CONNAUGHT TO 
 CHICAGO 
 
 GEO. A. BIRMINGHAM 
 

 (S,atmii Iniocraity ffiibracg 
 
 Jjtljara, Km Inrfe 
 
 BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE 
 
 SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND 
 
 THE GIFT OF 
 
 HENRY W. SAGE 
 
 1891 
 
. 1 "m 
 
 ITR 
 
 Cornell University Library 
 
 E 168.H24 
 
 Connaught to Chicago. 
 
 3 1924 028 683 476 
 
CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
Piru- MacDonald 
 
 ' (;i-:o. A. v.iRMiNGiiA^r 
 
 (l<l-:\. CAMiN )IAXNA\') 
 
GONNAUGHT 
 
 TO 
 
 GHIGAGO 
 
 BY 
 
 GEO. A. BIRMINGHAM j^,, 
 
 AUTHOR OF \ 
 
 "the lighter side of IRISH LIFE" 
 "SPANISH GOLD," ETC. 
 
 -Vna,L,.. . ...... r-.j >JiC..-o. v-^i 
 
 ^u-><s«^ 
 
 lantan 
 JAMES NISBET & CO., LIMITED 
 22 BERNERS STREET, W. 
 
 D. 
 
 Mi 
 
First Published in igi4 
 
 ; , ' 1 ! 'I 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. 
 I. 
 
 II. 
 
 III. 
 
 IV. 
 
 V. 
 
 VI. 
 
 VII. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 IX. 
 
 X. 
 
 XI. 
 
 XII. 
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 
 PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 
 THE " HUSTLING " LEGEND 
 HOLIDAY FEVER 
 THE IRON TRAIL 
 ADVANCE, CHICAGO ! 
 MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 
 THE LAND OF THE FREE . 
 VS^OMAN IN THE STATES . 
 MEN AND HUSBANDS 
 THE OPEN DOOR . 
 COLLEGES AND THEIR STUDENTS 
 THE IRISHMAN ABROAD . 
 
 I 
 
 28 
 
 75 
 92 
 
 108 
 
 124 
 
 149 
 
 178 
 
 195 
 212 
 
 233 
 259 
 
CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 
 
 " From Connaught to Chicago." You can 
 take the phrase as the epitome of a tragedy, 
 the long, slow, century and a half old tragedy 
 of the flight of the Irish people from their 
 own country, the flight of the younger men 
 and women of our race from the land of their 
 birth to the " Oilean Ur," the new island of 
 promise and hope across the Atlantic. Much 
 might be written very feelingly about that 
 exodus. The first part of it began in reality 
 long ago, in the middle of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, when the farmers of north-east Ulster 
 were making their struggle for conditions of 
 life which were economically possible. When 
 the land war of those days was being waged 
 and the fighters on the one side were called 
 " Hearts of Steel," that war which resulted in 
 the establishment of the once famous Ulster 
 
 A 
 
2 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Custom, hopeless men fled with their families 
 from Belfast, from Derry, and from many 
 smaller northern ports. They settled in 
 America and avenged their wrongs in the 
 course of the War of Independence. For the 
 rest of Ireland the great exodus began later : 
 not until the middle of the nineteenth century, 
 when the famine of 1846 and the following 
 years showed unmistakably that the social 
 order of Connaught and Munster was im- 
 possible. It continued, that exodus, all 
 through the years of the later land war. It 
 is still going on, though the stream is feebler 
 to-day. I could write a good deal about this 
 exodus, could tell of forsaken cottages, of 
 sorrowful departures, of broken hearts left 
 behind. But it was not in the spirit of tragedy 
 that we made our expedition to America, from 
 Connaught to Chicago. 
 
 The phrase has another connotation. It 
 carries with it a sense of adventuring. It was 
 often, almost always, the bravest and most 
 adventurous of our people who went. It was 
 those who feared their fate too much who 
 stayed at home. There is something fasci- 
 nating in all the records of adventuring. We 
 think of Vasco da Gama pushing his way along 
 an unknown coast till he rounded the Cape 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 3 
 
 of Good Hope. We think of Columbus sail- 
 ing after the setting sun, and our hearts are 
 lifted up. Less daring, but surely hardly less 
 romantic, were the goings forth of our Irish 
 boys and girls. They went to seek susten- 
 ance, fortune, life at its fullest and freest in 
 an unknown land in unguessed ways. I like 
 to think of the hope and courage of those who 
 went. They had songs — in the earlier days 
 of the adventuring, one seldom hears them 
 now — which express the spirit of their going. 
 I remember taking a long drive, twenty years 
 ago, through a summer night with a young 
 farmer, who for the most part was tongue- 
 tied and silent enough. But the twilight of 
 that June evening moved him beyond his self- 
 restraint, and he sang to me with immense 
 emotion : " To the West ! to the West ! To 
 the Land of the Free ! " I was vaguely un- 
 comfortable then, not understanding what 
 was in his heart. I know a little better now. 
 He was a man with a home, settled and safe, 
 with a moderate comfort secured to him, but 
 the spirit of adventuring was in his blood, and 
 America represented to him in some vague 
 way the Hy Brasil, the Isles of the Blest, which 
 had long ago captivated the imagination of 
 his ancestors. 
 
4 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Well, we went adventuring too ; but com- 
 pared to theirs our adventure was very tame, 
 very unworthy. Our ship was swift and safe, 
 or nearly safe. It seemed hardly worth while 
 to make our wills before we started. There 
 were waiting for us on the other side friends 
 who would guide our steps and guard us from 
 — there were no dangers— all avoidable dis- 
 comfort. We even had a friend, such is our 
 astounding good fortune, who offered to go 
 with us, and actually did meet us in New York. 
 He had spent much time in America and was 
 well accustomed to the ways of that country. 
 We were dining in his company, I remember, 
 in the familiar comfort of a London club, 
 when the news that we were really to go to 
 America first came to us. 
 
 " I'd better go too," he said, " you'll want 
 some one to take care of you. I don't think 
 that either one or other of you is to be trusted 
 to the American newspaper reporters without 
 an experienced friend at your elbows." 
 
 Next time we dined in our friend's company 
 it was in the restaurant of the Ritz Carlton 
 in New York, and very glad we were to see him, 
 though the newspaper reporter in America is 
 by no means the dangerous wild beast he is 
 supposed to be. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 5 
 
 There was thus little enough of real adven- 
 turing about our journey to America. Yet to 
 us it was a strange and wonderful thing. We 
 felt as Charles Kingsley did when he wrote, 
 "At Last," for a visit to America had long 
 been a dream with us. There are other places 
 in the world to which we wanted and still 
 want to go. Egypt is one of them, for we 
 desire to see the deserts where St. Antony 
 fasted and prayed. The South Pacific Archi- 
 pelago is another, for we are lovers of Steven- 
 son, but for me, at least, the United States 
 came first. I wanted to see them more than 
 I wanted to see the Nitrian Desert or Samoa. 
 It was not Niagara that laid hold of my 
 imagination, or the Mississippi, though I did 
 want to see it because of " Huckleberry Finn." 
 What I desired most was to meet American 
 people in their own native land, to see for 
 myself what they had made of their continent, 
 to understand, if I could, how they felt and 
 thought, to hear what they talked about, to 
 experience their way of living. I wanted to 
 see Irish friends whom I had known as boys 
 and girls. I had been intimate with many of 
 them before they went out. I had seen them, 
 changed almost beyond recognition, when 
 they returned, on rare short visits to their 
 
6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 homes. I wanted to know what they were 
 doing out there, to see with my own eyes what 
 it was which made new men and women of 
 them. I wanted to know why some of them 
 succeeded and grew rich, why others, not 
 inferior according to our Irish judgment, came 
 back beaten and disillusioned to settle down 
 again into the old ways. Neither Egypt nor 
 Samoa, not India, not Jerusalem itself, pro- 
 mised so much to me as America did. 
 
 There is besides a certain practical advantage, 
 in our particular case, which America has over 
 any other country to which we could travel. 
 The Americans speak English. This is a 
 small matter, no doubt, to good linguists, but 
 we are both of us singularly stupid about 
 foreign tongues. My French, for instance, is 
 despicable. It is good enough for use in 
 Italy. It serves all practical purposes in 
 Spain and Portugal, but it is a very poor 
 means of conveying my thoughts in France. 
 For some reason the French people have great 
 difficulty in understanding it, and their ver- 
 sion of the language is almost incomprehen- 
 sible to me, though I can carry on long con- 
 versations with people of any other nation 
 when they speak French. It is the same with 
 my Italian, my German, and my Portuguese. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 7 
 
 They are none of them much good to me in 
 the countries to which they are supposed to 
 belong. This is a severe handicap when 
 travelling. We both hate the feeling that we 
 are mere tourists. We do not like to be 
 confined to hotels with polyglot head waiters 
 in them, or to be afraid to stir out of the 
 channels buoyed out with Cook's interpreters. 
 We see sights, indeed, visit picture galleries, 
 cathedrals, gape at mountains and waterfalls ; 
 but we never penetrate into the inside of the 
 life of these foreign countries. We are never 
 able to philosophise pleasantly about the way 
 in which people live in them. The best we 
 can do is to wander after nightfall along the 
 side streets of cities, or to rub shoulders with 
 the shopping crowd during the afternoon in 
 Naples or Lisbon. America is foreign enough. 
 It is as foreign as almost any European country, 
 as foreign as any country in the world in 
 which people wear ordinary clothes. I dare- 
 say Algiers is more foreign. I am sure that 
 Borneo must be. But New York is just as 
 strange a place as Paris or Rome, and therefore 
 just as interesting, with this advantage for us 
 that we could understand, after a few days, 
 every word that was spoken round us. 
 
 Indeed, this similarity of language was 
 
8 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 something of a disappointment to us. We 
 did not actually expect to hear people say 
 " I guess " at the beginning of every sentence. 
 We knew that was as impossible as the fre- 
 quent " Begorras " with which we Irish are 
 credited. But we had read several delightful 
 American books, one called Rules of the Game, 
 with particular attention, and we thought the 
 American language would be more vigorously 
 picturesque than it turned out to be. The 
 American in books uses phrases and employs 
 metaphors which are a continual joy. His 
 conversation is a series of stimulating shocks. 
 In real life he does not keep up to that level. 
 He talks very much as an Englishman does. 
 There are, indeed, ways of pronouncing certain 
 words which are strange and very pleasant. I 
 would give a good deal to be able to say " very " 
 and " America " as these words are said across 
 the Atlantic. " Vurry " does not represent 
 the sound, nor does " Amurrica," but I have 
 tried in vain to pick up that vowel. I suppose 
 I am tone deaf. I either caricature it as 
 " vurry " or relapse into the lean English 
 version of the word. There are also some 
 familiar words which are used in ways strange 
 to me. " Through," for instance, is a word 
 which I am thoroughly accustomed to, and 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 9 
 
 " cereal " is one which I often come across in 
 books deaHng with agriculture. But I was 
 puzzled one morning when an attentive Ameri- 
 can parlour-maid, with her eye on my porridge 
 plate, asked me whether I was " through with 
 the cereal." Solicitors on this side of the 
 Atlantic are regarded as more or less respect- 
 able members of society. Some of their 
 clients may consider them crafty, but no one 
 would class them, as actors used to be classed, 
 with vagabonds. It was, therefore, a surprise 
 to me to read a notice on an office door : 
 " Solicitors and beggars are forbidden to enter 
 this building." I made inquiries about what 
 the solicitors had done to deserve this, and 
 found that " solicitor," in that part of America, 
 perhaps all over America, means, not a kind of 
 lawyer, but one who solicits subscriptions, 
 either for some charity or for his own use and 
 benefit. 
 
 There are other words : " baggage check," 
 for instance, which could not be familiar to us, 
 because we have not got the thing to which 
 they belong in the British Isles. And a 
 highly picturesque, vigorous phrase meets one 
 now and then. There was an occasion in 
 which a laundry annoyed us very much. It 
 did not bring back some clothes which had 
 
10 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 gone to be washed. We complained to a 
 pleasant and highly vital young lady who con- 
 trolled all the telephones in our Ixotel. She 
 took our side in the dispute at once, seized 
 the nearest receiver, and promised to " lay 
 out that laundry right now." We went up 
 to our rooms comforted with the vision of a 
 whole staff of washerwomen lying in rows like 
 corpses, with napkins tied under their chins, 
 and white sheets over them. Americans ought 
 not to swear, and do, in fact, swear much less 
 than English people in ordinary conversation. 
 The Englishman, when things go wrong with 
 him, is almost forced to say " damn " in order 
 to express his feelings. His way of speaking 
 his native language offers him no alternative. 
 The American has at command a small battery 
 of phrases far more helpful than any oath. It 
 is no temptation to damn a laundry when you 
 can " lay it out " by telephone. 
 
 I like the American use of the word " right " 
 in such phrases as " right here," " right now," 
 and " right away." When you are told, by 
 telephone, as you are told almost everything 
 in America, that your luggage will be sent up 
 to your room in the hotel " right now," you 
 are conscious of the friendliness of intention 
 in the hall porter, which the EngHsh phrase 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE ii 
 
 " at once " wholly fails to convey. Even if 
 you have to v^ait several hours before you 
 actually get the luggage, you know that every 
 effort is being made to meet your wishes. You 
 may, perhaps, have got into a bath and find 
 yourself, for the want of clean clothes, forced 
 to decide between staying there, going straight 
 to bed, or getting back into the dirty gar- 
 ments in which you have travelled. But you 
 have no business to complain. The " right 
 now " ought to comfort you, especially 
 when it is repeated cheerily, while you stand 
 dripping and embarrassed at the receiver to 
 make a final appeal. The word " right " in 
 these phrases does not intensify, it modifies, 
 the immediateness of the now. This is one 
 of the things to which you must get accus- 
 tomed in America. But it is a friendly phrase, 
 offering and inviting brotherliness of the most 
 desirable kind. That it means no more than 
 the " Anon, sir, anon," of Shakespeare's tap- 
 ster, is not the fault of anybody. Some 
 sacrifices must be made for the sake of friendli- 
 ness. 
 
 But taken as a whole the American language 
 is very little different from English. I imagine 
 the tendency to diverge has been checked by 
 the growing frequency of intercourse between 
 
12 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 the two countries. So many Americans come 
 to England and so many English go to America 
 that the languages are being reduced to one 
 dead level. What used to be called " Ameri- 
 canisms " are current in common talk on this 
 side of the Atlantic, and on the other there is 
 a regrettable tendency to drop even the fine 
 old forms which the English themselves lost 
 long ago. " Gotten " still survives in America 
 instead of the degraded " got," but I am 
 afraid it is losing its hold. " Wheel " is in 
 all ways preferable to bicycle, and may, per- 
 haps, become naturalised here. I cannot 
 imagine that the Americans will be so foolish 
 as to give it up. Whether " an automobile 
 ride " is preferable to a drive in a motor I do 
 not know. They both strike me as vile phrases, 
 and it is difficult to choose between them. 
 
 America, as a country to travel in, had for 
 us another attraction besides its language. 
 Some people have relations in Spain to whom 
 they can go, and in whose houses they can 
 stay as guests. Others have relatives of the 
 same convenient kind in Austria and even in 
 Russia. Many people have friends in France 
 and Germany. We are not so fortunate. 
 When we go to those countries we spend our 
 time in hotels, or at best in pensions. We 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 13 
 
 do not discover intimate things about the 
 people there. It is impossible for us to learn, ex- 
 cept through books, and they seldom tell us the 
 things we want to know, whether the Austrians 
 are morose or cheerful at breakfast time, and 
 whether the Germans when at home hate 
 fresh air as bitterly as they hate it when travel- 
 ling. And these are just the sort of things 
 which it is most interesting to know about 
 any people. The politics of a foreign country 
 are more easily studied in the pages of periodi- 
 cals like The Nineteenth Century than in the 
 daily press of the country itself. Statistics 
 about trade and population can be read up in 
 books devoted to the purpose. All sorts of 
 other information are supplied by the invalu- 
 able Baedeker, so that it is in no way necessary 
 to go to Venice in order to find out things 
 about St. Mark's. But very intimate details 
 about the insides of houses, domestic manners, 
 and so forth, can only be obtained by staying 
 in private homes. This we thought we might 
 accomplish in America, because we had some 
 friends there before we started. In reality 
 ready-made friends are unnecessary for the 
 traveller in America. He makes them as he 
 goes along, for the Americans are an amazingly 
 sociable people and hospitable beyond all 
 
14 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 other nations. To us Irish — and we are sup- 
 posed to be hospitable — the stranger is a 
 stranger until he is shown in some way to 
 be a friend. In America he is regarded as a 
 friend unless he makes himself objectionable, 
 unless he makes himself very objectionable 
 indeed. We heard of American hospitaHty 
 before we started. We feel now as the Queen 
 of Sheba felt after her visit to King Solomon, 
 that the half was not told us. To be treated 
 hospitably is always delightful. It is doubly 
 so when the hospitality enables the fortunate 
 guest to learn something of a kind of life which 
 is not his own. 
 
 For all these reasons — I have enumerated 
 four, I think — we desired greatly to go to 
 America ; and there was still another thing 
 which attracted us. You cannot go to America 
 except by sea. Even if you are seasick — -and I 
 occasionally am, a little— travelling in a steamer 
 is greatly to be preferred to travelling in a 
 train. A good steamer is clean ; the best 
 train covers you with smuts. The noise of 
 the train is nerve-shattering. The noise 
 which a steamer makes, even in a gale, is 
 soothing. When a train stops and when it 
 starts again it jerks and bumps. It also runs 
 over things called points, and then it bumps 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 15 
 
 more. A steamer stops far seldomer than a 
 train, and does so very gently and smoothly. 
 It never actually bumps, and though it very 
 often rolls or pitches, it does these things in 
 a very dignified way with due deliberation. 
 We chose a slow steamer for our voyage out, 
 and if we are fortunate enough to go to America 
 again we shall choose another slow steamer. 
 
 Having made up our minds to go — or rather, 
 since these things are really decided for us 
 and we are never the masters of our movements, 
 having been shepherded by Destiny into a 
 trip to America, we naturally sought for in- 
 formation about the country. We got a great 
 deal more than we actually sought. Everyone 
 we met gave us advice and told us what to 
 expect. Advice is always contradictory, and 
 the only wise thing to do is to take none of 
 what is offered. But it puzzled us to find 
 that the accounts we got of the country were 
 equally contradictory. English people, using 
 a curious phrase of which they seem to be very 
 fond, prophesied for us " the time of our lives." 
 They said that we should enjoy ourselves from 
 the day we landed in New York until the day 
 when we sank exhausted by too much joy, a 
 day which some of them placed a fortnight off, 
 some three weeks, all of them underestimating. 
 
i6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 as it turned out, our capacity for enduring 
 delight. Americans, on the other hand, decried 
 the country, and told us that the lot of the 
 traveller in it was very far from being pleasant. 
 This puzzled us. A very modest and retiring 
 people might be expected to underestimate 
 the attractions of their own land. We Irish, 
 for instance, always assert that it rains three 
 days out of every four in Ireland. But the 
 Americans are not popularly supposed to be, 
 and in fact are not, particularly modest. I 
 can only suppose that the Americans we met 
 before we started were in bad tempers, because 
 they were for one reason or another obliged 
 to stay in England, and that they belittled 
 their country in the spirit of the fox who said 
 the grapes were sour. 
 
 One piece of advice which we got gave us, 
 incidentally and accidentally, our first glimpse 
 at one of the peculiarities of the American 
 people — their hatred of letter writing as a 
 means of communication. The advice was 
 this : 
 
 " Do not attempt to take a sealskin coat into 
 America, because there is a law there against 
 sealskin coats, and the Custom House officers 
 will hold up the garment." 
 
 This seemed to us very improbable. I re- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 17 
 
 membered the song I have aheady quoted 
 about the " Land of the Free," and could not 
 bring myself to believe that a great nation, a 
 nation that had fought an expensive war in 
 order to set its slaves at liberty, could possibly 
 want to interfere with the wearing apparel of 
 a casual stranger. The Law which is very 
 great and majestic everywhere is, according 
 to the proverb, indifferent to very small 
 matters. America, which is as great and 
 majestic as any law, could not possibly be 
 supposed to concern itself with the material 
 of a woman's coat. So we reasoned. But 
 the warning was given with authority by one 
 who knew a lady who had tried to bring a 
 sealskin coat into America and failed. We 
 thought it well to make sure. An inquiry at 
 the steamboat office was useless. The clerk 
 there declined to say anything either good or 
 bad about the American Custom House regu- 
 lations. I have noticed this same kind of 
 cautious reticence among all Americans when 
 the subject of customs comes up. I imagine 
 that the people of ancient Crete avoided speak- 
 ing about that god of theirs who ate young 
 girls and for the same reason. There is 
 no use running risks, and the American Cus- 
 tom House officer is a person whom it is not 
 
 B 
 
1 8 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 well to offend. This is the way with all 
 democracies. In Russia and Germany a man 
 has to be careful in speaking about the Czar 
 or the Kaiser. In republics we shut our 
 mouths when a minor official is mentioned, 
 unless we are among tried and trusted friends. 
 I myself dislike respecting anyone ; but if 
 respect is exacted of me I should rather yield 
 it to a king with a proper crown on his head 
 than to an ordinary man done up with brass 
 buttons. However, Anglo-Saxons on both 
 sides of the Atlantic seem to like doing obeis- 
 ance to officials, and their tastes are no affairs 
 of mine. 
 
 Having failed in the steamboat office, I 
 wrote a letter to a high American official in 
 England— not the Ambassador. I did not 
 like to trouble him about a sealskin coat. An 
 English official, high, or of middling station, 
 would have answered me by return of post, 
 because he is glad of an opportunity of writing 
 a letter. In fact he likes writing letters so 
 much that he would have sent me two answers, 
 the first a brief but courteous acknowledg- 
 ment of my letter, and an assurance that it 
 was receiving attention ; the second an ex- 
 tract from the Act of Parliament which dealt 
 with my particular problem. The American 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 19 
 
 official does not like writing letters. No 
 American does. Rather than write a letter 
 an American will pursue you, viva voce, over 
 hundreds of miles of telephone wire, or spend 
 an hour of valuable time in having an interview 
 with you in some more or less inaccessible 
 place. Not even promotion to a high official 
 position will cause an American to feel kindly 
 towards a pen. The official to whom I wrote 
 would, I am sure, have told me all there is to 
 know about the American dislike of sealskin 
 coats, if he could have got me on the telephone. 
 He could not do that, because my name is not 
 in the London telephone directory. He 
 would, although he is a most important per- 
 son and I am less than the least, have come to 
 me and talked face to face if he had known 
 where to find me ; but I wrote from a club, 
 and the chances were five to one at least against 
 his finding me there. There was nothing for 
 it but to write a letter, but it took him several 
 days to make up his mind to the effort. His 
 answer, when he did write it, followed me to 
 New York, and the sealskin coat problem had 
 solved itself then. 
 
 I noticed, when in New York, that it takes 
 a posted letter much longer to get from one 
 street in that city to another quite near at 
 
20 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 hand, than It does in London for a letter posted 
 in the same way to get from Denmark Hill to 
 Hampstead. I connect this fact with the dis- 
 like for letter-writing which is prevalent among 
 Americans. But I do not know which is cause 
 and which is effect. It may be that the Ameri- 
 can avoids letters because he knows that they 
 will go to their destination very slowly. It 
 may be, on the other hand, that the American 
 post ofhce has dropped into leisurely ways 
 because it knows that it is seldom used for 
 business purposes. Love letters it carries, 
 no doubt, for it is difficult to express tender 
 feelings on a telephone, and impossible to 
 telegraph them ; but love letters are hardly 
 ever urgent. The " Collins " or " Hospitable 
 Roof " communication must be a letter, and 
 must go through the post, but the writer and 
 the recipient would both be better pleased 
 if it never arrived at all. Business letters 
 are different things, and I am sure the 
 American post office carries comparatively few 
 of them. 
 
 I wish that some one with a taste for statis- 
 tics would make out a table of the weights of 
 the mail bags carried on Cunard steamers. I 
 am convinced, and nothing but statistics will 
 make me think differently, that the westward 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 21 
 
 bound ships carry far more letters than those 
 which travel eastward. All Englishmen, except, 
 for obvious reasons, English journalists, write 
 letters whenever they have a decent excuse. 
 Americans only write letters when they must. 
 It was, I think, the late Charles Stewart 
 Parnell who observed that most letters an- 
 swer themselves if you leave them alone 
 long enough. This is profoundly true, al- 
 though Englishmen do not believe it. I have 
 tried and I know. Americans have either 
 come across Parnell's remark or worked out 
 the same truth for themselves. I applaud 
 their wisdom, and I was once sorry that they 
 practised this form of economy. If we had got 
 an answer to our letter before we sailed we 
 should have left the coat behind us. As it 
 was we took the coat with us and carried it 
 about America, giving ourselves indeed a 
 good deal of trouble and reaping very little in 
 the way of comfort or credit by having it. 
 When we did get the letter it showed us that 
 the Americans reaUy do object strongly to 
 these coats and have made a law against them. 
 If we had known that before starting we should 
 have left the coat behind us at any cost to 
 our feelings. 
 
 We are not aggressive people, either of us, 
 
22 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 and we always try to conform to the customs 
 of the country in which we are, and to respect 
 the feelings of the inhabitants. We cannot, 
 indeed, afford to do anything else. Members 
 of powerful, conquering nations go about the 
 world insisting on having their own way 
 wherever they are. The English, for instance, 
 have spread the practice of drinking tea in the 
 afternoon all over Europe. They make it 
 understood that wherever they go afternoon 
 tea must be obtainable. Other peoples shrug 
 their shoulders and give in. The Americans 
 have insisted that hotels shall be centrally 
 heated, and all rooms and passages kept up to 
 a very high temperature. No one else wants 
 this kind of heat, and until the Americans took 
 to travelling in large numbers we were all 
 content with fire-places in rooms and chilly 
 corridors. But the Americans are a great 
 people, and there is hardly a iirst-rate hotel 
 left in Europe now which has not got a system 
 of central heating installed. The French have 
 secured the use of their language, or a colour- 
 able imitation of their language, on all menu 
 cards and bills of fare. No self-respecting 
 maitre (ThHel, even if 90 per cent, of his 
 patrons are Americans, English, and Germans, 
 would dare to call soup anything except potage 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 23 
 
 or consomme. I think we owe it to the Rus- 
 sians that ladies can now smoke cigarettes 
 without reproach in all European restaurants, 
 though they cannot do this yet in America, 
 because very few Russians of the tourist classes 
 go to America. It must be very gratifying to 
 belong to one of these great nations and to be 
 able to import a favourite custom or a valued 
 comfort wherever you go. We are mere Irish. 
 We have never conquered anyone ourselves, 
 although we are rather good at winning other 
 people's battles for them. We have not 
 money enough to make it worth anybody's 
 while to consider our tastes ; nor indeed are 
 we sure enough of ourselves to insist on having 
 our own way. There is always at the back of 
 our minds the paralysing thought that per- 
 haps the other people may be right and we 
 may be wrong. We submit rather than 
 struggle. 
 
 We like, for instance, good tea at breakfast, 
 strong dark brown tea, which leaves a distinct 
 stain on the inside of the cup out of which we 
 drink it. Nobody else in the world likes this 
 kind of tea. If we were a conquering, domi- 
 neering people, we should go about Europe 
 and America saying : " This, which we drink, 
 is tea. Your miserable concoction is slop or 
 
24 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 worse." If we were rich enough, and if large 
 numbers of us travelled, we should establish 
 our kind of tea as an institution. It would 
 be obtainable everywhere. At first it would 
 be called " The a I'Irlandaise," and we should 
 get it by asking for it. Afterwards it would 
 be " the " simply, and if a traveller wanted 
 anything else he would have to ask for that by 
 some special name. But we are not that kind 
 of people. There are not enough of us, and 
 the few there are have not sufficient money 
 to make them worth considering. Besides, as 
 I say, we are never self-confident enough to 
 assert that our kind of tea is the true and 
 superior kind. We are uneasily conscious 
 that it is rude to describe other people's 
 favourite beverages as " slop " even when they 
 call ours " poison." And there is always the 
 doubt whether we may not be wrong after all. 
 Great peoples do not suffer from this doubt. 
 The American is perfectly certain that houses 
 ought to be centrally heated. To him there 
 does not seem to be any possibility of arguing 
 about that. He has discovered a universal 
 truth, and the rest of the world must learn it 
 from him. The German is equally sure that 
 fresh air in a railway carriage brings death to 
 the person who breathes it. He is as certain 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 25 
 
 about that as he is that water wets him when 
 it is poured over him. There is no room for 
 discussion. But we Irish are differently con- 
 stituted. When anyone tells us that our type 
 of tea reduces those who drink it to the con- 
 dition of nervous wrecks, and ultimately drives 
 them into lunatic asylums, we wonder whether 
 perhaps he may not be right. It is true that 
 we have drunk the stuff for years and felt no 
 bad effects ; but there is always " the plaguy 
 hundredth chance " that the bad effects may 
 have been there all the time without our notic- 
 ing them, and that, though we seem sane, we 
 may be gibbering imbeciles. Thus it is that 
 we never have the heart to make any real 
 struggle for strong tea. 
 
 This same infirmity would have prevented 
 our dragging that coat into America, if we had 
 found out in time that sealskin coats strike 
 Americans as wicked things. To us it seems 
 plain that seals exist mainly for the purpose 
 of supplying men, and especially women, with 
 skins ; just as fathers have their place among 
 created things in order to supply money for 
 the use of their children, or steam in order that 
 it may make engines work. Left to ourselves, 
 we should accept all these as final truths and 
 live in the light of them. But the moment 
 
26 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 anyone assails them with a flat contradiction 
 we begin to doubt. The American says that 
 the seal, at all events the seal that has the 
 luck to live in Hudson Bay, ought not to be 
 deprived of his skin, and that men and women 
 must be content with their own skins, sup- 
 plemented when necessary by the fleeces of 
 sheep. 
 
 The Englishman or the German would 
 stand up to the American. 
 
 " I will," one of them would say, " kill a 
 Hudson Bay seal if I like, or have him killed 
 for me by some one else. I will wear his 
 skin unless you prevent me by actual force, 
 and I will resist your force as long as I can." 
 
 We do not adopt that attitude. We cannot, 
 for the spirit of defiance is not in us. When 
 we were assured, as we were in the end, that 
 the American really has strong feelings about 
 seals, we began to think that he might be 
 right. 
 
 " America," so we argued, " is a much larger 
 country than Ireland. It is much richer. 
 The buildings in its cities are far higher. 
 Who are we that we should set up our 
 opinions about tea or skins or anything else 
 against the settled convictions of so great a 
 people ? " 
 
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 27 
 
 Therefore, though we brought our coat into 
 America we did so in no spirit of defiance. 
 Once we found out the truth, we concealed 
 the coat as much as possible, carrying it about 
 folded up so that only the lining showed. It 
 was hardly ever worn ; only twice, I think, the 
 whole time we were there. The weather, 
 indeed, was as a rule particularly warm for 
 that season of the year. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 
 
 Our ship, after a prosperous and pleasant 
 voyage, steamed up the Hudson River in a 
 bhnding downpour of rain vi^hich drove 
 steadily across the decl<s. Our clothes had 
 been packed up since very early in the morning, 
 and we declined to get soaked to the skin when 
 there was no chance of our being able to get 
 dry again for several hours. Therefore we 
 missed seeing the statue of Liberty and the 
 Woolworth Buildings. We were cowards, and 
 we suffered for our cowardice by losing what 
 little respect our American fellow-travellers 
 may have had for us. They went out in the 
 rain to gaze at the statue of Liberty and the 
 Woolworth Buildings. We saw nothing 
 through the cabin windows except an adver- 
 tisement of Colgate's toothpaste. The Wool- 
 worth Buildings we did, indeed, see later on. 
 The statue of Liberty we never saw at all. I 
 
 could of course write eloquently about it 
 28 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 29 
 
 without having seen it. Many people do 
 things of this kind, but I desire to be perfectly- 
 honest. I leave out the statue of Liberty. I 
 am perfectly sure it is there ; but beyond that 
 fact I know nothing whatever about it. 
 
 We actually landed, set foot at last on the 
 soil of the new world a little after 8 a.m., 
 which is a detestable hour of the day under 
 any circumstances, and particularly abomin- 
 able in a downpour of rain. If a stranger with 
 whom I was very slightly acquainted were to 
 land at that hour in Dublin, and if it were 
 raining as hard there as it did that morning in 
 New York — it never does, but it is conceivable 
 that it might — I should no more think of 
 going to meet him at the quay than I should 
 think of swimming out a mile or two to wave 
 my hand at his ship as she passed. A year ago 
 I should have made this confession without 
 the smallest shame. It would not have 
 occurred to me as possible that I should make 
 such an expedition. If a very honoured 
 guest arrived at a reasonable hour and at an 
 accessible place — steamboat quays are never 
 accessible anywhere in the world — if the day 
 were fine and I had nothing particular to do, 
 I might perhaps go to meet that guest, and 
 I should expect him to be surprised and 
 
30 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 gratified. I now confess this with shame, and 
 I intend to reform vay habits. I blush hotly 
 when I think of the feelings of the Americans 
 who come to visit us. They behave very 
 much better than we do to strangers. There 
 were three people to meet us that morning 
 when we landed, and two others arrived at 
 the quay almost immediately afterwards. Of 
 the five there was only one whom I had ever 
 seen before, and him no oftener than twice. 
 Yet they were there to shake hands in warm 
 welcome, to help us in every conceivable way, 
 to whisper advice when advice seemed neces- 
 sary. 
 
 There were also newspaper reporters — in- 
 terviewers — and we had our first experience of 
 that business as the Americans do it, in the 
 shed where our baggage was examined by 
 Custom House officers. 
 
 " Don't," said one of my friends, " say more 
 than you can help about religion." 
 
 The warning seemed to me unnecessary. I 
 value my religion, not so much as I ought to, 
 but highly. Still it is not a subject which I 
 should voluntarily discuss at eight o'clock in 
 the morning in a shed with rain splashing on 
 the roof. The very last thing I should dream 
 of offering a newspaper reporter is a formal 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 31 
 
 proof of any of the articles of the Apostles' 
 creed. Nor would any interviewer whom I 
 ever met care to listen to a sermon. I was on 
 the point of resenting the advice; but I reflected 
 in time that it was certainly meant for my good, 
 and that the ways of the American interviewer 
 were strange to me. He might want to find 
 out whether I could say my catechism. I 
 thanked my friend and promised to mention 
 religion as little as possible. I confess that 
 the warning made me nervous. 
 
 " What," I whispered, " are they likely to 
 ask me ? " 
 
 " Well ; what you think of America, for one 
 thing. They always begin with that." 
 
