scarcely be so foolish as deliberately to renounce their 
 spiritual birthright, or let it drift little by little away from them. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 166 
   
 But, on the other hand, virulent and inveterate political enmity, had it 
 arisen, might quite conceivably have led the Americans to make it a 
 point of honour to differentiate their speech from ours, as many 
 Norwegians are at this moment making it a point of honour to 
 differentiate their language from the Danish, which was until of late 
 years the generally accepted medium of literary expression. In the 
 evolution of their literature, the Americans might purposely have 
 rejected our classical tradition, making their effort rather to depart 
 from than to adhere to it. Again, an observer in 1776 could not have 
 foreseen the practical annihilation, by steam and electricity, of that 
 barrier which then appeared so formidable--the Atlantic Ocean. He might 
 have foreseen the immense influx of men of every race and tongue into 
 the unpeopled West; but he could scarcely have anticipated with 
 confidence the ready absorption of all these alien elements (save one!) 
 into the dominant Anglo-Saxon polity. It was quite on the cards that a 
 new American language might have developed from a fusion of all the 
 diverse tongues of all the scattered races of the earth. 
   
 Nothing of the sort, as we know, has happened. The instinct of kinship 
 from the first kept political enmity in check; the Atlantic has been 
 practically wiped out; and English has easily absorbed, in America, all 
 the other idioms which have been brought into contact, rather than 
 competition, with it. The result is that the English language occupies a 
 unique position among the tongues of the earth. It is unique in two 
 dimensions--in altitude and in expanse. It soars to the highest heights 
 of human utterance, and it covers an unequalled area of the earth's 
 surface. Undoubtedly it is the most precious heirloom of our race, and 
 as such we must reverence and guard it. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 167 
   
 . Nor must we islanders talk as 
 though we hold it in fee-simple, and allowed our trans-Atlantic kinsfolk 
 merely a conditional usufruct of it. Their property in it is as complete 
 and indefeasible as our own; and we should rejoice to accept their aid 
 in the conversation and renovation (equally indispensable processes) of 
 this superb and priceless heritage. 
   
 English critics of the beginning of the century so convincingly set 
 forth the reasons why America, absorbed in the conquest of nature and in 
 material progress, could not produce anything great in the way of 
 literature, that their arguments remain embedded in many minds even to 
 this day, when events have conclusively falsified them. It is a 
 commonplace with some people that America has not developed a great 
 _American_ literature. If this merely means that, in casting off her 
 allegiance to George III., America did not cast off her allegiance to 
 Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Addison, Swift, Pope, the 
 reproach, if it be one, must be accepted. If it be a humiliation to 
 American authors to own the traditions and standards established by 
 these men, and thereby to enrol themselves in their immortal fellowship, 
 why, then it must be owned that they have deliberately incurred that 
 humiliation. One American of vivid originality tried to escape it, and 
 with what result? Simply that Whitman holds a place of his own, somewhat 
 like that of Blake one might say, in the literature of the English 
 language, and has produced at least as much effect in England as in 
 America. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 168 
   
 If, on the other hand, it be implied that American literature 
 feebly imitates English literature, and fails to present an original and 
 adequate interpretation of American life, no reproach could well be more 
 flagrantly unjust. It is not only the abstract merit of American 
 literature, though that is very high, but precisely the Americanism of 
 it, that gives it its value in the eyes of all thinking Englishmen. Only 
 one American author of the first rank could possibly, at a superficial 
 glance, appear--not so much English as--European, cosmopolitan. I mean, 
 of course, Edgar Allan Poe, who has left perhaps a deeper impress upon 
 literature outside the English-speaking countries than any other 
 imaginative writer of the century, with the exception of Byron. Poe was 
 a born idealist, a creature of pure intelligence. Whether in poetry or 
 fiction, he was always solving problems; and it is hard to be 
 distinctively national in an exercise of pure intelligence. We do not 
 look for local colour in, for example, the agreeable essays of Euclid. 
 But Poe's intelligence was, at bottom, of a characteristically American 
 type. He was the Edison of romance.[N] As for the other great writers of 
 America, what can be more patent than their Americanism? Speaking only, 
 for the present, of those who have joined the majority, I would name two 
 who seem to me to stand with Poe in the very front rank of original 
 genius. They are Emerson, that starlike spirit, dwelling in a serener 
 ether than ours, which, though we may never attain, it is yet a 
 refreshment to look up to; and Hawthorne, not perhaps the greatest 
 romancer in the English tongue, but certainly the purest artist in that 
 sphere of fiction. Now, it is a mere truism to say that each of these 
 men was, in his way, a typical product of New England, inconceivable as 
 the offspring of any other soil in the world. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 169 
   
 . Emerson, it has been said, 
 not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying 
 into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole 
 which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the 
 conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and 
 reproduced the physical charm of Rome more subtly than any other artist, 
 his genius drew at once its strength and its delicacy from his Puritan 
 ancestry and environment. To realise how intimately he smacks of the 
 soil, we have but to think of that marvellous scene in _The Blithedale 
 Romance_, the search for Zenobia's body. From what does it derive its 
 peculiar quality, its haunting savour? Simply from the presence of Silas 
 Foster, that delightful incarnation of the New England yeoman. "If I 
 thought anything had happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o' 
 sorrowful," said the grim Silas; and there never was a speech more 
 dramatically true, or, in its context, more bitterly pathetic. 
   
 Even while English critics were proving that there could be no such 
 thing as an American literature, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper 
 were laying its foundations on a thoroughly American basis. Irving was 
 none the less American for loving the picturesque traditions of his 
 English ancestry; Cooper, a gallant and fertile genius, did his country 
 and our language an inestimable service by adding a whole group of 
 specifically American figures to the deathless aristocracy of the realms 
 of romance. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 170 
   
 Then, in the generation which has just passed away, we have 
 such men as Thoreau, racy of his native soil; Longfellow, in his day and 
 way the chief interpreter of America to England; Whittier, so intensely 
 local that, as Professor Matthews puts it, "he wrote for New England 
 rather than for the whole of the United States;" Lowell, courtly, 
 cultured, cosmopolitan, and yet the creator of Hosea Biglow; Holmes, as 
 American in his humour as Lamb was English, who justly ranks with Lamb 
 and Goldsmith among the personally best-beloved writers of the English 
 tongue. Prescott, in the sphere of history, paralleled the achievement 
 of Cooper in fiction, by giving literary form to the romance of the New 
 World; while Motley was inspired (too ardently, perhaps) by the spirit 
 of free America in writing the great epic of religious and political 
 freedom in Europe. Finally, it must not be forgotten that in _Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin_, a tragically American production, Mrs. Beecher Stowe added 
 to the literature of the English language the most potent, the most 
 dynamic, pamphlet ever hurled into the arena of national life. 
   
 Of all that living Americans are doing for the literature of our common 
 tongue it is as yet impossible to speak adequately. Since 1870, a new 
 spirit of nationalism has entered into American literature, which has 
 not yet been thoroughly studied in America or appreciated in England. So 
 far from having no national literature, America has now, perhaps, the 
 most intimately national body of fiction in the modern world. Before the 
 Civil War there was practically no deliberate and systematic study of 
 local and racial idiosyncracies. Hosea Biglow was a mask, not a 
 character, and Parson Wilbur was a literary device. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 171 
 Even Hawthorne 
 thought primarily of the element of imagination in the romances--the 
 universal, not the local, element. His leading characters are 
 psychological creations, with nothing specifically American about them; 
 his local colour and local character-study, though admirable, are 
 incidental, or at any rate stand on a secondary plane. In the South 
 there was no literature at all, local or otherwise, with the one 
 startling exception of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.[O] But since 1870, and 
 mainly, indeed, within the past twenty years, a marvellous change has 
 come over the scene. Not only the national but the local 
 self-consciousness of America has sprung to literary life, until at the 
 present day there is scarcely a corner of the country, scarcely an 
 aspect of social life, that has not found its special, and, as a rule, 
 very able interpreter through the medium of fiction. Pursuing technical 
 methods partly borrowed from abroad (from France rather than from 
 England), American writers have undertaken what one is tempted to call a 
 sociological ordnance-survey of the Republic from Maine to Arizona, from 
 Florida to Oregon. There is scarcely a human being in the United States, 
 from the Newport society belle to the "greaser" of New Mexico, that has 
 not his or her more or less faithful counterpart in fiction. No European 
 country, so far as I know, has achieved anything like such comprehensive 
 self-realisation. Comprehensive, I say--not necessarily profound. 
 Perhaps France in Balzac, perhaps Russia in Turgueneff and Tolstoi, 
 found more searching interpretation than America has found even in her 
 host of novelists. But never, surely, was there a body of fiction that 
 touched life at so many points, to mirror if not to probe it. And in 
 many cases to probe it as well. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 172 
   
 It would take a volume to criticise these writers in any detail. I can 
 attempt no more than a bald and imperfect enumeration. Miss Mary 
 Wilkins's studies of New England life are well known and appreciated in 
 England, but the talent of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett is not sufficiently 
 recognised. In her _Country of the Pointed Firs_, for example, there are 
 whole chapters that rise to a classical perfection of workmanship. The 
 novelists of the Eastern cities, with Mr. Howells, a master craftsman, 
 at their head, are of course numberless. For studies in the local colour 
 of New York nothing could be better than Professor Brander Matthews' 
 _Vignettes of Manhattan_, and other stories. Mr. Paul Leicester Ford's 
 _Honorable Peter Stirling_, though antiquated in style, gives a 
 remarkable picture of political life in New York. The Bowery Boy is 
 cleverly represented, so far as dialect at any rate is concerned, by 
 Mr. E.W. Townsend in his _Chimmie Fadden_. Even the Jewish and the 
 Italian quarters of New York have their portraitists in fiction. Life in 
 Washington has been frequently and ably depicted; for instance, in Mrs. 
 Burnett's _Through one Administration_. Of the many interpreters of the 
 South I need mention only three: Mr. Cable, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, and 
 Mr. Chandler Harris. Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") has made 
 the mountains of Tennessee her special province. Chicago has several 
 novelists of her own: for example, Mr. Henry Fuller, author of _The 
 Cliff Dwellers_, Mr. Will Payne, and that close student of Chicago 
 slang, Mr. George Ade, the author of _Artie_. The Middle West counts 
 such novelists as Miss "Octave Thanet" and Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose 
 _Main Travelled Roads_ contains some very remarkable work.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 173 
   
 The Far West 
 is best represented, perhaps, in the lively and graphic sketches of Mr. 
 Owen Wister; while California has novelists of talent in Miss Gertrude 
 Atherton and Mr. Frank Norris. At least two Americans living abroad have 
 made noteworthy contributions to this sociological survey of their 
 native land: the late Mr. Harold Frederic, who has dealt mainly with 
 country life in New York State, and Miss Elizabeth Robins, whose 
 picture, in _The Open Question_, of a Southern family impoverished by 
 the war, is exceedingly vivid and bears all the marks of the utmost 
 fidelity. Nor must I omit to mention that the stage has borne a modest 
 but not insignificant part in this movement of national 
 self-portraiture. Mr. Augustus Thomas' _Alabama_ is a delightful picture 
 of Southern life, while Mr. James A. Herne's _Shore Acres_ takes a 
 distinct place in the literature of New England, his _Griffith 
 Davenport_[P] in the literature of Virginia. 
   
 There must, of course, be many gaps in this summary enumeration. It is 
 very probable that many novelists of distinction have altogether escaped 
 my notice; and I have made no attempt to include in my list the writers 
 of short magazine stories, many of them artists of high accomplishment. 
 One omission, however, I must at once repair. "Mark Twain's" 
 contributions to the work of self-realisation have been in the main 
 retrospective, but nevertheless of the first importance. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 174 
   
 He is the 
 "sacred poet" of the Mississippi. If any work of incontestable genius, 
 and plainly predestined to immortality, has been issued in the English 
 language during the past quarter of a century, it is that brilliant 
 romance of the Great Rivers, _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. 
   
 Intensely American though he be, "Mark Twain" is one of the greatest 
 living masters of the English language. To some Englishmen this may seem 
 a paradox; but it is high time we should disabuse ourselves of the 
 prejudice that residence on the European side of the Atlantic confers 
 upon us an exclusive right to determine what is good English, and to 
 write it correctly and vigorously. We are apt in England to class as an 
 "Americanism" every unfamiliar, or too familiar, locution which we do 
 not happen to like. As a matter of fact, there is a pretty lively 
 interchange between the two countries of slipshod and vulgar 
 "journalese;" and as the picturesque reporter is a greater power in 
 America than he is with us, we perhaps import more than we export of 
 this particular commodity. But there can be no rational doubt, I think, 
 that the English language has gained, and is gaining, enormously by its 
 expansion over the American continent. The prime function of a language, 
 after all, is to interpret the "form and pressure" of life--the 
 experience, knowledge, thought, emotion, and aspiration of the race 
 which employs it. This being so, the more tap-roots a language sends 
 down into the soil of life, and the more varied the strata of human 
 experience from which it draws its nourishment, whether of vocabulary or 
 idiom, the more perfect will be its potentialities as a medium of 
 expression. We must be careful, it is true, to keep the organism 
 healthy, to guard against disintegration of tissue; but to that duty 
 American writers are quite as keenly alive as we. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_AMERICAN LITERATURE  Pg 175 
   
 It is not a source of 
 weakness but of power and vitality to the English language that it 
 should embrace a greater variety of dialects than any other civilised 
 tongue. A new language, says the proverb, is a new sense; but a 
 multiplicity of dialects means, for the possessors of the main language, 
 an enlargement of the pleasures of the linguistic sense without the 
 fatigue of learning a totally new grammar and vocabulary. So long as 
 there is a potent literary tradition keeping the core of the language 
 one and indivisible, vernacular variations can only tend, in virtue of 
 the survival of the fittest, to promote the abundance, suppleness, and 
 nicety of adaptation of the language as a literary instrument. The 
 English language is no mere historic monument, like Westminster Abbey, 
 to be religiously preserved as a relic of the past, and reverenced as 
 the burial-place of a bygone breed of giants. It is a living organism, 
 ceaselessly busied, like any other organism, in the processes of 
 assimilation and excretion. It has before it, we may fairly hope, a 
 future still greater than its glorious past. And the greatness of that 
 future will largely depend on the harmonious interplay of spiritual 
 forces throughout the American Republic and the British Empire. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 176 
 [Footnote M: I do not mean that we are callous to American criticism, or 
 always take it in good part when it comes home to us. I think with 
 shame, for example, of the stupid insolence with which certain English 
 journalists used for years to treat Mr. W.D. Howells, merely because he 
 had expressed certain literary judgments from which they dissented. What 
 I do mean, and believe to be true, is that we are _habitually 
 unconscious_ of American criticism, while Americans may rather be said 
 to be _habitually over-conscious_ that the eyes of England and of the 
 world are on them. The existence of this habit of mind seems to me no 
 less evident than the fact that it is rapidly correcting itself.] 
   
 [Footnote N: I went to see Poe's grave in Baltimore, marked by a mean 
 and ugly monument, little more than a mere tombstone. It is surely time 
 that a worthy memorial should be raised, at his burial-place or 
 elsewhere, to this unique genius. England and the English-speaking world 
 would gladly contribute. For a masterly criticism and vindication of 
 Poe, let me refer the reader to Mr. John M. Robertson's _New Essays 
 towards a Critical Method_. London and New York, 1897.] 
   
 [Footnote O: For the reasons of this barrenness, see an essay on _Two 
 Studies in the South_, in Professor Brander Matthews' _Aspects of 
 Fiction_. New York, 1896.] 
   
 [Footnote P: Founded on a novel by Miss Helen H. Gardener.] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 177 
   
 Nothing short of an imperative sense of duty could tempt me to set forth 
 on that most perilous emprise, a discussion of the American language. 
 The path is beset with man-traps and spring-guns. Not all the serious 
 causes of dissension between England and America have begotten half the 
 bad blood that has been engendered by trumpery questions of vocabulary, 
 grammar, and pronunciation. I cannot hope to escape giving offence, 
 probably on both sides; but if I can induce one or two people on either 
 side to think twice before they scoff once, I shall not have written in 
 vain. 
   