 I had been told that before I left home. I 
 had even been advised by an experienced 
 traveller to jot down, during the voyage out, 
 all the things I thought about America, and 
 have them ready on slips of paper to hand to 
 the interviewers when I arrived. This plan, 
 I was assured, would save me trouble and would 
 give the Americans a high opinion of my busi- 
 ness ability. I took the advice. I had quite 
 a number of excellent remarks about America 
 ready in my pocket when I landed. They 
 were no use to me. Not one single interviewer 
 asked me that question. Not even the one 
 
32 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 who chatted with me in the evening of the 
 day on which I left for home. I do not know 
 why I was not asked this question. Every 
 other stranger who goes to America is asked it, 
 or at all events says he is asked it. Perhaps 
 the Americans have ceased to care what any 
 stranger thinks about them. Perhaps they 
 were uninterested only in my opinion. I 
 can understand that. 
 
 Nor was I tempted or goaded to talk about 
 religion. The warning which I got to avoid 
 that subject was wasted. No one seemed to 
 care what I believed. I do not think I should 
 have startled the very youngest interviewer if 
 I had confided to him that I believed nothing 
 at all. The nearest I ever got to religion in 
 an interview was when I was asked what I 
 thought about Ulster and Home Rule. That 
 I was asked frequently, almost as frequently 
 as I was asked what I thought of Synge's Play- 
 boy of the Western World ; and both these 
 seemed to me just the sort of questions I ought 
 to be asked, if indeed I ought to be asked any 
 questions at all. I do not, indeed cannot,think 
 about Ulster and Home Rule. Nobody can. 
 It is one of those things, like the fourth 
 dimension, which baffle human thought. Just 
 as you hope that you have got it into a think- 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 33 
 
 able shape it eludes you, and you see it sneering 
 at your discomfiture from the far side of the 
 last ditch. But it was quite right and proper 
 to expect that an Irishman, especially an 
 Irishman who came originally from Belfast, 
 would have something to say about it, some 
 thought to express which would illuminate the 
 morass of that controversy. I could not 
 complain about being asked that question. I 
 ought to have had something to say about 
 Synge's play too, but I had not. I think it is 
 a wonderful play, by far the greatest piece of 
 dramatic literature that Ireland has produced ; 
 but I cannot give any reasons for the faith that 
 is in me. Therefore, I am afraid I must have 
 been a most unsatisfactory subject for the 
 interviewers. They cannot possibly have 
 liked me. 
 
 I, on the other hand, liked them very much 
 indeed. I found them delightful to talk to, 
 and look back on the hours I spent with them 
 as some of the most interesting of my whole 
 American trip. They all, without exception, 
 seemed to want to be pleasant. They were 
 the least conceited set of people I ever came 
 across, and generally apologised for coming to 
 see me. The apologies were entirely unneces- 
 sary. Their visits were favours conferred on 
 
 c 
 
34 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 me. They were strictly honourable. When, 
 as very often happened, I said something par- 
 ticularly foolish and became conscious of the 
 fact, I used to ask the interviewer to whom I 
 had said it not to put it in print. He always 
 promised to suppress it, and he always kept 
 his promise, though my sillinesses must often 
 have offered attractive copy. Nor did any 
 interviewer ever misrepresent me, except when 
 he failed to understand what I said, and that 
 must always have been more my fault than his. 
 At first I used to be very cautious with inter- 
 viewers, and made no statements of any kind 
 without hedging. I used to shy at topics 
 which seemed dangerous, and trot away as 
 quickly as I could to something which offered 
 opportunity for platitudes. I gradually came 
 to realise that this caution was unnecessary. 
 I would talk confidently now to an American 
 interviewer on any subject, even religion, for 
 I know he would not print anything which 
 I thought likely to get me into trouble. 
 
 I cannot understand how it is that the 
 American interviewers have such a bad repu- 
 tation on this side of the Atlantic. They are 
 a highly intelligent, well-educated body of 
 men and women engaged in the particularly 
 difficult job of trying to get stupid people, like 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 35 
 
 me, or conceited people, to say something 
 interesting. They never made any attempt 
 to pry into my private affairs. They never 
 asked obviously silly questions. I have heard 
 of people who resorted to desperate expedients 
 to avoid interviewers in America. I should 
 as soon think of trying to avoid a good play 
 or any other agreeable form of entertainment. 
 After all there is no entertainment so pleasant 
 as conversation with a clever man or woman. 
 I have heard of people who were deliberately 
 rude to interviewers and gloried in their rude- 
 ness afterwards. That seems to me just as 
 grave a breach of manners as to say insolent 
 things to a host or hostess at a dinner party. 
 
 Every now and then an interviewer, using 
 a very slender foundation of fact, produces 
 something which is brilliantly amusing. There 
 was one, with whom I never came into per- 
 sonal contact at all, who published a version 
 of a conversation between Miss Adaire O'Neill 
 and me. What we actually said to each other 
 was dull enough. The interviewer, by the 
 simple expedient of making us talk after the 
 fashion which " Mr. Dooley " has made 
 popular, represented us as exceedingly inter- 
 esting and amusing people. No one but a fool 
 would resent being flattered after this fashion. 
 
36 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 The one thing which puzzles me about the 
 business is why the pubHc wants it done. It 
 is pleasant enough for the hero of the occasion, 
 and it is only affectation to call him a victim. 
 The man who does the work, the interviewer, 
 is, I suppose, paid. He ought to be paid very 
 highly. But where does the public come in ? 
 It reads the interview — we must, I think, take 
 it for granted that somebody reads interviews 
 — but it is very difficult to imagine why. The 
 American public, judging from the number of 
 interviews published, seems particularly fond 
 of this kind of reading. Yet, however clever 
 the interviewer, the thing must be dull in 
 nine cases out of ten. 
 
 My first interviewer, my very first, photo- 
 graphed me. I told him that he was wasting 
 a plate, but he went on and wasted three. 
 Why did he do it ? If I were a very beautiful 
 woman I could understand it, though I think 
 it would be a mistake to photograph Venus 
 herself on the gangway of a steamer at eight 
 o'clock in the morning in a downpour of rain. 
 If I had been a Christian missionary who had 
 been tortured by Chinese I could understand 
 it. Tortures might have left surprising marks 
 on my face or twisted my spine in an interest- 
 ing way. If I had been an apostle of physical 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 37 
 
 culture, dressed in a pair of bathing drawers 
 and part of a tiger skin, the photographing 
 would have been intelligible. But I am none 
 of these things. What pleasure could the 
 public be expected to find in the reproduction 
 of a picture of a commonplace middle-aged 
 man. Yet the thing was done. I can only 
 suppose that reading interviews and looking 
 at the attendant photographs has become a 
 habit with the American public, just as carry- 
 ing a walking stick has with the English gentle- 
 man. A walking stick is no real use except to 
 a lame man. The walker does not push himself 
 along with it. He does not, when he sets out 
 from homCj expect to meet anyone whom he 
 wants to hit. It cannot be contended that 
 the stick is ornamental or adds in any way to 
 the beauty of his appearance. He carries it 
 because he always does carry it and would 
 feel strange if he did not. The Americans 
 put up with interviews in their papers for the 
 same sort of reason. After all no one, least 
 of all the subject, has any right to complain. 
 
 Those were our two first impressions of 
 America, that it was a country of boundless 
 hospitality and a country pervaded by agree- 
 able newspaper men. I am told by those who 
 make a study of such things that the first 
 
38 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 glance you get at a face tells you something 
 true and reliable about the man or woman it 
 belongs to, but that you get no further infor- 
 mation by looking at the face day after day for 
 months. When you come to know the man 
 or woman really well and have studied his 
 actions and watched his private life closely for 
 years, you find, if you still recollect what it 
 was, that your first impression was right. I 
 knew an Englishman once who lived for ten 
 years in Ireland and was deeply interested in 
 our affairs. He told me that when he had been 
 a week in the country he understood it, under- 
 stood us and all belonging to us thoroughly. 
 At the end of three months he began to doubt 
 whether he understood us quite as well as he 
 thought. After five years he was sure he did 
 not understand us at all. After ten years — 
 he was a persevering man — he began to under- 
 stand us a little, and was inclined to think he 
 was getting back to the exact position he held 
 at the end of the first week. Ten years hence, 
 if he and I live so long, I intend to ask him 
 again what he thinks about Ireland. Then, I 
 expect, he will tell me that he is quite con- 
 vinced that his earliest impressions were 
 correct. This is my justification for recording 
 my first impressions of America. I hope to 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 39 
 
 get to know the country much better as years 
 go on. I shall probably pass through the 
 stage of laughing at my earliest ideas, but in 
 the end I confidently expect to get back to my 
 joyous admiration for American hospitality 
 and my warm affection for American jour- 
 nalists. 
 
 Almost immediately — certainly before the 
 end of our second day — we arrived at the 
 conclusion that New York is a singularly 
 clean city. We are, both of us, by inclination 
 dwellers in country places. The noise of 
 great towns worries us. The sense of being 
 closely surrounded by large numbers of other 
 people annoys us. But we should, no doubt, 
 get used to these things if we were forced to 
 dwell long in any city. I am, however, certain 
 that I should always loathe the dirt of cities. 
 The dirt of the country, good red mud, or the 
 slime of wet stems of trees, does not trouble me, 
 even if I am covered with it. I enjoy the dirt 
 of quiet harbours, fish scales, dabs of tar and 
 rust off old anchor chains. I am happier when 
 these things are clinging to me than when I 
 am free of them. I am no fanatical wor- 
 shipper of cleanliness. I do not rank it, as 
 the English proverb does, among the minor 
 divinities of the world. But I do not like, I 
 
40 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 thoroughly detest, the dirt of the cities, that 
 impalpable grime which settles down visibly 
 on face, hands, collar, cuffs, and invisibly, but 
 sensibly, on coats, hats, and trousers. New 
 York, of all the cities that ever I have been in, 
 is freest of this grime. You can open your 
 bedroom window at night in New York, and 
 the pocket handkerchief you leave on your 
 dressing table will still be white in the morn- 
 ing, fairly white. You can walk about New 
 York all day and your nose will not be covered 
 with smuts in the evening. I am told that 
 the cleanness of New York is partly due to the 
 fact that trains running in and out of the city 
 are forced by the municipal authorities to use 
 electricity as a motive power and are forbidden 
 to burn coal till they get into the country. I 
 am told that only a hard, comparatively smoke- 
 less coal may be burned by anyone in the city. 
 If these things are true, then the City Fathers 
 of New York ought to be held up as a pattern 
 to Town Councillors and Corporations all 
 over the world. 
 
 As a matter of fact — such is the injustice of 
 man — the municipal government of New York 
 is not very greatly admired by the rest of the 
 world. It is supposed to be singularly cor- 
 rupt, and my fellow-countrymen are blamed 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 41 
 
 for its corruptness. When an European city 
 feels in a pharisaical mood, it says : " Thank 
 God I am not as other cities are, even as this 
 New York." European cities may be morally 
 cleaner. I do not know whether they are or 
 not. They are certainly physically much 
 dirtier. And from the point of view of the 
 ordinary citizen, physical dirt is more continu- 
 ously annoying than the moral kind. If I 
 lived in a community whose rulers openly sold 
 contracts and offices, I should break out into 
 a violent rage once a year or so, and swear that 
 I would no longer pay taxes for the benefit 
 of minor politicians and their henchmen. All 
 the rest of the year I should be placid enough, 
 for I should forget the corruption if I escaped 
 the perpetual unpleasantness of dirt, city dirt. 
 No government, after all, is honest. The 
 most that can be expected from men placed in 
 authority is that they should not outrage public 
 opinion by flaunting their dishonesty. But 
 I cannot help feeling that men in authority, 
 whom, after all, the rest of us pay, should do 
 their business, and part of their business is to 
 keep smuts away from our faces. If it is reaUy 
 true that we Irish govern New York, then men 
 ought to give up speaking of us as " the dirty 
 Irish." Dirty ! It appears that we are the 
 
42 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 only people who have ever kept a city clean. 
 I wish we could do it at home. 
 
 This Irish political corruption in New York 
 is a very interesting thing, and I tried hard to 
 arrive at some understanding of it. Tammany 
 was defeated while we were in New York, and 
 Mr. Mitchell became Mayor, promising a 
 clean, morally clean, administration. He also 
 is of Irish descent, so that there were country- 
 men of ours on both sides in the struggle, and 
 we are, evidently, not all of us lovers of cor- 
 ruption. The scene in Broadway when the 
 defeat of Tammany was announced surpassed 
 anything I have ever beheld in the way of a 
 demonstration of popular rejoicing, except 
 perhaps " Mafeking Night " in London. Huge 
 crowds paraded the streets. Youths with 
 horns marched in procession making music 
 like that of Edouard Strauss, but even louder. 
 Hawkers did an immense trade in small gongs 
 with balls attached to them, which made a 
 noise like cymbals. Grave-looking men wore 
 on their heads huge plumes of cut, crinkled 
 paper, like the paper with which some people 
 hide fireplaces in summer-time. Others had 
 notices on their hats which declared " We 
 told you so " — notices printed beforehand, 
 and equally applicable to a victory of the other 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 43 
 
 side. Sky signs and lights of all sorts blazed 
 above our heads. Newspaper offices flashed 
 election figures on screens in front of their 
 windows. Now and then an explosion rose 
 clear above the din, and we knew that some 
 enterprising photographer was making a flash- 
 light picture of the scene. 
 
 There was no question about the fact that 
 New York was pleased with itself. The de- 
 monstration of popular delight would have 
 followed very appropriately the capture of a 
 Bastille, some stronghold of an ancient tyranny 
 which held people down against their will. 
 The supporters of Tammany rule were, of 
 course, not in Broadway that night. They 
 may have been sitting at home behind drawn 
 blinds meditating on the fickleness of men, or 
 perhaps on the ingratitude of democracies. 
 Tammany was corrupt, no doubt, but the 
 water supply of New York is very good, and it 
 was no easy matter to get water there. Also 
 the city is strikingly clean. But there was no 
 question about the general disgust with Tam- 
 many rule. No man whom I talked to before 
 or after the election had a good word to say 
 for the organisation. Only, if I were suspected 
 of glorying in their shame, patriotic Americans 
 used occasionally to remind me of Marconi 
 
44 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 scandals at home and the Enghsh sale of 
 patents of nobility. And this was no real 
 defence of Tammany. But I was not glorying, 
 and Heaven forbid that I should ever hold up 
 European political methods as a model to any- 
 one. All I wanted was to understand. I was 
 eagerly curious to know how Tammany came 
 to be, whence its power came. It did not 
 satisfy me to be told that Tammany bribed 
 people and sold offices and therefore was 
 powerful. That is like saying that Mohammed 
 spread his religion by force of arms. I am 
 sure that Tammany did bribe and I am sure 
 that Mohammedans did ultimately conquer 
 and put pressure on the conquered to accept 
 the Koran. But before you can conquer you 
 must have soldiers, soldiers who believe of 
 their own free will. Before you can bribe 
 you must have money to bribe with. Before 
 you can sell offices you must have offices to 
 sell. How did Tammany get itself into the 
 position of being able to bribe ? 
 
 I was always asking these questions and 
 always failing to get satisfactory answers to 
 them. In the end, when I had almost given 
 up hope, I did get a little light of the sort I 
 wanted. It was after dinner one night at a 
 private house in New York. The ladies had 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 45 
 
 left the room, and there were five men sitting 
 round the table. Four of them were clever and 
 distinguished men, and they might have talked 
 very satisfactorily about things which inter- 
 ested them. But with that thoughtful courtesy 
 which is one of the charms of American hos- 
 pitality, they allowed the fifth man, the 
 stranger in their midst, to guide the conversa- 
 tion. I asked one of my usual questions about 
 Tammany. For a time I got nothing but the 
 familiar stories of Tammany corruption given 
 with more than the usual detail. We had 
 names and dates put to scandalous achieve- 
 ments, and learned who had been allowed a 
 " rake off " on this or that financial transaction. 
 I heard about the alliance, under the banner 
 of Tammany, between the Irish and the Jews. 
 I reflected that other things besides misfortune 
 make strange bedfellows. Then came the 
 illumination. One of the men present leaned 
 back in his chair and laid down his cigar. 
 
 " A Tammany ward boss," he said, " has 
 the confidence of the people in his ward. If 
 he had not he would not be a ward boss." 
 
 I did not want to interrupt by asking ques- 
 tions, and felt that I could guess sufficiently 
 nearly the functions and business of a " ward 
 boss " to do without an explanation. 
 
46 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 " He wouldn't," said my friend, " win or 
 keep the confidence of the people unless he 
 deserved it more or less, unless he deserved it 
 a good deal, unless he really was a friend to the 
 people. He may not be a man of much ability. 
 He generally isn't, but he has a good heart." 
 
 This was startling. My preconceived idea 
 of a Tammany boss of any kind was of a man 
 of considerable ability and a bad heart. I 
 suppose I looked surprised. The speaker 
 qualified his statement a little. 
 
 " A good heart, to start with. Everyone 
 in the ward who is in any kind of difficulty or 
 trouble goes to the boss. Most of them are 
 poor ignorant people, and don't know how to 
 manage things for themselves. There's a 
 sick child who ought to be got into hospital. 
 The ward boss sees about it. There's a boy 
 who ought to be in a situation. The ward 
 boss gets a situation for him. There's a man 
 who has been badly treated by his employer — 
 Oh ! you know the sort of things which turn 
 up. They're the same with poor people all 
 the world over." 
 
 I did know, very well. I was also beginning 
 to understand. 
 
 " Then, I suppose," I said, " the people vote 
 the way the ward boss tells them." 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 47 
 
 " Naturally." 
 
 Well, yes, naturally. What do political 
 rights and wrongs matter to them ? 
 
 " After a while," my informant went on, 
 " if he manages well, he is let a Httle bit into 
 the inner ring. He gets a bit of money dropped 
 to him here and another bit there. That makes 
 a difference to him. He begins to do himself 
 pretty well, and he likes it." 
 
 Most men do. These " bits of money," 
 however they come, bring very pleasant things 
 with them. That is the same everywhere. 
 
 " After a while — I don't say this is exactly 
 what happens every time, but it's something 
 like this. After a while he goes uptown and 
 dines at one of the swagger restaurants, just 
 to see what it's like. He is a bit out of it at 
 first, but he goes again. He sees people there 
 and he picks up their names. They are people 
 with very impressive names, names he's been 
 hearing all his life, and associating with millions 
 and automobiles and diamonds. It gives him 
 rather a pleasant feeling to find himself sitting 
 at the next table and hearing the voices of 
 these men ; seeing the women with their 
 jewels, and smelling the scent off their clothes. 
 You know the sort of thing." 
 
 I could guess. I have, in my time, dined at 
 
48 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 restaurants of the kind, though not often 
 enough to get to know the looks of their native 
 miUionaires. 
 
 " Then some night or other one of these 
 men steps across to our man's table and talks 
 to him. He's as friendly as the devil. He 
 introduces him to one or two others, or perhaps 
 to some women ; but women don't come much 
 into business over here. Well, the poor fellow 
 is a little bit above himself, and no wonder. 
 He's never been anything before but just a 
 ' Mick,' and never expected to be anything 
 else." 
 
 Here I had to interrupt. 
 
 " A Mick ? " I said. 
 
 " An Irishman. That's what we generally 
 call Irishmen." 
 
 They call us " Pat " on this side of the 
 Atlantic, and I think I prefer it, but I have no 
 particular quarrel with " Mick." Both names 
 are conveniently short. 
 
 " There's nothing more than friendliness at 
 first. Then, perhaps a week later, there's 
 something said about a contract or a new loan 
 that is to be floated. Influence, a word in 
 the right quarter, comes in useful in these 
 cases. Our man, the man we're talking of, 
 doesn't know very clearly what the talk is 
 
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 49 
 
 about. He doesn't know that he has any 
 influence ; but it rather pleases him to feel 
 that the other men think he has. There is a 
 hint dropped about a subscription to the party 
 funds and — well, that's how it's done." 
 
 I grasped at ideas which flitted past me. 
 There always are " party funds." Politics 
 cannot go on without them. There always are 
 desirable things, whether contracts, rakes off, 
 appointments, or — as in our monarch-ridden 
 states — titles. But I wonder where the blame 
 for the corruption really lies, the heavy part of 
 the blame. Tammany Mick had a good heart 
 to start with, and he was not a man of much 
 ability. 
 
 However, these are only the speculations 
 of an inquisitive man. They do not matter. 
 New York smashed Tammany last autumn, 
 and no doubt will keep it smashed. But a 
 mere alliance of anti-Tammany forces will not 
 permanently get the better of a well-con- 
 structed machine, nor is the enthusiasm for 
 clean government good in a long distance race. 
 An American poet has noted as one of the 
 characteristics of truth, that though slain it 
 will rise again, and of error that when van- 
 quished it dies among its worshippers. In 
 politics it is the machine which possesses 
 
 D 
 
so CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 truth's valuable power of recuperation and 
 idealism which gets counted out after a knock- 
 down blow. It seems as if a machine will 
 only go under finally in competition with 
 another more efficient machine, and the new 
 more efficient machine is just as great a danger 
 to political morality as the old one was. This 
 is the vicious circle in which democracies go 
 round and round. Perhaps the truth is that 
 politics, like art, are non-moral by nature, that 
 politicians have nothing to do with right or 
 wrong, truth or falsehood, honesty or dis- 
 honesty. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE " HUSTLING " LEGEND 
 
 I WALKED through New York late at night 
 shortly after I landed, and had for companions 
 an Englishman, who knew the city well, and 
 an American. The roar of the traffic had 
 ceased. The streets were almost deserted. 
 Along Fifth Avenue a few motors rushed 
 swiftly bearing belated revellers to their homes. 
 Save for them the city was as nearly silent as 
 any city ever is. We talked. It was the 
 Englishman who spoke first. 
 
 " New York and the sound of blasting go 
 together," he said. " They are inseparably 
 connected in my mind. New York is built on 
 rock out of material blasted off rock with 
 dynamite. This fact explains New York. It 
 is the characteristic thing about New York. 
 No other city owes its existence in the same 
 way to the force of explosives shattering rock." 
 
 " New York," said the American, " is one 
 of the soldiers of Attila the Hun." 
 
 SI 
 
52 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 The night was warm. He unbuttoned his 
 overcoat as he spoke and flung it back from 
 his chest. He squared his shoulders, looked 
 up at the immensely lofty buildings on each 
 side of us, looked round at the shadow-patched 
 pavements, fixed his eyes finally on the lamps 
 of a motor which was racing towards us from 
 a great distance along the endless avenue. 
 Then he pursued his comparison. 
 
 " Attila's soldier," he said, " went through 
 some Roman city with his club over his shoulder. 
 There were round him evidences of old civilisa- 
 tions which puzzled him. He gazed at the 
 temples, the baths, the theatres with wonder- 
 ing curiosity ; but he was conscious that he 
 could smash everything and kill everyone he 
 saw. He was the barbarian, but he was also 
 the strong man. New York is like that among 
 the cities of the world." 
 
 I contributed a borrowed comment on 
 America. 
 
 " An Irishman once told me," I said, " that 
 America isn't a country. It's a great space 
 in which there are the makings of a country 
 lying about. He might have said the same sort 
 of thing about New York. There are the 
 makings of a city scattered around." 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 53 
 
 " Chunks of blasted rock," said the EngHsh- 
 man. 
 
 " The Hun had a lot to learn," said the 
 American, " but he was the strong man. He 
 could smash and crush. Nobody else could." 
 
 There is a very interesting story or sketch — 
 I do not know how it ought to be described — 
 by the late " O. Henry," which he called The 
 Voice of the City. He imagines that certain 
 American cities speak, and each of them utters 
 its characteristic word. Chicago says, " I 
 will." Philadelphia says, " I ought." New 
 Orleans says, " I used to." If I had " O. 
 Henry's " genius I should try to concentrate 
 into phrases the voices of the cities I know. 
 I should like to be able to hear distinctly what 
 they all say about themselves. Belfast, I am 
 convinced, says " I won't." Dublin occasion- 
 ally murmurs, " It doesn't really matter." 
 So far I seem to get, but then I am puzzled. 
 I should like to hear what Edinburgh says, 
 what Paris says, what Rome would say if 
 something waked her out of her dream. I 
 should be beaten by London, even if I had all 
 his genius, just as " O. Henry " was beaten 
 by New York. He failed to disentangle the 
 motif from the clamorous tumult of mighty 
 
54 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 chords with which that city assails the ear. 
 There is a supreme moment which comes in 
 the Waldstein Sonata. The Hstener is a- 
 quiver with maddening expectation. He is 
 wrought upon with sound until he feels that 
 he must tear some soft thing with his teeth. 
 Then at the moment when the passion in him 
 becomes intolerable the great scrap of melody 
 thunders triumphantly over the confusion, 
 and it is possible to breathe again. This is 
 just what does not happen in the case of places 
 like London and New York. A Beethoven 
 yet unborn will catch their melodies for us 
 some day, and the sonata of great cities will 
 be written. Till he comes it is better to leave 
 the thing alone. Neither blasting nor dyna- 
 mite is the keyword. Attila's Hun with his 
 club fails us, though he helps a little. And 
 there is more, a great deal more, about New 
 York than the confused massing of materials 
 on the site of what is to be a temple or a rail- 
 way station. 
 
 When I was in New York they were building 
 a large edifice of some kind in Broadway, not 
 far from Thirty-fifth Street. I used to see the 
 work in progress every day, and often stopped 
 to watch the builders for a while. Whenever 
 I think of New York I shall remember the 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 55 
 
 shrill scream of the steam drill which made 
 holes in the steel girders. The essential thing 
 about that noise was its suggestion of relent- 
 lessness. Perhaps New York is of all cities 
 the most relentless. The steel suffers and 
 shrieks through a long chromatic scale of agony. 
 New York drills a hole, pauses to readjust its 
 terrible force, and then drills again. 
 
 That is one aspect of New York. The 
 stranger cannot fail to be conscious of it. It 
 is brought home to him by the rush of the 
 overhead railway in Fourth Avenue, by the 
 hurry of the crowds in Broadway, by the grind- 
 ing clamour of the subway trains. It is this, 
 no doubt, which has given rise to the theory 
 that New York is a city of hustle. It seems 
 to me a very cruel thing to say of any people 
 that they hustle. The word suggests a dis- 
 agresable kind of spurious activity. The 
 hustler is not likely to be efficient. He makes 
 a fine show of doing things ; but he does not, 
 somehow, get much done. The hustler is 
 like a football player who is in all parts of the 
 field at different times, sometimes in the for- 
 ward line, sometimes among the backs, always 
 breathless, generally very much in the way, 
 and contributing less than anyone else to the 
 winning of the game for his side. If New 
 
56 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 York were a city of hustlers New York would 
 drill no holes in steel girders. 
 
 The fact is, that America has, in this matter 
 of hustle, been grossly slandered in Europe. 
 I am not sure that the Americans, with a 
 curious perversity, have not slandered them- 
 selves, and done as much as anyone to keep 
 the hustle myth alive. The American under- 
 stands the value of not hurrying as well as any- 
 one in the world. He has, justly, a high 
 opinion of himself, and declines to be a slave 
 to a wretched machine like a clock. I realised 
 this leisureliness the first time I went into a 
 restaurant to get something to eat. I could 
 have smoked a cigarette comfortably between 
 the ordering and the getting of what I ordered. 
 I could have smoked other cigarettes, calmly, 
 as cigarettes ought to be smoked, between 
 each course. American men do actually smoke 
 in this way during meals, and I trace the cus- 
 tom not to an excessive fondness for tobacco, 
 but to the leisurely way in which the busiress 
 of eating is gone about. And it is not in 
 restaurants only that this quiet disregard of 
 time's abominable habit of going on is evident. 
 The New York business man gets through liis 
 work — it is evident that he does get through 
 it — without feeling it necessary to give every^- 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 57 
 
 one the impression that each half-hour of the 
 day is dedicated to a separate affair, and that 
 the entire time-table will be reduced to chaos 
 if a single minute strays out of its proper 
 compartment into the next. 
 
 Perhaps it is because I am Irish that I like 
 this way of doing business. There is a char- 
 acter in one of the late Canon Sheehan's novels, 
 who says that there are two things which are 
 plenty in Ireland — water and time. There 
 are, undoubtedly, places in the world where 
 water is scarce, the Sahara desert, for instance ; 
 but I suspect that time is quite abundant 
 everywhere, though some people affect to 
 believe that it is not. I know English business 
 men who scowl at you if you venture, having 
 settled the little affair which brought you to 
 their ofHce, to make a pleasant remark about 
 the chances of a general election before Christ- 
 mas. They pretend that they have not time 
 to talk about General Elections. They do 
 this as Bob Sawyer used to have himself sum- 
 moned from Church, in order to keep up their 
 reputation. They want you to think that 
 they are overwhelmed with pressing things. 
 I have always suspected that, having got rid 
 of their visitor, they spend hours reading about 
 general elections in the daily papers. The 
 
58 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 American business man is, apparently, never 
 too busy to enjoy a chat. He invites you to 
 lunch with him when you go to his office. He 
 shows you the points of interest in the neigh- 
 bourhood after luncheon. He discusses the 
 present condition of Ireland, a subject which 
 demands an immense quantity of time. He 
 settles the Httle matter which brought you to 
 his office with three sentences and a wave of 
 the hand. He does not write you a letter 
 afterwards beginning : " In confirmation of 
 our conversation to-day I note that you are 
 
 prepared to " It is, I suppose, a man's 
 
 temperament which settles which way of 
 doing business he prefers. It is also, very 
 largely, a question of temper. In my normal 
 mood I prefer the American method. There 
 is a broad humanity about it which appeals 
 to me strongly. But if I have been annoyed 
 by anything early in the day, broken a bootlace, 
 for instance, or lost a collar stud, I would 
 rather do business in the English way. In 
 the one case I like to come in contact with a 
 fellow-man, to feel that he has affections and 
 weaknesses like my own. It is pleasant to get 
 to know him personally. In the other case, 
 thanks to the misfortunes of the morning, I 
 am filled with a gloomy hatred of my kind. 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 59 
 
 I want, until the mood has worn off, to see as 
 Httle as possible of anyone, and to keep in- 
 evitable people at arm's length. It is much 
 easier to do this when the inevitable people 
 also want to keep me at arm's length, and the 
 English business man generally does. The 
 friendliness of the American business man is 
 a little trying sometimes to anyone in a bad 
 temper. Sometimes, not always. I remem- 
 ber one occasion on which I was exceptionally 
 cross. I forget what had happened to me in 
 the morning, but it was worse than breaking 
 a bootlace. It may have had something to do 
 with telephones, instruments which gener- 
 ally drive me to fury. At all events, though 
 in a bad temper, I had to go to see a man in 
 his ofHce. He was a man of extraordinarily 
 friendly spirit, even for an American. I 
 dreaded my interview, fearing that I might 
 say something actually rude before it was over. 
 Nothing could have been more soothing than 
 my reception. This wonderful man cast a 
 single quick glance at me as I entered his 
 office. He realised my condition, and got 
 through with the wretched necessity which 
 had brought me there with a rapidity and pre- 
 cision which would have done credit to any 
 Englishman. Then he ushered me out again 
 
6o CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 without making or giving me time to make a 
 single remark of a miscellaneous kind. I 
 apologised to him afterwards. He patted me 
 reassuringly on the shoulder. 
 
 " That's all right," he said, " I saw the 
 minute you came into the room that you were 
 a bit rattled." 
 
 That seems to me a splendid example of 
 tact. I do not suggest that all American 
 business men have this faculty for swift, self- 
 sacrificing sympathy. It must be rare, even 
 in New York. Does it exist at all in England ? 
 If I called on an English merchant some morn- 
 ing when the spring was in my blood, and I 
 felt that I wanted to leap and spring like a 
 lamb, would he divine my mood, join hands 
 and dance with me on his hearthrug ? I doubt 
 it. He would not do it even if I were a hundred 
 times more important than I am. He would 
 not do it if I were chairman of a fantastically 
 prosperous company. Yet it must have been 
 just as hard for my American friend to be 
 austere as it would be for an Englishman to 
 be inanely gay. 
 
 I am not a business man myself. I have for 
 many years practised the art of getting other 
 people to manage my small affairs for me, so 
 perhaps I ought not to write about business 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 6i 
 
 men. But an author is always on the horns 
 of a dilemma. He knows he ought not to 
 write about anything that he does not thor- 
 oughly understand. But if he confined himself 
 to those subjects he would never write anything 
 at all. Even if he gave himself some latitude, 
 and allowed himself to write about things of 
 which he knows a little, he would still find 
 himself in a narrow place. His best hope is 
 that if he writes freely on every subject that 
 comes into his head he will only be found out 
 by a few people at a time. Sailors will find 
 him out when he writes about the sea. In- 
 surance agents will laugh at his ignorance 
 when he writes about premiums ; doctors will 
 be irritated when he sets down what he thinks 
 about measles. But the sailors will believe 
 that he knows a great deal about insurance 
 and disease in general ; doctors will think him 
 an expert about ships, and so forth. And 
 there are always far fewer people in any given 
 profession than there are people out of it. 
 The writer has, therefore, a good hope that 
 those who find him out in any point which he 
 touches will always be a minority. Minorities 
 do not matter. 
 
 It is the consideration of this fact which 
 gives me courage to write about business men, 
 
62 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 and more courage now to go on and write about 
 buildings. I know nothing about architec- 
 ture, but the people who do are very few, so 
 that the penalty of being found out will be 
 light. 
 
 There does not seem at first glance to be 
 any connection between business men and 
 architecture. But there is a very real one. 
 There is also a private connection of thought 
 in my own mind. It was from the windows 
 of an office, high up in one of the sky-scraper 
 buildings, that I got my first comprehensive 
 view of New York. There is, generally, a 
 certain sameness about these bird's eye views 
 of cities. The bird, and the man who gets 
 into the position of the bird, sees a number of 
 spires of churches sticking up into the sky, 
 and below them a huddled mass of roofs. 
 Sometimes tall chimneys assert themselves 
 beside the spires. But the spires are the domi- 
 nating things. The chimneys may have every 
 appearance of arrogance, but one feels that they 
 are upstarts. The spires hold the place of a 
 recognised aristocracy. The bird, if he were, say, 
 an eagle, and had not the sparrow's intimate 
 knowledge of the life of the streets, would natur- 
 ally come to the conclusion that the worship 
 of God is the most potent factor in the life of 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 63 
 
 the European city. He would, perhaps, be 
 wrong, but he would have a good case to make 
 for himself when he was recounting his experi- 
 ences to the other eagles. 
 
 " I have seen," he would say, " these vast 
 nesting places of men, and the spires of the 
 churches are far the most important things in 
 them. They reach up higher than anything 
 else, and there are great numbers of them." 
 