 In the way of scoffing, we English have doubtless (and inevitably) been 
 the worst offenders. We have habitually used "Americanism" as a term of 
 reproach, implying, if not saying in so many words, that America was the 
 great source of pollution, and of nothing but pollution, to the 
 otherwise limpid current of our speech. Dean Alford wrote offensively 
 to this effect; Archbishop Trench, on the other hand, discussed the 
 relations between the English of America and the English of England with 
 courtesy and good sense. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 178 
 He protested against certain transatlantic 
 neologisms, including in his list that excellent old word "to berate," 
 and a word so useful and so eminently consonant with the spirit of the 
 language as "to belittle;" but, whether wise or unwise, his protest was 
 at least civil. Other writers, both in books and periodicals, have been 
 apt to take their tone from the Dean rather than from the Archbishop. It 
 may even be said that the instinct of the majority of Englishmen, which 
 finds heedless expression in the newspapers and common talk, is to 
 regard Americanisms as necessarily vulgar, and (conversely) vulgarisms 
 as probably American. If challenged and brought to book, they can 
 generally realise the narrowness and injustice of this way of thinking; 
 yet they relapse into it next moment. It is time we should be on our 
 guard against so insidious a habit. Its reduction to absurdity may be 
 found (alackaday!) in _Fors Clavigera_ for June 1, 1874. With shame and 
 sorrow I transcribe the passage, for the time has not yet come for it 
 to be forgotten. If it were merely the aberration of an individual, 
 however distinguished, it were better kept out of sight, out of mind; 
 but it is, I repeat, the reckless exaggeration of a not altogether 
 uncommon habit of thought:-- 
   
      "England taught the Americans all they have of speech or thought, 
      hitherto. What thoughts they have not learned from England are 
      foolish thoughts; what words they have not learned from England, 
      unseemly words; the vile among them not being able even to be 
      humorous parrots, but only obscene mocking-birds." 
   
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 179 
   
 Can we wonder that Americans have retorted with some asperity upon 
 criticisms in which any approach to such insolent insularism is even 
 remotely or inadvertently implied? 
   
 The American retort, however, has not always been judicious or 
 dignified. It has too often consisted in the mere pitting of one 
 linguistic prejudice against another. It is very easy to prove that 
 there are bad speakers and bad writers in both countries, and the 
 attempt to determine which country has the more numerous and the greater 
 sinners is exceedingly unprofitable. The "You're another" style of 
 argument has been far too prevalent. Here we have Mr. Gilbert M. Tucker, 
 for instance, in a book entitled _Our Common Speech_ (1895) implying, 
 if he does not absolutely assert (p. 173), that a "boldness of 
 innovation" in matters linguistic, amounting to "absolute 
 licentiousness," is more characteristic of England than of America. The 
 suggestion leaves my British withers entirely unwrung, for I approve of 
 bold innovation in language, trusting to the impermanence of the unfit 
 to counteract the effects of licentiousness. If I could believe that we 
 British were the bolder innovators, I should admit it without blenching; 
 but observation and probability seem to me to point with one accord in 
 the opposite direction. New words are begotten by new conditions of 
 life; and as American life is far more fertile of new conditions than 
 ours, the tendency towards neologism cannot but be stronger in America 
 than in England. America has enormously enriched the language, not only 
 with new words, but (since the American mind is, on the whole, quicker 
 and wittier than the English) with apt and luminous colloquial 
 metaphors; and I know not why Mr. Tucker should disclaim the credit. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 180 
   
 He next sets forth to show how recent English writers are corrupting the 
 language; and, in doing so, he falls into some curious errors. 
   
 Dickens was boldly innovating when he made Silas Wegg say, "Mr. Boffin, 
 I never bargain"--"haggle," it would seem, is the proper word. But if 
 Mr. Tucker will look into the matter, he will find it extremely probable 
 that this was the original sense of the word "bargain," and quite 
 certain that it was a very early sense; for instance-- 
   
   "So worthless peasants bargain for their wives, 
   As market-men for oxen, sheep, or horse." 
   
   I HENRY VI., V. v. 53. 
   
 And, in any case, is it possible to set up such a distinction between 
 "bargaining" and "haggling" as to be worth an international wrangle? 
 "Starved" for frozen is to Mr. Tucker an innovation; it was used both by 
 Shakespeare and Milton. "Assist" in the sense of to "be present at" is 
 an "absurd" innovation; it was used by Gibbon and by Prescott, a 
 "tolerably good authority," says Mr. Tucker himself, "in the use of 
 English. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 181 
   
 ." Miss Yonge is taken to task for saying, "Theodora _flung_ away 
 and was rushing off;" but Milton says, "And crop-full out of doors he 
 flings." Charles Reade "is guilty of such phrases as 'Wardlaw whipped 
 before him,' 'Ransome whipped before it;'" but the Princess in _Love's 
 Labour's Lost_ is guilty of saying, "Whip to our tents, as roes run 
 o'er the land," and the word occurs in the same sense in Ben Jonson and 
 Steele, to search no further. The simple fact is that Mr. Tucker has not 
 happened to note the intransitive sense of "to fling" and "to whip," 
 which has been current in the best authors for centuries. He is very 
 severe on the English habit of "inserting utterly superfluous words," 
 instancing from Lord Beaconsfield, "He was _by way of_ intimating that 
 he was engaged on a great work," and, from a magazine, "She was _by way 
 of_ painting the shrimp girl." Now, this is not an elegant expression, 
 and for my part I should be at some pains to avoid it; but it has a 
 perfectly distinct meaning, and is not a mere redundancy. If Mr. Tucker 
 supposes that "She was by way of painting the shrimp girl" means exactly 
 the same as "She was painting the shrimp girl," he misses one of the 
 fine shades of the English language. Similarly, his remark on the 
 "peculiar misuse of the affix _ever_, as in saying 'What_ever_ are you 
 doing?'" stands in need of reconsideration. It is wrong, certainly, to 
 treat _ever_ as an affix, and to mistake the first two words of "What 
 ever are you doing?" for the one word "whatever;" but to suppose the 
 "ever" meaningless and inert, is to overlook a clearly marked and very 
 useful gradation of emphasis. "What are you doing?" expresses simple 
 curiosity; "What ever are you doing?" expresses surprise; "What the 
 devil are you doing?" expresses anger--we need not run farther up the 
 scale. Nor is this use of "ever" an innovation, licentious or otherwise. 
 "Ever" has for centuries been employed as an intensive particle after 
 the interrogative pronouns and adverbs how, who, what, where, why. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 182 
   
 For 
 instance, in _The World of Wonders_ (1607), "I shall desire him to 
 consider how ever it was possible to get an answer from these priests." 
   
 One of the most remarkable paragraphs in Mr. Tucker's book is that in 
 which he proves "the greater permanence and steadiness of our American 
 speech as compared with that of the mother country" by going through 
 Halliwell's _Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms_, and picking 
 out 76 words which Halliwell regards as obsolete, but which in America 
 are all alive and kicking. (The vulgarism is mine, not Mr. Tucker's.) 
 Now as a matter of fact not one of these words is really obsolete in 
 England, and most of them are in everyday use; for instance, adze, 
 affectation, agape, to age, air (appearance), appellant, apple-pie 
 order, baker's dozen, bamboozle, bay window, between whiles, bicker, 
 blanch, to brain, burly, catcall, clodhopper, clutch, coddle, copious, 
 cosy, counterfeit money, crazy (dilapidated), crone, crook, croon, 
 cross-grained, cross-patch, cross purposes, cuddle, to cuff (to strike), 
 cleft, din, earnest money, egg on, greenhorn, jack-of-all-trades, 
 loophole, settled, ornate, to quail, ragamuffin, riff-raff, rigmarole, 
 scant, seedy, out of sorts, stale, tardy, trash. How Halliwell ever came 
 to class these words as archaic I cannot imagine; but I submit that any 
 one who sets forth to write about the English of England ought to have 
 sufficient acquaintance with the language to check and reject 
 Halliwell's amazing classification. Does Mr. Tucker so despise British 
 English as never to read an English book? How else is one to account for 
 his imagining for a moment that clodhopper, clutch, copious, cosy, 
 cross-grained, greenhorn, and rigmarole are obsolete in England? 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE I Pg 183 
   