 But the eagle would not say that about 
 New York. It is not spires, nor is it factory 
 chimneys which stick up highest there 
 and catch the attention of a spectator from a 
 height. OflBce buildings are the dominant 
 things. Churches are kept in what many 
 people regard as their proper place. You can 
 see them if you look for them, but they are 
 subordinate. The same thing is true of an- 
 other view of New York, that marvellous 
 spectacle of the city's profile which you get in 
 the evening from any of the Hudson River 
 Ferry Boats. The sky line is jagged, and the 
 silhouettes are not those of cross-crowned 
 domes or spires, but of large buildings dedi- 
 cated to commerce. 
 
 The philosophic eagle might, reasoning as 
 he did before, leap to the conclusion that God 
 is of little importance in the city of New York ; 
 
64 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 that bank books there count for more than 
 Bibles. I am not at all sure that he would 
 be right. It looks, anyone who has seen New 
 York must admit, as if the American who 
 coined the phrase " the almighty Dollar " had 
 really expressed the faith of his countrymen. 
 But I am inclined to think that he was led 
 into injustice by a desire to be epigrammatic. 
 It may be that my experience was singularly 
 fortunate, but I came to the conclusion that 
 God counts for a good deal in the life of New 
 York and of America generally. I do not 
 mean that any creed has obtained for itself 
 national recognition, or that any particular 
 church has reached a position analogous to that 
 of the English established church. Religion in 
 America seems to me a confused force, which 
 has not yet fully found itself ; but it is a 
 force. The desire to do justly, to love mercy, 
 though scarcely perhaps to walk humbly, is 
 present, and is coming to be mightier than 
 the dollar. 
 
 Yet it is certainly true that the most striking 
 buildings in New York are not ecclesiastical 
 but commercial. This is a defiance of the old 
 European tradition, a breach even of that 
 feebler tradition which America took over 
 from Europe before she entered into pos- 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 65 
 
 session of her own soul. I am reminded of 
 AttUa's Hun with his contempt for Roman 
 civilisation and his confidence in his own 
 strength. 
 
 Business used to look askance at magnifi- 
 cence. It was the pride of the London 
 merchant that he managed mighty affairs in 
 an unpretentious counting-house. But we are 
 learning from the Americans. Our Insurance 
 companies were the first to start building 
 sumptuous habitations for themselves. Banks 
 and other corporations are following their 
 example. Yet even to-day the offices in the 
 city of London are singularly unimpressive to 
 the eye, and many a house with world-wide 
 influence scorns to appeal to the passer-by with 
 anything more striking than a " Push " or 
 " Pull " stamped in worn letters on the brass 
 plates of a pair of swinging doors. It was a 
 great tradition, this total lack of ostentation 
 where mighty forces were. At first New York 
 too felt the attraction of it. Wall Street, 
 which is one of the older parts of the city, is 
 not impressive to look at. The Cotton Ex- 
 change is a building of a very middling kind. 
 Yet I am inclined to think that the instinct 
 for magnificence displayed by the newer 
 American captains of commerce is sound. I 
 
 E 
 
ee CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 am not considering the advertisement value of 
 a great building. It may be vi^orth something 
 in that way, though grubbiness can also be an 
 effective advertisement. What seems to lie at 
 the back of the display is the desire of life to 
 express itself in sumptuousness. The Vene- 
 tians, a nation of merchants, felt this and 
 built in the spirit of it. After all, commerce is 
 a very great kind of life. There is energy in 
 it, adventure, romance. It offers opportuni- 
 ties for struggle, promises victory, threatens 
 defeat. Is it any wonder that men absorbed 
 in it should feel the thrill of the superbia vitae, 
 and build to secure visible embodiment for 
 the emotion ? Men have always tried to 
 build finely for their governors. King's 
 palaces and Parliament houses are impressive 
 everywhere. This was right when kings and 
 parliaments were important. Now that the 
 offices of financiers are much more important 
 than the habitations of law-makers, they too 
 are becoming splendid. 
 
 It is, I suppose, to be expected that these 
 mighty buildings should have forms which at 
 first are repellent in their strangeness. We, 
 who were nursed in an older artistic tradition, 
 have learned to value, perhaps too highly, 
 restraint and dignity. The outstanding char- 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND S'j 
 
 acteristics of the American sl<yscraper seems 
 to me to be exuberance. I am reminded of 
 the wild spirit of one or two European build- 
 ings, of the cloisters of Belem, for instance, 
 though there the sense of exultation expresses 
 itself in a very different way. But the essential 
 spirit is similar. I could imagine the builders 
 chanting as they worked : " Behold ye are 
 gods. Ye are all children of the Highest." 
 They are gods who have not experienced the 
 tedium vitae of Olympian happiness. But 
 New York is not so drunken with exuberance 
 that it cannot build with quiet dignity. 
 Tiffany's shop in Fifth Avenue, and, a little 
 lower down, Altmann's great department 
 store, are buildings on which the eye rests 
 with undisturbed satisfaction. The men who 
 built these had more in mind than the erection 
 of houses in which rings or stockings might 
 conveniently be sold. They felt that com- 
 merce in jewellery or clothes was in itself a 
 worthy thing which might be undertaken in a 
 lofty spirit, and greatly carried on. There is 
 a feeling of nobility in the proportion of 
 windows and doors, in the severity of the 
 street fronts. These might be palaces of 
 noblemen of an ancient lineage. They are — 
 shops. Has America discovered a dignity in 
 
68 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 shop-keeping ? The station of the Pennsyl- 
 vania Railway is one of the glories of New 
 York, and here again New York is certainly 
 right, though I — it is a purely personal feeling — 
 am infuriated to find the calm self-restraint of 
 the Greeks associated with anything so blatant 
 as a railway train. Anywhere else in the 
 world the great hall of the Central Station 
 would be the nave of a cathedral. It is im- 
 possible not to feel — even when hurrying for 
 a train — that the porters are really acolytes 
 masquerading for a moment in honour of 
 some fantastic fool's day. 
 
 The churches of New York are of subor- 
 dinate interest. Trinity Church has a singu- 
 larly suggestive position, right opposite the 
 end of Wall Street — God in protest against 
 Mammon. But the building itself might be 
 anywhere in England. I can fancy it in Not- 
 tingham or Bath, and there would be no need 
 to alter the place of a stone in it. It is a 
 dignified and beautiful parish church, but it 
 has, as a building, nothing American about it. 
 It has not, apparently, influenced the spirit of 
 New York architecture. The people have not 
 found self-expression in it. St. Patrick's 
 Cathedral, in Fifth Avenue, is a fine, a very 
 fine example of modern Gothic. Except the 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 69 
 
 new graduates' school buildings at Princeton 
 this cathedral strikes me as the finest example 
 of modern Gothic I have ever seen. But 
 ought New York to have Gothic buildings ? 
 Here, I know, I come up against a difficult 
 question. There are those who hold that for 
 certain purposes — for worship and for the 
 dignified ceremonial life of a University — the 
 Gothic building is the one perfect form which 
 man has devised. We cannot better it. All 
 we can do is to soak ourselves in the spirit of the 
 men of the great centuries of this style, and 
 humbly try to feel as they felt so that we may 
 build as they. It may be granted that we 
 shall devise nothing better. I, for one, gladly 
 admit that St. Patrick's in New York and the 
 hall at Princeton are conceived in the old 
 spirit, and are as perfect as any modern work 
 of the kind is, perhaps as perfect as any modern 
 Gothic work can be. But when all this is 
 said it remains true that the life of New York 
 is not the life of mediaeval Rouen, of the 
 London which built Westminster or of the 
 Cologne which paid honour to the Three 
 Kings. Can New York accept as its vision of 
 the divine the conception, however splendid, 
 of those " dear dead days " ? 
 
 It may well be that I am all wrong in my 
 
70 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 feeling about modern Gothic, that what is 
 wanting in these buildings is not the spirit 
 which was in the old ones. It may be that 
 like certain finer kinds of wine they require 
 maturing. I can conceive that a church 
 which seems remote now, almost to the point 
 of frigidity, may not only seem, but actually 
 be, different two hundred years hence. It is 
 scarcely possible to think that the prayers of 
 generations have no effect upon the walls of 
 the building in which they are uttered. There 
 must cling to the place some aroma, some 
 subtle essence of the reachings after God of 
 generation after generation. The repentances 
 of broken hearts, the supplications of sorrow- 
 ing women, the vows of strong, hopeful souls, 
 the pieties of meek priests, must be present 
 stiU among the arches and the dim places above 
 them. Men consecrate their temples, but it 
 takes them centuries to do it. Perhaps West- 
 minster would have left me cold if I had 
 walked its aisles four hundred years ago. This 
 lack of maturity, and not, as I suppose, the 
 fact that they do not come of the spirit of our 
 time, may be what is the matter with our 
 newer Gothic buildings. 
 
 There is one church in New York — there 
 may be others unknown to me — which gives 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 71 
 
 the impression of having grown out of the 
 life which dwelt in it, in the same sense in 
 which certain English churches, those espe- 
 cially of the Sussex country-side, have grown 
 rather than been deliberately and consciously 
 built. This is the unpretentious building 
 known as " The Little Church Round the 
 Corner." The affectionate familiarity of the 
 name suits the place and means more to the 
 discerning soul than any dedication could 
 mean. The student of architecture would 
 perhaps reckon this church contemptible, and 
 having seen it once would bestow no second 
 glance upon it. It is built in no style of re- 
 cognised orthodoxy. I do not know its his- 
 tory, but it looks as if bits had been added on 
 to it time after time by people who knew 
 nothing and cared nothing for unity of design, 
 but who had in their hearts a genuine love 
 for the building. It is an expression of life, 
 this little church, but not, I think, of the life 
 of New York. It is as if someone had made a 
 little garden and filled it with all kinds of 
 delicate sweet-smelling flowers in a glade of a 
 mighty forest. Within the garden are the 
 flowers, tended and well-beloved. Outside 
 and all around are great trees with gnarled 
 trunks and far-off branches which have fought 
 
72 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 their own way in desperate competition to the 
 sunHght. I could, I think, worship very faith- 
 fully in that " Little Church Round the 
 Corner," but I should have to shut New 
 York out of my heart every time I passed 
 through the doors of it. Just so I can find 
 delight in the sweetness of Keble's Christian 
 Tear, but while I do I must forget the sea, 
 and how " at His word the stormy wind ariseth 
 which lifteth up the waves thereof." I must 
 cease to be in love with the perils of ad- 
 venturing. 
 
 There is one church in New York which 
 seems to me to have caught the spirit of the 
 city, the unfinished Cathedral of St. John the 
 Divine. It gives the worshipper within its 
 walls a strange sense of titanic strength striv- 
 ing majestically to express itself in stone. I 
 am told that the building is to be finished in 
 some other way, in accordance with the rules 
 and orthodoxies of some school of architecture. 
 This may not be true, but even if it is there 
 still remains the hope that enough has been 
 already done to preserve for the finished work 
 its character of relentless strength. If its 
 builders are brave enough to go on as they 
 have begun this cathedral should rank in the 
 eyes of future generations as one of the great 
 
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 73 
 
 houses of God in the world. St. Mark's, with 
 its fantastic spires and gorgeous colouring, 
 expresses all the past history of Venice and 
 her commerce with the East, all which that 
 strange republic learnt of the Divine, from the 
 glow of Syrian deserts, where sun-baked cara- 
 vans crawled slowly, and from the heavy scents 
 of Midianitish merchandise in the market- 
 places of Damascus. The confused and misty 
 aisles of Westminster embody in stone a 
 realised conception of the tumultuous life of 
 London, of its black river weary with the 
 weight of the untold wealth it bears, of its 
 crowds thronging narrow places, of its streets 
 where past and present look suspiciously into 
 each others' eyes, while things which are to be 
 already push for elbow-room. The Cathedral 
 of St. John the Divine, standing on the very 
 edge of its steep, broken hill, gives me, as no 
 other building does, the sense of strength — of 
 the kind of strength which will do rather than 
 endure, which is unwilling to abide restraint 
 of any kind. 
 
 The building is a fit mate for the sky- 
 scrapers, can hold its own among them be- 
 cause its spirit is their spirit, touched with the 
 flame of inspiration by the torch of the Divine. 
 The very absence of unity of style seems the 
 
74 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 crowning glory of it. It is Attila's Hun once 
 more. What did he care that the spoils in 
 which he decked himself were of various 
 fashionings ? It is the dynamite blasting 
 living rock. It is, as it seems to me, New York 
 in process of being given in stone an inter- 
 pretation which neither words nor music have 
 given her yet. It will be a loss not only to 
 New York, but to the world, if the builders 
 of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine allow 
 themselves to be frightened by the spectre of 
 European artistic tradition. They may tame 
 their church, civilise it, curl and comb the 
 seven locks of its hair. If they do the great 
 strength will surely depart from it, and it will 
 become a common thing. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 HOLIDAY FEVER 
 
 We shall always be thankful that we paid a 
 visit to Atlantic City. It is not, I believe, one 
 of the places of which Americans are par- 
 ticularly proud. The trains which connect It 
 with New York have Indeed the reputation of 
 being the fastest in the world, but that may 
 not be because everyone Is In a great hurry 
 to get to Atlantic City. They run at high 
 speed both ways, and It Is quite possible that 
 some men may be In an equal hurry to get 
 away. Our friends were certainly a little cold 
 when we said we were going there. Left to 
 ourselves, or meekly following, as we generally 
 do, the advice given to us by well-instructed 
 people, we should not have gone to Atlantic 
 City. But we were shepherded there by cir- 
 cumstances, fate, or whatever the power Is 
 called which regulates the minor affairs of life. 
 And we were glad we went. No one, says 
 Tennyson, can be more wise than destiny. 
 
 75 
 
l6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Our visit to Atlantic City went to prove the 
 truth of that profound remark. 
 
 The means which destiny used for getting 
 us to Atlantic City was a play. We had a 
 play of our own, and it was produced there 
 for the first time on the west side of the 
 Atlantic. American theatrical managers be- 
 lieve in experimenting with a play in some 
 minor place before taking the plunge of the 
 New York production. They call this — in a 
 phrase not unknown in England — " trying it on 
 the dog." It seems to me rather a good plan. 
 The verdict of the dog is not indeed of great 
 value. Dogs, human dogs, are the same 
 everywhere. They are afraid to say they like 
 anything which has not got the seal of a great 
 city's approval set on it. They take refuge in 
 damning with dubious phrase ; and, in fact, 
 no one with any experience much minds what 
 they say. But the experimental production 
 has a value of its own apart from the opinion 
 of the dog. The company shakes down and 
 learns to work together. The first perform- 
 ance in an important place, when the time 
 comes for it, is much more likely to go smoothly 
 if the actors have faced audiences, even 
 audiences of the dog kind, every night for a 
 week beforehand. 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 77 
 
 We did not understand the philosophy of 
 these dog productions at first, and were 
 therefore a little nervous all the time we 
 were in Atlantic City, but not, I am glad to 
 say, nervous enough to have our enjoyment of 
 the place spoiled. Nothing would induce me 
 to say, or for a single moment to think, that 
 Atlantic City is in any way a characteristic 
 product of American civilisation. All our civi- 
 lisations produce places of this kind. But it 
 is fair, I think, to say that America does this 
 particular thing better than any other country. 
 Superior people might say that America does 
 it worse ; but I am not superior. I recognise 
 that the toiling masses have a right to revel 
 during their brief holidays in the way that 
 appeals to them as most delightful. I do not 
 revel in that way myself ; but that is not 
 because I have found better ways, but only 
 because I am growing older and prefer to take 
 my humble pleasures quietly. When I was 
 young I enjoyed tumultuous pleasures as much 
 as anyone. I revelled with the best of my 
 day in the town of Douglas ; and if I did not 
 get as much out of it as I might now if I were 
 young again, it was only because there was 
 not, in those days, nearly so much in it. The 
 holiday resort has been enormously developed 
 
78 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 during the last twenty-five years, and America, 
 judging by Atlantic City — and I am told Coney 
 Island is better — is in the very van of human 
 progress. 
 
 I have seen Portrush, our humble Irish 
 attempt at a pleasure city. I have seen 
 Blackpool, which far surpasses Portrush in its 
 opportunities for delight. I have seen the 
 Lido, where the Germans bathe. I have seen 
 Brighton, which is spoiled by a want of 
 abandon and a paralysing respect for gentility. 
 Atlantic City outdoes them all. Atlantic City 
 is Portrush, Blackpool, Brighton, the Lido, and 
 Ostend rolled into one, and then, in all the 
 essential features of such places, raised to the 
 third power so to speak ; multiplied by itself 
 and then multiplied by itself again. 
 
 Our friends, as I have hinted, warned us 
 against Atlantic City. They said : 
 
 " You won't enjoy that place." 
 
 Or, varying the emphasis in a way very 
 flattering to our reputations for cultivated 
 gentility : 
 
 " Tou won't enjoy that place." 
 
 Or, altering the emphasis once more, after 
 we had explained apologetically that we went 
 there on business : 
 
 " You won't enjoy that place." 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 79 
 
 When we persisted in going, they took it for 
 granted that we wanted to argue with them. 
 Then they closed the discussion with an em- 
 phatic insistence on the one word which had 
 hitherto escaped them : 
 
 " You won't enjoy that place." 
 
 One friend, mistaking us for cynical students 
 of the weaknesses and follies of humanity, 
 varied the warning in another way : 
 
 " You won't," he said, " enjoy it now. It's 
 not the season." 
 
 They were all wrong. In spite of the 
 private anxiety which gnawed at our hearts 
 we did enjoy Atlantic City. We enjoyed it 
 all the more because we went there out of 
 season. It is our deliberate practice to visit 
 places of this kind out of season, and the date 
 of the production of our play at Atlantic City 
 was a most fortunate one for us. We no 
 longer want to revel. The time for that is 
 past for us, but we do want to understand, 
 and we seem to get nearer that when the chief 
 side-shows are closed, when the hotels are being 
 painted, and when the sea has given up the 
 attempt to sparkle and look cheerful. In one 
 of Mr. Anthony Hope's novels there is a 
 statesman of great craftiness who warns a 
 Prince Consort that he must not think he 
 
8o CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 knows the Queen, his wife, because he is 
 allowed to see her in her stays. I daresay 
 there is a good deal in the warning. But I 
 cannot help feeling that you would understand 
 a queen better if you saw her frequently, let 
 us say, in her dressing-gown, than if you never 
 saw her except in her robes of State, with the 
 crown royal firmly fixed on her head with 
 hairpins. It must be the same with pleasure 
 cities. One knows them, not well, but a little 
 better when they have tucked up their skirts, 
 put on old blouses and turned to the task of 
 cleaning up after the festivities. 
 
 It is more instructive to walk along the 
 broad sea front of Blackpool through a fine 
 chill mist of January rain than to stand there 
 on a blazing August day when the colliers' 
 week of holiday is in full swing. Deeper 
 thoughts come to him who gazes at the forlorn 
 rows of notices that lodgings are to let within 
 than to him who hurries through street after 
 street looking for some place in which to lay 
 his head. I am sure that I catch the essential 
 spirit of the Lido when the November sea is 
 brown, when the sands are drab, when the 
 thousands of bathing-boxes stand locked and 
 empty than I would if smiling wavelets en- 
 ticed plump Germans to splash in them and 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 8i 
 
 braut faars lingered, indecently affectionate, in 
 the shadows behind. I did once, accidentally, 
 see Portrush in the very height of its season, 
 and it was a disappointment to me. Bevies of 
 girls, hatless but with hair elaborately dressed, 
 paraded the streets with their arms round 
 each others' waists. Critical young men, in 
 well-creased suits of the kind supposed to be 
 suitable for yachting, watched other girls being 
 taught to swim in a deep pool. Nursemaids 
 helped children to build sand castles. Mothers 
 of forty years of age or thereabouts sat un- 
 comfortably knitting with their backs against 
 the rocks. More than five thousand people 
 carried hand cameras about. Lovers, united 
 for a day or two, wrote each others' names in 
 huge letters on the sand, where the retiring 
 tide had left it smooth and dry. There was 
 too much to feel, far too much to think about. 
 I grew confused and desperate. I could not 
 understand. Out of season the observer has 
 a better chance. If Portrush confused me, 
 Atlantic City, seen in its full glory, would have 
 bewildered me utterly. Also out of season I 
 am not tormented with vain regrets. I am 
 spared the vexation of feeling that a yachting 
 suit, carefully creased, would no longer lift 
 my heart up to the skies. It is not forced 
 
82 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 upon me that my pulses no longer throb 
 wildly at the sight of girls who smile. I 
 do not think how sad it is that I shall never 
 again want to win the applause of a crowd by 
 taking a header into deep water from a giddy 
 height. I am glad that we visited Atlantic 
 City out of season. 
 
 I forget how many piers Atlantic City has, 
 but it is unusually rich in these structures, 
 and I have no doubt that the builders of them 
 were wise. A pier makes an irresistible appeal 
 to the pleasure-seeker. He would rather dance 
 on a pier, under proper shelter of course and 
 on a good floor, than in a well-appointed 
 saloon on solid land. He would rather eat 
 ices on a pier than in an ordinary shop, though 
 he has to pay more for them, the cost of the 
 ice being the same and the twopence for entry 
 into the enchanted region being an extra. A 
 cinematograph show draws more customers if 
 it is on a pier. The reason of this is that 
 the normal and properly constituted holiday- 
 maker wants to get as much sea as he can. 
 When he is not in it he likes to have it all 
 round him or as nearly all round him as 
 possible without going in a boat. Boats, for 
 several reasons, are undesirable. They some- 
 times make people sick. They are expensive. 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 83 
 
 They demand an undivided allegiance. You 
 cannot have a cinematograph, for instance, in 
 a boat. The nearest thing to a boat is a pier. 
 It is almost surrounded by the sea. That is 
 why piers are a regular feature of up-to-date 
 pleasure cities, and why Atlantic City has so 
 many of them. It is all to the credit of our 
 revellers that they love to be near the sea, to 
 feel it round them, to hear it splashing under 
 their feet. The sea is the cleanest thing there 
 is. You can vulgarise it ; but it is almost 
 impossible, except at the heads of long estu- 
 aries, to dirty it. It seems as if pleasure- 
 seekers, who are also seekers of the sea, must 
 be essentially clean people, clean-hearted, 
 otherwise they would not feel as strongly im- 
 pelled as they evidently do to get into touch 
 with the ocean. And it is real ocean at 
 Atlantic City. Far out one sees ships pass- 
 ing, the lean three-masted schooners of the 
 American coasting trade, trawlers in fleets, 
 tramp steamers, companionless things, all of 
 these given to the real business of the sea, 
 not to pleasure voyaging. The eye lingers on 
 them, and it is hard afterwards to adjust the 
 focus of the mental vision to the long wooden 
 parade, itself almost a pier, the flaunting sky 
 signs, the innumerable tiny shops where every 
 
84 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 kind of useless thing is sold. Atlantic City 
 has, indeed, some boats of its own, boats 
 which go out from a haven tucked away be- 
 hind the north corner of the parade, and pass 
 up and down across the sea front. Their sails 
 are covered with huge advertisements of 
 cigarettes and chewing gums. They are 
 manned, no doubt, by the kind of long- 
 shoremen who cater for the trippers' pleasure. 
 They have in them as passengers whoever in 
 America corresponds to the London Cockney. 
 Among ships which sail these are surely as the 
 women of the streets. But you cannot alto- 
 gether degrade a boat. She retains some 
 pathetic remnant of her dignity, even if you 
 make her sails into advertisement hoardings. 
 It was good to watch these boats, their masts 
 set far forward, after the American cat-boat 
 fashion, making short swift tacks among the 
 sandbanks over which the Atlantic rollers 
 foamed threateningly. 
 
 It is easy to understand why the shops along 
 sea fronts of places like Atlantic City are for 
 the most part devoted to the sale of useless 
 things. Picture postcards I reckon to be very 
 nearly useless. They give a transient gleam 
 of pleasure to the buyer, none at all to the 
 person who receives them. The whole class 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 85 
 
 of goods called souvenirs is entirely useless. 
 The photographs taken by seaside artists are 
 not such as can give any satisfaction to the 
 sitters afterwards. Yet the impulse to buy 
 these things and to be photographed is almost 
 irresistible. We yielded, not to the seductions 
 of the photographers, nor to the lure of the 
 souvenir sellers, but with shameless self- 
 abandonment to the postcard shops. I found 
 it very hard to pass any of them without 
 buying. I still have many of the Atlantic 
 City postcards, and I look at them whenever 
 I feel in danger of growing conceited in order 
 to reduce myself to a proper condition of 
 humility. We also — moved by what strange 
 impulse ? — bought several instruments for cut- 
 ting up potatoes. Under ordinary circum- 
 stances a potato-chopper has no attractions 
 whatever for me. I could pass a shop window 
 filled with them and not feel one prick of 
 covetous desire. And Atlantic City of all 
 places in the world was for us — I suppose in 
 some degree for every visitor — most unsuitable 
 for the purchase of kitchen utensils. We 
 knew, even while we bought them, that we 
 should have to haul them with us round 
 America and back across the Atlantic, that 
 they would be a perpetual nuisance to us all 
 
86 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 the time, and in all probability no use whatever 
 when we got them home. Yet we bought 
 them. If the dollar we spent on them had 
 been the last we possessed we should have 
 bought them all the same. Such is the strange 
 effect of places like Atlantic City on people 
 who are, in other places, sane enough. I can 
 analyse and understand the impulse well 
 enough though I cannot resist it. It is the 
 holiday spirit of the place which gets a hold 
 on visitors. All a whole long year we common- 
 place people, who are not millionaires, are 
 spending our money warily on things of care- 
 fully calculated usefulness. We watch each 
 shilling and see that it buys its full worth of 
 something which will make life more tolerable 
 or pleasant. Then comes the brief holiday, 
 and with it the sudden loosing of all bonds 
 of ordinary restraint. Our souls revolt against 
 spending money on things which are any real 
 good to us. We want, we are compelled to 
 fling it from us, asking in exchange nothing 
 but trifles light as air. In desperate reaction 
 against the tyranny of domestic economics we 
 even insist on buying things, like potato- 
 cutters, which will be an actual encumbrance 
 to us afterwards. 
 
 Cowper represents John Gilpin's wife as 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER S; 
 
 insisting on taking her own wine on a pleasure 
 party, and writes of her that 
 
 " Though on pleasure she was bent 
 She had a frugal mind." 
 
 I refuse to believe that of any human being, 
 and I count Cowper a good poet but a bad 
 psychologist. The man who brought a load 
 of potato-cutters down to Atlantic City was 
 probably not a poet at all, but he had a pro- 
 found knowledge of human nature. He knew 
 that he would sell the things there. It was 
 the place of all places in the world for his 
 trade. It is a high tribute to Atlantic City 
 as a holiday resort that it forced us to buy 
 two of these machines. None of the other 
 pleasure cities we have visited have had such 
 a drastic effect upon us. Postcards we yield 
 to everywhere. Even the dreariest of second- 
 rate watering-places can sell them to us. In 
 Blackpool I found a paper-knife irresistible. 
 In Portrush I once bought a coloured mug. 
 Atlantic City alone could have sold me potato- 
 choppers, two of them. 
 
 In towns and rural districts where men and 
 women live their ordinary lives, work, love, 
 and ultimately die, it is the rarest thing 
 possible to see any grown person wheeled 
 
88 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 about in a perambulator or bath-chair. Occa- 
 sionally some pitiful victim of a surgeon's 
 skill is lifted out of the door of a nursing home 
 and placed tenderly in one of these vehicles. 
 He is wheeled about in the fresh air in obedi- 
 ence to the doctor's orders, no doubt in hope 
 that he will recover sufficient strength to 
 make another operation possible. But a bath- 
 chair, even now when surgery has become a 
 recognised form of sport, is a very unusual 
 sight. In all pleasure cities it is quite common. 
 In Brighton, for instance, or at Bournemouth, 
 anyone who can, with any chance of being 
 believed, represent himself as an invalid, takes 
 advantage of his infirmity to get himself 
 wheeled about in a bath-chair. At inter- 
 national exhibitions and in some of the greater 
 picture galleries which are also pleasure re- 
 sorts it is generally possible to hire a bath- 
 chair. Atlantic City, being, as I believe, the 
 greatest of all such places, has devised a kind 
 of glorified perambulator, something far more 
 seductive than a bath-chair. It has room for 
 two in it, and this in itself is a great advance. 
 It has the neatest imaginable hood which you 
 can pull over you in case of rain or if you 
 desire privacy. It looks something like a very 
 small but sumptuously appointed motor-car. 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 89 
 
 You need not even pretend to be a cripple 
 in Atlantic City in order to make good your 
 right to enter one of these chairs. All sorts 
 of people, brisk-looking young girls and men 
 whose limbs are plainly sound, are wheeled 
 about, not only shamelessly but with evident 
 enjoyment. There are immense numbers of 
 these vehicles, more, surely, than there are 
 invalids in the whole world. Out of season 
 when we saw them they are absurdly cheap, 
 almost the only thing in America except 
 oysters and chocolates and, curiously enough, 
 silk stockings, which are cheap judged by 
 European standards. I longed very earnestly 
 to go in one of these vehicles, but at the last 
 moment I always shrank from the strangeness 
 of it. Neither the taxi of the London streets 
 nor the outside car of my native land ever 
 made so strong an appeal to me as these per- 
 ambulators of Atlantic City. I suppose it 
 was the holiday spirit of the place again. 
 Girls and young men, certainly middle-aged 
 men, would feel like fools if they sat in per- 
 ambulators anywhere else, but it is a sweet 
 and pleasant thing — according to a Latin poet 
 who must have known — ^to play the fool in the 
 proper place. Atlantic City is the proper place. 
 Hence the enormous numbers of perambulators. 
 
90 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 The hotels in Atlantic City are, most of 
 them, as fantastic in appearance as the place 
 itself. I imagine that the architects who 
 planned them must, before they began their 
 work, have been kept for weeks on the sea 
 front and forced to go to all the entertain- 
 ments which offered themselves by day and 
 night. They were probably fed on crab 
 dressed in various ways and given ginrikkys to 
 drink. Then when allowed to drop to sleep 
 in the early morning they would naturally 
 dream. At the end of a fortnight or so of 
 this treatment their dreams would be imprinted 
 on their memories, and they would draw plans 
 of hotels suitable for Atlantic City. Only in 
 this way, I think, can some of the newer hotels 
 have been conceived. They are not ugly, far 
 from it. Crab, dressed as American cooks 
 dress it, does not induce nightmares, nor is 
 a ginrikky nearly so terrific a drink as it sounds. 
 The architect merely dreams, as Coleridge did 
 when his Kubla Khan decreed a stately 
 pleasure dome in Xanadu. But Coleridge 
 dreamed on opium, and his visions were of 
 stately things. The Atlantic City hotel is 
 less stately than fantastic. It is a building 
 which anyone would declare to be impossible 
 if he did not see in it actual existence. 
 
HOLIDAY FEVER 91 
 
 It will always be a source of regret to me 
 that I did not stay in one of these hotels which 
 captivated me utterly. It was just what, as 
 a boy, I used to imagine that the palace of the 
 Sleeping Beauty must be. A look at it brought 
 back dear memories of the transformation 
 scenes of pantomimes, in the days before 
 transformation scenes went out of fashion. 
 It was coloured pale green all over, and, 
 looked at with half closed eyes, made me think 
 of mermaids. I am sure that it was perfectly 
 delightful inside ; but we did not stay there. 
 A friend had recommended to us another 
 hotel, of great excellence and comfort, but 
 built before Atlantic City understood the 
 proper way to treat architects. In any case 
 we could not have stayed in the pale green 
 hotel. It was closed. We were in Atlantic 
 City out of season. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE IRON TRAIL 
 
 Our luck, which had up to that point been 
 as good as luck could be, failed us miserably 
 when we started for Chicago. The very day 
 before we left New York there was a blizzard 
 and a snowstorm. Not in New York itself. 
 There was only a very strong wind there. 
 Nor in Chicago, but all over the district which 
 lay between. One train was held up for 
 eighteen hours in a snow-drift. The last 
 fragments of food in the restaurant car were 
 consumed, and the passengers arrived chilled 
 and desperately hungry at their destination. 
 We might have been in that train. It was 
 not, indeed, possible for us to leave New 
 York a day sooner than we did, but I cannot 
 see why the blizzard could not have waited a 
 little. Twenty-four hours' delay would have 
 made no difference to it. It might even have 
 gathered force. To us it would have made 
 
 all the difference in the world. We missed a 
 
 92 
 
THE IRON TRAIL gj 
 
 great experience. That is why I say that our 
 luck failed us at this point. 
 
 It would not, at the moment, have been a 
 pleasant experience, and I do not pretend 
 that we should have enjoyed either the cold 
 or the hunger ; and we are not the sort of 
 people who, under such circumstances, secure 
 the last sardine. We should, owing to our 
 feebleness in self-assertion, have been among 
 the first to go foodless. But afterwards we 
 could have thought about it and all our lives 
 told steadily improving stories about the ad- 
 venture. The recollection of it would have 
 added zest to every remaining hour of comfort 
 in our lives. What is a short spell of suffering 
 compared to such enduring joys ? But in 
 these matters we have been singularly un- 
 lucky through life. We have never been in a 
 shipwreck or a railway accident, or been forced 
 to escape from a burning house. Only once 
 did a horse run away with us — and it fell, 
 almost immediately after making its dash for 
 liberty. No burglar has roused us to do 
 battle with him in the middle of the night. 
 It seems hard, when we have been denied all 
 the great adventures of life, to miss, by the 
 narrow margin of a single day, the minor ex- 
 citement of being snowed up in a train. 
 
94 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 However, it is useless to complain. The 
 thing was not to be and it was not. Our 
 journey was commonplace and unadventurous. 
 We hired what is called a drawing-room car on 
 our train. This is an extravagant thing to do. 
 For people of our humble means it is almost 
 criminally reckless. Some day, when we 
 cannot afford to have our boots re-soled, 
 when we are looking at the loaves in the 
 windows of bakers' shops with vain desire, 
 when we have neither money nor credit left 
 to us, we shall think with poignant regret of 
 the huge sums we spent on that drawing- 
 room car. We shall be sorry, at least one of 
 us will be sorry, that we were not more careful 
 when he or she, the survivor, cannot afford 
 a simple tombstone to mark the grave of the 
 other. But at that moment the money, in 
 spite of Atlantic City, being actually in our 
 pockets, we felt that the drawing-room car 
 was an absolute necessity. I should take it 
 again if I were going to Chicago. But then 
 we are not yet reduced to penury. 
 
 The alternative to a drawing-room car, 
 on most trains, is a section in a Pullman 
 sleeping-car. Against this we rose in revolt. 
 I cannot imagine how the Americans, who 
 are in many ways much more highly civilised 
 
THE IRON TRAIL 95 
 
 than Europeans, tolerate the existence of 
 Pullman sleeping-cars. I am not physically — 
 though I am in every other way — an exception- 
 ally modest man. I have, for instance, no 
 objection to mixed bathing, and it does not 
 make me blush to meet one of the housemaids 
 in an hotel when, dressed only in my pyjamas, 
 I am searching for the bathroom. But I do 
 object to undressing in the corridor of a 
 Pullman sleeping-car, and I cannot, not being 
 a professional acrobat, undress in my berth. 
 For a lady the thing is, of course, much worse. 
 Besides the undressing, and the still more 
 difHcult dressing again, there is the business 
 of washing in the morning ; washing, and for 
 most men, shaving. You go into a sort of 
 dressing-room to do that. There are not 
 nearly basins enough. There is not room 
 enough. Somebody is sure to walk on your 
 sponge, will walk on your toothbrush, too, 
 unless you happen to be a clerk, and therefore 
 practised in the art of holding things behind 
 your ear. 
 
 I think Americans are beginning to recog- 
 nise that these sleeping-cars are barbarous. I 
 met one lady who told me that she would 
 always gladly sacrifice a new dress in order to 
 spend the money on a drawing-room car. I 
 
96 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 entirely sympathise with her ; but, even if 
 you are prepared for these heroic extra- 
 vagances, you cannot always get a drawing- 
 room car. There was one occasion on which 
 we failed, though we telegraphed three days 
 before to engage one. On some of the best 
 trains of the best lines, there are also what are 
 called " compartments." These are compar- 
 able in comfort to the cabins of the Inter- 
 national Company of Wagons Lits on the 
 continental trains ie luxe, though inferior 
 to the London and North-Western Railway 
 Company's sleeper. No one has any right to 
 grumble who secures a compartment. Un- 
 fortunately it is not every railway company 
 which has them, and it is by no means every 
 train on which they are run. 
 
 The drawing-room car, when you get it, is, 
 in itself, a comfortable thing to travel in. 
 There is a good deal of room in it. There is 
 satisfactory lavatory accommodation. The 
 attendants are civil and competent. Anyone 
 who can sleep in a train at all could sleep 
 in a drawing-room car if only he were not 
 waked up every time the train stops or starts. 
 Trains must stop occasionally, of course. 
 But there is no real need for emphasizing the 
 stops as American trains do. It is possible — 
 
THE IRON TRAIL 97 
 
 I know this, because both the French and 
 EngHsh trains do it — to stop without giving 
 inexperienced passengers the impression that 
 there has been a collision. Stopping is not a 
 thing a train ought to be proud of. There is 
 no reason why the attention of passengers 
 should be drawn to it forcibly. For starting 
 with a bang there is, of course, more excuse. 
 To start at all is a triumph. It is a victory 
 of mind over inert matter, and anyone who 
 accomplishes it wants, naturally and properly, 
 to be admired. I can understand the annoy- 
 ance of the train, conscious of being able to 
 start, at feeling that its passengers, who ought 
 to be praising it, are perhaps sound asleep. 
 Yet I cannot help thinking that all the ad- 
 miration any train ought to want might be 
 secured without excessive violence. Suppose 
 a notice were hung up in every coach : " This 
 train will stop twice during the night, and 
 after each stop will start again. Passengers 
 are requested to realise that this is not an 
 easy thing to do. They will therefore admire 
 the train." No passenger with a spark of 
 decent feeling in him would refuse an ap- 
 preciative pat to the engine in the morning. 
 We do as much for horses who cannot drag 
 us nearly so far or half so fast. We do it for 
 
 G 
 
98 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 dogs who do not drag us at all, only fetch 
 things for us. We should certainly treat 
 engines with the same kindness if they were 
 a little tenderer to us. But I refuse to pat, 
 stroke, or in any way fondle an engine which, 
 out of mere vanity, wakes me up by starting 
 boisterously. 
 
 We ran during the night through the tail 
 of the snowstorm which had stopped the 
 train the day before. We had left New York 
 in pleasant autumn weather, on one of those 
 days which, without being cold, has an ex- 
 hilarating nip about it. We arrived in Chicago 
 in what seemed to us midsummer weather, 
 though I believe it was not really hot for 
 Chicago. We passed on our way through a 
 snow-covered district, and had the greatest 
 difficulty in keeping warm during the night. 
 This is one of the advantages of travelling in 
 America. The distances are so immense that 
 in the course of a single journey you have the 
 chance of trying several kinds of climate. In 
 England you get the same result by staying 
 in one place. But the American plan is much 
 better. There, having discovered a climate 
 which suits you, you can settle down in it 
 with a fair amount of confidence that it will 
 remain what it is for a week or two at a time. 
 
THE IRON TRAIL 99 
 
 In England, whether you travel about or 
 stay still, you have got to accustom yourself 
 to continual variety. 
 
 After breakfast, when the train had passed 
 the snow-covered region and the air became a 
 little warmer, we sat on the platform at the 
 end of the observation car and looked out at 
 the country through which we were going. 
 Nothing could conceivably be more mono- 
 tonous. The land was quite flat, the railway 
 line was absolutely straight. The train sped 
 on at a uniform pace of about forty miles an 
 hour. As far back as the eye could see were 
 the rails of the track, narrowing and narrowing 
 until they looked like a single sharp line, ruled 
 with remorseless precision from some point 
 at an infinite distance in the east. On each 
 side of us were broad spaces of flat land, 
 reaching, still flat, to the horizons north and 
 south of us. Every half-hour or so we passed 
 a village, a collection of meanly conceived, 
 two-storied houses with a hideous little church 
 standing just apart from them. Hour after 
 hour we rushed on with no other change of 
 scenery ; no mountain, no lake, no river, just 
 flat land, with a straight line ruled on it. I 
 suppose that the life of the people who in- 
 habit that region is as interesting, in reality, 
 
100 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 as any other life. The seasons change there, 
 I hope. Harvests ripen, cows calve, men die ; 
 but on us, strangers from a very different 
 land, the unvarying flatness of it all lay like 
 an intolerable weight. 
 
 Yet that journey gave me, more than any- 
 thing else I saw, a sense of the greatness of 
 the American people. There is, I suppose, 
 some one thing in the history of every nation 
 which impresses the man who realises, even 
 dimly, the meaning of it, more than anything 
 else does. Elizabethan England's buccaneer- 
 ing adventures to the Spanish main seem to 
 me to make intelligible the peculiar greatness 
 of England more than anything else her people 
 have ever done. Revolutionary France in 
 arms against Europe is France at her most 
 glorious, with her special splendour at its 
 brightest. So my imagination fixes on 
 America's settlement of her vast central plain 
 as the greatest thing in her story. Her 
 fight for independence was fine, of course ; 
 but many other nations have fought such 
 wars and won or, just as finely, lost. Her 
 civil war stirs thoughts of greatness in any- 
 one who reads it. But this tremendous 
 journey of the American people from the east 
 to the Mississippi shores, halfway across 
 
THE IRON TRAIL loi 
 
 a continent, was something greater than any 
 war. 
 
 First, no doubt, hunters went out from the 
 narrow strip of settled, seaboard land. They 
 pushed their adventurous way across the 
 AUeghanies, finding passes, camping in strange 
 fastnesses. They came upon the westward 
 flowing waters of the great network of rivers 
 which drain into the Mississippi. They made 
 their long, dim trails. They fought, with 
 equal cunning, bands of Indian braves. They 
 returned, in love with wildness, weaned from 
 the ways of civilisation, to tell their tales of 
 strange places by the firesides of sober men. 
 Or they did not return. They were great 
 men, and their achievements very great, but 
 not the greatest. 
 
 More wonderful was the accomplishment of 
 those long streams of settlers who crossed 
 Virginia and Pennsylvania to find the upper 
 reaches of the waterways which should lead 
 and bear them mile by mile to the Mississippi 
 shore. It is barely a century since these men, 
 home lovers not wanderers, with the call of 
 the wild in their ears, home builders not 
 hunters, went floating in rude arks down the 
 Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee. With 
 unimaginable courage and faith they took with 
 
102 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 them women, children, cattle, and household 
 plenishing. Somewhere each ark grounded, 
 and the work of settlement began. I saw the 
 woods which stretch for miles over rolling 
 hills and round lakes beyond that curious 
 colony of very wealthy people at Tuxedo. 
 My imagination pictured for me, as I gazed 
 at these woods, the outpost settlements of 
 a hundred years ago. The " half-faced camp," 
 rudest of the dwellings of civilised man, was 
 built. Trees were " girdled " or cut down 
 with patient toil. A small clearing was made 
 amid the interminable miles of forest land. 
 I imagined the men, lean and grim, the anxious 
 women, ever on the alert because of the per- 
 petual menace of the Indians who might lurk 
 a stone's throw off among the shadows of the 
 trees. 
 
 We can guess at the satisfaction of each 
 triumph won ; the day when the lean-to shed, 
 with its open side, gave place to the log hut, 
 still rude enough ; the day when some great 
 tree, sapless from its " girdling," was hewn 
 down at last ; the adding of acre after acre of 
 cleared land ; the incredibly swift growth of 
 villages and towns ; the pushing out of settle- 
 ments, south and north, into yet stranger 
 wildernesses, away from the friendly banks of 
 
THE IRON TRAIL 103 
 
 the waterways. The courage and endurance 
 of these settlers must have been far beyond 
 that required of soldiers, explorers or ad- 
 venturers. Step by step, almost Hterally step 
 by step, they made this wonderful journey, 
 conquering every acre as they passed it. Yet 
 we know very little about them. Homer 
 made a list of the ships which sailed for Troy. 
 Who has chronicled the arks and rafts of 
 these still braver men ? Camoens wrote his 
 " Lusiad " to glorify the voyage of Vasco da 
 Gama round the African coast. All England's 
 Elizabethan literature is, rightly understood, 
 an interpretation of the spirit of Drake and 
 Raleigh. No one has written an epic of these 
 American pioneer settlers. Yet surely if ever 
 men deserved such commemoration they did. 
 
 Our train ran on and on at forty miles an 
 hour, and my spirit was cowed by the vast 
 monotony. What sort of spirit had the men 
 who faced it first, to whom the conquest of a 
 mile was a great achievement, to whom it must 
 have seemed that there was no end to it at 
 all ? I wonder whether there was in them 
 some great kind of faith, of which we have 
 lost the secret now, a belief that God Himself 
 had bidden them go forward ? Or perhaps 
 there was strong in them that instinct for the 
 
I04 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 conquest of nature which, whether he knew it 
 or not, has always been in man, which has 
 made him greater than the beasts, only a 
 little lower than the angels. Or perhaps it 
 was hunger for life itself, not for a fuller or a 
 richer life, but for the bare material existence, 
 which sent them on, threatened by want in 
 civilised places, to look for ground where 
 things would grow, where the fruit of their 
 toil would not be taken from them. To find 
 a parallel for the achievement of these men 
 the mind must go back to dim ages before 
 history began, when our ancestors — why and 
 how we cannot guess — learned to light fires, 
 chip flints, snare beasts, make laws, groped 
 through a palpable obscurity towards justice 
 and right, fought those impossible battles of 
 theirs which have won for us the kingship of 
 the world. Theirs was an achievement greater 
 indeed than that of America's pioneer settlers, 
 but of the same kind. 
 
 I went to church in New York on Thanks- 
 giving Day, and I, though a stranger, was 
 given the privilege of reading aloud that 
 wonderful chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy 
 which tells how God led His people through 
 a great and terrible wilderness. I forgot, as 
 I read it, all about Israel and Sinai. I re- 
 
THE IRON TRAIL 105 
 
 membered how the people among whom I 
 was had journeyed across their vast continent. 
 They are not my people. Their glory is none 
 of mine. Their Thanksgiving Day had no- 
 thing to do with me, but emotion thrilled me 
 strangely as I read. I wondered, thanked, and 
 bent my head with fear, so great was the 
 past which is remembered, so terrible the 
 warning which follows the recital : " Beware, 
 lest thou at all forget the Lord thy God." 
 
 The observation car, with its sheltered 
 platform at the back of it, is a pleasant feature 
 of the long-distance American train, one which 
 might, with advantage, be copied in Europe. 
 But the best thing, the most wholly satis- 
 factory, about American railway travelling, is 
 that certain trains are fined for being late. 
 This happens in England, I think, certainly 
 in Ireland, in the case of mail trains. It does 
 them a lot of good, but gives small gratification 
 to the suffering passengers, because the Post 
 Office authorities take the money. In America 
 the passengers get the fine. Our train was an 
 hour and a quarter late in getting to Chicago, 
 and we were handed a dollar each as compen- 
 sation for our annoyance. I felt sorrier than 
 ever that we had not travelled the day before 
 in the train that was delayed by the blizzard. 
 
io6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Then we should have got eighteen dollars each 
 and been able to buy several splendid dinners 
 to make up for our starvation. 
 
 It is not every train in America which pays 
 for unpunctuality in this way. I am not 
 sure that the rule applies even to express trains 
 all over the continent, nor do I know whether 
 the railway companies deal thus justly with 
 their passengers of their own free will. It 
 seems very unlikely that they do. I am in- 
 clined to think that there must be law on the 
 subject, either a law made by the State of 
 Illinois, or, as I hope, one made by Congress 
 itself. However this may be, I have no doubt 
 at all that the law, if it is a law, ought to be 
 made and strictly enforced in every civilised 
 country. I travelled once by a London and 
 North- Western express train, which was three 
 hours late ; and I suffered a loss, was actually 
 obliged to disburse no less a sum than ^2, i8j. 
 in consequence. I tried in vain to make the 
 Company see that it ought to pay me back 
 that fz, \%s. I never got a penny. Yet the 
 offence of the American company was a trifling 
 one in comparison. It was one hour and a 
 quarter late in a journey supposed to occupy 
 twenty- three hours. The London and North- 
 western railway took nine hours over a journey 
 
THE IRON TRAIL 107 
 
 which it professed to do in six. I cannot help 
 feeling that the English company would have 
 got its train to London on that occasion much 
 more rapidly if it had known beforehand that 
 it might have to pay each passenger fifteen 
 shillings at Euston. We hear a great deal on 
 this side of the Atlantic about the scandalous 
 way in which American railway magnates 
 control legislation. It appears that occasion- 
 ally at all events the legislators exercise a very 
 salutary control over the railways. 
 
 Charges of corrupting senators are certainly 
 made against American railway directors. 
 They may conceivably be true. If they are 
 it seems desirable, in the interests of the 
 passengers, that some of the British railways 
 would take in hand the task of corrupting the 
 House of Commons in the American way. 
 The morals of that assembly could in no case 
 be much worse than they are, so there would 
 be little loss in that way, while the gain to the 
 public would be immense if trains, even a few 
 of the best trains, were forced under heavy 
 penalties to keep time. , 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 ADVANCE, Chicago! 
 
 Chicago possesses one exceedingly good hotel. 
 We know this by experience. The other hotels 
 in the city may be equally good, but we shall 
 never try them. Having found one almost 
 perfect hotel, we shall, whenever we visit that 
 city again, go back to it. But I expect that all 
 the other hotels are good too, very good ; for 
 Chicago appears to take an interest in its hotels. 
 In most cities, perhaps in all other cities, 
 hotels are good or bad according as their 
 managers are efficient, or the reverse. The 
 city itself does not care about its hotels any 
 more than it cares about its bootmakers. A 
 London bootmaker might provide very bad 
 leather for the soles of a stranger's boots. The 
 Times would not deal with the bootmaker in 
 a special article. It might be very difficult 
 to obtain hot water in one of the great London 
 hotels — I have seen it stated, on the authority 
 
 io8 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 109 
 
 of an American, that it is very difficult — but 
 London itself does not care whether it is or 
 not. The soling of boots and the comfort of 
 casual guests are, according to the generally 
 prevailing view, affairs best settled between 
 the people directly interested, the traveller on 
 the one hand and the bootmaker or manager 
 on the other. No one else thinks that he has 
 a right to interfere. 
 
 Chicago takes a different view. It has a 
 sense of civic responsibility for its hotels, pos- 
 sibly also for its bootmakers. I did not try 
 the bootmakers, and therefore cannot say 
 anything certainly about them. But I am 
 sure about the hotels. It happened that there 
 was a letter awaiting my arrival at the hotel, 
 the very excellent hotel, in which we stayed. 
 This letter was not immediately delivered to 
 me. I believe that I ought to have asked for 
 it, that the hotel manager expects guests to 
 ask for letters, and that I had no reasonable 
 ground of complaint when the letter was not 
 delivered to me. Nor did I complain. I am 
 far too meek a man to complain about anything 
 in a large hotel. I am desperately afraid of 
 hotel officials. They are all much grander 
 than I am, and occupy far more important 
 
no CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 positions in the world. I should not grumble 
 if a princess trod on my toe. Princesses have 
 a right, owing to the splendour of their posi- 
 tion, to trample on me. But I would rather 
 grumble at a princess than complain to a head 
 waiter or the clerk in charge of the office of a 
 large hotel. Princesses are common clay com- 
 pared to these functionaries. But even if I 
 were a very brave man, and even if I believed 
 that one man was as good as another and I 
 the equal of the manager of a large hotel, I 
 should not have complained about the failure 
 to deliver that letter. The hotel when we were 
 there was very full, and full of the most im- 
 portant kind of people, doctors. It was not 
 to be expected that such a trifle as a letter for 
 me would engage the attention of anybody. 
 
 Next morning there was a paragraph in one 
 of the leading Chicago papers about my letter, 
 and the manager of the hotel was told plainly 
 in clear print, that he must do his business 
 better than he did. I was astonished when 
 the manager, taking me solemnly apart, showed 
 me the paragraph, astonished and terror- 
 stricken. I apologised at once for daring to 
 have a letter addressed to me at his hotel. I 
 apologised for not asking for it when I arrived. 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! in 
 
 I apologised for the trouble his staff had been 
 put to in carrying the letter up to my room in 
 the end. Then I stopped apologising because, 
 to my amazement, the manager began. He 
 apologised so amply that I came gradually to 
 feel as if I were not entirely in the wrong. 
 Also I realised why it is that this hotel — and 
 no doubt its fellows in Chicago — is so super- 
 latively good. Chicago keeps an eye on them. 
 The press is alive to the fact that every citizen 
 of a great city, even a hotel manager, should 
 do not merely his duty but more, should 
 practise counsels of perfection, perform works 
 of supererogation, deliver letters which are not 
 asked for. 
 
 The incident is in itself unimportant, but 
 it seems to me to illustrate the spirit of Chicago. 
 It is a great city and is determined to get things 
 done right. It has besides, and this is its rare 
 distinction, an unfaltering conviction that it 
 can get things done right. Most communities 
 are conscious of some limitations of their 
 powers. For Chicago there are no limitations 
 at all anywhere. Whatever ought to be done 
 Chicago will do. Nothing is too small, nothing 
 too great to be attempted and carried through. 
 It may be an insignificant matter, like the com- 
 
112 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 fort of a helpless and foolish stranger. It 
 may be a problem against which civilised 
 society has broken its teeth for centuries, like 
 the evil of prostitution. Chicago is convinced 
 that it can be got right and Chicago means to 
 do it. 
 
 I admire this sublime self-confidence. I 
 ought always to be happy when I am among 
 men who have it, because I was born in Belfast, 
 and the first air I breathed was charged with 
 exactly this same intensely bracing ozone of 
 strong-willed ness . 
 
 Belfast is very like Chicago. If a Belfast 
 man were taken while asleep and transported 
 on a magic carpet to Chicago, he would 
 not, on waking up, feel that anything very 
 strange had happened to him. The out- 
 ward circumstances of life would indeed be 
 different, but he would find himself in all 
 essential respects at home. He would talk to 
 men who said " We will," with a conviction 
 that their " we will " is the last word which 
 can or need be said on any subject ; just as 
 he had all his life before talked to men who 
 said " We won't " with the same certainty 
 that beyond their " we won't " there was 
 nothing. 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 113 
 
 Chicago is, indeed, greater than Belfast, not 
 merely in the number of its inhabitants and 
 the importance of its business, but in the fact 
 that it asserts where Belfast denies. It is a 
 greater and harder thing to say " Yes " than 
 " No." But there is a spiritual kinship be- 
 tween the two places in that both of them 
 mean what they say, and are quite sure that 
 they can make good their " yes " and " no " 
 against the world. If ever the rest of America 
 finds itself up against Chicago as the British 
 Empire is at present up against Belfast, the 
 result will be the hopeless bewilderment of the 
 rest of America. 
 
 I was in Chicago for a very short time. I 
 did not see any of the things which visitors 
 usually see there. I went there with certain 
 prejudices. I had read, like everyone else, 
 Mr. Upton Sinclair's account of the slaughter 
 of pigs in Chicago. I had read several times 
 over the late Mr. Frank Norris' The Pit. I 
 had read and heard many things about the 
 wonderful work of Miss Jane Addams. I had 
 a vague idea that Chicago was both better 
 and worse than other places, that God and the 
 devil had joined battle there more definitely 
 than elsewhere, that the points at issue were 
 
 H 
 
114 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 plainer, that there was something nearer to a 
 straight fight in Chicago between good and 
 evil than we find in other places. " We are 
 here," says Matthew Arnold, 
 
 " As on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, 
 Where ignorant armies strive by night." 
 
 In Chicago I felt the armies would be less 
 ignorant, the alarms a little less confused. I 
 am not sure now that this is so. It may be 
 quite as hard in Chicago as it is anywhere else 
 to find out quite certainly what is right ; 
 which, in certain tangled matters, is God's 
 side and which is the devil's. But I do not 
 believe that the Chicago man, any more than 
 the Belfast man, is tormented with the para- 
 lysis of indecision. He may, and very likely 
 wiU, do a great many things which will turn 
 out in the end not to be good things. But he 
 will do them quite unfalteringly. When, 
 having done them, he has time to look round 
 at the far side of them, he may discover that 
 there was some mistake about them some- 
 where. Then he will undo them and do some- 
 thing else instead with the same vigorous 
 conviction. He will, in any case, keep on 
 doing things and believing in them. 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 115 
 
 I was in a large bookseller's shop while I 
 was in Chicago. It was so large that it was 
 impossible to discover with any certainty what 
 pleases Chicago most in the way of literature. 
 There seemed to me to be copies of every book 
 I had ever heard of waiting there for buyers, 
 and, I presume, they would not wait, unless 
 buyers were likely to come. But I was struck 
 with the very large number of books dealing 
 with those subjects which may be classed 
 roughly under the term Eugenics. There 
 were more of these books in that shop than 
 I had ever seen before. I should not have 
 guessed that there were so many in the world. 
 I may, of course, have received a wrong im- 
 pression. This particular shop had its books 
 arranged according to subjects. There was 
 not, as generally in England and Ireland, a 
 counter devoted to the latest publications, or 
 a series of shelves given over to books priced 
 at a shilling. In this shop all books on econo- 
 mics, for example, whether old or new, cheap 
 or dear, were in one place ; all books on music 
 in another ; and so forth. The idea underlying 
 the arrangement being that a customer knows 
 more or less the subject he wants to read 
 about, and is pleased to find all books on that 
 
ii6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 subject ready waiting for him in rows. Our 
 idea, on the other hand, that which underhes 
 the arrangement of our shops, is that a cus- 
 tomer wants, perhaps, a new book, perhaps 
 a ten-and-sixpenny book, perhaps a shiUing 
 book, without minding much what the book 
 is about. He is best suited by finding all the 
 new books in one place, all the ten-and-six- 
 penny books in another, and all the shilling 
 books in a third. I do not know which is the 
 better plan, but that adopted in the Chicago 
 shop has the effect of making the casual cus- 
 tomer realise the very large number of books 
 there are on every subject. I may, therefore, 
 have been deceived about the popularity of 
 books on eugenics in Chicago. There may be 
 no more on sale there than elsewhere. But 
 I think there are. Of some of the books there 
 were very large numbers, twenty or thirty 
 copies of a single book all standing in a row. 
 Plainly it was anticipated that there were in 
 Chicago twenty or thirty people who would 
 want that particular book. I never, in any 
 bookshop elsewhere, saw more than five or six 
 copies of a eugenic book in stock at the same 
 time. I also noticed that the majority of 
 these books were cheap ; not details and ela- 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 117 
 
 borate treatises on, let us say, Weissmannism 
 and the mechanism of heredity ; but short 
 handbooks, statements of conclusions sup- 
 posed to be arrived at and practical advice 
 suited to plain people. I formed the opinion 
 that the study of eugenics is popular in Chicago, 
 more popular than elsev^^here, and that a good 
 many people believe that some good is to be 
 got out of knowing what science has to teach 
 on these subjects. 
 
 I was told by a man who ought to have known 
 that these books are steadily becoming more 
 popular. The demand for them was very small 
 five years ago. It is very large now and be- 
 coming steadily larger. This seems to me a 
 very interesting thing. For a long time people 
 were content just to take children as they 
 came, and they did not bother much about 
 the hows and the whys of the business. 
 Grown-up men and women did not indeed 
 believe that storks dropped babies down 
 chimneys, or that doctors brought them in 
 bags. But they might just as well have be- 
 lieved these things for all the difference such 
 knowledge as they had made in their way of 
 conducting the business. Their philosophy 
 was summed up in a proverb : " When God 
 
ii8 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 sends the mouth He sends the food to fill it." 
 To go further into details struck people, 
 twenty years ago, as rather a disgusting pro- 
 ceeding. 
 
 Now we have all, everywhere, grown out 
 of this primitive innocence. We have been 
 driven away from our old casual ways of re- 
 producing ourselves, and are forced to think 
 about what we are doing. There is nothing 
 very interesting or curious about this. It is 
 simply a rather unpleasant fact. What is in- 
 teresting is that Chicago seems to be think- 
 ing more than the rest of us, is, at all events 
 more interested than the rest of us, in the 
 range of subjects which I have very roughly 
 called eugenics. Chicago is, apparently, buy- 
 ing more books on these subjects, and pre- 
 sumably buys them in order to read them. Is 
 this a symptom of the existence of a latent 
 vein of weakness in Chicago ? 
 
 I am not a very good judge of a question of 
 this sort. The whole subject of eugenics and 
 all the other subjects which are associated with 
 it are extremely distasteful to me. I like to 
 think of young men and young women falling 
 in love with each other and getting married 
 because they are in love, without considering 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 119 
 
 over much the almost inevitable consequences 
 until these are forced upon them. I fancy- 
 that in an entirely healthy community things 
 would be managed in this way, and that the 
 result, generally speaking and taking a wide 
 number of cases into consideration, would be 
 a race of wholesome, sound children, fairly 
 well endowed with natural powers and fitted 
 to meet the struggle of life. But Chicago 
 evidently thinks otherwise. The subject of 
 eugenics is studied there, and, as a conse- 
 quence of the study, a number of clergy of 
 various churches have declared that they will 
 not marry people who are suffering from cer- 
 tain diseases. They have all reason on their 
 side. I admit it. I have nothing to urge 
 against them except an old-fashioned pre- 
 judice in favour of the fullest possible liberty 
 to the individual. Yet I cannot help feeling 
 that it is not a sign of strength in a community 
 that it should think very much about these 
 things. A man seldom worries about his 
 digestion or reads books about his stomach 
 until his stomach and his digestion have gone 
 wrong and begun to worry him. A great in- 
 terest in what is going on in our insides is 
 either a sign that things are not going on pro- 
 
I20 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 perly, or else a deliberate invitation to our 
 insides to give us trouble. It is the same with 
 the community. But I should not like to 
 think that anything either is or soon will be 
 the matter with Chicago. It would be a 
 lamentable loss to the world if Chicago's de- 
 finite " I wiU " were to weaken, if the native 
 hue of this magnificent, self-confident resolu- 
 tion were to be sicklied o'er with a pale cast 
 of thought. 
 
 At present, at all events, there is very little 
 sign of any such disaster. It happened that 
 while we were in Chicago there was some sort 
 of congress of literary men. They dined 
 together, of course, as all civilised men do 
 when they meet to take counsel together on 
 any subject except the making of laws. In 
 all probability laws would be better made if 
 parliaments were dining clubs ; but this is 
 too wide a subject for me to discuss. The 
 literary men who met in Chicago had a dinner, 
 and I was highly honoured by receiving an 
 invitation to it. I wish it had been possible 
 for me to be there. I could not manage it, 
 but I did the next best thing, I read the report 
 of the proceedings in the papers on the follow- 
 ing morning. One speaker said that he looked 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 121 
 
 forward to the day when Chicago would be the 
 world centre of literature, music and art. He 
 was not, of course, a stranger, one of the liter- 
 ary men who had gathered there from various 
 parts of America. He was a citizen of Chicago. 
 No stranger would have ventured to say so 
 magnificent a thing. As long as Chicago says 
 things like that, simply and unaffectedly, and 
 believes them, Chicago can study eugenics as 
 much as it likes, might even devote itself to 
 Christian Science or take to Spiritualism. It 
 would still remain strong and sane. For this 
 was not a silly boast, made in the name of a 
 community which knows nothing of literature, 
 music or art. Chicago knows perfectly well 
 what literature is and what art is. Chicago 
 understands what England has done in litera- 
 ture and art, what France has done, what 
 Germany has done. Chicago has even a very 
 good idea of what Athens did. If I were to 
 say that I looked forward to inventing a per- 
 fect flying machine I should be a fool, because 
 I know nothing whatever about flying machines 
 and have not the dimmest idea of what the 
 difficulties of making them are. If Chicago 
 were as ignorant about literature and art as I 
 am about aeronautics, its hope of becoming 
 
122 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 the world centre of these things would be 
 fit matter for a comic paper. What makes 
 this boast so impressive is just the fact 
 that Chicago knows quite well what it 
 means. 
 
 There are no bounds to what a man can do 
 except his own self-distrust. There is nothing 
 beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly 
 believes in itself. No other city believes in 
 itself quite so whole-heartedly as Chicago does, 
 and I expect Chicago will be the world centre 
 of literature, music and art. There is nothing 
 to stop it, unless, indeed, Chicago itself gives 
 up the idea and chooses to be something else 
 instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to be 
 the New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl and 
 streets of gold and a tree of life growing in 
 the midst of it. Then Chicago will be the 
 New Jerusalem, and I shall humbly sue to be 
 admitted as a citizen. My petition will, I 
 am sure, be granted, for the hospitality of the 
 people of Chicago seems to me to exceed, if 
 that be possible, the hospitality of other parts 
 of America. I am not sure that I should be 
 altogether happy there, even under the new, 
 perfected conditions of life ; but perhaps I 
 may. I was indeed born in Belfast, and as a 
 
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 123 
 
 young man shared its spirit. That gives me 
 hope. But I left Belfast eariy in life. I have 
 dwelt much among other peoples and learned 
 self-distrust. It may be too late for me to go 
 back to my youth and learn confidence again. 
 If it is too late, I shall not be really happy in 
 Chicago. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 
 
 Chicago is generous as well as strong. There 
 is no note of petty jealousy in its judgment of 
 other cities. Memphis belongs to the South 
 and is very different from the cities of the 
 East and the middle West. It is easily con- 
 ceivable that Chicago might be a little con- 
 temptuous of Memphis, just as Belfast is more 
 than a little contemptuous of Dublin. But 
 Chicago displays a fine spirit. I was assured, 
 more than once, when I was in Chicago, that 
 Memphis is a good business city, and I suppose 
 that no higher praise could be given than that. 
 I never met a Belfast man who would say as 
 much for Dublin. But, of course, Chicago 
 is not in this matter so highly tried as Bel- 
 fast is. Memphis does not assume an air 
 of social superiority to Chicago as Dublin 
 
 does to Belfast. It is not, therefore, so very 
 
 134 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 125 
 
 hard for Chicago to be generous in her 
 judgment. 
 
 Perhaps " generous " is the wrong word to 
 use. " Just " would be better. No genero- 
 sity is required, because Memphis really is one 
 of those places in which business is efficiently 
 done. Timber, I understand, is one of the 
 things in which Memphis deals. Cotton is 
 another. I do not know which of the two is 
 a greater source of trade, but cotton is the more 
 impressive to the stranger. The place is full 
 of cotton. Mule-carts drag great bales of it 
 to and from railway stations. Stern-wheel 
 steamers full of it ply up and down the Missis- 
 sippi. I shall never again take out a pocket- 
 handkerchief — I use the cheaper, not the linen 
 or silken handkerchief — without looking to see 
 if there is a little piece of white fluff sticking 
 on my sleeve. When I next visit one of the 
 vast whirling mills of Lancashire I shall think 
 of a large quiet room in Memphis full of tables, 
 on which are laid little bundles of cotton, each 
 bearing a neat ticket with mysterious numbers 
 and letters written on it. As I watch the 
 operatives tending the huge machines which 
 spin their endless threads, I shaU think of the 
 men who handle the samples of the cotton 
 
126 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 crop in that Memphis office. They take the 
 stuff between their fingers and thumbs and 
 slowly pull it apart, looking attentively at the 
 fine fibres which stretch and separate as the 
 gentle pull is completed. By some exquisite 
 sensitiveness of touch and some subtle skill of 
 glance they can tell to within an eighth of an 
 inch how long these fibres are. And on the 
 length of the fibre depends to a great extent 
 the value of the crop of the particular planta- 
 tion from which that sample comes. Outside 
 the windows of the room is the Mississippi, 
 a broad, sluggish, grey river when I saw 
 it ; where the deeply laden steamers splash 
 their way from riverside plantations to 
 Memphis, and then down to New Orleans, 
 where much of the cotton is shipped to 
 Europe. 
 
 Beyond the room where the cotton is graded 
 is an office, a sunlit pleasant place with com- 
 fortable writing desks and a case full of various 
 books. You might fancy yourself in the 
 private room of some cultivated lawyer in an 
 English country town, if it were not that in a 
 corner of that office there stands one of those 
 machines which, with an infinite amount of 
 fussy ticking, disgorge a steady stream of 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 127 
 
 ribbon stamped with figures. In New York 
 and Liverpool men are shouting furiously at 
 each other across the floors of Cotton Ex- 
 changes. Prices are made, raised, lowered by 
 their shouts. Transactions involving huge 
 sums of money are settled by a gesture or two 
 and a shouted number. A hand thrust for- 
 ward, palm outwards, sells what twenty 
 panting steamers carry to the Memphis quays. 
 A nod and a swiftly pencilled note buys on 
 the assurance that the men with the sensitive 
 fingers have rightly judged the exact length 
 of a fibre, impalpable to most of us. All the 
 time the shouting and the gestures are going 
 on, thousands of miles away this machine, with 
 detached and unexcited indifference, is stamp- 
 ing a record of the frenzied bidding there in 
 the sunlit Memphis office. Chicago is no 
 more than just when it says that Memphis is 
 a city where business is done. 
 