 Far be it from me to assert that Mr. Tucker makes no good points in his 
 catalogue of English solecisms. I merely hint that this game of pot and 
 kettle is neither dignified nor profitable; that purism is almost always 
 over-hasty, and apt to ignore both the history and the psychology of 
 language; and, finally, that nothing is gained by introducing acerbity 
 (though I have admitted the frequent provocation) into a discussion 
 which a little exercise of temper should render no less agreeable than 
 instructive to both parties. "The speech of the lower orders of our 
 people," says Mr. Tucker, "... differs from what all admit to be 
 standard correctness in a much smaller degree[R] than we have every 
 reason to believe to be the case in England, _our enemies themselves 
 being judges_." Now I protest I am not Mr. Tucker's enemy, and I know of 
 no reason why he should be mine. I cannot share the withering contempt 
 with which he regards the extension of the term "traffic" from barter to 
 movement to and fro, as in a street or on a railway; but if he prefers 
 another word (he does not suggest one, by the way) for the traffic on 
 Broadway or on the New York Central, I shall not esteem him one whit the 
 less.[S] Even when he tells me that "bumper" is the English term for 
 the American "buffer" (on a railway carriage) I do not feel my blood 
 boil. A very slight elevation of the eyebrows expresses all the emotion 
 of which I am conscious. So long as he does not insist on my saying a 
 "bumper state" when I mean a "buffer state," I see no reason whatever 
 for any rupture of that sympathy which ought to subsist between two men 
 who take a common interest and pride in the subject of his 
 treatise--_Our Common Speech_. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 184 
 [Footnote Q: See _English Past and Present_, ninth edition, pp. 63, 
 215.] 
   
 [Footnote R: "What great city of this country," Mr. Tucker inquires, 
 "has developed, or is likely to develop, any peculiar class of errors at 
 all comparable in importance to those of the Cockney speech of London?" 
 The answer is pat: New York and Chicago--unless Mr. Townsend's _Chimmie 
 Fadden_ and Mr. Ade's _Artie_ are sheer linguistic libels.] 
   
 [Footnote S: It must be very painful to Mr. Tucker to find Shakespeare 
 talking of the "two hours' traffic of our stage." He was a hardened 
 offender, was Shakespeare, against Mr. Tucker's ideal of one single, 
 inelastic, cast-iron signification for every word in the language.] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 185 
 It is not to be expected that an extremely English intonation should 
 ever be agreeable to Americans, or an extremely American intonation to 
 Englishmen. We ourselves laugh at a "haw-haw" intonation in English; 
 why, then, should we forbid Americans to do so? If "an accent like a 
 banjo" is recognised as undesirable in America (and assuredly it is), 
 there is no reason why we in England should pretend to admire it. But a 
 vulgar or affected intonation is clearly distinguishable, and ought to 
 be clearly distinguished, from a national habit in the pronunciation of 
 a given letter, or accentuation of a particular word, or class of words. 
 For instance, take the pronunciation of the indefinite article. The 
 American habitually says "[=a] man" (_a_ as in "game"); the Englishman, 
 unless he wants to be emphatic, says, "[)a] man."[T] Neither is right, 
 neither wrong; it is purely a matter of habit; and to consider either 
 habit ridiculous is merely to exhibit that childishness or provincialism 
 of mind which is moved to laughter by whatever is unfamiliar. Again, 
 when I first read the works of the sagacious Mr. Dooley, I thought it a 
 curiously far-fetched idea on the part of that philosopher to talk of 
 Admiral Dewey as his "Cousin George," and assert that "Dewey" and 
 "Dooley" were practically the same name. I had not then noticed that the 
 American pronunciation of "Dewey" is "Dooey," and that the liquid "yoo" 
 is very seldom heard in America. In the course of the five minutes I 
 spent in the Supreme Court at Washington, I heard the Chief Justice of 
 the United States make this one remark: "That, sir, is not 
 _constitootional_." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 186 
   
 To our ears this "oo" has an old-fashioned ring, 
 like that of the "ee" in "obleeged;" but to call it wrong is absurd, and 
 to find it ridiculous is provincial. Very possibly it can be proved that 
 had Shakespeare used the word at all, he would have said 
 "constitootional;" but that would make the "oo" neither better nor worse 
 in my eyes. There always have been, and always will be, changing 
 fashions in pronunciation; and the Americans have as good a right to 
 their fashion as we to ours. Fifty years hence, perhaps, our grandsons 
 will be saying "constitootional," and theirs "constityootional." I 
 confess that, in point of abstract sonority, I prefer the "yoo" to the 
 dry "oo;" but that, again, is a pure matter of taste. If Americans 
 choose to say, 
   
                                "From morn 
   To noon he fell, from noon to dooey eve, 
   A summer's day." 
   
 I am perfectly willing that they should do so, reserving always my own 
 right to say "dyooey." It would not at all surprise me to learn that 
 Milton said "dooey;" but neither would it lead me to alter the 
 pronunciation which, as one of the present generation of Englishmen, I 
 have learnt to prefer. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 187 
   
 It is said that when Mr. Daly's company returned to New York, after a 
 long visit to England, they pronounced "lieutenant" according to the 
 English fashion, "leftenant," but were called to order by an outburst of 
 protest. Though, for my own part, I say "leftenant," I heartily 
 sympathise with the protesters. "Leftenant," though a corruption of 
 respectable antiquity, is a corruption none the less, and since it has 
 died out in America, it would be mere snobbery to reintroduce it. 
   
 So, too, with questions of accentuation. We say "prim-arily" and 
 "tem-porarily;" most (or at any rate many) Americans say "primar-ily" 
 and "temporar-ily." Here there is no question of right or wrong, 
 refinement or vulgarity. The one accentuation is as good as the other. 
 It may be argued, indeed, that our accentuation throws into relief the 
 root, the idea, the soul of the word, not the mere grammatical suffix, 
 the "limbs and outward flourishes;" but on the other hand, it may be 
 contended with equal truth that the American accentuation has the Latin 
 precedent in its favour. Neither advantage is conclusive; neither, 
 indeed, is, strictly speaking, relevant; for Englishmen do not make a 
 principle of accentuating the root rather than the prefix or suffix, 
 else we should say "inund-ation," "resonant," "admir-able;" and the 
 Americans do not make a principle of following the Latin emphasis, else 
 they would say "ora-tor" and "gratui-tous," and the recognised 
 pronunciation of "theatre" would be "theayter." It is argued that there 
 is a general tendency among educated Englishmen to throw the accent as 
 far back as possible; that, for instance, the educated speaker says 
 "in-teresting," the uneducated, "interest-ing." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 188 
   
 True; but until this 
 tendency can be proved to possess some inherent advantage, there is not 
 a shadow of reason why Americans should be reproached or ridiculed for 
 obeying their own tendency rather than ours. The English tendency is a 
 matter of comparatively recent fashion. "Con-template," said Samuel 
 Rogers, "is bad enough, but bal-cony makes me sick." Both forms have 
 maintained themselves up to the present; but will they for long? I think 
 one may already trace a reaction against the universal throwing backward 
 of the accent. I myself say "per-emptory" and "ex-emplary;" but it would 
 take very little encouragement to make me say "peremp-tory" and 
 "exemp-lary," which seem to me much more expressive words. There is 
 surely no doubt that, in accenting a prefix rather than the root of the 
 word, we lose a certain amount of force. "Con-template," for instance, 
 is not nearly so strong a word as "contemp-late." We say an 
 "il-lustrated" book or the "_Il-lustrated London News_" because we do 
 not require any particular force in the epithet; but when the sense 
 demands a word with colour and emotion in it, we say the "illus-trious" 
 statesman, the "illus-trious" poet, throwing into relief the essential 
 element in the word, the "lustre." What a paltry word would 
 "tri-umphant" be in comparison with "trium-phant!" But the larger our 
 list of examples, the more capricious does our accentuation seem, the 
 more evidently subject to mere accidents of fashion. There is scarcely a 
 trace of consistent or rational principle in the matter. To make a merit 
 of one practice, and find in the other a subject for contemptuous 
 criticism, is simply childish. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 189 
   