 Modern business seems to me the most 
 wonderful and romantic thing that the world 
 has ever seen. A doctor in London takes a 
 knife and cuts a bit out of a man's side. By 
 doing that he acquires, if he chooses to exercise 
 it, the right to levy a perpetual tax on the 
 earnings of a railway somewhere in the Argen- 
 
128 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 tine Republic. No traveller on that railway- 
 knows of his existence. None of the engine- 
 drivers, porters, guards, or clerks who work 
 the railway have ever heard of that doctor or 
 of the man whose side was cut. But of the 
 fruit of their labours some portion will go to 
 that doctor and to his children after him if he 
 chooses, with the money his victim pays him, to 
 buy part of the stock of that railway company. 
 An obscure writer, living perhaps in some re- 
 mote corner of Wales, tells a story which 
 catches the fancy of the ladies who subscribe 
 to Mudie's library. He is able, because he 
 has written feelingly of Evangelina's first kiss, 
 to take to himself and assure to his heirs some 
 part of the steel which sweating toilers make 
 in Pittsburg, or, if that please him better, he 
 can levy a toll upon the gold dug from a mine 
 in South Africa. What do the Pittsburg steel 
 workers know or care about him or Evangelina 
 or the ladies who thrill over her caress ? Why 
 should they give up part of the fruit of their 
 toil because an imaginary man is said to have 
 kissed a girl who never existed ? It is very 
 difficult to explain it, but all society, all 
 nations, peoples, and languages agree that they 
 must. The whole force of humanity, com- 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 129 
 
 bined for this purpose only, agrees that the 
 doctor, because of his knife, which has very 
 Hkely killed its victim, and the novelist, because 
 of his silly simpering heroine, shall have an 
 indefeasible right to tax for their own private 
 benefit almost any industry in the whole wide 
 world. This is an unimaginable romance. So 
 is all business ; but Memphis brought home 
 the strangeness of it to me most compellingly. 
 
 Here is a dainty lady, fur-clad, scented, 
 pacing with delicate steps across the floor of 
 one of our huge shops. In front of her, not 
 less exquisitely dressed, a handsome man bows 
 low with the courtesy of a great lord of other 
 days : 
 
 " Lingerie, madam, this way, if you please. 
 The second turning to the left. This way, 
 madam. Miss Jones, if you please. Madam 
 wishes to see " 
 
 And madam, with her insolent eyes, deigns 
 to survey some frothy piles of frilly garments, 
 touches, appraises the material, peers at the 
 stitches of the hems, plucks at inserted strips 
 of lace. 
 
 Here are broad acres of black, caked earth, 
 and all across them are rows and rows of 
 stunted bushes, like gooseberry bushes, but 
 
I30 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 thinner and much darker. On all their prickly- 
 branches hang little tufts of white fluff — cotton. 
 Among the bushes go men, women, and chil- 
 dren, black, negroes everyone of them, dressed 
 in bright yellow, bright blue and flaming red. 
 From their shoulders hang long sacks which 
 trail on the ground behind them. They 
 steadily pick, pick, pick the fluffs of cotton out 
 of the opened pods, and push each little bit 
 into a sack. There you have the beginning of 
 all, the ending of part, of this wonderful sub- 
 stance which clothes, so they tell us, nine- 
 tenths of the men and women who wear 
 clothes at all. What is in between the dainty 
 English lady and the negro in Tennessee ? 
 
 The plantation owner drives his mule along 
 winding tracka through the fields where the 
 bushes are, and watches. He is a man harassed 
 by the insoluble negro problem, in constant 
 dread of insect pests, oppressed by economic 
 difficulties. Men in mills near by comb the 
 thick seeds from the raw cotton, press it tight 
 and bind it into huge bales. Men grade and 
 sort the samples of it. Men shout at each 
 other in great marts, buy and sell cotton yet 
 unsorted, unpicked, ungrown ; and the record 
 of their doings is flashed across continents 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 131 
 
 and oceans. Ships laden down to the limit 
 of safety plunge through great seas with tired 
 men on their bridges guiding them. In 
 Lancashire, in Russia, in Austria, huge fac- 
 tories set their engines working and their 
 wheels go whirling round. Men and women 
 sweat at the machines. In Derry and a 
 thousand other places women in gaunt bare 
 rooms with sewing-machines, or in quiet 
 chambers of French convents with needles in 
 their hands, are working at long strips of cotton 
 fabric. In shops, women again, officered by 
 men, are selling countless different stuffs made 
 out of this same cotton-fluff. 
 
 And the whole complex organisation, the 
 last achieved result of man's age-long struggle 
 for civilisation, works on the perilous verge of 
 breaking down. The fine lady at the one end 
 of it may buy what she cannot pay for and dis- 
 turb the delicately balanced calculations of the 
 shopkeeper. Some well-intentioned govern- 
 ment somewhere may insist that the women 
 who sew shall have fire and a share of the sun- 
 light, things which cost money. Inspectors 
 come, with pains and penalties ready in their 
 pockets, and it seems possible that they will 
 dislocate the whole machine. Labour, pain- 
 
132 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 fully organised, suddenly claims a larger share 
 of the profits which are flowing in. The 
 wheels of all the factories stop whirling. Their 
 stopping affects everyone through the whole 
 length of the tremendous chain, alters the 
 manner of life in the tiniest of the negroes' 
 huts. A sanguine broker may speculate disas- 
 trously and the long chain of the organisation 
 quivers through its entire length and threatens 
 breaking. A shipowner raises rates, the ser- 
 vants of a railway company go on strike. 
 Someone makes a blunder in estimating the 
 size of a future crop. Negroes prove less 
 satisfactory than usual as workers. The possi- 
 bilities of a breakdown somewhere are almost 
 uncountable. Yet somehow the thing works. 
 It is a wonderful accomplishment of man that 
 it should work and breakdown as seldom as it 
 does ; but the dread of breakdown is present 
 everywhere. 
 
 Everyone, the whole way from the lady who 
 wants lingerie to the negro who picks at the 
 bushes, is beset with anxiety. But, fortun- 
 ately, no one ever feels more than his own 
 immediate share of it. The cotton planter 
 will indeed be affected seriously by an epidemic 
 of speculation in New York, or a strike in 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 133 
 
 Lancashire, or the legislation of some well- 
 meaning government. He knows all this, but 
 it does not actually trouble him much. He 
 has his own particular worry, and it is at him 
 so constantly that it leaves all the other worries 
 no time to get at him at all. His worry is the 
 negro. 
 
 According to the theory of the American 
 constitution the negro is a free man, a brother, 
 as responsible as anyone else for the due order- 
 ing of the state. In actual practice the negro 
 is either slowly emerging from the slave status 
 or slowly sinking back to it again. It does not 
 matter which way you look at it, the essential 
 thing is, whichever way he is going, he is not 
 yet settled down in either position. It is 
 impossible — on account of the law — to treat 
 him as a slave. It is impossible — on account 
 of his nature, so I am told — to treat him as a 
 free man. He is somewhere in between the 
 two. He is economically difficult and socially 
 undesirable. But he is the only means yet 
 discovered of getting cotton picked. If any- 
 one would invent a machine for picking cotton 
 he would benefit the world at large immensely 
 and make the cotton planter, save for the fear 
 of certain insects, a happy man. But the 
 
134 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 shape of the cotton bush renders it very diffi- 
 cult to get the cotton off it except by the use 
 of the human finger and thumb. We are not 
 nearly so clever at inventing things as we think 
 we are. The cotton bush has so far defeated 
 us. The negro, who supplies the finger and 
 thumb, has very nearly defeated us too. It is 
 hard to get him to work at all, and still harder 
 to keep him at it. He does not seem to be 
 responsive to the ordinary rules of political 
 economy. If he can earn enough in one day 
 to keep him for three days he sees no sense in 
 working during the other two. 
 
 The southern American does not seem to 
 be trying to solve this negro problem. He 
 makes all sorts of makeshift arrangements, 
 tries plans which may work this year and next 
 year, but which plainly will not work for very 
 many years. These seem the best he can do. 
 Perhaps they are the best anyone could do. 
 Perhaps it is always wisest to be content to 
 keep things going and to let the remoter 
 future take care of itself. The cotton crop 
 has to be picked somehow this year, and it 
 may have to be picked next year too. After 
 that — well, nobody speculates in futures fur- 
 ther ahead than that. 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 135 
 
 The problem of the social position of the 
 negro seems to be quite as difHcult to solve as 
 that created by his indifference to the laws of 
 political economy. The " man and brother " 
 theory has broken down hopelessly, and the 
 line drawn between the white and coloured 
 parts of the population in the south is as well 
 defined and distinct as any line can be. The 
 stranger is told horrible tales of negro doings, 
 and is convinced that the white men believe 
 them by the precautions they take for the pro- 
 tection of women. There may be a good deal 
 of exaggeration about these stories, and in 
 any case the morality or immorality of the 
 negro is not the most difficult element in the 
 problem. Education, the steady enforcement 
 of law, and the gradual pressure of civilisation 
 will no doubt in time render outrages rarer. 
 It is, at all events, possible to look forward 
 hopefully. The real difficulty seems to me to 
 lie in the strong, contemptuous dislike which 
 white people who are brought into close contact 
 with negroes almost invariably seem to feel 
 for them. In the northern parts of America, 
 where negroes form a very small part of the 
 population, this feeling does not exist. A 
 northern American or an Englishman would 
 
136 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 not feel that he were insulted if he were asked 
 to sit next a negro at a public banquet. A 
 southern American would decline an invita- 
 tion if he thought it likely that he would be 
 called upon to do such a thing. A southern 
 lady, who happened to be in New York, was 
 offered by a polite stranger a seat in a street 
 car next a negro. She indignantly refused to 
 occupy it. The very offer was an outrage. 
 
 The feeling would be intelligible if it were 
 the outcome of instinctive physical prejudice. 
 An Englishwoman, who had hardly ever come 
 into contact with a negro, once found herself 
 seated at tea in the saloon of a steamer opposite 
 a negress who was in charge of some white 
 children. She found it impossible to help 
 herself to cake from the dish from which the 
 negress had helped herself. The idea of doing 
 so filled her with a sense of sickness. Yet she 
 did not feel herself insulted or outraged at 
 being placed where she was. A southern 
 American woman would have felt outraged. 
 But the southern American woman has no 
 instinctive shrinking from physical contact 
 with black people. She is accustomed to it. 
 She has at home a black cook who handles the 
 food of the household, a black nurse who minds 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 137 
 
 the children, perhaps a black maid who per- 
 forms for her all sorts of intimate acts of ser- 
 vice. As servants she has no objection to 
 negroes. There is in her nothing correspond- 
 ing to the Englishwoman's instinctive shrink- 
 ing from the touch of a black hand. 
 
 Nor is the southern American's contempt 
 for the negroes anything at all analogous to 
 the contempt which most people feel for those 
 who are plainly their inferiors. A brave man 
 has a thoroughly intelligible contempt for one 
 who has shown himself to be a coward. But 
 this is an entirely different thing, different in 
 kind, not merely in degree, from a southern 
 white man's contempt for a negro. It is the 
 existence of this feeling, intensely strong and 
 very difficult to explain, which makes the pro- 
 blem of the negro's social future seem hopeless 
 of solution. No moral or intellectual advance 
 which the negro can make affects this feeding 
 in the slightest. It is not the brutalised negro 
 or the ignorant negro, but the negro, whom 
 the white man refuses to recognise as a possible 
 equal. 
 
 Memphis, in spite of its negro problem, 
 seems to me to be rapidly emerging from the 
 ruins of one civilisation and to be pressing 
 
138 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 forward to take a foremost place in another. 
 I do not suppose that Memphis now regrets 
 the past very much, or even thinks often of 
 the terrible humiliation of the Civil War and 
 the years of blank hopeless ruin which followed 
 it. There was that indeed in the past which 
 must have left indelible marks behind it. It 
 was not easy for a proud people, essentially 
 aristocratic in their outlook upon life, to accept 
 defeat at the hands of men whom they looked 
 down upon. It is not easy to forget the in- 
 tolerable injustice which, inevitably I suppose, 
 followed the defeat. But Memphis is looking 
 forward and not back, is grasping at the possi- 
 bilities of the future rather than brooding over 
 the past. 
 
 But if Memphis and the south generally are 
 content to forget the past, it does not follow 
 that the past has forgotten them. The spirit 
 of the older civilisation abides. It haunts the 
 new life like some pathetic ghost, doomed to 
 wander helplessly among people who no longer 
 want to see it. There is a certain suavity 
 about Memphis which the stranger feels 
 directly he touches the life of the place. It is 
 a lingering perfume, deHcate, faint, but ap- 
 preciable. I am told that it is to be traced to 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 139 
 
 Europe, that the business men in Europe have 
 closer relations with England, Austria, and 
 Russia than with the northern states of their 
 own country. I am also told that we must 
 look to the origin of it to the Cavalier settlers 
 of the southern states, from whom the people 
 who live there now claim descent. I do not 
 like either explanation. A man does not 
 catch suavity by doing business with Lan- 
 cashire. The quality is not one on which the 
 northern Englishman prides himself, or indeed 
 which is very obvious in his way of living. 
 The blood of those original Cavaliers, gentle- 
 men all of them I am sure, must have got a 
 good deal mixed in the course of the last two 
 hundred years, especially as strangers are 
 always pouring into the south. It must be 
 an attenuated fluid now, scarcely capable of 
 flavouring perceptibly a new and vigorous life. 
 I prefer my own hypothesis of a ghost. Some 
 of these creatures smell of sulphur and leave 
 a reek of it behind them when they pay visits 
 to their old homes on earth. Others betray 
 their presence by the damp, cold, earthy air 
 they bring with them from the tombs in which 
 their bodies were laid. This Memphis ghost, 
 which no one in Memphis sees but which yet 
 
HO CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 has its influence on Memphis' Hfe, is of quite 
 a different kind. It is scented with pot- 
 pourri and the deHcate rose-water which 
 great ladies of bygone generations made and 
 used. It is the ghost of some grande dame, 
 like Madame Esmond, who owned slaves and 
 used them with no misgiving about her right 
 to do so, whose pride was very great, whose 
 manners were dignified, whose ways among 
 those of her own caste were exceedingly 
 gracious. There is something, some linger- 
 ing suggestion of great ladies about Memphis 
 still, in spite of its new commercial prosperity. 
 I think it must be because the spirits of them 
 haunt the place. 
 
 Someone must surely have written a book 
 on the philosophy of American place-names. 
 The subject is an interesting one, and the 
 world has a lot of authors in it. It cannot 
 have escaped them all. But I have not seen 
 the book. If I ever do see it I shall turn 
 straight to the chapter which deals with 
 Memphis and Cairo, for I very much want to 
 know how those two places came to have 
 Egypt for their godfather. Most American 
 place-names are easy enough to understand, 
 and they seem to me to surpass, in their fas- 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 141 
 
 cinating suggestion of romance, our old Irish 
 and English names. It is, of course, inter- 
 esting to know that all the chesters in England 
 — Colchester, Dorchester, Manchester, and 
 Chester itself — were once Roman camps ; and 
 that most of the Irish kils — Kilkenny, Kil- 
 dare, Killaloe, Kilrush — were the churches of 
 once honoured saints. But the Romans and 
 the saints are very remote. They were im- 
 portant people in their day no doubt, but it 
 is very hard to feel the personal touch of them 
 now. American place-names bring us closer 
 to men with whom we feel that we can sym- 
 pathise. There is a whole range of names 
 taken straight from old homes — Southampton, 
 for instance, Boston, New Orleans. We do not 
 need to go back in search of emotions to the 
 original meaning of York or to worry over the 
 derivation of Orleans. It is enough for us to 
 feel that these names suggest all the pathetic 
 nostalgia of exiles. The men who named 
 these places must have been thinking of dearly 
 loved church towers, of the streets and 
 market places of country towns, whose every 
 detail was well remembered and much re- 
 gretted, of homes which they could scarcely 
 hope to see again. It is not hard, either, to 
 
142 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 catch the spirit of the Puritan settlers in theo- 
 logical and biblical names, in Philadelphia, 
 Salem, and so forth. The men who gave these 
 names to their new homes must have felt that, 
 like Abraham, they had gone forth from their 
 kindred and their people, from the familiar 
 Ur of the Chaldees, to seek a country, to find 
 that better city whose builder and maker is God. 
 Philadelphia is perhaps to-day no more re- 
 markable for the prevalence of brotherly love 
 among its people than any other city is. But 
 there were great thoughts in the minds of the 
 men who named it first ; and reading the name 
 to-day, even in a railway guide, our hearts are 
 lifted up into some sort of communion with 
 theirs. Then there are the Indian names, of 
 lakes, mountains, and rivers chiefly, but occa- 
 sionally of cities too. Chicago is a city with 
 an Indian name. Perhaps these are of all the 
 most suggestive of romance. It must have 
 been the hunters and explorers, pioneers of 
 the pioneers, who fixed these names. One 
 imagines these men, hardened with intolerable 
 toil, skilled in all the lore of wild life, brave, 
 adventurous, picking up here and there a word 
 or two of Indian speech, adopting Indian names 
 for places which they had not time to name 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 143 
 
 themselves, handing on these strange syllables 
 to those who came after them to settle and to 
 build. Greater, so it seems, than the romance 
 of the home-sick exile, greater than the romance 
 of the Puritan with his Bible in his hand, is the 
 wild adventurousness which comes blown to us 
 across the years in these Indian names. 
 
 But there are names like Memphis which 
 entirely baffle the imagination. It is almost 
 impossible to think that the people who named 
 that place were home-sick for Egypt. What 
 would Copts be doing on the shores of the 
 Mississippi ? How could they have got there ? 
 Nor Is it easy to think of any emotion which 
 the name Memphis would be likely to stir 
 in the mind of a settler. Memphis means 
 nothing to most men. It is easy to see why 
 there should be an American Rome. A man 
 might never have been in Rome, might have 
 no more than the barest smattering of its 
 history, yet the name would suggest to him 
 thoughts of imperial greatness. Anyone who 
 admires imperial greatness would be inclined 
 to call a new city Rome. But Memphis sug- 
 gests nothing to most of us, and to the few is 
 associated only with the worship of some long 
 forsaken god. I can understand Indiana- 
 
144 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 polis. There was Indiana to start with, a 
 name which anyone with a taste for sonorous 
 vowel sounds might easily make out of Indian. 
 The Greek termination is natural enough. It 
 gives a very desirable suggestion of classical 
 culture to a scholar. But a scholar would be 
 driven far afield indeed before he searched out 
 Memphis for a name. 
 
 I asked several learned and thoughtful people 
 how Memphis came by its name. I got no 
 answer which was really satisfactory. It was 
 suggested to me that cotton grows in Egypt 
 and also in the neighbourhood of Memphis. 
 But cotton does not immediately suggest 
 Egypt to the mind. Mummies suggest Egypt. 
 So, though less directly, does corn. If a cache 
 of mummies had been discovered on the banks 
 of the Mississippi it would be easy to account 
 for Memphis. If Tennessee were a great 
 wheat state, one could imagine settlers saying, 
 " There is corn in Egypt, according to the 
 Scriptures. Let us call our new city by an 
 Egyptian name." But I doubt whether cotton 
 suggested Memphis. It certainly did not 
 suggest Cairo, for Cairo is not a cotton place. 
 I was told — though without any strong con- 
 viction — that the sight of the Mississippi re- 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 145 
 
 minded somebody once of the Nile. It would 
 of course remind an Egyptian fellah of the 
 Nile ; but the original settlers in Memphis 
 were almost certainly not Egyptian fellaheen. 
 Why should it remind anyone else of the Nile ? 
 It reminded me of the Shannon, and I should 
 probably have wanted to call Memphis Athlone 
 if I had had a voice in the naming of it. It 
 would remind an Englishman of the Severn, 
 a German of the Rhine, an Austrian of the 
 Danube, a Spaniard — it was, I think, a Spaniard 
 who went there first — of the Guadalquiver. 
 I cannot believe that the sight of a very great 
 river naturally suggests the Nile to anyone 
 who is not familiar with Egypt beforehand. 
 
 It is indeed true that both the Mississippi 
 and the Nile have a way of overflowing their 
 banks, but most large rivers do that from time 
 to time. The habit is not so peculiar as to 
 force the thought of the Nile on early obser- 
 vers of the Mississippi. Indeed there is a 
 great difference between the overflowings of 
 the Nile and those of the Mississippi. The 
 Nile, so I have always understood, fertilises the 
 land round it when it overflows. The Missis- 
 sippi destroys cotton crops when it breaks 
 loose. South of Memphis for very many 
 
146 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 miles the river is contained by large dykes, 
 called levees, a word of French origin. These 
 are built up far above the level of the land 
 which they protect. It is a very strange thing 
 to stand on one of these dykes and look down 
 on one side at the roofs of the houses of the 
 village, and on the other side, at the river. 
 When we were there the river was very low. 
 Long banks of sand pushed their backs up 
 everywhere in the main stream, and there was 
 half a mile of dry land between the river and 
 the bank on which we stood. But at flood 
 time the river comes right up to the dyke, 
 rises along the slope of it, and the level of the 
 water is far above that of the land which the 
 dyke protects. Then the people in the villages 
 near the dyke live in constant fear of inunda- 
 tion, and I saw, beside a house far inland, a 
 boat moored — should I in such a case say 
 tethered ? — to a tree in a garden ready for 
 use if the river swept away a dyke. I suppose 
 the people get accustomed to living under such 
 conditions. Men cultivate vines and make 
 excellent wine on the slopes of Vesuvius 
 though Pompeii lies, a bleached skeleton, at 
 their feet. I should myself rather plant 
 cotton behind a dyke, than do that. But I 
 
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 147 
 
 am not nearly so much afraid of water as I am 
 of fire. 
 
 I was told that at flood time men patrol the 
 tops of the dykes with loaded rifles in their 
 hands, ready to shoot at sight anyone who 
 attempts to land from a boat. The idea is 
 that unscrupulous people on the left bank, 
 seeing that their own dyke is in danger of 
 collapsing, might try to relieve the pressure 
 on it by digging down a dyke on the right bank 
 and inundating the country behind it. The 
 people on the other side of course take similar 
 precautions. Most men, such unfortunately 
 is human nature, would undoubtedly prefer to 
 see their neighbour's houses and fields flooded 
 rather than their own. But I find it difficult 
 to believe that anyone would be so entirely 
 unscrupulous as to dig down a protecting dyke. 
 The riflemen can scarcely be really necessary, 
 but their existence witnesses to the greatness 
 of the peril. 
 
 I saw, while I was in Memphis, a place where 
 the river had torn a large piece of land out of 
 the side of a public park. The park stood high 
 above the river, and I looked down over the 
 edge of a moderately lofty cliff at the marks 
 of the river's violence. Some unexpected 
 
148 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 obstacle or some unforeseen alteration in the 
 river bed had sent the mighty current in full 
 force against the land in this particular place. 
 The result was the disappearance of a tract of 
 ground and a semicircle of clay cliff, which 
 looked as if it had been made with a gigantic 
 cheese scoop. The river was placid enough 
 when I saw it, a broad but lazy stream. But 
 for the torn edge of the park I should have 
 failed to realise how terrific its force can be. 
 The dykes were convincing. So were the 
 stories of the riflemen. But the other brought 
 the reality home to me almost as well as if I 
 had actually seen a flood. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE LAND OF THE FREE 
 
 We should have been hard indeed to please 
 if we had not enjoyed our visits to Chicago 
 and Memphis. We should be ungrateful now 
 if we confessed that there was any note of 
 disappointment in the memory of the joyous 
 time we had. Yet there is one thing we regret 
 about that journey of ours to the middle west 
 and south. We should dearly have liked to 
 see a dozen other places, smaller and less im- 
 portant, which lay along the railway line 
 between Chicago and Memphis, and between 
 Memphis and Indianapolis. We made the 
 former of these journeys entirely, and the 
 latter partly, by day. Some unimaginative 
 friends warned us beforehand that these 
 journeys were dull, that it would be better to 
 sleep through them if possible, rather than 
 spend hours looking out of railway carriage 
 
 windows at uninteresting landscapes. These 
 
 149 
 
ISO CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 friends were entirely wrong. The journeys 
 were anything but dull. The trains dragged 
 us through a whole series of small towns, and, 
 after the manner of many American trains, 
 gave us ample opportunity of looking at the 
 houses and the streets. 
 
 In other countries trains are obliged to 
 hide themselves as much as possible when they 
 come to towns. They go into tunnels when 
 they can or wander round the backs of mean 
 houses, so that the traveller sees nothing 
 except patches of half-bald earth sown with 
 discarded tins, and rows of shirts and stock- 
 ings hanging out to dry. European peoples, it 
 appears, do not welcome trains. In America 
 the train seems to be an honoured guest. It 
 is allowed, perhaps invited, to wander along 
 or across the chief streets. I have been told 
 by a very angry critic that this way of stating 
 the fact is wrong, misleading, and abominably 
 unjust to the American people. The towns, he 
 says, did not invite the train, but the train, 
 being there first, so to speak, invited the towns 
 to exist. Very likely this is so. But it seems 
 to me to matter but little whether the train 
 or the town came first. The noticeable 
 thing is that the town evidently likes the train. 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 151 
 
 It is just as sure a mark of affection to lay out 
 a main street alongside the railway line as it 
 would be to invite the railway to run its line 
 down the middle of the main street. An 
 EngHsh town, if it found that a railway was 
 established on its site before it got there, would 
 angrily turn its back to the line, would, even 
 at the cost of great inconvenience, run its 
 streets away from the railway. The American 
 plan, from the point of view of the passenger, 
 is far better. He gets the most dehghtful 
 glances of human activity and is set wonder- 
 ing at ways of life that are strange to him. 
 
 Our imagination would, I think, have in any 
 case been equal to the task of conjuring up 
 mental pictures of what life is like in these 
 smaU isolated inland towns. We should, no 
 doubt, have gone grievously wrong, but we 
 should have enjoyed ourselves even without 
 guidance. Fortunately we were not left to 
 our own imaginative blunderings. We had 
 with us a volume of Mr. Irvine Cobb's stories, 
 for the possession of which we selfishly dis- 
 puted. It gave us just what we wanted, a sure 
 groundwork for our imaginings. We peopled 
 those little towns with the men and women 
 whom Mr. Cobb revealed to us. His humour 
 
152 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 and his delightful tenderness gave us real 
 glimpses of the lives, the hopes, the fears, the 
 prejudices and memories of many people who 
 otherwise would have been quite strange to 
 us. Each little town as we came to it was 
 inhabited by friendly men and women. Thanks 
 to Mr. Cobb, they were our friends. All that 
 was wanted was that we should be theirs. 
 Hence the bitter disappointment at not being 
 able to stop at one after the other of the towns, 
 at being denied the chance of completing a 
 friendship with people whom we already liked. 
 But it may well be that we should not really 
 have got to know them any better. We have 
 not, alas ! Mr. Cobb's gift of gentle humour 
 or his power of sympathetic understanding, 
 also it takes years to get to know anyone, and 
 we could not, in any case, have stayed for 
 years in all these towns. Life has not years 
 enough in it. 
 
 Besides the towns there were the people we 
 met on the trains. There was, for instance, 
 a man who went up and down selling apples 
 and grapes in little paper bags. We bought 
 from him, and while buying we heard him 
 speak. There was no doubt about the matter. 
 He was an Irishman, and not merely an Irish- 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 153 
 
 man by descent, the son or grandson of an 
 emigrant, but one who had quite recently left 
 Ireland. His voice, to our ears, was like well- 
 remembered music. I know the feeling of 
 joy which comes with landing from an EngHsh- 
 manned steamer on the quay in Dublin and 
 hearing again the Irish intonation and the 
 Irish turns of phrase. But that is an expected 
 pleasure. It is nothing compared to the sud- 
 den delight of hearing an Irish voice in some 
 place thousands of miles from Ireland, where 
 the last thing you expect to happen is a meeting 
 with an Irishman. I remember being told of 
 an Irishwoman who was travelling from Singa- 
 pore to Ceylon in a steamer. She lay in her 
 cabin, helplessly ill with some fever contracted 
 during her stay in the far East. She seemed 
 incapable of taking an interest in anything, 
 until two men came to mend something in 
 the corridor outside her cabin door. They 
 talked together, and at the sound of their 
 voices the sick lady roused herself. She had 
 found something in life which still interested 
 her. She wanted very much to know whether 
 the men came from County Antrim or County 
 Down. She was sure their homes were in one 
 or the other. The Irish voices had stirred her. 
 
154 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 We were neither sick nor apathetic, but we 
 were roused to fresh vitahty by the sound of 
 our Irish apple-seller's voice. He came from 
 County Wicklow. He told us so, needlessly 
 indeed, for we knew it by his talk. He had 
 been in America for two years, had drifted 
 westwards from New York, was selling apples 
 in a train. Did he Hke America ? Was he 
 happy ? Was he doing well ? And — crucial, 
 test question — would he like to go back to 
 Ireland ? 
 
 " I would so. If there was any way I could 
 get my living there." 
 
 I suppose that is the way it is with the most 
 of us. We have it fixed somehow in our minds 
 that a living is easier got anywhere than at 
 home. Perhaps it is. Yet surely apples 
 might be sold in Ireland with as good a hope 
 of profit as in Illinois or Tennessee. Baskets 
 are cheap at home, and a basket is the sole 
 outfit required for that trade. The apples 
 themselves are as easy to come by in the one 
 place as in the other. But possibly there are 
 better openings in America. The profession 
 may be overcrowded at home. Many pro- 
 fessions are — medicine, for instance, and the 
 law. Apple selling may be in the like case. 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 155 
 
 At all events, here was an Irishman, doing 
 fairly well by his own account in the middle 
 west of America, yet with a sincere desire to 
 go back again to Ireland if only he could get a 
 living there. 
 
 There was another man whom we met and 
 talked to with great pleasure. Our train 
 lingered, as trains sometimes will, for an hour 
 or more at a junction. It was waiting for 
 another train which ought to have met ours, 
 but did not. We sat on the platform of the 
 observation car, and gazed at the blinking 
 signal lights, for the darkness had come. Sud- 
 denly a man cHmbed over the rail of the car 
 and sat down beside us. He had, as we could 
 see, a very dirty face, and very dirty hands. 
 He wore clothes like those of an engine stoker. 
 He was, I think, employed in shunting trains. 
 He apologised for startling us, and expressed 
 the hope that we had not mistaken him for a 
 murderous Red Indian. He was a humorist, 
 and he had seen at a glance that we were inno- 
 cent strangers, the sort of people who might 
 expect an American train to be held up by 
 Red Indians with scalp ing-knives. He told 
 us a long story about a lady who was walking 
 from coach to coach of a train while he was 
 
156 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 engaged in shunting it about and was detach- 
 ing some coaches from it. She was crossing 
 the bridge between two coaches at an unlucky 
 moment and found herself suddenly on the 
 line between two portions of the train. The 
 expression of her face had greatly amused our 
 friend. His account of the incident greatly 
 amused us. But the most interesting thing 
 about this man, the most interesting thing 
 to us, was his unaffected friendliness. In 
 England a signalman or a shunter would not 
 climb into a train, sit down beside a passenger 
 and chat to him. A miserable consciousness 
 of class distinction would render this kind of 
 intercourse as impossible on the one side as 
 on the other. Neither the passenger nor the 
 shunter would be comfortable, not even if the 
 passenger were a Liberal politician or a newly 
 made Liberal peer. In America this sense of 
 class distinction does not seem to exist. I 
 have heard English people complain that 
 Americans are disrespectful. I should rather 
 use the word unrespectful, if such a word ex- 
 isted. For disrespectful seems to imply that 
 respect is somehow due, and I do not see why 
 it should be. I am quite prepared to sign my 
 assent to the democratic creed that one man 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 157 
 
 is as good as another. I even go further than 
 most democrats and say that one man is 
 generally better than the other, whenever it 
 happens that I am the other. I see no reason 
 why a railway signalman should not talk to me 
 or to anyone else in the friendly tones of an 
 equal, provided of course that he does not 
 turn out to be a bore. It is a glory and not a 
 shame of American society that it refuses to 
 recognise class distinction. 
 
 My only complaint is that America has not 
 gone far enough in the path of democratic 
 equality. There are Americans who take tips. 
 Now men neither take tips from nor give tips 
 to their equals. If a friend were to slip six- 
 pence into my hand when saying good-bye, I 
 should resent it bitterly. Unless I were quite 
 sure that he was either drunk or mad, I should 
 feel that he was deliberately treating me as 
 his inferior. I should admit that I was his 
 inferior if I pocketed the tip. I should feel 
 bound to touch my hat to him and say, " Thank 
 you, sir," or " Much obliged to your honour." 
 No man is in any way degraded by taking wages 
 for the work he does, whatever that work may 
 be, cleaning boots or lecturing in a University. 
 But a man does lower himself when, in addition 
 
158 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 to his wages, he accepts gifts of money from 
 strangers. He is being paid then not for 
 courtesy or civility, which he ought to show 
 in any case, but for serviHty ; and that no one 
 can render except to a recognised superior. 
 The tip in a country where class distinctions 
 are a regular part of the social order is right 
 enough. It is, at all events, a natural outcome 
 of the theory that some men by reason of their 
 station in life are superior to others. In a 
 social order which is based upon the principle of 
 equality among men the tip has no proper place. 
 The distinction between tips and wages is 
 a real one, although it is sometimes obscured 
 by the fact that the wages of some kinds of 
 work are paid entirely or almost entirely in the 
 form of tips. A waiter in a restaurant or an 
 hotel lives, I believe, mainly on tips. Tips 
 are his wages. Nevertheless he places himself 
 in a position of inferiority by allowing himself 
 to be paid in this way. It is plain that this is 
 so. There is a sharp line which divides those 
 who are tipped from those who are not. It 
 may, for instance, be the misfortune of any- 
 one to require the services of a hospital nurse. 
 But we do not tip her, however kind and atten- 
 tive she may be. She gets her wages, her 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 159 
 
 salary, a fixed sum. It would be insulting to 
 offer her, in addition, five shillings for herself. 
 Hers is a profession which neither involves nor 
 is supposed to involve any loss of self-respect. 
 On the other hand, the chambermaid who 
 makes the beds in an hotel is tipped. She 
 expects it. And her profession, in the popular 
 estimation at least, does involve a certain loss 
 of self-respect. The best class of young 
 women are unwilling to be domestic servants, 
 but are not unwilling to be hospital nurses. 
 Yet the hospital nurse works as hard as, if not 
 harder, than a housemaid. She does the 
 same kind of work. There is no real difference 
 between making the bed of a man who is sick 
 and making the bed of a man who is well. In 
 either case it is a matter of handling sheets 
 and blankets. But a suggestion of inferiority 
 clings to the profession of a housemaid and 
 none to that of a hospital nurse. The reason 
 is that the one woman belongs to the class 
 which takes tips, the other to the class which 
 does not. 
 
 It is easy to see that in a country like America, 
 into which immigrants are continually flowing 
 from Europe, there is sure to be a large number 
 of people — Italian waiters, for instance, and 
 
i6o CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Swedish or Irish domestic servants — who have 
 not yet grasped the American theory of social 
 equaHty. They have grown up in countries 
 where the theory does not prevail. They 
 naturally and inevitably expect and take tips, 
 the largesse of their recognised superiors. 
 No one accustomed to European life grudges 
 them their tips. But there are, unfortunately, 
 many American citizens, born and bred in 
 America, with the American theory of equality 
 in their minds, who also take tips, and are 
 very much aggrieved if they do not get them. 
 Yet they, by word and manner, are continually 
 asserting their position of equality with those 
 who tip them. This is where the American 
 theory of equality between man and man breaks 
 down. The driver of a taxi-cab, for instance, 
 can have it one way or the other. He cannot 
 have it both. He may, like a doctor, a la.wjev 
 or a plumber, take his regular fee, the sum 
 marked down on the dial of his cab, and treat 
 his passenger as an equal. Or he may take, 
 as a tip, an extra twenty cents, in which case 
 he sacrifices his equality and proclaims himself 
 the inferior of the man who tips him, a mem- 
 ber of a tippable class. There ought to be 
 no tippable class of American citizens. The 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE i6i 
 
 English complaint of the disrespectfulness of 
 Americans is, in my opinion, a foolish one, 
 unless the American expects and takes tips. 
 Then the complaint is well founded and just. 
 The tipper pays for respectfulness when he 
 gives a tip, and what he pays for he ought to 
 get. 
 
 It is, I think, quite possible that the custom 
 of tipping has something to do with the diffi- 
 culty, so acute in America, of getting domestic 
 servants. It is widely felt that domestic ser- 
 vice in some way degrades the man or woman 
 who engages in it. There is no real reason 
 why it should. It is not in itself degrading 
 to do things for other people, even to render 
 intimate personal service to other people. The 
 dentist who fills a tooth for me does something 
 for me, renders me a special kind of personal 
 service. He loses no self-respect by supply- 
 ing me with a sound instrument for chewing 
 food. Why should the person who cooks the 
 food which that tooth will chew lose self-respect 
 by doing so ? There is no real distinction be- 
 tween these two kinds of service. Nor is there 
 anything in the contention that the domestic 
 servant is degraded by abrogating her own will 
 and taking orders from someone else. Nine men 
 
 h 
 
1 62 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 out of ten take orders from somebody. From 
 the soldier on the battlefield, the most honour- 
 able of men, to the clerk in a bank, we are almost 
 all of us obeying orders, doing not what we our- 
 selves think best or pleasantest, but what some- 
 one in authority thinks right. What is the 
 difference between obeying when you are told 
 to clean a gun and obeying when you are told 
 to wash a jug ? The real reason why a sug- 
 gestion of inferiority clings to the profession 
 of domestic service is that domestic servants 
 belong to the tippable class. Society can, if it 
 likes, raise domestic service to a place among 
 the honourable professions, by ceasing to tip 
 and paying wages which do not require to be 
 supplemented by tips. If this were done 
 there would be far less difficulty in keeping up 
 the supply of domestic servants. 
 
 I find myself on much more difficult ground 
 when I pass on to discuss the impression made 
 on me by the claim of America to be, in some 
 special way, a free country. 
 
 " To the West ! to the West ! to the land 
 of the free." So my farmer friend sang to me 
 twenty years ago. The tradition survives. 
 The American citizen believes that a man is 
 freer in America than he is, for instance, in 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 163 
 
 England. If freedom means the power of the 
 individual to do what he likes without being 
 interfered with by laws, then no man can ever 
 be quite free anywhere except on a desert 
 island. I, as an individual, may earnestly de- 
 sire to go out into a crowded thoroughfare and 
 shoot at the street cars with a revolver. I am 
 not free to do this in any civilised country in the 
 world. For people with desires of that kind 
 there is no such thing as liberty. The freedom 
 of the individual is everywhere a compromise 
 between his personal inclination and the general 
 sense of the community. Men are more free 
 where the community makes fewer laws, less 
 free where the community makes more. In 
 England I can, if I like, buy and drink at dinner 
 a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of any 
 train which has a restaurant car in any part of 
 the country. In certain states in America I 
 cannot buy a bottle of beer in the restaurant 
 car of the train. There is a law which stops 
 me. It may be a very good law. The infringe- 
 ment of my liberty which it entails may be for 
 my good and the good of society in general ; 
 but where that law exists I am certainly less 
 free than where it does not exist. 
 
 The tendency of modern democratic states 
 
1 64 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 is to make more and more laws, and thereby to 
 confine within ever narrower Hmits the freedom 
 of the individual man. A few years ago an 
 Englishman could send his child to school or 
 keep his child at home without any education, 
 just as he chose. Now he must send his child 
 to school. The law insists on it. The Irish- 
 man, in most parts of Ireland, can still, if he 
 likes, allow his child to grow up without ever 
 going to school. There is no law to interfere 
 with him. In that particular respect Ireland 
 is freer than England, for England has gone 
 further along the path of curtailing individual 
 liberty. In the matter of buying beer England 
 is freer than America, because you can buy beer 
 anywhere inEngland if yougo toahouse licensed 
 to sell beer. In some parts of America there are 
 no houses licensed to sell beer, and you cannot 
 buy it. America has, in this particular respect, 
 gone further than England along the path of 
 curtailing individual liberty. 
 
 There are several other things about which 
 there are laws in America which do not exist in 
 England, and with regard to which America is 
 not so free a country as England is. But there 
 are also laws in England which do not exist in 
 America. The Englishman is more or less 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 165 
 
 accustomed to his laws. He has got into the 
 habit of obeying them, and they do not seem to 
 interfere with his freedom. The American laws, 
 to which he is not accustomed, strike him as 
 unwarrantable examples of minor tyranny. 
 But it is likely that the American is, in the same 
 way, accustomed to his laws and is not irri- 
 tated by them. He has got into the way of not 
 wanting to buy beer in Texas, and does not feel 
 that his liberty is curtailed by the existence of 
 a law which it does not occur to him to break. 
 He may be, on the other hand, profoundly 
 annoyed by English laws, to which he is not 
 accustomed. It may strike him, when he 
 comes to England, that his liberty is being con- 
 tinually interfered with, just as an Englishman 
 feels himself continually hampered in America. 
 I can, for instance, understand that an American 
 in England might feel that his liberty was most 
 unwarrantably interfered with by the law which 
 obliges him to have a penny stamp on every 
 cheque he writes. It must strike him as mon- 
 strous that he cannot get his own money out of 
 a bank without paying the government for being 
 allowed to do so. After all it is his money, and 
 the government is not even a banker. Why 
 should he pay for taking a sovereign from the 
 
1 66 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 little pile of sovereigns which his banker keeps 
 for him when he would not have to pay for 
 taking one out of a stocking if he adopted the 
 old-fashioned plan of keeping his money there ? 
 The Englishman feels no annoyance at the pay- 
 ment of this penny. He is so entirely accus- 
 tomed to it that it seems to him a violation of 
 one of the laws of nature to write a cheque on a 
 simple, unstamped piece of paper. 
 
 On the whole, although the citizens of both 
 countries feel free enough when they are at 
 home, there is probably less freedom, that is to 
 say there are more laws, in America than in Eng- 
 land. America is more thoroughly democratic 
 in constitution than England is, and therefore 
 less free. This seems a paradox, but is in 
 reality a simple statement of obvious fact ; nor 
 is there any difficulty in seeing the reason for it. 
 Democracies produce professional politicians. 
 The professional politician differs from the 
 amateur or voluntary politician exactly as any 
 professional differs from any amateur. An 
 amateur carpenter saws wood and hammers 
 nails for the fun of the thing, and stops sawing 
 and hammering as soon as sawing and hammer- 
 ing cease to amuse him. The professional 
 carpenter must go on sawing and hammering 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 167 
 
 even if he does not want to, because it is in this 
 way that he earns his bread. He therefore 
 gets a great deal more sawing and hammering 
 done in a year than any amateur does. It is 
 the same with politicians. The amateur poH- 
 tician makes a law now and then when he feels 
 like it. When law-making ceases to interest 
 him he goes off to hunt or fish. The profes- 
 sional politician must go on making laws even 
 though the business has become inexpressibly 
 wearisome. Thus it is that in states where 
 there are professional politicians, in democratic 
 states, there are more laws, and therefore 
 less freedom, than in states which only have 
 amateur politicians. America, being slightly 
 more democratic than England, has slightly 
 more laws and slightly less freedom. 
 
 But it would be easy to make too much of 
 this difference between England and America. 
 The freedom which men value most is very 
 little affected by laws. Laws neither give nor 
 withhold it. Freedom is really an atmosphere 
 in which we are able to breathe without anxiety 
 or fear. There are some societies in which a 
 man must be constantly watching himself lest 
 he should give expression to a thought or an 
 opinion which is liable to offend some powerful 
 
1 68 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 interest or outrage some cherished conviction. 
 All sorts of unpleasant consequences follow 
 incautious utterance of an unpopular opinion, 
 or even the discovery that unpopular opinions 
 are held. It may be that the rash individual 
 is looked on very coldly. It may be that those 
 who seem to be his friends gradually draw 
 away from him. It may be — this is not so 
 unpleasant but quite unpleasant enough — that 
 he is assailed in newspapers and held up in their 
 columns to public odium. It may be that he 
 is made to suffer in more material ways, that he 
 loses business or runs the risk of being deprived 
 of some position which he holds. In very un- 
 civilised communities he is sometimes actually 
 treated with physical violence. The windows 
 of his house are broken or he is mobbed. The 
 dread of some or all of these penalties makes 
 him very cautious. He goes through life glanc- 
 ing timidly from side to side, always anxious, 
 always a little frightened, and therefore — since 
 fear is the real antithesis of liberty — never 
 free. 
 
 All communities suffer from spasmodic fits 
 of this kind of intolerance. In England in the 
 year 1900 it was not safe to be a pro-Boer, and 
 England at that time was not a free country. 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 169 
 
 England is now free to quite an extraordinary 
 extent. A man may hold and express almost 
 any conceivable opinion without suffering for it. 
 He can stand up in a public assembly and say 
 hard things about England herself, point out 
 her faults in plain and even bitter language. 
 The English people as a whole remain totally 
 indifferent to what he says about them. If the 
 hard thing is said wittily they laugh. If it is 
 said dully they yawn. In neither case do they 
 display any signs of anger. They succeed in 
 giving the stranger in their midst the impression 
 that nothing he does or says matters in the least 
 so long as he avoids crossing the indefinable 
 line which separates " good form " from bad. 
 His manners may get him into trouble. His 
 opinions will not. 
 
 America is free too in this same way, but is 
 not, I think, so free as England. There are 
 several subjects about which it is not wise to 
 talk quite freely in America. The ordinary 
 middle-class American, the man with whom 
 one falls into casual conversation in a train, is 
 sensitive about criticism of his country and its 
 institutions in a way that the ordinary English- 
 man is not. It may very well be that in this 
 he is the Englishman's superior. A perfectly 
 
I70 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 detached judge of humanity — some epicurean 
 deity observing all things with passionless calm, 
 and weighing all emotion in the scales of abso- 
 lute justice — might, quite conceivably, rank a 
 slightly resentful patriotism higher than toler- 
 ant apathy. We Irishmen are not tolerant of 
 criticism, and I sincerely hope that ours is the 
 better part. We do not like the expression of 
 opinions which differ from our own, and are 
 inclined to suppress them with some violence 
 when we can. As a nation we value truth far 
 more than liberty ; truth being, of course, the 
 thing which we ourselves believe ; obviously 
 that, for we would not believe it unless we were 
 quite sure that it was true. Americans are 
 not so whole-hearted as we are in this matter. 
 The more highly-educated Americans are even 
 inclined to drift into a tolerant agnosticism 
 which is almost English. But most Americans 
 are still a little intolerant of strange opinions 
 and still have enough conscious patriotism to 
 resent criticism. 
 
 It is the fault of a great quality. No society 
 can be both enthusiastic and free. It is the 
 tips and the equality over again. We cannot 
 have things both ways. If society aUows a 
 man, without pain or penalty, to say exactly 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 171 
 
 what he means, it is always because that society 
 is convinced, deep down in its soul, that he can- 
 not possibly mean what he says. A man is free 
 to speak what he chooses, to criticise, to abuse, 
 to sneer, wherever his fellow-men have made 
 up their minds that it does not matter what he 
 says, how keenly he criticises, abuses, or sneers. 
 On the other hand a society which is very much 
 in earnest about anything — and a great many 
 Americans are — will not suffer differences of 
 opinion patiently, and will always be resentful 
 of criticism. Say to an Englishman that 
 American football is superior to the Rugby 
 Union game. He will look at you with a sleepy 
 expression in his eyes, and after a short pause, 
 politeness requiring some answer from him, he 
 will say : " Is it really ? " His tone suggests 
 that he does not care whether it is or not, but 
 that he means to go on playing the Rugby Union 
 game if he plays at all, a point about which 
 he has not quite made up his mind. Say to an 
 American that Rugby Union football is superior 
 to his game and he will look at you with highly 
 alert but slightly troubled eyes. He wants to 
 respect you if he can, and he does not like to 
 hear you saying a thing which cannot possibly 
 be true. But he too is polite. 
 
172 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 " There may be," he says, " some points of 
 superiority about the EngHsh game — but, on 
 the whole — think of the organisation of our 
 forwards. Think of the amount of thought 
 required. Think of the rapid decisions which 
 have to be made. Think of — But come and 
 see the match next Saturday and then you'll 
 understand." 
 
 There is still another kind of freedom ; free- 
 dom to behave as we like, freedom of manners. 
 This is almost as important as freedom to 
 speak and think without fear of consequences. 
 Indeed for most people it is more important. 
 Only a few of us think, or want to say what we 
 think. All of us have to behave, to have 
 manners of some sort either good or bad. It 
 is curious to notice that while men everywhere 
 are acquiescing without much protest to the 
 curtailment of the sort of freedom which is 
 affected by law, they are steadily claiming and 
 securing more and more freedom of manners. 
 We are far less bound by conventions than we 
 used to be. There was a time when everybody 
 possessed, and once a week wore, what were 
 called " Sunday clothes." One hardly ever 
 hears the phrase now, and men go to church 
 in coats which would have struck their grand- 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 173 
 
 mothers as distinctly unsuited to a place of 
 worship. Sunday clothes were a bondage, and 
 we have broken free. There was, very long 
 ago, a definite code of manners binding upon 
 men and women when they met together. 
 When it prevailed the intercourse between the 
 sexes must have been singularly stiff and un- 
 comfortable. There were many things which 
 a woman could not do without losing her char- 
 acter for womanliness, and many things which 
 a man could not do in the company of ladies^ 
 smoke, for instance. 
 
 It is, I think, women and not men who decide 
 how much of this sort of liberty people are to 
 enjoy. If I am right about this, then American 
 women are more generous than English 
 women. There is much more freedom in the 
 matter of clothes in America than in England. 
 I remember hearing an Englishwoman com- 
 plain that no matter how she tried she never 
 could succeed in dressing correctly in America. 
 In England she knew exactly the kind of gown 
 to wear at an afternoon party, at a small dinner, 
 at a large dinner, at an evening reception, in the 
 box of a theatre. In America she perpetually 
 found herself wearing the wrong thing. I 
 imagine that in reality she did not wear the 
 
174 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 wrong thing, because there is no such rigid 
 standard of appropriateness of dress in America 
 as there is in England. More latitude is al- 
 lowed, and if a gown is hardly ever correct, it is 
 also hardly ever wrong. Every man who sits 
 in the staUs of a London theatre must display 
 eighteen inches of white shirt above the top 
 button of his waistcoat. In America he may 
 wear a blue flannel shirt if he likes, and nobody 
 cares whether it is visible beneath his tie or not. 
 In England a man who dines in a very smart 
 restaurant must wear a tail coat and a white tie. 
 In America he can, if he chooses, wear a tail 
 coat and a black tie, or a short coat and a white 
 tie. There is no fixed rule determining the 
 connection between coats and ties. 
 
 It is not only the class of people who dine in 
 smart restaurants and sit in stalls of theatres 
 which is subject to rules of this kind. Every 
 class has its own conventions, and, so far as 
 my observation goes, every class is a little 
 freer in America than it is in England. 
 No English chauffeur with any self-respect 
 would consent to drive a motor-car about 
 London unless he were wearing some kind 
 of uniform. In America the most magnificent 
 cars are frequently driven by chauffeurs in 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 175 
 
 grey tweed suits with ordinary caps on their 
 heads. 
 
 I am nearly sure that it is women, the 
 women of our own class, who decide what 
 clothes we shall wear and what clothes they 
 will wear themselves. I am quite sure that it 
 is they who regulate the degree of formal 
 stiffness there is to be in our intercourse with 
 them. English women have, to a very con- 
 siderable extent, given up requiring from men 
 those symbols of respect which had long ago 
 ceased to be anything but the mere conven- 
 tional survivals of the mediaeval idea of 
 chivalry. Men and women in England meet 
 on friendlier and more equal terms than they 
 used to. American women have gone even 
 further than the English in setting themselves 
 and us free from the old restrictions. They 
 invite comradeship, and have, as far as possible, 
 swept away the barriers to free intercourse 
 between sex and sex. 
 
 To some people liberty of any sort, liberty 
 for its own sake, will always seem a desirable 
 thing. These will prefer the manners of 
 America to those of England, but will cling to 
 their admiration of the Englishman's tolerance 
 of criticism. There are others — it is a matter 
 
176 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 of temperament — who prefer restraint, who 
 Hke to talk cautiously, who cling to social con- 
 ventions. To them it will be a comfort to 
 know that in one respect the American woman 
 is not so free as her English sister. In England 
 a woman may, without loss of reputation, 
 smoke almost anywhere, anywhere that men 
 smoke, except in the streets and the entrance 
 halls of theatres. In New York there are only 
 two or three restaurants in which a woman is 
 allowed to smoke. Even if she is indifferent 
 to her reputation and does not mind being 
 considered fast she cannot smoke in the other 
 restaurants. The head waiter comes and 
 stops her if she tries. This may be quite 
 right. I do not know whether it is or not. 
 Many very strong arguments may be and are 
 brought against women smoking. It is, I am 
 thankful to say, no business of mine to weigh 
 them against the other arguments which go 
 to show that women are as well entitled to the 
 solace of tobacco as men are. What interests 
 me far more than the arguments on either side 
 is the fact that American women are in this 
 one respect much less free than English 
 women. The women of both nations smoke, 
 but the American woman must do it in privacy 
 
THE LAND OF THE FREE 177 
 
 or semi-privacy. The Englishwoman inhales 
 her cigarette with untroubled enjoyment in 
 any restaurant in London. She must dress 
 herself strictly as convention prescribes for 
 each occasion. She must be a little careful in 
 her intercourse with men. She has not yet 
 got a vote. But she may smoke. The Ameri- 
 can woman has much more freedom in the 
 matter of clothes. She can be as friendly 
 with a man as she likes. In several states she 
 has a vote. But society in general frowns on 
 her smoking, and sets its policeman, the head 
 waiter, to prevent her doing it. I should 
 myself prefer a cigarette to a vote ; but I am 
 fond of tobacco and all elections bore me, so 
 I am not an unprejudiced judge. American 
 women may be in this matter, as indeed they 
 certainly are in other matters, nobler than I 
 am. They may gladly sacrifice tobacco for the 
 sake of the franchise, but I do not see why 
 they should not have both. 
 
 M 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 WOMAN IN THE STATES 
 
 There is a story told about Lord Beaconsfield 
 which, if true, goes to show that he was not 
 nearly so astute a man as is generally sup- 
 posed. A lady, an ardent advocate of Woman 
 Suffrage, once called on him and tried to con- 
 vince him of the justice of her cause. She 
 was a very pretty lady, and she spoke with 
 great enthusiasm. One imagines flashing 
 eyes, heightened colour, graceful gestures of 
 the hands. Lord Beaconsfield listened to her 
 and looked at her. When she had finished 
 speaking he said : " You darling ! " The 
 lady, we are told, was angry, thinking that she 
 had been insulted. She was perfectly right. 
 The remark, which might under other cir- 
 cumstances have been received with blushing 
 satisfaction, was just then and there a piece of 
 intolerable rudeness. It was stupid besides. 
 
 But perhaps the great statesman meant to be 
 178 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 179 
 
 rude. Perhaps, on the other hand, he was 
 carried away for the moment and ceased to be 
 inteUIgent. Perhaps the whole story was in- 
 vented by some malicious person and is en- 
 tirely without foundation. In any case it is 
 a serious warning to the man who sits down 
 to write about American women. It makes 
 him hesitate, fearfully, before venturing to 
 say the very first thing he must want to say. 
 But he who writes takes his life in his hands. 
 I should be little better than a poltroon if I 
 shrank from uttering the truth. 
 
 I was asked by an able and influential editor 
 in New York to write an article on American 
 Women. It is not every day that I am thus 
 invited to write articles, so I take a pardon- 
 able pride in mentioning the request of this 
 American editor. It was after dinner that he 
 asked me, and a lady, who was with us, heard 
 him do it. I looked at her before I answered. 
 If she had scowled or even frowned I should 
 not now be writing about American women. 
 She encouraged me with a nod and a smile. 
 Yet she knew — she must have known — what I 
 should write first of all. Upon her head be 
 at least part of the blame. She not merely 
 smiled. She went on to persuade me to 
 
i8o CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 write the article. By persuading me she 
 helped to make me quite certain that what I 
 am writing is true. 
 
 The American woman is singularly charming. 
 
 Is this an insult ? I think of the many 
 American women whom I met who were kind 
 enough to talk to me, and I know that this 
 is not what they would like to have written 
 about them. Some of them were very earnest, 
 knights-errant, who rode about redressing 
 human wrongs. It happens occasionally — not 
 often, of course, but very occasionally — that 
 women with causes are not charming. They 
 are inclined to over-emphasize their causes, to 
 keep on hammering at a possible convert, to 
 become just a little tiresome. This is, as far as 
 I could judge, never the case with the American 
 ladies who have causes. Others whom I met 
 were learned and knew all about philosophies 
 dim to me. Others again were highly cultured. 
 I am an ignorant and stupid man. Very 
 clever women sometimes frighten me. I was 
 never frightened in America. Others again, 
 without being learned or particularly cultured, 
 were brilliant. They were all charming. That 
 is the truth. I have written it, and if the 
 skies come tumbling indignantly about my ears 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES i8i 
 
 they just must tumble. " Impavidum ferient 
 ruinae " ; but I hope nothing so bad as that 
 will happen to me. 
 
 There are people in the world who believe 
 that we are born again and again, rising or 
 sinking in the scale of living things at each 
 successive incarnation according as we behave 
 ourselves well or badly in our present state. 
 If this creed were true I should try very hard 
 indeed to be good, because I should want, 
 next time I am born, to be an American 
 woman. She seems to me to have a better 
 kind of life than the woman of any other 
 nation, or indeed than anybody else, man or 
 woman. She is, as I hope I have suggested, 
 more free than her European sister. " So full 
 of burrs," said a great lady of old times, " is 
 this workaday world, that our very petti- 
 coats will catch them." This is a true esti- 
 mate of the position of the European woman. 
 They who wear petticoats over here must 
 walk warily with chaperons beside them. 
 But in America there are either fewer burrs or 
 petticoats are made of some better material. 
 The American woman, even when she is quite 
 young, can go freely enough and no scandalous 
 suggestions attach to her unless she does 
 
1 82 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 something very outrageous. She has in other 
 ways too a far better time than the English 
 woman. American social life seems to me — 
 the word is one to apologise for — gynocentric. 
 It is arranged with a view to the convenience 
 and delight of women. Men come in where 
 and how they can. The late Mr. Price Collier 
 observed this, and drew from it the deduction 
 that the Englishman tends on the whole to 
 be more efficient than the American, every- 
 thing in an English home being sacrificed to 
 his good. That may or may not be true ; 
 but I think the American woman is certainly 
 more her own mistress than the English- 
 woman, just because America does its best 
 for women and only its second best for men. 
 
 I do not pretend to be superior to these 
 advantages. I like a good time as well as any- 
 one. But I have other ambitions. And I do 
 not want to be an American woman only for 
 the sake of material gains. She seems to me 
 to deserve her good luck because she has done 
 her business in life exceedingly well, better 
 on the whole than the American man has 
 done his. 
 
 I am — I wish to make this clear at once — 
 a good feminist. No man is less inclined than 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 183 
 
 I am to endorse the words of the German 
 Emperor and confine woman's activities to 
 " Kirche, Kiiche und Kinder." I would, if I 
 had my way, give every woman a vote. I 
 would invite her to discuss the most intricate 
 political problems, with a full confidence that 
 she could not possibly make a worse muddle 
 of them than our male politicians do. I 
 should like to see her conducting great busi- 
 nesses, doctoring her neighbours, pleading for 
 them in law courts, driving railway engines, 
 and, if she wanted to, carrying a rifle or 
 steering a submarine. I would place woman 
 in every possible way on an equality with man 
 and confine her with no restriction except 
 those with which she voluntarily impedes her 
 own activities, like petticoats, stays and blouses 
 which hook up the back. Having made this 
 full confession of faith I shall not, I hope, be 
 reproached for appearing to recognise a dis- 
 tinction betwen woman's business in life, the 
 thing which the American woman has done 
 very well, and man's business, which the 
 American man seems to me to have managed 
 rather badly. Strictly speaking, in the ideal 
 state, all public affairs are women's just as 
 much as men's. Strictly speaking, again in 
 
1 84 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 the ideal state, man is just as responsible as 
 woman for the arts of domestic life. But we 
 are not yet living in the ideal state, and for a 
 long while now the household has been re- 
 cognised as woman's sphere, while man has 
 resented her interference with anything out- 
 side the circle of social and family life. 
 
 It is in these matters whch have been en- 
 trusted to her that the American woman has 
 shown herself superior to the American man. 
 I admit, of course, that the American man 
 has done a great many things very brilliantly. 
 But he does not seem to me to have succeeded 
 in making the business of living, so far as it 
 falls within his province, either comfortable 
 or agreeable. The Englishman has done 
 better. Examples of what I mean absolutely 
 crowd upon me. Take the question of cook- 
 ing food. The American man, left to his own 
 devices, is not strikingly successful with food. 
 The highest average of cooking in England is 
 to be found in good men's clubs. You may, 
 and often do, get excellent dinners in private 
 houses in England ; but you are surer of an 
 excellent dinner in a first-rate club. In 
 America it is the other way about. Many 
 men's clubs have skilful cooks, but you are 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 185 
 
 on the whole more likely to get very good 
 food in a woman's club or in a private house 
 than in a man's club. I am not myself an 
 expert in cooked food. The subject has never 
 had a real fascination for me. But I have a 
 sense of taste, like my better educated gourmet 
 brethren, and I am convinced that where the 
 American woman has control of the cooking 
 the business is better done than it generally 
 is in England, and far better done than when 
 it is left to American men. 
 
 The kindred subject of drinks, again, marks 
 the superiority of the American woman. For 
 some reason, quite obscure to me, women are 
 not supposed to know anything about wine. 
 They either do not like it at all, or they like 
 bad kinds of wine. Wine is man's business in 
 all countries. In America wine is dear, and 
 usually of indifferent quality. Man has mis- 
 managed the cellar. On the other hand 
 women are supposed — again the reason is be- 
 yond me — to like eating sweets, to be speci- 
 alists in that whole range of food which in 
 America goes under the name of candies. 
 Men have not created the demand for candies 
 or secured the supply. They are woman's 
 affair. The consequence is that American 
 
1 86 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 candies are better than any others in the 
 world, better even than the French. It is 
 necessary to search New York narrowly and 
 patiently in order to find a good bottle of 
 claret. I speak on this matter as an outsider, 
 but I am assured by highly skilled experts that 
 the fact is as I state it. On the other hand 
 — I know this by experience — you can satisfy 
 your soul with an almost infinite variety of 
 chocolates without going three hundred yards 
 from the door of your hotel in New York or 
 Philadelphia. 
 
 The one form of alcoholic drink in which 
 America surpasses the rest of the world is the 
 cocktail. I have never yet seen a properly 
 written history of cocktails. The subject still 
 waits its philosopher. But I am inclined to 
 think that the cocktail, the original of the 
 species, Manhattan, Bronx, or whatever it may 
 have been, was invented by a woman. True, 
 these drinks are now universally mixed by men. 
 But the inspiration is unquestionably feminine. 
 Formulse for the making of cocktails exist. I 
 was once asked to review a book which con- 
 tained several hundred receipts for cocktails. 
 But everyone agrees that the formula is of 
 minor importance. The cocktail depends for 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 187 
 
 its excellence not on careful measurements, 
 but on the incalculable and indescribable 
 thing called personality. The most skilful 
 pharmaceutical chemist, trained all his life to 
 the accurate weighing of scruples and measure- 
 ment of drachms, might well fail as a maker of 
 cocktails. He would fail if he did not possess 
 an instinct for the art. Now this is charac- 
 teristic of all women's work. Man reaches his 
 conclusions by argument, bases his convictions 
 on reason, and is generally wrong. Woman 
 responds to emotion, follows instinct, and 
 is very often right. Man is the drudging 
 scientist, patient, dull. Woman is the dash- 
 ing empiricist, inconsequential, brilliant. The 
 cocktail must be hers. I shall continue, until 
 strong evidence to the contrary is offered to 
 me, to beHeve that the credit for this glory 
 of American life belongs to her and not to 
 man. 
 
 It would, no doubt, be insulting to say that 
 part of the business of a woman, as distin- 
 guished from a man, is to dress well and be 
 agreeable. I should not dream of saying such 
 a thing. But there can be no harm in sug- 
 gesting that it is the duty of both sexes to 
 do these things. There is no real reason why 
 
1 88 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 an idealist, man or woman, should not be 
 pleasant to look at, nor is it necessary that 
 very estimable people should administer snubs 
 to the rest of us. It seems to me that even 
 very good people are better w^hen they have 
 nice manners and pleasanter when they dress 
 well. It is not, I admit, their fault when they 
 are not good-looking, but it is their fault if 
 they do not, by means of clothes, make them- 
 selves as good-looking as they can. There is 
 no excuse for the man or woman who em- 
 phasizes a natural ugliness. Man, I regret to 
 say, does not often recognise his duty in these 
 matters. Woman, generally speaking, has done 
 her best. The American woman has made the 
 very most of her opportunities, and has suc- 
 ceeded both in looking nice and in being an 
 agreeable companion. In the art of putting 
 on her clothes she has no superior except the 
 Parisienne, and even in Paris itself it is often 
 difficult to tell, without hearing her speak, 
 whether the lady at the next table in a restau- 
 rant is French or American. I knew an English 
 mother who sent her daughter to Paris for six 
 months in order that the girl might learn to 
 dress herself. The journey to America would 
 have been longer, but once there the girl 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 189 
 
 would have had just as good a chance of ac- 
 quiring the art. I am very unskilful in de- 
 scribing clothes, and the finer nuances of 
 costume are far beyond the powder of any 
 language at my command to express. But it 
 is possible to appreciate effects without being 
 able to analyse the way in which they are 
 produced. The effect on the emotions of a 
 symphony rendered by a good orchestra is 
 almost as great for the man who does not 
 know exactly what the trombones are doing as 
 it is for the musician who understands that 
 they are adding to the general noise by playing 
 chromatic scales or whatever it is that trom- 
 bones do play. It is the same with clothes. 
 I cannot name materials, or discuss styles in 
 technical language, but I am pleasantly con- 
 scious that the American woman has the air 
 of being very well dressed. 
 
 I am not attempting to make a comparison 
 between the clothes of very wealthy women 
 of the leisured classes in America and those of 
 women similarly placed in other countries. 
 Aristocracies and plutocracies are cosmopoli- 
 tan. National characteristics are to a con- 
 siderable extent smoothed off them. The 
 women of these classes dress almost equally 
 
190 CONN AUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 well everywhere. The possibility of compari- 
 son exists only when one considers the com- 
 paratively poor women of the middle and 
 lower middle classes. It is these who, in 
 America, have the Instinct for dressing well 
 unusually highly developed. Some women 
 have this instinct. Others have not. It 
 seems to be distributed geographically. There 
 are cities — no bribe would induce me to name 
 one of them — where the women are usually 
 badly dressed. You walk up and down the 
 chief thoroughfares. You enter the most 
 fashionable restaurants and are oppressed by 
 a sense of prevailing dowdiness. It is not a 
 question of money. The gowns which you see, 
 the coats, the hats have obviously cost great 
 sums. For half the expenditure women in 
 other places look well dressed. It is not a 
 matter of the skill of dressmakers and milliners. 
 A woman who has not got the instinct for 
 clothes might go to — I forget the man's name, 
 but he is the chief costumier in Paris — might 
 give him a free hand to do his best for her, and 
 afterwards she would not look a bit better 
 dressed. It is not, I believe, possible to ex- 
 plain exactly what she lacks. It is an extra 
 sense, as incommunicable as an ear for music. 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 191 
 
 A woman either has it or has not. The Ameri- 
 can woman has it. 
 
 I know — no one knows better than I do — 
 that it is a contemptible thing to take any 
 notice of clothes. The soul is what matters. 
 The body may be in rags. The mind is what 
 counts, and fine feathers do not make fine 
 birds. A great prophet would not be the less 
 a great prophet though his finger nails were 
 black. I hope we should all adore him just 
 the same even if he never washed his face or 
 wore a collar. But just at first, before we got 
 to know him really well, it is possible that we 
 might be a little prejudiced against him if he 
 looked as if he never washed. That is all I 
 wish or mean to say about the American 
 woman's power of dressing herself. It dis- 
 arms prejudice. The stranger starts fair, so 
 to speak, when he is introduced to her. In 
 the case of women who cannot, or for any 
 reason will not dress themselves nicely, there 
 are preliminary difficulties in the way of ap- 
 preciating their real worth. 
 
 But the best clothes in the world are no 
 help when it comes to conversation, unless 
 indeed one is able to discuss them in detail, 
 and I am not. I have met exquisitely dressed 
 
192 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 women who were very difficult to talk to. 
 The American woman is not one of these. 
 Besides being well dressed she is a delightful 
 talker on all subjects. She may or may not 
 be profound. I am not profound myself, so 
 I have no way of judging about that. But 
 profoundness is not wanted in conversation. 
 Its proper place is in scientific books. In 
 conversation it is merely a nuisance, and the 
 American woman, when she is profound, has 
 more sense than to show it. She talks well 
 because she is not in the least shy or self- 
 conscious. Even young American girls are not 
 shy. Brought into sudden contact with a 
 middle-aged man they treat him as an equal, 
 with a frank sense of comradeship. They have, 
 apparently, no awe of advanced or advancing 
 years. They do not pretend to think that 
 elderly people are in any way their superiors, 
 or display in the presence of the aged that 
 kind of chilling aloofness which is called re- 
 spect. I detest people who behave as if they 
 respected me because I am older than they are. 
 I recognise at once that they are hypocrites. 
 Boys and girls must know, in their hearts, 
 just as well as we do, that respect is due to 
 the yo^ng from the elderly and not the other 
 
WOMAN IN THE STATES 193 
 
 way about. The ancient Romans understood 
 this : " Maxima debetur pueris reverentia " is 
 in the Latin grammar, and Latin grammar is 
 a good authority on all subjects connected 
 with ancient Roman civilisation. 
 