 Mere slovenliness of pronunciation is a totally different matter. For 
 instance, the use of "most" for "almost" is distinctly, if not a 
 vulgarism, at least a colloquialism. It may be of ancient origin; it may 
 have crossed in the _Mayflower_ for aught I know; but the overwhelming 
 preponderance of ancient and modern usage is certainly in favour of 
 prefixing the "al," and there is a clear advantage in having a special 
 word for this special idea. If American writers tried to make "most" 
 supplant "almost" in the literary language, we should have a right to 
 remonstrate; the two forms would fight it out, and the fittest would 
 survive. But as a matter of fact I am not aware that any one has 
 attempted to introduce "most," in this sense, into literature. It is 
 perfectly recognised as a colloquialism, and as such it keeps its place. 
 Again, such pronunciations as "mebbe" for "maybe" and "I'd ruther" or "I 
 druther" for "I'd rather" are obvious slovenlinesses. No American would 
 defend them as being correct, any more than an Englishman would defend 
 "I dunno" for "I don't know" or "atome" for "at home." If an actor, for 
 instance, were to say, 
   
   "I druther be a dog and bay the moon 
   Than such a Roman," 
   
 American and English critics alike could not but protest against the 
 solecism; for in poetry absolute precision of utterance is clearly 
 indispensable. But in everyday speech a certain amount of colloquialism 
 is inevitable. Let him whose own enunciation is chemically free from 
 localism or slovenliness cast the first stone even at "mebbe" and 
 "ruther." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 190 
   
 A curious American colloquialism, of which I certainly cannot see the 
 advantage, in the substitution of "yep," or "yup" for "yes," and of 
 "nope" for "no." No doubt we have in England the coster's "yuss;" but 
 one hears even educated Americans now and then using "yep," or some 
 other corruption of "yes," scarcely to be indicated by the ordinary 
 alphabetical symbols. It seems to me a pity. 
   
 Much more respectable in point of antiquity is the habit which obtains 
 to some extent even among educated Americans, of saying "somewheres" and 
 "a long ways." Here the "s" is an old case-ending, an adverbial 
 genitive. "He goes out nights," too, on which Mr. Andrew Lang is so 
 severe, is a form as old as the language and older. I turn to Dr. Leon 
 Kellner's _Historical English Syntax_ (p. 119) and find that the Gothic 
 for "at night" was "nahts," and that the form (with its correlative 
 "days ") runs through old Norse, old Saxon, old English, and middle 
 English: for instance, "dages endi nahtes" _(Heliand)_, "daeges and 
 nihtes" _(Beowulf)_, "daeies and nihtes" (Layamon), all meaning "by day 
 and by night." In all, or almost all, words ending in "ward," the 
 genitive inflection, according to modern English practice, can either be 
 retained or dropped at will. It is a mere pedantry to declare "toward" 
 better English than "towards," "upward" than "upwards."  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 191 
   
 Thus we see 
 that here again there is neither logical principle nor consistent 
 practice to be invoked. At the same time, as "somewheres" has become 
 irremediably a vulgarism in England, it would, I think, be a graceful 
 concession on the part of educated Americans to drop the "s." After all, 
 "somewhere" does not jar in America, and "somewheres" very distinctly 
 jars in England. 
   
 An insidious laxity of pronunciation (rather than of grammar), which is 
 taking great hold in America, is the total omission of the "had" or 
 "have," in such phrases as "You'd better," "we've got to." Mr. Howells's 
 Willis Campbell, a witty and cultivated Bostonian, says, in _The Albany 
 Depot_, "I guess we better get out of here;" Mr. Ade's Artie, a Chicago 
 clerk, says, "I got a boost in my pay," meaning "I have got:" the 
 locution is very common indeed. It is no more defensible than "swelp me" 
 for "so help me." It arises from sheer laziness, unwillingness to face 
 the infinitesimal difficulty of pronouncing, "d" and "b" together. As a 
 colloquialism it is all very well; but I regard it with a certain alarm, 
 for where all trace of a word disappears, people are apt to forget the 
 logical and grammatical necessity for it. Though contracted to its last 
 letter, a word still asserts its existence; but when even the last 
 letter has vanished its state is parlous indeed. 
   
 An Anglicism much ridiculed in America is "different to." As a 
 Scotchman, I dislike it, and would neither use nor defend it. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 192 
   
 At the 
 same time I cannot but hint to American critics that the use of a 
 particular preposition in a particular context is largely a matter of 
 convention; that when we learn a new language we have simply to get up 
 by rote the conventions that obtain in this regard, reason being little 
 or no guide to us; and that within the same language the conventions are 
 always changing. You may easily nonplus even a good grammarian by asking 
 him suddenly, "What preposition should you use in such-and-such a 
 context?" just as you may puzzle a man by asking him to spell a word 
 which, if he wrote it without thinking about it, would present no 
 difficulty to him. Some very good American writers always say, "at the 
 North," and "at the South," where an Englishman would certainly say 
 "in." "At," to my mind, suggests a very narrow point of space. I should 
 say "at" a village, but "in" a city--"at Concord," but "in Boston." I 
 recognise, however, that this is a mere matter of convention, and do 
 not dream of condemning "at the North" as an error. In the same way I 
 would claim tolerance, though certainly not approval, for "different 
 to." 
   
 As a general rule, I think, educated Americans are more apt to err on 
 the side of purism than of laxity. I have before me, for example, a long 
 list of rules and warnings for American writers, issued by the _New York 
 Press_, many of which are very much to the point, while others seem to 
 me captious and pedantic. For instance, a woman is not to "marry" a man; 
 she is "married to" him; "the clergyman or magistrate marries both." The 
 grammatical suitor, then, when the awful moment arrives, must not say to 
 the blushing fair, "Will you marry me?" but "Will you be married to me?" 
 Again, you not only must not split infinitives, but you must not 
 separate an auxiliary from its verb; you must say "probably will be," 
 not "will probably be." This is English by the card indeed. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE II Pg 193 
   
 I will not waste space upon discussing the different fashions of 
 spelling in England and America. The rage excited in otherwise rational 
 human beings by the dropping of the "u" in "favor," or the final "me" in 
 "program," is one of the strangest of psychological phenomena. The 
 baselessness of the reasonings used to bolster up the British clinging 
 to superfluous letters is very ably shown in Professor Matthews' 
 _Americanisms and Briticisms_. Let me only put in a plea for the 
 retention of such abnormal spellings as serve to distinguish two words 
 of the same sound. For instance, it seems to me useful that we should 
 write "story" for a tale and "storey" for a floor, and in the plural 
 "stories" and "storeys." 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 194 
 [Footnote T: "Surely, on Mr. Archer's own showing," writes Mr. A.B. 
 Walkley, "the Englishman has the advantage here, for 'when he wants to 
 be emphatic' he can be, whereas the American cannot." This is a 
 misapprehension on Mr. Walkley's part. The American a can be spoken with 
 or without emphasis, just as the speaker pleases. It is because we are 
 accustomed always to associate this particular sonority with emphasis 
 that even when it is spoken without emphasis, we imagine it to be 
 emphatic.] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE III Pg 195 
   
 Passing now from questions of pronunciation and grammar to questions of 
 vocabulary, I can only express my sense of the deep indebtedness of the 
 English language, both literary and colloquial, to America, for the old 
 words she has kept alive and the new words and phrases she has invented. 
 It is a sheer pedantry--nay, a misconception of the laws which govern 
 language as a living organism--to despise pithy and apt colloquialisms, 
 and even slang. In order to remain healthy and vigorous, a literary 
 language must be rooted in the soil of a copious vernacular, from which 
 it can extract and assimilate, by a chemistry peculiar to itself, 
 whatever nourishment it requires. It must keep in touch with life in the 
 broadest acceptation of the word; and life at certain levels, obeying a 
 psychological law which must simply be accepted as one of the conditions 
 of the problem, will always express itself in dialect, provincialism, 
 slang. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE III Pg 196 
   
 America doubles and trebles the number of points at which the English 
 language comes in touch with nature and life, and is therefore a great 
 source of strength and vitality. The literary language, to be sure, 
 rejects a great deal more than it absorbs; and even in the vernacular, 
 words and expressions are always dying out and being replaced by others 
 which are somehow better adapted to the changing conditions. But though 
 an expression has not, in the long run, proved itself fitted to survive, 
 it does not follow that it has not done good service in its time. 
 Certain it is that the common speech of the Anglo-Saxon race throughout 
 the world is exceedingly supple, well nourished, and rich in forcible 
 and graphic idioms; and a great part of this wealth it owes to America. 
 Let the purists who sneer at "Americanisms" think for one moment how 
 much poorer the English language would be to-day if North America had 
 become a French or Spanish instead of an English continent. 
   