 It is her power of making herself agreeable 
 which is the greatest charm of the American 
 woman, a greater charm than her ability in 
 dressing. I am a man very little practised in 
 the art of conversation. A dinner party — a 
 party of any kind, but particularly a dinner 
 party — is a thing from which I shrink. I am 
 always very sorry for the two women who are 
 placed beside me. I know that they will have 
 to make great exertions to keep up a conversa- 
 tion with me. I watch them suffering and am 
 myself a prey to excruciating pangs of self- 
 reproach. But my agony is less in America 
 than elsewhere. The American woman must, 
 of course, suffer as much as the Englishwoman 
 when I take her in to dinner ; but she possesses 
 in an extraordinary degree the art of not show- 
 ing it. She frequently deceives me for several 
 minutes at a time, making me think that she 
 is actually enjoying herself. She is able to do 
 this because she has an amazing vitality and 
 a very acute kind of intelligence. Now the 
 
194 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 highest compliment which a woman can pay to 
 a man is to enjoy his company. The Ameri- 
 can woman understands this, and succeeds in 
 pretending she is doing it. She is wise too. 
 Recognising that even her powers have their 
 Hmits, and that no woman however vital and 
 intelligent can go on disguising her weariness 
 for very long, she makes her dinners and 
 luncheons as short as possible, shorter than 
 similar functions are in England. She does not 
 attempt anything in the way of a long-distance 
 contest with the heavy stupidity of the ordi- 
 nary man. Hers is the triumph of the sprinter. 
 For a short time she flashes, sympathises, 
 subtly flatters, talks with amazing brilliance, 
 charms. Then she escapes. What happens 
 to her next I can only guess ; but I imagine 
 that she must be very much exhausted. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 MEN AND HUSBANDS 
 
 Comic papers on both sides of the Atlantic 
 have adopted the marriages between American 
 women and EngHsh men of the upper classes 
 as a standing joke, one of those jokes of which 
 the public never gets tired, whose infinite 
 variety repetition does not stale. The fun lies 
 in the idea of barter. The Englishman has a 
 title. The American woman has dollars. He 
 lays a coronet at her feet. She hands money 
 bags to him. Essentially the joke is the same 
 on whichever side of the Atlantic it is made. 
 But there is a slight difference in the way the 
 parts of it are emphasized. The tendency 
 among American humorists is to dwell a little 
 on the greed of the Englishman, who is re- 
 presented as incapable of earning money for 
 himself. The English jester lays more stress 
 on the American woman's desire to be called 
 
 " my lady," and pokes fun at the true demo- 
 
 195 
 
196 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 crat's fondness for titles. I appreciate the 
 joke thoroughly wherever it is made, and I 
 invariably laugh heartily at it. But I decline 
 to take it as anything more than a joke. It is 
 not a precise and scientific explanation of 
 fact. 
 
 There are a great many marriages between 
 American women of large or moderate fortune 
 and English men, or other Europeans of title. 
 That is the fact. No doubt the dollars are 
 as attractive to noblemen as they are to any- 
 body else. There are a number of pleasant 
 things, steam yachts, for instance, which can 
 be got by those who have dollars, but not by 
 those who are without them. They may occa- 
 sionally be the determining factor in the choice 
 of a wife. But I feel sure that most English- 
 men, when they marry American women, do 
 so because they like them. They marry the 
 woman, not the money. In the same way a 
 title is a very pleasant thing to have. I have 
 never enjoyed the sensation and never shall, 
 but I know that it must be most agreeable to 
 be styled " Your Grace," and to have a coronet 
 embroidered on a pocket handkerchief. But I 
 do not believe that American women marry 
 coronets. They marry men. The coronet 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 197 
 
 counts, I daresay, but the man counts 
 more. 
 
 It is interesting to notice that, although 
 there are many marriages between American 
 women and EngUsh men, there are compara- 
 tively few marriages between English women 
 and American men. If it were a mere question 
 of exchanging money for titles we might expect 
 English women of title to marry American 
 men. There are a great many English women 
 with titles and a great many rich American 
 men. They might marry each other but they 
 do not, not, at all events, in large numbers. 
 It is true that the woman cannot, unless she 
 is a princess, give her husband a title, as a 
 man can give a title to his wife. But it is no 
 small thing to have a wife with a title. It is 
 a pleasure well worth buying, if it is to be 
 bought. But apparently it is not. The 
 English woman of title prefers to marry an 
 English man, however rich Americans may be. 
 The American man prefers American women, 
 though none of them have titles. Exact 
 statistics about these marriages are not avail- 
 able, but we may take the vitality of current 
 jokes as an indication of what the facts are. 
 The joke about the marriage between Miss 
 
198 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Sadie K. Bock, daughter of the well-known 
 dollar dictator of Capernaum, Pa., U.S.A., and 
 the Viscount Fitzeffingham-Plantagenet, is 
 fresh and always popular. But no one ever 
 made a joke about a marriage between the 
 dollar dictator's son and Lady Ermyntrude. 
 There would be no point in that joke if it 
 were made, because the thing does not happen, 
 or does not happen often enough to strike the 
 popular imagination. 
 
 The truth appears to be that American 
 women, apart from any question of their 
 dowries, are attractive both to English and 
 American men. English men, on the other 
 hand, are attractive both to English and Ameri- 
 can women. 
 
 I occupy in this investigation the position 
 of an unprejudiced outsider. I am neither 
 English nor American, but Irish, and I can 
 afford to discuss the matter without passion, 
 since Irish women are admittedly more at- 
 tractive than any others in the world, and 
 Irish men are seldom tempted to marry out- 
 side their own people. A very wise English 
 lady, one who has much experience of life, 
 once said that young Englishmen of good 
 position are lured into marrying music-hall 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 199 
 
 dancers, a thing which occasionally happens to 
 them, because they find these ladies more 
 entertaining and exciting than girls of their 
 own class. I do not know whether this is 
 true or not, but if it is it helps to explain the 
 attractiveness of American women. There is 
 always a certain unexpectedness about them. 
 They are always stimulating and agreeable. It 
 is much more difficult to account for the 
 attractiveness of the English man. 
 
 The manners of a well-bred Englishman are 
 not superior to those of a well-bred American 
 man. Nor are they inferior. Looked at 
 superficially they are the same. As far as 
 mere conventional behaviour towards women 
 is concerned there is no difference between 
 an Englishman and an American. A well- 
 mannered Englishman rises up and opens the 
 door for a woman when she leaves the room. 
 So does a well-mannered American. The 
 Englishman hands tea, bread and butter or 
 cake to a woman before he takes tea, bread 
 and butter or cake for himself. So does the 
 American. The outward acts are identical. 
 But there is a subtle difference in the spirit 
 which inspires them. The Englishman does 
 these things because he is chivalrous. His 
 
200 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 manners are based on the theory " Noblesse 
 oblige." The woman belongs to the weaker 
 sex, he to the stronger. All courtesy is 
 therefore due to her. This is the theory 
 which underlies the behaviour of Englishmen 
 to women. Good manners are a survival, one 
 of the few survivals, of the old idea of chivalry ; 
 and chivalry was the nobly conceived homage 
 of the strong to the weak, of the superior to 
 the inferior. The American, performing ex- 
 actly the same outward acts, is reverent. And 
 reverence is essentially the opposite of chivalry. 
 It is not the homage of the strong to the weak, 
 but the obeisance of the inferior in the pre- 
 sence of a superior. 
 
 This difference of spirit underlies the whole 
 relationship of men to women in England and 
 America. It helps to explain the fact that 
 the feminist movement in England is much 
 fiercer than it is in America. The English 
 feminist is up against chivalry and wants 
 equality. The American woman, though she 
 may claim rights, has no inducement to destroy 
 reverence. 
 
 I should be very sorry to think, I should be 
 mad to say, that this difference in spirit has 
 anything to do with the attractiveness of 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 201 
 
 English men, considered not as temporary 
 companions, but as husbands. But there are, 
 or once were, people who held the theory that 
 the natural woman — and all women are per- 
 haps more or less natural — prefers as a husband 
 the kind of man who asserts himself as her 
 superior. " O. Henry " has a story of a 
 woman v/ho learned to respect and love her 
 husband only after she had goaded him into 
 beating her. Up to that point she had de- 
 spised him thoroughly. Other novelists, deep 
 students of human nature aU of them, have 
 worked on the same scheme. They are quite 
 wrong, of course. But if they were right they 
 might quote the Englishman's invincible 
 chivalry as the reason of his attractiveness, 
 maintaining, cynically, that a woman prefers, 
 in a husband, that kind of homage to the 
 reverence that the American man continually 
 offers her. 
 
 The American man strikes me as more alert 
 than the Englishman. If this were noticeable 
 only in New York I should attribute the alert- 
 ness to the climate. The air of New York 
 is extraordinarily stimulating. The stranger 
 feels himself tireless, as if he could go on doing 
 things of an exhausting kind all day long 
 
202 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 without intervals for rest. It would be small 
 wonder if the natives of the place were eager 
 beyond other men. But they are not more 
 eager and alert than other Americans. There- 
 fore we cannot blame or thank the climate for 
 these qualities. They must depend upon 
 some peculiarity of the American nervous 
 system, unless, indeed, they are the result of 
 living under the American constitution. A 
 man would naturally feel it his duty to be as 
 alert as he could if he felt that his country 
 was pre-eminently the land of progress, and 
 that all the other countries in the world were 
 more or less old-fashioned and effete. But 
 wherever the alertness comes from it is 
 certainly one of the characteristics of the 
 American man. 
 
 With it goes sanguineness. Every man who 
 undertakes any enterprise looks at it from two 
 points of view. He thinks how very nice life 
 will be if the enterprise succeeds. He also 
 considers how disagreeable things will become 
 if, for any reason, it fails to come off. The 
 Englishman, unless he is a politician, is tem- 
 peramentally inclined to give full weight to 
 the possibility of failure. The American 
 dwells rather on the prospects of success. 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 203 
 
 There are, of course, a great many sanguine 
 Englishmen. Most members of Parliament, 
 for instance, must be extraordinarily hopeful, 
 otherwise they would not go on expecting to 
 get things done by voting and listening to 
 speeches. Some Americans, though not many, 
 are cautious to the point of being almost 
 pessimistic. But broadly speaking, Americans 
 are more sanguine than Englishmen. That is 
 why so many new faiths, and new foods, come 
 from America. Only a very hopeful people 
 could have invented Christian Science or 
 expect to be benefited by eating " Grape 
 Nuts " at breakfast time. That is also, I 
 imagine, why Americans drink so much iced 
 water. Conscious of the dangers of being too 
 sanguine, they try to cool down their spirits 
 in the way which is generally recognised as 
 best for reducing excessive hopefulness. To 
 pour cold water on anything is a proverbial 
 expression. The Americans pour gallons of 
 very cold water down their throats, which 
 shows that they are on the watch against the 
 defects of their high qualities. 
 
 With the alertness and hopefulness there 
 goes, inevitably, a certain restlessness. " Better 
 the devil you know than the devil you don't " 
 
204 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 is a proverb which appeals to the Englishman. 
 It could never be popular in America. The 
 American, if he made up his mind to go in for 
 the acquaintance of devils at all, vi^ould be 
 inclined to try the newer kinds, not merely 
 because he would be hopeful about them, but 
 because he would feel sure that the old ones 
 would bore him. He would never settle down 
 to a monotonous cat and dog life with a 
 thoroughly familiar devil. The Englishman 
 prefers to remain where he is unless the odds 
 are in favour of a change being a change for 
 the better. The American will make a change 
 unless he thinks it likely to be a change for the 
 worse. 
 
 We were greatly struck while we were in 
 America by the fact that there were very few 
 gardens there. The season of the year, late 
 autumn, was not indeed favourable to gardens. 
 Still I think we should have recognised flower 
 beds and the remains of flowers if we had seen 
 them. At first we were inclined to think that 
 Americans do not care for flowers ; but we were 
 constantly assured, on unimpeachable autho- 
 rity, that they do. And we were not dependent 
 on mere assertion. We saw that Americans 
 adorn their rooms with cut flowers, sometimes 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 205 
 
 at huge expense. They must, therefore, Hke 
 flowers. They also, we were told, like growing 
 them ; but, as a matter of fact, they do not 
 grow them to anything Uke the same extent 
 that flowers are grown in England or Ireland. 
 We used to ask why people who like flowers 
 and would like to grow them have so few 
 gardens. We got several answers. The 
 climate, of course, was one. But it is not 
 fair to make the climate responsible for 
 too many things. Besides the climate, as I 
 have said before, is not the same all over 
 America. It is difficult to believe that it is 
 everywhere fatal to gardening. 
 
 Another answer — a much more satisfactory 
 one — was that it takes time to create a garden, 
 and Americans do not usually stay long enough 
 in one house to make it worth while to start 
 gardening. It is plainly an unsatisfactory 
 thing to inaugurate a herbaceous border one 
 year if you are likely to leave it early in the 
 next. As for yew hedges and delights of that 
 kind, no one plants them unless he has a good 
 hope that his son will be there to enjoy them 
 after he has gone. The American, so we were 
 told, and so, of course, believed, is always 
 looking forward to moving into a new house. 
 
2o6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 This is because he is alert, sanguine, and a 
 lover of change. The Englishman is inclined 
 to settle down in one house, and it is very- 
 difficult to root him out of it. Therefore 
 gardens are commonly possible in England and 
 rarely so in America. 
 
 We did indeed see some gardens in America, 
 and they were tended with all the care which 
 flower lovers display everywhere. We saw in 
 them plants brought from very different 
 places, round which there doubtless gathered 
 all sorts of associations, whose blossoms were 
 redolent with the perfume of happy memories 
 as well as their own natural scents. But these 
 gardens belonged to men who, either through 
 the necessity of their particular occupation or 
 through some eccentricity of character, felt 
 that they were likely to remain in one place. 
 
 Gardens are generally best loved and most 
 carefully tended by women. I have known men 
 who took a real interest in plants, but for the 
 most part men who spend their leisure hours 
 in gardens occupy themselves in mowing the 
 grass or scuffling the walks. They will trim 
 the edges of flower-beds with shears, they will 
 sometimes even dig, but their hearts are not 
 with the growing plants. Often they confess 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 207 
 
 as much openly, saying without shame that 
 mowing is capital exercise after office hours, 
 or that the celery bed must be properly 
 trenched if it is to come to perfection. No 
 one who works in this spirit is a gardener, 
 nor is a man who merely desires a tidy trim- 
 ness. To the real gardener neatness is an 
 unimportant detail. It is better that a flower 
 should grow in a bed with ragged edges than 
 that it should wither slowly in the middle of 
 the trimmest of lawns. It is women, far 
 oftener than men, who possess or are possessed 
 by the instinct for getting things to grow. 
 It is, after all, a sort of mother instinct, since 
 flowers, like children, only respond to those 
 who love them. Probably every woman who 
 has the mother instinct has the garden in- 
 stinct too, and most women, we may be 
 thankful for it, are potentially good mothers. 
 
 Perhaps it is the fact that he is content to 
 stay still long enough to render gardens pos- 
 sible which makes the Englishman attractive 
 as a husband. It is easy to understand that 
 there is something very fascinating to a garden 
 lover in the prospect of attachment to one 
 particular spot. It is a great thing to feel : 
 " Here I shall live until the end of living comes, 
 
208 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 and then my sons will live here after me. All 
 the rockeries I build, all the trees I plant, all 
 ray pergolas and rose hedges are for delight in 
 coming years, for delight still in the years be- 
 yond my span of living." This instinct for a 
 settled home, of which a garden is the symbol, 
 is surely stronger in woman than in any man. 
 Woman is after all the stable part of humanity. 
 Man fights, invents, frets, fusses, and passes. 
 Woman is the link between the generations. 
 Man makes life possible and great. It is 
 woman who continues life, hands it on. Her 
 nature requires stability. She feels after 
 settledness in hope of finding it. 
 
 If I were a philosopher I should pursue these 
 speculations and write several pages about men 
 and women which it would be very difficult for 
 anyone to understand. But I have no taste 
 for hunting elusive thoughts among the 
 shadows of vague words. I am content to note 
 my little facts, that American men are more 
 restless than Englishmen, that there are fewer 
 gardens in America than England, that most 
 women like gardens, and that there are more 
 marriages between American women and Eng- 
 lish men than between English women and 
 American men. 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 209 
 
 I came across a curious example of American 
 restlessness a little while ago. There was a 
 footman, very expert in his business, who lived 
 and earned good wages in an English house. 
 He was an ambitious footman, and, though his 
 wages were good, he wanted them to be better 
 still. His opportunity came to him. An 
 American wanted a valet, and was prepared to 
 pay very large wages indeed. The footman 
 offered his services, and being, as I said, a very 
 good footman, he secured the vacant position 
 and the wages, which were far beyond any he 
 would ever have earned in England. At the 
 end of two years he happened to meet the butler 
 under whom he had served in the English 
 house. The butler congratulated him on his 
 great wealth. The footman, now a valet, re- 
 plied that there are several things in the world 
 better worth having than money. 
 
 " I haven't," he said, " slept a fortnight at 
 a time in the same bed since I left you, and it's 
 killing me." 
 
 Now that would not have killed, or gone near 
 killing an American-born footman, if there is 
 such a thing as an American-born footman. 
 He would have enjoyed it, just as his master 
 did; for that American being very wealthy, 
 
 o 
 
2IO CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 could, if he liked, have slept in the same bed 
 every night for a year, every night for many 
 years, until indeed the bed wore out. He 
 preferred to vary his beds as much as possible. 
 He had, no doubt, many beds which were, in 
 a sense, his own : beds in town houses, beds in 
 shooting boxes, beds in fishing lodges, beds in 
 Europe, beds which he had bought with money 
 and to which he had an indefeasible title as pro- 
 prietor. But not one of these was, as an Eng- 
 lishman would understand the words, his own 
 bed. There was not one to which he came 
 back after wandering as to a familiar resting- 
 place. They were all just couches to sleep on, 
 more or less comfortable, to be occupied for a 
 night or two, indistinguishable from those 
 which he hired in hotels. 
 
 I am told that the English are learning the 
 habit of restlessness from the Americans, as 
 indeed they have learned many other things. 
 If they learn it thoroughly they will, I think, 
 have to give up the hope of being able to marry 
 wealthy American women. Their titles will 
 not purchase desirable brides for them if they 
 are no longer able to offer settled homes. Ac- 
 cording to a very learned German historian, it 
 was the introduction of the stabilitas loci ideal 
 
MEN AND HUSBANDS 211 
 
 into the western rules which made monasticism 
 the popular career it was in the Church, It is 
 his old fondness for settling down, and staying 
 there, which made the Englishman so popular 
 as a husband. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE OPEN DOOR 
 
 Americans are forced by the restlessness of 
 their nature to move about frequently from 
 house to house, but they have arranged that 
 each temporary abode is very comfortable. 
 They are ahead of the English in their domestic 
 arrangements. I pay this tribute to them very 
 unwillingly, because I myself am more at ease 
 in an inconveniently arranged house. That is 
 because I am accustomed to inconvenience. 
 The English houses are greatly superior to the 
 Irish, therefore to go straight from an Irish 
 house to an American, from Connaught to 
 Chicago, is to plunge oneself too suddenly into 
 strangely civilised surroundings. I admire, but 
 I fear it would be years before I could enjoy 
 an American house. I go to bed most con- 
 tentedly in a bedroom in which a single candle 
 lights a little circle round it, leaving dim, fasci- 
 nating spaces, in which anything may lurk. I 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 213 
 
 like when the candle is extinguished to see a 
 faint glow of light from a fire reflected on the 
 ceiling. I find it pleasant to remember, after 
 I have got into bed, that I do not know in what 
 part of the room I left the matches ; that if I 
 awake in the night and want the light I must 
 go on a dangerous and exciting quest, feeling 
 my way towards the dressing-table, sweeping 
 one thing after another off it while I pass my 
 hand along in search of the matchbox. The 
 glare of the electric light robs bed-going of its 
 romance. The convenient switch beside my 
 hand cuts me off from all chance of midnight 
 adventure. 
 
 I like to get out of bed on a frosty morning 
 and find myself in a thoroughly cold room. 
 The effort to do this very trying thing braces 
 me for the day. I slip a hand, an arm, a foot, 
 from the blankets, feel the nip of the air, draw 
 them back again, go through a period of in- 
 tense mental struggle, make a gallant effort, 
 fling all the bedclothes from me, and stand 
 shivering on the floor. I feel then that I am 
 a strong, virtuous man, fit to go forth and con- 
 quer. The glow of righteousness becomes 
 even more delightful if I find a film of ice on 
 the water of my jug, and break it with the 
 
214 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 handle of a toothbrush. All this is denied me 
 in an American house. Getting out of bed 
 there is no real test of moral courage. The 
 room is pleasantly warm, a sponge is soft and 
 pliable, not a frozen stone. 
 
 I like, where this is still possible, to have my 
 bath in a large tin basin, shallow and flat, which 
 stands in the middle of the bedroom floor, with 
 a mat under it. There are fine old Irish houses 
 in which this delightful way of bathing still 
 survives. Alas ! they are, even in Ireland, 
 getting fewer every day. The next best thing 
 is to wander down chilly corridors in search of 
 the single bathroom which the house contains. 
 This is, fortunately, still necessary in most 
 English and nearly all Irish houses. Anyone 
 who is fond of the amusement of reading house 
 agents' advertisements must have noticed the 
 English economy in bathrooms. " Handsome 
 mansion, four reception rooms, lounge hall, 
 billiard room, fifteen bedrooms, bath, hot and 
 cold." I do not believe that there is a house 
 like that in all America. Imagine the excite- 
 ment of living in it when all the fifteen bed- 
 rooms are full. It stimulates a man to feel, 
 as he sallies forth with his towel under his arm, 
 that any one of the other fourteen inhabitants 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 215 
 
 may have reached the bath before him, that 
 thirteen people may possibly be waiting in a 
 queue outside the door. To get into the bath- 
 room in a house of that kind at the first attempt 
 must be like holding a hand at Bridge with four 
 aces, four kings, four queens, and a knave in it, 
 a thing worth living and waiting for. In 
 America all this is denied us. A bathroom, 
 luxuriously arranged, adjoins each bedroom. 
 Washing is made so ridiculously easy that 
 there ceases to be any virtue in it. No one 
 would say in America that cleanliness is next 
 to godliness. There is no connection between 
 the two things. It would be as sensible to 
 say that breathing is a subordinate kind of 
 virtue. In England a dressing-gown is well- 
 nigh a necessity. I know a thoughtful host 
 who provides one for his guests, a warm, volu- 
 minous garment in which it is possible to go 
 comfortably to the bathroom. In America a 
 dressing-gown, for a man, is a useless encum- 
 brance. I dragged one with me, but I shall 
 never take it again ; for, like many other things, 
 it is misnamed. It is only when one has to 
 stop dressing that a dressing-gown is any use. 
 
 In these matters of the heating of houses 
 and the arrangement of baths, I prefer what I 
 
2i6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 am accustomed to, but I know that I am little 
 better than a barbarian. I might, if I had 
 lived in the days when matches were first in- 
 vented, have sighed for my flint and steel, but 
 I hope I should have recognised the superiority 
 of matches. I might, in the early days of rail- 
 ways, have wished to go travelling in stage- 
 coaches, but I should have known that steam- 
 engines are really better things than horses at 
 dragging heavy weights for long distances. 
 Thus I cling to the romance of icy bedrooms 
 and inconvenient baths, but I acknowledge 
 freely that the Americans have found the better 
 way and made a step forward along the road of 
 human progress. 
 
 I am not, however, so obstinately conser- 
 vative as to fail in appreciating some other 
 points in the American mastery of the domestic 
 arts. I may long for chilly rooms and remote 
 baths, but I thoroughly enjoy clean towels. 
 Never have I met so many clean towels as in 
 America. The English middle-class house- 
 keeper is behind her French sister in the pro- 
 vision of towels, but the American is ahead even 
 of France. The American towel is indeed 
 small, the bath-towel particularly small ; but 
 that seems to me a trifling matter, hardly worth 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 217 
 
 mentioning, when the supply is abundant. I 
 would rather any day have three small apples 
 than one large one, and my feeling about towels 
 is the same. It is a real pleasure to find a row 
 of clean ones waiting every time it becomes 
 necessary to wash. It is certainly a mark of 
 superior civilisation to realise the importance 
 of house Hnen in daily life. On the other hand, 
 it must be admitted that the American fails in 
 the matter of sheets. What you get are good, 
 very good, smooth, and cool. You are con- 
 stantly given clean ones. But they are not 
 long enough. In England the sheet on your 
 bed covers your feet completely, and leaves a 
 broad flap at the other end which you can turn 
 over the blankets and tuck under your chin. In 
 America you must either leave your feet sheet- 
 less or be content with a mere ribbon of linen 
 under your chin, a narrow strip which will cer- 
 tainly wriggle away during the night. This may 
 not be the fault of the American housekeeper. 
 There may be some kind of linen-draper's 
 Trust which baffles the efforts of reformers. 
 I have heard that in one of the Western States, 
 where the suffrage has been granted to women, 
 a law has been passed that all sheets must be 
 made eighteen inches longer than they usually 
 
21 8 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 are in the other American States. That law 
 is a strong proof of the advantage to the com- 
 munity of allowing women to vote. It also 
 seems to show that the American woman, at 
 all events, is alive to the necessity of reform in 
 this matter of sheets and is determined to do 
 her best to remedy a defect in her household 
 management. 
 
 The disuse of doors in those parts of the 
 house which are inhabited during the daytime 
 is a very interesting feature of American domes- 
 tic life. The first action of an Englishman 
 when he enters a room is to shut the door. His 
 first duty when leaving it, if anyone remains 
 inside, is to shut the door. No well-trained 
 servant ever leaves a door open unless specially 
 requested to do so. Children, from their very 
 earliest years, are taught to shut doors, and 
 punished — it is one of the few things for which 
 a child is systematically punished now — for 
 leaving doors open. An English mother calls 
 after her child as he leaves the room the single 
 word " door " ; or, if she is a very polite and 
 affectionate mother, two words, " door, dear," 
 or " door, please." An American child would 
 not understand a request made in this elliptical 
 form. It knows of course what a door is, just 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 219 
 
 as it knows what a wall is, but it would be 
 puzzled by the mere utterance of the word, just 
 as an English child would be if its mother sud- 
 denly called to it, " wall," or " wall, dear," or 
 " wall, please." The American child would 
 wonder what its mother wanted to say about 
 a door. The English child understands thor- 
 oughly in the same way as we all understand 
 what a dentist means when he says, " Open, 
 please." It is never our favourite books, our 
 tightly clenched hands, or our screwed up 
 eyes, which he wants us to open, always our 
 mouths. The word " open " is enough for us. 
 So the word " door," through a long associa- 
 tion of ideas, at once suggests to the English 
 child the idea of shutting it. 
 
 An Englishman is thoroughly uncomfortable 
 in a room with the door open. An American's 
 feeling about shut doors was very well expressed 
 to me by a lady who had been paying a number 
 of visits to friends in England. 
 
 " EngHsh houses," she said, " always seem to 
 me like hotels. When you go into them you 
 see nothing except shut doors." 
 
 If, after due apologies, you ask why Ameri- 
 cans have no doors between their sitting- 
 rooms, or why, when they have doors they 
 
220 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 do not use them, you always get the same 
 answer. 
 
 " Doors," they say, " are necessary in Eng- 
 land to keep out draughts, because the English 
 do not know how to heat their houses. In our 
 houses all rooms and passages are kept up to an 
 even temperature and we do not require 
 doors." 
 
 This is an intelligible, but not the real ex- 
 planation of this curious difference between the 
 Americans and the English. There are some 
 English houses which are centrally heated and 
 in which the temperature is as even, though 
 rarely as high, as in American houses ; but 
 the Englishmen who live in them still shut the 
 doors. An Englishman would shut the door 
 of the inner chamber of a Turkish bath if there 
 were a door to shut. In summer, when the 
 days are very warm, he opens all the windows 
 he can, but he does not sit with the door open. 
 Temperature has nothing to do with this fond- 
 ness for doors. In the same way there are in 
 America some houses which are not centrally 
 heated, very old-fashioned houses, but they are 
 as doorless as the others. The fact seems to 
 be not that doors were disused when central 
 heating became common, but that central heat- 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 22I 
 
 ing was invented so that people who disliked 
 doors could be warm without them. 
 
 I think the lady who told me that the English 
 houses seemed like hotels to her hinted at the 
 real explanation. The open door is a symbol 
 of hospitality. It is the expression of socia- 
 bility of disposition. The Americans are hospi- 
 table and marvellously sociable. They natur- 
 ally like to live among open doors or with no 
 doors at all, so that anyone can walk up to them 
 and speak to them without difficulty. The 
 Englishman, on the other hand, wants to keep 
 other people away from him, even members of 
 his own family. His dearest desire is to have 
 some room of his own into which he can shut 
 himself where no one has a right to intrude. 
 He calls it his " den," which means the lurking 
 place of a morose and solitary animal. Rabbits, 
 which are sociable creatures, live in burrows. 
 Bees, which have perfected the art of life in 
 community, have hives. The bear has its den. 
 Every room in an old-fashioned Enghsh middle- 
 class house is really a den, though sometimes, 
 as in the case of the drawing-room, a den 
 which is meant for the use of several beasts of 
 the same kind at once. A change is indeed 
 coming slowly over English life in this matter. 
 
222 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 The introduction into middle classes of what 
 is called by house-agents " the lounge hall," is 
 a departure from the " den " theory of domestic 
 life. The " lounge hall " is, properly speaking, 
 a public room. It is available at all hours of 
 the day, and no one claims it specially as his 
 own. It is accessible at once to the stranger 
 who comes into the house from the street. It 
 is still rare in England, but where it exists it 
 marks an approach towards American ideals. 
 The term " living-room," only lately introduced 
 by architects into descriptions of English 
 houses, is another sign that we are becoming 
 more sociable than we were. It is not simply 
 another name for a drawing-room. It stands 
 for a new idea, an American idea. The drawing- 
 ing-room, properly the withdrawing-room, is 
 for the use of people who want to escape tem- 
 porarily from family life, the living-room for 
 those who live it to the full. 
 
 In the American house there are no " dens." 
 The American likes to feel that he is in direct 
 personal contact with the members of his 
 family and with his guest. It does not annoy 
 him, even if he happen to be reading a book 
 on economics, to feel that his wife may sit down 
 beside him, or his daughter walk past the back 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 223 
 
 of his chair humming a tune without his having 
 had any warning that either of them was at 
 hand. The noise made by a servant collecting 
 knives and plates after dinner, reaching him 
 through a drawn curtain, does not disturb his 
 enjoyment of a cigar. The servant is to him 
 a fellow human-being, and the sound of her 
 activities is a pleasant reminder of the comrade- 
 ship of man. He too has had his moments of 
 activity during the day. A guest in an Ameri- 
 can house is, for the time being, a member of 
 the family, not a stranger who, however wel- 
 come he may be, does not presume to intrude 
 upon his host's privacy. 
 
 The " porch," as it is called, a striking 
 feature of the American house, is another evi- 
 dence of the spirit of sociability. A " porch " 
 is a glorified and perfected verandah. In sum- 
 mer it is a large open-air sitting-room. In 
 winter it can, by a common arrangement, be 
 made into a kind of sun-parlour. It has its 
 roof supported by wooden posts. When the 
 cold weather comes frames, like very large 
 window sashes, are fitted between the posts, 
 and a glass-sided room is made. It is evident 
 that the life in these porches is of a very public 
 kind. The passer-by, the casual wanderer 
 
224 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 along the road outside, sees the American fam- 
 ily in its porch, can, if he cares to, note what 
 each member of the family is doing. The 
 American has no objection to this publicity. 
 He is not doing anything of which he is the 
 least ashamed. If other people can see him, 
 he can see them in return. The arrange- 
 ment gratifies his instinct for sociability. The 
 EngHshman, on the other hand, hates to be 
 seen. Nothing would induce him to make a 
 habit of sitting in a verandah. Even in the 
 depths of the country, when his house is a long 
 way from the road, he fits thin muslin curtains 
 across the lower part of his windows. These 
 keep out a good deal of light, and in that way 
 are annoying to him,jbut he puts up with gloom 
 rather than run any risk, however small, that a 
 stranger, glancing through the window, might 
 actually see him. Yet the Englishman com- 
 monly leads a blameless life in his own home. 
 He seldom employs his leisure in any shameful 
 practices. His casement curtains are simply 
 evidences of an almost morbid love of privacy. 
 
 The first thing an Englishman does when 
 he builds a house is to surround it with high 
 walls. This, indeed, is not an English pecu- 
 liarity. It prevails all over Western Europe. 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 225 
 
 It is a most anti-social custom and ought to 
 be suppressed by law, because It robs many- 
 people of a great deal of innocent pleasure. 
 The suburbs of Dublin, to take an example, 
 ought to be very beautiful. There are moun- 
 tains to the south and hills to the west and 
 north of the city, all of them lovely in outline 
 and colouring. There is a wide and beautiful 
 bay on the east. But the casual wayfarer can- 
 not see either the mountains or the bay. He 
 must walk between high yellow walls, walls 
 built, I suppose, round houses ; but we can 
 only know this by hearsay. For the walls 
 hide the houses as well as the view. In Sor- 
 rento, which is even more exquisitely situated 
 than Dublin, you walk for miles and miles be- 
 tween high walls, white in this case. The only 
 difference between the view you see at Dublin 
 and that which you see at Sorrento is that the 
 patch of sky you see in Dublin is grey, at Sor- 
 rento generally blue. At Cintra, one of the 
 world's most famous beauty spots, the walls 
 are grey, and there you cannot even see the 
 sky, because the owners of the houses inside 
 the walls have planted trees, and the branches 
 of the trees meet over the road. The Ameri- 
 cans do not build walls round their houses. 
 
 p 
 
226 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 The humblest pedestrian, going afoot through 
 the suburbs of Philadelphia, Indianapolis, or 
 any other city, sees not only the houses but 
 anything in the way of a view which lies beyond 
 them. 
 