 I am far from advocating a breaking down of the barrier between literary 
 and vernacular speech. It should be a porous, a permeable bulwark, 
 allowing of free filtration; but it should be none the less distinct and 
 clearly recognised. Nor do I recommend an indiscriminate hospitality to 
 all the linguistic inspirations of the American fancy. All I say is that 
 neologisms should be judged on their merits, and not rejected with 
 contumely for no better reason than that they are new and (presumably) 
 American. Take, for instance, the word "scientist." It was originally 
 suggested by Whewell in 1840; but it first came into common use in 
 America, and was received in England at the point of the bayonet. Huxley 
 and other "scientists" disowned it, and only a few years ago the _Daily 
 News_ denounced it as "an ignoble Americanism," a "cheap and vulgar 
 product of transatlantic slang." But "scientist" is undoubtedly holding 
 its own, and will soon be as generally accepted as "retrograde," 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE III Pg 197 
   
 "reciprocal," "spurious," and "strenuous," against which Ben Jonson, in 
 his day, so--strenuously protested. It holds its own because it is felt 
 to be a necessity. No one who is in the habit of writing will pretend 
 that it is always possible to fall back upon the cumbrous phrase "man of 
 science."[U] On the other hand, the purist objection to 
 "scientist"--that it is a Latin word with a Greek termination, and that 
 it implies the existence of a non-existent verb--may be urged with 
 equal force against such harmless necessary words as deist, aurist, 
 dentist, florist, jurist, oculist, somnambulist, ventriloquist, 
 and--purist. Much more valid objection might be made to the word 
 "scientific," which is not hybrid indeed, but is, if strictly examined, 
 illogical and even nonsensical. The fact is that three-fourths of the 
 English language would crumble away before a purist analysis, and we 
 should be left without words to express the commonest and most necessary 
 ideas. 
   
 Contrast with the case of "scientist" a vulgarism such as the use of 
 "transpire" in the sense of "happen." I do not quote it as an 
 Americanism; it is probably of English origin; it occurs, I regret to 
 note, in Dickens. I select it merely as an example of a demonstrably 
 vicious locution which ought indubitably to be banished from the 
 language. It has its origin in sheer blundering. Some one, at some time, 
 has come upon the phrase "such-and-such a thing has transpired"--that 
 is, leaked out, become known--and, ignorantly mistaking its meaning, has 
 noted and employed the word as a finer-sounding synonym for "occurred" 
 or "happened. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE III Pg 198 
   
 ." The blunder has been passed on from one penny-a-liner to 
 another, until at last it has crept into the pages of writers, on both 
 sides of the Atlantic, who ought to know better. If it served any 
 purpose, expressed any shade of meaning, it might be tolerated; but 
 being at once a useless pedantry and an obvious blunder, it deserves no 
 quarter. 
   
 My point, then, is that "scientist" ought to live on its merits, 
 "transpire" to die on its demerits. With regard to every neologism we 
 ought first to inquire, "Does it fill a gap? Does it serve a purpose?" 
 And if that question be answered in the affirmative, we may next 
 consider whether it is formed on a reasonably good analogy and in 
 consonance with the general spirit of the language. "Truthful," for 
 example, is said to be an Americanism, and at one time gave offence on 
 that account. It is not only a vast improvement on the stilted 
 "veracious," but one of the prettiest and most thoroughly English words 
 in the dictionary. 
   
 The above-quoted writer in the _New York Press_ is a purist in 
 vocabulary, no less than in grammar. He will not allow us to be 
 "unwell," we must always be "ill;" an inhuman imperative. Why should we 
 sacrifice this clear and useful gradation: unwell, very unwell, ill, 
 very ill? On "sick" he does not deliver judgment. The American use of 
 the word is ancient and respectable, but the English limitation of its 
 meaning seems to me convenient, seeing we have the general terms 
 "unwell" and "ill" ready to hand.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE III Pg 199 
   
 Again, the _New York Press_ authority 
 follows Freeman in wishing to eject the word "ovation" from the 
 language; surely a ridiculous literalism. It is true we do not sacrifice 
 a sheep at a modern "ovation," but neither (for example) do we judge by 
 the flight of birds when we declare the circumstances to be "auspicious" 
 for such and such an undertaking. Again, we are never to "retire" for 
 the night, but always to "go to bed." If, as is commonly alleged, 
 Americans say "retire" because they consider it indelicate to go to bed, 
 the feeling and the expression are alike foolish. But I do not believe 
 that either is at all common in America. On the other hand, one may 
 retire for the night without going to bed. In the case of ladies 
 especially, the interval between retiring and going to bed is reputed 
 to be far from inconsiderable. If, then, one really means "retired for 
 the night" and does _not_ definitely mean "went to bed," I see no crime 
 in employing the expression that conveys one's exact meaning. Finally 
 the _New York Press_ will not let us use the word "commence;" we must 
 always "begin." This is an excellent example of unreflecting or 
 half-reflecting purism. "Commence" is a very old word; it is used by the 
 best writers; it is easily pronounceable and not in the least 
 grandiloquent; indeed it has precisely the length and cadence of its 
 competitor. But somebody or other one day observed that it was Latin, 
 whereas "begin" was Saxon; and since then there has been a systematic 
 attempt, in several quarters, to hound the innocent and useful synonym 
 out of the language. Whence comes this rage for impoverishing our 
 tongue! The more synonyms we possess the better.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE III Pg 200 
   
 Wherefore (by the way) 
 I for my part should not be too rigorous in excluding a forcible 
 Americanism merely because it happens to duplicate some word or 
 expression already current in England. The rich language is that which 
 possesses not only the necessaries of life but also an abundance of 
 superfluities. 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 201 
 [Footnote U: Mr. Andrew Lang says: "Plenty of other words are formed on 
 the same analogy: the Greeks, in the verb 'to Medize,' set the example. 
 But we happen to have no use for 'scientist.'" It is not quite clear 
 whether Mr. Lang employs "have no use" in the American sense, expressing 
 sheer dislike, or in the literal and English sense. In the latter case I 
 can only say that he has been fortunate in never coming across 
 conjunctures in which "man of science" came in awkwardly and 
 inelegantly.] 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 202 
   
 Let me note a few of the Americanisms, good, bad, and indifferent, which 
 specially struck me, whether in talk or in books, during my recent visit 
 to the United States. I call them Americanisms without inquiring into 
 their history. Some of them may be of English origin; but for practical 
 purposes an Americanism may be taken to mean an expression commonly used 
 in America and not commonly used in England. 
   
 I had not been three hours on American soil before I heard a charming 
 young lady remark, "Oh, it was bully!" I gathered that this expression 
 is considered admissible, in the conversation of grown-up people, only 
 in and about New York. I often heard it there, and never anywhere else. 
 A very distinguished officer, who served as a volunteer in Cuba, was 
 asked to state his impressions of war. "War," he said, "is a terrible 
 thing. You can't exaggerate its horrors. When you sit in your tent the 
 night before the battle, and think of home and your wife and children, 
 you feel pretty sick and downhearted. But," he added, "next day, when 
 you're in it, oh, it _is_ bully!" 
   
 The general use of picturesque metaphor is of course a striking feature 
 of American conversation. Many of these expressions have taken firm root 
 in England, such as "to have no use for" a man, or "to take no stock in" 
 a theory. But fresh inventions crop up on every hand in America. For 
 instance, where an English theatrical manager would say, "We must get 
 this play well talked about and paragraphed in advance," an American 
 manager puts the whole thing much more briefly and forcibly in the 
 phrase, "We don't want this piece to come in on rubbers. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 203 
   
 ." Metaphor 
 apart, many Americans have a gift of fantastic extravagance of phrase 
 which often produces an irresistible effect. A gentleman in high 
 political office had one day to receive a deputation with whose objects 
 he had no sympathy. He listened for some time to the spokesman of the 
 party, and then, at a pause, broke in with the remark: "Gentlemen, you 
 need proceed no further. I am not an entirely dishevelled jackass!" One 
 would give something for a snapshot photograph of the faces of that 
 deputation. 
   
 Small differences of expression (other than those with which every one 
 is familiar--such as "elevator," "baggage," "depot," &c.)--strike one in 
 daily life. The American for "To let" is "For rent;" a "thing one would 
 wish to have expressed otherwise" is, more briefly, "a bad break;" 
 instead of "He married money" an American will say "He married rich;" 
 but this, I take it, is a vulgarism--as, indeed, is the English 
 expression. I find that in the modern American novel, setting forth the 
 sayings and doings of more or less educated people, there are apt to be, 
 on an average, about half a dozen words and phrases at which the English 
 reader stumbles for a moment. Mr. Howells, a master of English, may be 
 taken as a faithful reporter of the colloquial speech of Boston and New 
 York. In one of his comediettas, he makes Willis Campbell say, "Let me 
 turn out my sister's cup" (pour her a cup of tea). Mrs. Roberts, in 
 another of these delightful little pieces, says, "I'll smash off a 
 note," where an English Mrs. Roberts would say "dash off "; and where an 
 English Mrs. Roberts would ring the bell, her American namesake "touches 
 the annunciator." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 204 
   
 It is commonly believed in England that there is no 
 such thing as a "servant" in America, but only "hired girls" and 
 "helps." This is certainly not so in New York. I once "rang up" a 
 friend's house by telephone, and, on asking who was speaking to me, 
 received the answer, in a feminine voice, "I'm one of Mr. So-and-so's 
 servants." 
   
 The heroine of _The Story of a Play_ says to her husband, "Are you still 
 thinking of our scrap of this morning?" "Scrap," in the sense of 
 "quarrel," is one of the few exceedingly common American expressions 
 which, have as yet taken little hold in England.[V] Admiral Dewey, for 
 instance, is admired as a "scrapper," or, as we should phrase it, a 
 fighting Admiral. Mr. Henry Fuller, of Chicago, in his powerful novel 
 _The Cliff Dwellers_, uses a still less elegant synonym for "scrap"--he 
 talks of a "connubial spat." In the same book I note the phrases "He 
 teetered back and forth on his toes," "He was a stocky young man," "One 
 of his brief noonings," "That's right, Claudia--score the profession." 
 "Score," as used in America, does not mean "score off," but rather, I 
 take it, "attack and leave your mark upon." It is very common in this 
 sense. For instance, I note among the headlines of a New York paper, 
 "Mr. So-and-so scores Yellow Journalism." Talking of Yellow Journalism, 
 by the way, the expressions "a beat," and "a scoop," for what we in 
 England call an "exclusive" item of news, were unknown to me until I 
 went to America. I was a little bewildered, too, when I was told of a 
 family which "lived on air-tights." Their diet consisted of canned (or, 
 as we should say, tinned) provisions. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 205 
 The most popular slang expression of the day is "to rubberneck," or, 
 more concisely, "to rubber." Its primary meaning is to crane the neck in 
 curiosity, to pry round the corner, as it were.[W] But it has numerous 
 and surprising extensions of meaning. It appears to be one of the laws 
 of slang that when a phrase strikes the popular fancy, it is pressed 
 into service on every possible or impossible occasion. Another 
 favourite expression is "That cuts no ice with me."[X] I was unable to 
 ascertain either its origin or its precise significance. On the other 
 hand, a piece of slang which supplies a "felt want," and will one day, I 
 believe, pass into the literary language, is "the limit" in the sense of 
 "le comble." A theatrical poster, widely displayed in New York while I 
 was there, bore this alluring inscription: 
   
      THE LIMIT AT LAST! 
   
      "THE MORMON SENATOR AND THE MERMAID" 
   
      JAGS OF JOY FOR JADED JOHNNIES. 
   
 A "jag," be it known, means primarily a load, secondarily a "load," or 
 "package," of alcohol. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 206 
   
 Collectors of slang will find many priceless gems in two recent books 
 which I commend to their notice: _Chimmie Fadden_, by Mr. E.W. Townsend, 
 and _Artie_, by Mr. George Ade. _Chimmie Fadden_ gives us the dialect of 
 the New York Bowery Boy, or "tough," in which the most notable feature 
 is the substitution either of "d" or "t" for "th." Is this, I wonder, a 
 spontaneous corruption, or is it due to German and Yiddish influence? 
 When Chimmie wants to express his admiration for a young lady, he says: 
 "Well, say, she's a torrowbred, an' dat goes." When the young lady's 
 father comes to thank him for championing her, this is how Chimmie 
 describes the visit: "Den he gives me a song an' dance about me being a 
 brave young man for tumping de mug what insulted his daughter," "Mug," 
 the Bowery term for "fellow" or "man," in Chicago finds its equivalent 
 in "guy." Mr. Ade's Artie is a Chicago clerk, and his dialect is of the 
 most delectable. In comparison with him, Mr. Dooley is a well of English 
 undefiled. Here again we find traces of the influence of polyglot 
 immigration. "Kopecks" for "money" evidently comes from the Russian Jew; 
 "girlerino," as a term of endearment, from the "Dago" of the sunny 
 south; and "spiel," meaning practically anything you please, from the 
 Fatherland. When Artie goes to a wedding, he records that "there was a 
 long spiel by the high guy in the pulpit." After describing the 
 embarrassments of a country cousin in the city, Artie proceeds, "Down at 
 the farm, he was the wise guy and I was the soft mark." "Mark" in the 
 sense of "butt" or "gull" is one of the commonest of slang words. When 
 Artie has cut out all rivals in the good graces of his Mamie, he puts it 
 thus, "There ain't nobody else in the one-two-sevens. They ain't even in 
 the 'also rans.'" When they have a lovers' quarrel he remarks, "Well, I 
 s'pose the other boy's fillin' all my dates." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 207 
   
 When he is asked whether 
 Mamie cycles, he replies, "Does she? She's a scorchalorum!" When he 
 disapproves of another young gentleman, this is how "he puts him next" 
 to the fact, as he himself would say-- 
   
      "You're nothin' but a two-spot. You're the smallest thing in the 
      deck.... Chee-e-ese it! You can't do nothin' like that to me and 
      then come around afterwards and jolly me. Not in a million! I tell 
      you you're a two spot, and if you come into the same part o' the 
      town with me I'll change your face. There's only one way to get 
      back at you people.... If he don't keep off o' my route, there'll 
      be people walkin' slow behind him one o' these days.... But this 
      same two-spot's got a sister that can have my seat in the car any 
      time she comes in." 
   
 I plead guilty to an unholy relish for Chimmie's and Artie's racy 
 metaphors from the music-hall, the poker-table, and the "grip-car."[Y] 
 But it is to be noted that both these profound students of slang, Mr. 
 Townsend and Mr. Ade, like the creator of the delightful Dooley, express 
 themselves in pure and excellent English the moment they drop the mask 
 of their personage. This is very characteristic. Many educated Americans 
 take great delight, and even pride, in keeping abreast of the daily 
 developments of slang and patter; but this study does not in the least 
 impair their sense for, or their command of, good English. The idea that 
 the English language is degenerating in America is an absolutely 
 groundless illusion.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 208 
   
 Take them all round, the newspapers of the leading 
 American cities, in their editorial columns at any rate, are at least as 
 well written as the newspapers of London; and in magazines and books the 
 average level of literary accomplishment is certainly very high. There 
 are bad and vulgar writers on both sides of the Atlantic; but until the 
 beams are removed from our own eyes, we may safely trust the Americans 
 to attend to the motes in theirs. 
   
   
 POSTSCRIPT.--When this paper originally appeared, it formed the text for 
 an editorial article in the _Daily News_, in which Mr. Andrew Lang's 
 sign manual was not to be mistaken. Mr. Lang brought my somewhat 
 desultory discussion very neatly to a point. He admitted that we 
 habitually use "Americanism" as a term of reproach; "but," he asked, 
 "who is reproached? Not the American (who may do as he pleases) but the 
 English writer, who, in serious work, introduces, needlessly, an 
 American phrase into our literature. We say 'needlessly' when our 
 language already possesses a consecrated equivalent for the word or 
 idiom." 
   
 In the first place, one has to remark that many English critics are far 
 from accepting Mr. Lang's principle that "the American may do as he 
 pleases, of course." Mr. Lang himself scarcely acts up to it in this 
 very article. And, for my part, I think the principle a false one. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 209 
   
 . I 
 think the English language has been entrusted to the care of all of us, 
 English no less than Americans, Americans no less than English; and if I 
 find an American writer debasing it in an essential point, as opposed to 
 a point of mere local predilection, I assert my right to remonstrate 
 with him, just as I admit his right, under similar circumstances, to 
 remonstrate with me. 
   
 It is not here, however, that I join issue with Mr. Lang: it is on his 
 theory that an English writer necessarily does wrong who unnecessarily 
 employs an Americanism. This is a question of great practical moment, 
 and I am glad that Mr. Lang has stated it in this definite form. My view 
 is perhaps sufficiently indicated above, but I take the opportunity of 
 reasserting it with all deliberation. I believe that, as a matter both 
 of literary and of social policy, we ought to encourage the free 
 infiltration of graphic and racy Americanisms into our vernacular, and 
 of vigorous and useful Americanisms (even if not absolutely necessary) 
 into our literary language. Where is the harm in duplicating terms, if 
 only the duplicates be in themselves good terms? For instance, take the 
 word "fall." Mr. Brander Matthews writes: "An American with a sense of 
 the poetic cannot but prefer to the imported word 'autumn' the native 
 and more logical word 'fall,' which the British have strangely suffered 
 to drop into disuse." Well, "autumn" was a sufficiently early 
 importation. "Our ancestors," wrote Lowell (quoted by Mr. Matthews in 
 the same article), "unhappily could bring over no English better than 
 Shakespeare's;" and in Shakespeare's (and Chaucer's) English they 
 brought over "autumn." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 210 
   
 The word has inherent beauty as well as splendid 
 poetical associations. I doubt whether even Shakespeare could have made 
 out of "fall" so beautiful a line as 
   
   "The teeming autumn, big with rich increase." 
   
 I doubt whether Keats, had he written an _Ode to the Fall_, would have 
 produced quite such a miraculous poem as that which begins 
   
   "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness." 
   
 Still, Mr. Matthews is quite right in saying that "fall" has a poetic 
 value, a suggestion, an atmosphere of its own. I wonder, with him, why 
 we dropped it, and I see no smallest reason why we should not recover 
  The British literary patriotism which makes a point of never saying 
 
 "fall" seems to me just as mistaken as the American literary patriotism 
 (if such there be) that makes a merit of never saying "autumn." By 
 insisting on such localisms (for the exclusive preference for either 
 term is nothing more) we might, in process of time, bring about a 
 serious fissure in the language. Of course there is no reason why Mr. 
 Lang should force himself to use a word that is uncongenial to him; but 
 if "fall" is congenial to me, I think I ought to be allowed to use it 
 "without fear and without reproach." 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 211 
   
 Take, now, a colloquialism. How formal and colourless is the English 
 phrase "I have enjoyed myself!" beside the American "I have had a good 
 time!" Each has its uses, no doubt. I am far from suggesting that the 
 one should drive out the other. It is precisely the advantage of our 
 linguistic position that it so enormously enlarges the stock of 
 semi-synonyms at our disposal. To reject a forcible Americanism merely 
 because we could, at a pinch, get on without it, is--Mr. Lang will 
 understand the forcible Scotticism--to "sin our mercies." 
   
 Mr. Lang is under a certain illusion, I think, in his belief that in 
 hardening our hearts against Americanism's we should raise no barrier 
 between ourselves and the classical authors of America. He says: "Let us 
 remark that they [Americanisms] do not occur in Hawthorne, Poe, Lowell, 
 Longfellow, Prescott, and Emerson, except when these writers are 
 consciously reproducing conversations in dialect." He made the same 
 remark on a previous occasion; when his opponent (see the _Academy_, 
 March 30, 1895) opened a volume of Hawthorne and a volume of Emerson, 
 and in five minutes found in Hawthorne "He had named his two children, 
 one _for_ Her Majesty and one _for_ Prince Albert," and in Emerson 
 "Nature tells every secret once. Yes; but in man she tells it _all the 
 time_." The latter phrase is one which Mr. Lang explicitly puts under 
 his ban. He is an ingenious and admirable translator: I wish he would 
 translate Emerson's sentence from American into English, without loss of 
 brevity, directness, and simple Saxon strength. For my part, I can think 
 of nothing better than "In man she is always telling it," which strikes 
 me as a feeble makeshift. 
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 212 
   
 . "All the time," I suggest, is precisely one of 
 the phrases we should accept with gratitude--if, indeed, it be not 
 already naturalised. 
   
 Mr. Lang is peculiarly unfortunate in calling Oliver Wendell Holmes to 
 witness against his particular and pet aversion "I belong here" or "That 
 does not belong there." Writing of "needless Americanisms," he says, 
 "The use of 'belong' as a new auxiliary verb [an odd classification, by 
 the way] is an example of what we mean. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was a 
 stern opponent of such neologisms." I turn to the Oxford Dictionary, and 
 the one quotation I find under "belong" in this sense, is:--"'You belong 
 with the last set, and got accidentally shuffled with the others.'--_O.W. 
 Holmes, 'Elsie Venner_.'" But this, Mr. Lang may say, is in 
 dialogue. Yes, but not in dia_lect_. I am very much mistaken if the 
 locution does not occur elsewhere in Holmes. If Mr. Lang, in a leisure 
 hour, were to undertake a search for it, he might incidentally find 
 cause to modify his view as to the sternness of the Autocrat's 
 anti-Americanism. 
   
 Let me not be thought to underrate the services which, by sound precept 
 and invaluable example, Mr. Lang has rendered to all of us who use the 
 English tongue. Conservatism and liberalism are as inevitable, nay, 
 indispensable, in the world of words as in the world of deeds; and I 
 trust Mr. Lang will not set down my liberalism as anarchism. He and I, 
 in this little discussion, are simply playing our allotted parts. I 
 believe (and Mr. Lang would probably admit with a shrug) that the forces 
 of the future are on my side.  
 
 
 
 PART II  (REFLECTIONS)_THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE IV Pg 213 
   
 May I recall to him that charming anecdote 
 of Thackeray and Viscount Monck, when they were rival candidates for the 
 representation of Oxford in Parliament? They met in the street one day, 
 and exchanged a few words. On parting, Thackeray shook hands with his 
 opponent and said, "Good-bye; and may the best man win!" "I hope _not_," 
 replied Viscount Monck, with a bow. A hundred years hence, if some 
 English-speaker of the future should chance to disinter this book from 
 the recesses of the British Museum or the Library of Congress, and 
 should read these final paragraphs, I doubt not he will say--for the 
 immortal soul of the language even anarchism cannot affect--"the race is 
 not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." 
 
 
 
 FOOTNOTES Pg 214 
 [Footnote V: Mr. Walkley reports that he has heard a Cockney policeman, 
 speaking of a street row, "There's been a little scrappin'."] 
   
 [Footnote W: "About a dozen ringers followed us into the church and 
 stood around rubberin'." "Gettin' next to the new kinds o' saddles and 
 rubber-neckin' to read the names on the tyres."--_Artie_. A writer in 
 the New York _Sun_ says: "I first heard the term 'rubbernecks' in 
 Arizona, about four years ago, applied to the throngs of onlookers in 
 the gambling-houses, who strove to get a better view of the games in 
 progress by stretching or bending their necks."] 
   
 [Footnote X: "We didn't break into sassiety notes, but that cuts no ice 
 in our set."--_Artie_.] 
   
 [Footnote Y: Extract from a letter to the _Chicago Evening Post_: "I do 
 not at all subscribe to the sneering remark of a talented author of my 
 acquaintance, to the effect that there were not enough cultured people 
 in Chicago to fill a grip-car. I asked him if he meant a grip-car and a 
 trailer, and he said, 'No; just one car.' And I told him right there 
 that I could not agree with him."] 
 
 
 Publication Date: December 29th 2014 https://www.bookrix.com/-mk496e398f1e345