 This is not because America is a republic 
 and therefore democratic in spirit. Portugal 
 is a republic too, having very vigorously got 
 rid of its king, but the walls of Cintra are as 
 high as ever. No one in the world is more 
 democratic than an English Liberal, but the 
 most uncompromising Liberals build walls 
 round their houses as high as those of any 
 Tory. The absence of walls in America is 
 simply another evidence of the wonderful 
 sociability of the people. Walls outside houses 
 are like doors inside. The European likes 
 both because the desire for privacy is in his 
 blood. The American likes neither. 
 
 The " Country Club " is an institution 
 which could flourish only among a very sociable 
 people. There are, of course, clubs of many 
 sorts in England. There is the club proper, 
 the club without qualification, which is found 
 at its very best in London. In books like 
 Whitaker's Almanac, which classify clubs, it 
 is described as " social," but this is only in- 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 227 
 
 tended to distinguish it from political or sport- 
 ing clubs. There is no suggestion that it is 
 sociable, and in fact it Is not. It is possible 
 to belong to a club in London for years without 
 knowing a dozen of your fellow-members. It 
 often seems as if the members of these clubs 
 went to them mainly for the purpose of not 
 getting to know each other ; a misfortune 
 which might happen to them anywhere else, 
 but from which they are secure in their clubs. 
 There are also all over England clubs specially 
 devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, yacht 
 clubs, and so forth. In these the members 
 are drawn together by their interest in a com- 
 mon pursuit, and are forced into some sort 
 of acquaintanceship. But these are very dif- 
 ferent in spirit and intention from the American 
 Country Club. It exists as a kind of centre of 
 the social life of the neighbourhood. There 
 may be and often are golf links connected 
 with it. There are tennis-courts, sometimes 
 swimming-baths. There is always a ball- 
 room. There are luncheon-rooms, tea-rooms, 
 reading-rooms. In connection with one such 
 club which I saw there are sailing matches 
 for a one design class of boats. But neither 
 golf nor tennis, dancing nor sailing, is the 
 
228 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 object of the club's existence. Sport is en- 
 couraged by these clubs for the sake of general 
 sociability. In England sociability is a by- 
 product of an interest in sport. 
 
 The Country Club at Tuxedo is not perhaps 
 the oldest, but it is one of the oldest institu- 
 tions of the kind in America. In connection 
 with it a man can enjoy almost any kind of 
 recreation from a Turkish bath to a game of 
 tennis, either the lawn or the far rarer original 
 kind. At the proper time of year there are 
 dances, and a debutante acquires, I believe, 
 a certain prestige by " coming out " at one of 
 them. But the club exists primarily as the 
 social centre of Tuxedo. It is in one way the 
 ideal, the perfect country club. It not only 
 fosters, it regulates and governs the social life 
 of the place. 
 
 Tuxedo has been spoken of as a millionaire's 
 colony. It is a settlement, if not of million- 
 aires, at all events of wealthy people. The 
 park, an immense tract of land, is owned by 
 the club. Ground for building can be obtained 
 only by those who are elected members of the 
 club and who are prepared to spend a certain 
 sum as a minimum on the building of their 
 houses. In theory the place is reserved for 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 229 
 
 people who either do or will know each other 
 socially, who are approximately on the same 
 level as regards wealth, and who all want to 
 meet each other frequently, for one purpose 
 or another, in the club. In practice, certain 
 difficulties necessarily arise. A man may be 
 elected a member of the club and build a 
 house. He may be a thoroughly desirable 
 person, but in course of time he dies. His 
 son may be very undesirable, or his son may 
 sell the house to someone whom the club is 
 not willing to admit to membership. But 
 Tuxedo society, instead of becoming, as might 
 have been expected, a very narrow clique, seems 
 to be singularly broad-minded and tolerant. 
 The difficulty of preserving the character of 
 the place and keeping a large society together 
 as, in all its essentials, a club, is very much less 
 than might be expected. The place is ex- 
 tremely interesting to any observer of Ameri- 
 can social life. The club regulates everything. 
 It runs a private police force for the park. It 
 keeps up roads. It supplies electric light and, 
 what is hardly less necessary in America, ice 
 to all the houses. It levies, though I suppose 
 without any actual legal warrant, regular rates. 
 The fact that the experiment was not wrecked 
 
230 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 long ago on the rocks of snobbery goes to show 
 that society in America is singularly fluid 
 compared to that of any European country. 
 That a considerable number of people should 
 want to live together in such a way is a witness 
 to the sociability of America. No other 
 country club has realised its ideal as the club 
 at Tuxedo has, but every country club — and 
 you find them all over America — has something 
 of the spirit of Tuxedo. 
 
 Tuxedo is immensely interesting in another 
 way. Nowhere else in the world, I suppose, 
 is it possible to see so many different kinds 
 of domestic architecture gathered together in 
 a comparatively small space. A walk round 
 the shores of the lake gives you an opportunity 
 of seeing houses built in the dignified and 
 spacious colonial style, a happy modification 
 of the English Georgian. Beside one of these, 
 close to it, may be a house like that of a Mexi- 
 can rancher, and the hill behind is crowned 
 with a French chateau. There are houses 
 which must have had Italian models, others 
 which suggest memories of Tudor manor- 
 houses, others built after the fashion of Queen 
 Anne's time. There are houses whose archi- 
 tects evidently had an eclectic appreciation of 
 
THE OPEN DOOR 231 
 
 all the houses built anywhere or at any time, 
 who have tried to embody the most desirable 
 features of very various styles in one building. 
 The general effect of a view of Tuxedo is 
 exceedingly bewildering at first, but almost 
 every house is the expression of some indi- 
 vidual taste, either good or bad. An architect 
 may start, apparently very often does start, 
 with the idea of building a house with twelve 
 rooms in it at a cost of four thousand pounds. 
 Having thus settled size and price he may go 
 ahead trusting to luck about the appearance. 
 Or an architect may start with the idea of 
 building a house in a certain style, or to express 
 some feeling, dignity, homeliness, grandeur, 
 or anything else. The architects who built 
 the Tuxedo houses all seem to have gone to 
 work on the latter plan. 
 
 If the Tuxedo experiment in social life fails 
 and the club goes into liquidation, the United 
 States Government might do worse than buy 
 the whole place as it stands and turn it into a 
 college of domestic architecture. The students 
 could, without travelling more than a mile or 
 two, study every known kind of country house. 
 But, indeed, a college of this sort seems less 
 needed in America than anywhere else. It is 
 
232 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 not only the insides of the houses which are 
 well planned. The outsides of the newer 
 houses are for the most part beautiful to look 
 at. And one can see them, there being no 
 walls. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 COLLEGES AND THEIR STUDENTS 
 
 The municipal elections in New York which 
 resulted in the defeat of Tammany were 
 fought out with great vigour in all the usual 
 ways. There were speeches, bands, and flags. 
 The newspapers were full of the sayings of 
 the different candidates, and the leader-writers 
 of each party seemed to be highly successful 
 in cornering the speakers of the other party. 
 It was shown clearly every day that orators 
 shamelessly contradicted themselves, went 
 back on their own principles and must, if they 
 had any respect for logic or decency, either 
 retract their latest remarks or explain them. 
 All this was very interesting to us. It would 
 have been interesting to anyone. It was 
 particularly interesting to us because it was 
 almost new to us. Elections are, I suppose, 
 fought in more or less the same way every- 
 where ; but in Connaught we hardly ever 
 233 
 
234 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 have elections. An independent candidate 
 bubbles up occasionally, but as a rule we are 
 content to return to Parliament the proper 
 man, that is to say the man whom somebody, 
 we never quite know who, says we ought to 
 return. 
 
 I gathered the Impression that elections 
 must be an exciting sport for those engaged 
 in them. I do not think that the " pomp and 
 circumstance " of the business, the outward 
 manifestations of activity, can make much 
 difference to the result. Speeches, for in- 
 stance, are certainly thrilling things to make, 
 and I can understand how it is that orators 
 welcome elections as heaven-sent opportunities 
 for the exercise of their art. But the people 
 who listen to the speeches always seem to 
 have their minds made up beforehand whether 
 they agree with the speaker or not. They 
 know what he is going to say and are pre- 
 pared with hoots or cheers. I never heard of 
 anyone who came to hoot remaining to cheer. 
 I doubt whether there is a single modern in- 
 stance of a speech having affected the destiny 
 of a vote. A very good speech might indeed 
 produce some effect if it were not that there 
 is always an equally good speech made at the 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 235 
 
 same time on the other side. Election speeches 
 are like tug-boats pulling different ways at the 
 opposite ends of a large ship. They neutra- 
 lise each other and the ship drifts gently, side- 
 ways, with the tide. 
 
 It cannot be seriously maintained that bands 
 or flags help voters to make up their minds. 
 In nine cases out of ten it is impossible to tell 
 for which side a band is playing, and there- 
 fore unlikely that it will draw voters to one 
 side rather than the other. In the tenth case, 
 when the band by selecting some particular 
 tune makes its meaning clear, the music is not 
 of a kind which moves the listener to any 
 feeling of gratitude to the candidate who pays 
 for it. I should, I think, feel bound to vote 
 for a man who gave me " panem et circenses," 
 but I should expect good bread and an attrac- 
 tive circus. I should not dream of voting for 
 a candidate who provided me with inferior 
 music. The flags are a real addition to the 
 gaiety of city life. The ordinary elector loves 
 to see them fluttering about. But the ordi- 
 nary elector is not by any means a fool. He 
 knows that the flags will be taken down very 
 soon after the election is over. If any can- 
 didate promised to keep his flags flying as a 
 
236 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 permanent decoration of the city streets he 
 might capture a few votes. But we all know 
 that none of them will do anything as useful 
 as that. 
 
 Nor do I think that the editors of newspapers 
 produce much effect by showing up the incon- 
 sistencies of politicians and pinning them 
 down to-day, when they are driven to say 
 something quite different to the things which 
 under stress of other circumstances they said 
 yesterday. It does not take a clever man, 
 like a newspaper editor, to corner a politician. 
 Any fool can do that ; and the performance of 
 an obviously easy trick does not move an 
 audience at all. An acrobat who merely hops 
 across the stage on one leg gets no applause 
 and the box-ofhce returns fall away. The 
 thing is too easy. It is the man who does 
 something really hard, balances himself on the 
 end of an umbrella and juggles with twenty 
 balls at once, who attracts the public. If a 
 newspaper editor at an election time would, 
 instead of showing up the other side, offer 
 proofs that the men on his own side are con- 
 sistent, logical, and high-principled, he would 
 have enormous influence with the voters. 
 " Anyone," so the ordinary man would reason, 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 237 
 
 " who can prove things Hke that about poH- 
 ticians, must be amazingly clever. If he is 
 amazingly clever, far cleverer than I ever hope 
 to be, then there is a strong probability that 
 his side is the right one. I shall vote for it." 
 The ordinary man, I repeat, is not nearly such 
 a fool as is generally supposed. He is quite 
 capable of reasoning, and he would reason, I 
 am sure, just in the way I have suggested, if 
 he were given a chance. 
 
 The keen interest which we took in the 
 showy side of electioneering made us diligent 
 readers of the newspapers. We were rewarded 
 beyond our hopes. We came across, on the 
 very evening of the election itself, a little 
 paragraph, tucked away in a corner, which we 
 might very easily have missed if we had been 
 less earnest students. In a certain district in 
 New York, so this paragraph told us, there 
 was a queue of voters waiting outside a 
 polling station. Among them was a man who 
 was known to be or was suspected of being 
 hostile to Tammany. It was likely that he 
 would cast his vote on the other side. There 
 were, looking thoughtfully at the queue, cer- 
 tain men described by the newspaper as 
 " gangsters " in the pay of the Tammany 
 
238 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 organisation. They seized the voter whose 
 principles seemed to them objectionable and 
 dragged him out of the queue, plainly in order 
 to prevent his recording his vote. So far 
 there was nothing of very special interest in 
 'the paragraph. We knew beforehand — even 
 in Ireland we know this — that voters are a 
 good deal influenced by the strength of the 
 party machine. The strength is seldom dis- 
 played in its nakedly physical form on this 
 side of the Atlantic ; but it is always there 
 and is really the determining force in most 
 elections. It was the thing which happened 
 next which gave the incident its value. A 
 university student who happened to be en- 
 gaged in social work in the neighbourhood saw 
 what was done. He was one man and there 
 were several " gangsters," but he attacked 
 them at once. He was, as might be supposed, 
 as he himself must surely have foreseen, 
 worsted in the fray which followed. The 
 " gangsters," after the manner of their kind, 
 mauled, beat and kicked him to such an extent 
 that he had to be carried to a hospital. It 
 did not appear that this university student was 
 a party man, eager for the triumph of his side 
 as the gangsters were for the victory of theirs. 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 239 
 
 He seems to have acted on the simple prin- 
 ciple that a man who has a right to vote ought 
 not to be interfered vs^ith in the exercise of 
 that right. He was on the side of justice and 
 liberty. He was not concerned with politics 
 of either kind. 
 
 I do not know what happened to that student 
 afterwards. I searched the papers in vain for 
 any further reference to the incident. I wanted 
 to know whether the voter voted in the end. I 
 wanted to know what was done to the gang- 
 sters. I wanted to know whether the student 
 recovered from his injuries or not. I wanted, 
 above aU, to know whether anyone recognised 
 how fine a thing that student did. I never dis- 
 covered another paragraph about the incident. 
 
 I was talking some time afterwards to an Eng- 
 lish friend, the friend to whom I have already 
 referred who knows America very well and who 
 offered to take care of me while I was there. I 
 told him the story of the voter and the 
 Tammany gangsters. 
 
 " These things," he said, " happen over here. 
 They are constantly happening. One gets into 
 the way of not being shocked by them. But 
 there always is that university student some- 
 where round, when they do happen." 
 
240 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 It is an amazingly high tribute to the Ameri- 
 can universities. If my friend is right ; if 
 blatant force and abominable injustice do in- 
 deed find themselves faced, always and as a 
 matter of course, by a university student, then 
 the universities are doing a very splendid work. 
 And I am inclined to think that my friend is 
 right. There is another story of the same kind, 
 one of many which might be told. This one 
 came to me, not in a newspaper but from the 
 lips of a man who told me that he was a witness 
 of what happened. 
 
 There was — I forget where — a kind of settle- 
 ment, half camp, half town, built in a lonely 
 place for the workmen of a company which was 
 conducting some mining or engineering enter- 
 prise. The town, if I am to call it a town, was 
 owned and ruled by the company. The work- 
 men were of various nationalities, and, taken 
 as a whole, a rough lot. It was, no doubt, diffi- 
 cult to keep them contented, difhcult enough to 
 keep them at all in such a place. It would be 
 probably unjust to say that the company en- 
 couraged immorality ; but the existence of dis- 
 orderly houses in the place was winked at. The 
 men wanted them. The officials of the com- 
 pany, we may suppose, found their line of least 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 241 
 
 resistance in ignoring an evil which they may 
 have felt they could not cure. After a while, 
 during one summer vacation there came to 
 the place a university student. He was not a 
 miner or an engineer, and had no particular 
 business with the company. He was, appar- 
 ently, on a kind of mission ; but whether he 
 was preaching Christianity or social reform of 
 a general kind I was not told. He was the 
 inevitable university student of my friend's 
 remark. 
 
 He found himself face to face with an evil 
 thing which he at all events would not ignore. 
 He made his protest. Now no man of the 
 world, certainly no business man, objects to 
 a proper protest, temperately made, provided 
 the protester does not go too far. The man of 
 the world is tolerant. He is a consistent be- 
 liever in the policy of living and letting live. 
 He recognises that people with principles must 
 be allowed to state them. It is in order to 
 be stated that principles exist. But he holds 
 that in common fairness he ought to be allowed 
 to ignore these statements of principle. That 
 was just what this university student could not 
 understand. He went on protesting more and 
 more forcibly until he made the officials un- 
 
 Q 
 
242 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 comfortable and the men exceedingly angry. It 
 was the men, either with, or, as I hope, without 
 the knowledge of their superiors, who first 
 threatened, then beat that university student ; 
 beat him on the head with a sandbag, and finally 
 drove him from the place with a warning that 
 he had better not return again. 
 
 He did return, bringing with him certain 
 officers of the law. He was a man of some 
 strength of character, and the recollection of 
 the beating did not cause him to hesitate. Un- 
 fortunately the officers of the law could not do 
 much. The disorderly houses were all quite 
 orderly when they appeared. They were small 
 shops selling apples, matches, and other inno- 
 cent things. There was no evidence to be got 
 that anything worse had ever gone on in them 
 than the sale of apples and matches. The pre- 
 vious inhabitants of these houses were picnicking 
 in the woods for a few days. All that the offi- 
 cers of the law were able to do was to conduct 
 the university student safely out of the place. 
 That was difficult enough. 
 
 I am not sure that this story is true, for I did 
 not read it in a newspaper ; but it is very like 
 several others which I heard. They may all 
 be false or very greatly exaggerated, but they 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 243 
 
 show at least the existence of a popular myth 
 in which the university student figures always 
 with the same kind of character. Behind 
 every myth there is some reality. Even solar 
 myths, the vaguest myths there are, lead back 
 ultimately to the sun, which is indubitably 
 there. It seems to me that whether he actually 
 does these fine things or not, the American 
 university student has succeeded in impressing 
 the public with the idea that he is the kind of 
 man who might do them. That in itself is no 
 small achievement. 
 
 I wanted very much, because of the myth 
 and for other reasons, to see something of 
 American university life. I did see something, 
 a little of it, both at Yale and Princeton. 
 
 I have heard it said that the Englishman is 
 more attached to his school than to his univer- 
 sity, that in after life he will think of himself 
 as belonging to Eton, to Harrow, to Winchester, 
 rather than to Oxford or to Cambridge. The 
 school, for some reason, rather than the univer- 
 sity, is regarded as " the mother " from whom 
 the life of the man's soul flowed, to whom his 
 affection turns. An Oxford man or a Cam- 
 bridge man is indeed all his Hfe long proud, as 
 he very well may be, of his connection with his 
 
244 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 university, but his school is the subject of his 
 deepest feehng. Round it rather than the 
 university gathers that emotion which, for want 
 of better words, may be described as educational 
 patriotism. An Irishman, on the other hand, 
 if he is a graduate of Dublin University, thinks 
 more of " Trinity " than he does of his school. 
 He may have been at one of the most famous 
 English public schools, but his university, to a 
 considerable extent, obliterates the memories 
 of it. He thinks of himself through life as a 
 T.C.D. man. 
 
 America is like Ireland in this respect. I find, 
 looking back on my memories of the Ameri- 
 can men whom I met most frequently, that I 
 know about several of them whether they are 
 Yale men, Princeton men, or Harvard men. 
 I do not know about any single one of them 
 what school they belonged to. I never asked 
 any questions on the subject. Such informa- 
 tion as I got came to me accidentally. It came 
 to me without my knowing that I was getting 
 it. Only afterwards did I realise that I knew 
 A. to be a Yale man, B. to be a Harvard man, and 
 so forth. In England the information which 
 comes unsought about a man concerns his 
 school rather than his university. It is the 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 245 
 
 name of his school which drops from his lips 
 when he begins talking about old days. There 
 are oftener books about his school than about 
 his university on his shelves, photographs of 
 his school on the walls of his study. 
 
 I do not know that there is in the American 
 universities any definitely planned and deli- 
 berate effort to create or foster this spirit of 
 patriotism. There is certainly no such effort 
 apparent in Dublin University. The spirit 
 is there ; that is all that can be said. It per- 
 vades these institutions. Only an occasional 
 and more or less eccentric undergraduate 
 escapes its influence. 
 
 The patriotism is indeed much more obvious 
 and vocal in America than in Dublin. We had 
 the good luck to be present at a football match 
 between Yale and Colgate Universities. It 
 was not a match of first-rate importance, but 
 an enormous crowd of spectators gathered to 
 witness it. The excitement of the supporters 
 of both sides was intense. There was no pos- 
 sible mistake about the fact that professors and 
 undergraduates, old men who had graduated 
 long ago and boys who were not yet under- 
 graduates, wives, mothers and sisters of gradu- 
 ates and undergraduates, were all eagerly 
 
246 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 anxious about the result of the game. Yale, in 
 the end, was quite unexpectedly beaten. It is 
 not too much to say that a certain gloom was 
 distinctly noticeable afterwards everywhere in 
 Yale. It hung over people who were not 
 specially interested in athletics of any kind. It 
 affected the spirits of my host's parlourmaid. 
 
 Very shortly after my return home I watched 
 a football match between Dublin University 
 and Oxford. The play was just as keen and 
 sportsmanlike as the play between Yale and 
 Colgate ; but there was nothing like the same 
 general interest in the game. There was a 
 sprinkling of spectators round the ground, an 
 audience which could not compare in size 
 with that of Yale. They were interested in 
 the game, intelligently interested. They ap- 
 plauded good play when they saw it ; but 
 there was nothing to correspond to the tense 
 excitement which we witnessed in America. 
 The game was a game. If Dublin won, well 
 and good. If Oxford won, then Dublin must 
 try to do better next time. No one feared 
 defeat as a disaster. No one was prepared to 
 hail victory with wild enthusiasm. A stranger 
 could not have gone through Newhaven on the 
 day of the Yale and Colgate football match 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 247 
 
 without being aware that something of great 
 importance was happening. The whole town 
 seemed to be streaming towards the football 
 ground. In Dublin you might have walked 
 not only through the city but through most 
 parts of the college itself on the day of the 
 match against Oxford and you would not have 
 discovered, unless you went into the park, that 
 there was a football match. Yet the pride of 
 a Dublin man in his university is as deep and 
 lasting as that of any American. 
 
 The reason of the difference is perhaps to 
 be found in the fact that everything connected 
 with university athletics is far more highly 
 organised in America than on this side of the 
 Atlantic. The undergraduate spectators are 
 drilled to shout together. They practise 
 beforehand songs which they sing on the 
 occasion of the match for the encouragement 
 of their own side. Young men with mega- 
 phones stand in front of closely packed rows 
 of undergraduates. They give the signal for 
 shouting. With wavings of their arms they 
 conduct the yells of the crowd as musicians 
 conduct their orchestras. The result is some- 
 thing as different as possible from the casual, 
 accidental applause of our spectators. It is 
 
248 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 the difference between a winter rainstorm and 
 the shower of an April morning. This organ- 
 ised enthusiasm affects everyone present. 
 Sober-looking men and women shout and 
 wave little flags tumultuously. They cannot 
 help themselves. I understood, after seeing 
 that football match, why it is that America 
 produces more successful religious revivalists 
 than England does. The Americans realise 
 that emotion is highly infectious. They have 
 mastered the art of spreading it. I do not 
 know whether this is a useful art or not. It 
 probably is, if the emotion is a genuine and 
 worthy one ; but it is not pleasant to think 
 that one might be swept away, temporarily 
 intoxicated, by the skill of some organiser who 
 is engaged in propagating a morbid enthusi- 
 asm. However that may be, love for a univer- 
 sity is a thoroughly healthy thing. It cannot 
 be wrong to foster it by songs and shouts or 
 even — a curious reversion to the totem re- 
 ligion of our remote ancestors — by identifying 
 oneself with a bulldog or a tiger. 
 
 I met one evening some young men who 
 had graduated in Trinity College, Dublin, 
 and afterwards gone over for a post-graduate 
 course to a theological college connected with 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 249 
 
 one of the American universities. We talked 
 about Dublin chiefly, but I made one inquiry 
 from them about their American experience. 
 
 " I suppose," I said, " that you have to 
 work a great deal harder here than you did 
 at home ? " 
 
 Their answer was given with smiling 
 assurance. 
 
 " Oh, dear, no ; nothing like so hard." 
 
 I should like very much to have further 
 reliable information on this point. Some- 
 thing might be got, perhaps, by consulting a 
 number of Rhodes scholars at Oxford. My 
 impression— a vague one — is that the ordinary 
 undistinguished American undergraduate is 
 not required to work so hard as an under- 
 graduate of the same kind is in England or 
 Ireland. In an American magazine devoted to 
 education I came across an article which com- 
 plained that, in the matter of what may be 
 called examination knowledge, the American 
 undergraduate is not the equal of the English 
 undergraduate. He does not know as much 
 when he enters the university, and he does 
 not know as much when he leaves it. This 
 was an American opinion. It would be very 
 interesting to have it confirmed or refuted. 
 
2 50 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 But no one, on either side of the Atlantic, 
 supposes that the kind of knowledge which is 
 useful in examinations is of the first import- 
 ance. The value of a university does not de- 
 pend upon the number of facts which it can 
 drive into the heads of average men ; but on 
 whether it can, by means of its teaching and 
 its atmosphere, get the average man into the 
 habit of thinking nobly, largely, and sanely. 
 It seems certain that the American university 
 training does have a permanent effect on the 
 men who go through it, an effect like that 
 produced by English schools, and certainly also 
 by English universities, on their students. A 
 man who is, throughout life, loyal to his school 
 or university has not passed through it un- 
 influenced. It seems likely that the American 
 universities are succeeding in turning out very 
 good citizens. The existence of what I have 
 called the university student myth, the exist- 
 ence of a general opinion that university men 
 are likely to be found on the side of civic 
 righteousness, is a witness to the fact that the 
 universities are doing their main work well. 
 
 The little, the very little I was able to see of 
 university life helped me to understand how 
 the work is being done. The chapel services. 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 251 
 
 on weekdays and Sundays, were in many ways 
 strange to me, and I cannot imagine that I, 
 trained in other rituals, would find digestible 
 the bread of life which they provide. But I 
 was profoundly impressed by the reality of 
 them. Here was no official tribute to a God 
 conceived of as a constitutional monarch to 
 whom respect and loyalty is due but whose 
 will is of no very great importance, a tribute 
 saved perhaps from formality by the mystic 
 devotion of a few ; but an effort, groping and 
 tentative no doubt, to get into actual personal 
 touch with a divinity conceived of as not far 
 remote from common life. These chapel ser- 
 vices — exercises is the better word for them — 
 can hardly fail to have a profound effect upon 
 the ordinary man. I have stood in the chapel 
 of Oriel College at Oxford and felt that now 
 and then men of the finer kind, worshipping 
 amid the austere dignity of the place, might 
 grow to be saints, might see with their eyes 
 and handle with their hands the mysterious 
 Word of Life. I sat in the chapel at Princeton, 
 I listened to a sermon at Yale, and felt that 
 men of commoner clay might go out from 
 them to face a battering from the fists and 
 boots of Tammany gangsters. 
 
252 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 It seems to me significant that Americans 
 have not got the words " don " and " donnish." 
 They are terms of reproach in England, but 
 the very fact that they are in use proves that 
 they are required. They describe what exists. 
 The Americans have no use for the words 
 because they have not got the man or the 
 quahty which they name. The teaching staffs 
 of the American universities do not develop 
 the qualities of the don. They do not tend 
 to become a class apart with a special outlook 
 upon life. It is possible to meet a professor — 
 even a professor of English literature — in 
 ordinary society, to talk to him, to be intimate 
 with him and not to discover that he is a 
 professor. Charles Lamb maintained that 
 schoolmastering left an indelible mark upon a 
 man, that having schoolmastered he never 
 afterwards was quite the same as other men. 
 I had a friend once who boasted that he could 
 " spot " a parson however he was dressed, had 
 spotted parsons who were not dressed at all — 
 in Turkish baths. I do not believe that the 
 most careful student of professional manner- 
 isms could detect an American professor out 
 of his lecture-room. It is possible that this 
 note of ordinary worldliness in the members 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 253 
 
 of the staff of the American university has a 
 beneficial effect upon the students. It may 
 help to suggest the thought that a university 
 course is no more than a preparation for life, 
 is not, as most of us thought once, a thing 
 complete in itself. 
 
 In all good universities there is a broad 
 democratic spirit among the undergraduates. 
 They may, and sometimes do, despise the 
 students of other universities as men of in- 
 ferior class, but they only despise those of their 
 fellow students in their own university who, 
 according to the peculiar standards of youth, 
 deserve contempt. In American universities 
 this democratic spirit is stronger than it is 
 with us because there is greater opportunity 
 for its development. There are wider differ- 
 ences of wealth — it is difficult to speak of class 
 in America — among the university students 
 there than here. There are no men in English 
 or Irish universities earning their keep by 
 cleaning the boots and pressing the clothes of 
 their better endowed fellow students. In 
 American universities there are such men, and 
 it is quite possible that one of them may be 
 president of an important club, or captain of 
 a team, elected to these posts by the very men 
 
254 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 whose boots he cleans. If he is fit for such 
 honours they will be given him. The fact 
 that he cleans boots will not stand in his way. 
 The wisdom of medieval schoolmen made 
 room in universities for poor students, sizars, 
 servitors. The American universities, with 
 their committees of employment for students 
 who want to earn, are doing the old thing in 
 a new way ; and public opinion among the 
 undergraduates themselves approves. 
 
 On the subject of the higher university 
 education of girls American opinion is sharply 
 divided. There are people there, just as 
 there are in England, who say that the whole 
 thing is a mistake, that it is better for girls 
 not to go to college on any terms, under any 
 system. I suppose that we must call these 
 people reactionary. There cannot be very 
 many of them anywhere. It was a surprise to 
 me to find any at all in America. They are 
 not, I think, very influential. Among those 
 who favour the higher education of girls there 
 are many who believe whole-heartedly in co- 
 education. I had no opportunity of seeing a 
 co-educational college, but I listened to a de- 
 tailed description of the life in one from a 
 lady who had lived it. According to her co- 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 255 
 
 education is the one perfect system yet hit 
 upon. Its critics urge two curiously incon- 
 sistent objections to it. One man, who is a 
 philosopher and also seemed to know what he 
 was talking about, told me that boys and girls 
 educated together lose the sense of sex mystery, 
 which lies at the base of romantic love, and 
 consequently do not want to marry. Accord- 
 ing to his theory, based upon a careful obser- 
 vation of facts, the students of co-educational 
 universities never fall in love with each other 
 or with anyone else. If the system were 
 widely adopted and had this effect upon the 
 students everywhere, the results would cer- 
 tainly be very unfortunate. Another critic, 
 equally well informed, said that the real ob- 
 jection to co-education is that the students 
 do little else except fall in love with each other. 
 This, though no doubt educative in a broad 
 sense of the word, is not exactly the kind of 
 education we send boys and girls to universi- 
 ties to get. It must be very gratifying to the 
 friends of the system to feel that these two 
 objections cannot both be sound. 
 
 Co-educational colleges are chiefly to be 
 found in the west, among the newer states. 
 In the east girls get their higher education 
 
2s6 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 for the most part in colleges of their own. 
 Smith College, for instance, has no connection 
 with any of the men's universities. Nor has 
 Vasa, nor Bryn Mawr. These institutions 
 have their own staffs, their own courses and 
 examinations, their own rules, and confer 
 their own degrees. Barnard College, on the 
 other hand, is closely connected with Colum- 
 bia University, occupying much the same 
 position as Girton and St. Margaret's Hall do 
 with regard to Cambridge and Oxford, scarcely 
 as intimately joined to Columbia as Trinity 
 Hall is to Dublin University. I had the 
 opportunity of learning something of the life 
 of Smith College. I was immensely impressed 
 by the spirit of the place, as indeed I was by 
 that of all the girls' schools and colleges which 
 I saw. There was an infectious kind of eager- 
 ness about both pupils and teachers. There 
 is a feeling of hopefulness. It is as if life were 
 looked upon as a great and joyful adventure 
 in which many discoveries of good things may 
 be expected, much strenuous work may be done 
 gladly, in which no disillusion waits for those 
 who are of good heart. Not the girls alone, 
 but those who teach and guide them, are 
 young, young in the way which defies the 
 
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 257 
 
 passing of years to make them old. We are 
 not young because we have seen eighteen 
 summers and no more, or old because we 
 have seen eighty. We are old when we have 
 shut the doors of our hearts against the desire 
 of new things, and steeled ourselves against 
 the hope of good. We are young if we refuse, 
 even when our heads are grey, to believe that 
 disappointment inevitably waits for us. The 
 world and everything in it belongs to the 
 young. It is this pervading sense of youth- 
 fulness which makes the American girls' 
 colleges so fascinating to a stranger. It is not 
 difficult to believe that the girls who come out 
 of them are able to take their places by the 
 side of men in business life, or if the commoner 
 and happier lot waits them, are well fitted to 
 be the partners of men who do great things 
 and the mothers of men who will do greater 
 things stiU. 
 
 I take it that the American universities, 
 both those for men and women, are the 
 greatest things in America to-day. This, 
 curiously enough, is not the American idea. 
 The ordinary American citizen is proud of 
 every single thing in his country except his 
 universities. He is always a little apologetic 
 
258 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 about them. He compares his country with 
 England, and is convinced that America is 
 superior in every respect, except in the matter 
 of universities. When he speaks of the English 
 universities he shovs^s a certain sense of rever- 
 ence, and makes mention of his own much in 
 the spirit of Touchstone, who introduced 
 Audrey as " a poor thing, but my own." 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 
 
 The educated American seems to have a great 
 deal of affection for Ireland, but is not over 
 fond of Irishmen. Our country, considered 
 as an island situated on the far side of the 
 Atlantic, makes a strong appeal to him. It 
 is a land of a thousand vv^rongs, a pitiful waif 
 on the hard highway of the world. It smells 
 strongly of poetry and music in a minor key, 
 and the American is, like all good business 
 men, an incurable sentimentalist. 
 
 It is always pleasant to be loved, and it is 
 nice to feel that America has this affection for 
 our poor, lost land. But the love would 
 gratify us much more than it does if there 
 were a little less pity mixed up in it, and if 
 it were not taken for granted that we all write 
 poetry. I remember meeting an American 
 lady who was quite lyrical in her appreciation 
 of Ireland. She had penetrated into the 
 
 259 
 
26o CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 country as far as Avoca, making the trip from 
 Dublin in a motor car. She stayed, so she told 
 me, " in a dear old-fashioned inn in Dublin." 
 She had forgotten its name, but described its 
 situation to me very accurately. I could not 
 possibly make a mistake about it. My heart 
 was hot within me when I suggested that it 
 might have been the Shelbourne Hotel at 
 which she stayed. Her face lit up with a 
 gleam of recognition of the name. 
 
 " Yes," she said, " that's it, such a sweet 
 old place ; just Ireland all over, and really 
 quite comfortable when you get used to it." 
 
 Now the Shelbourne Hotel is our idea of a 
 thoroughly up-to-date cosmopolitan caravan- 
 serai. 
 
 Even after a visit to America and a con- 
 siderable experience of American hotels I 
 cannot think of the Shelbourne Hotel as an 
 inn, as old-fashioned, or as in any way Irish 
 except through the accident of its situation. 
 It evidently suggests to the American mind 
 tender thoughts of Mr. Yeats' " small cabin, 
 of mud and wattles made " on Innisfree. It 
 suggests no such thoughts to us. Dinner at 
 the Shelbourne Hotel costs five shillings : 
 nothing to an American, of course, but a 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 261 
 
 heavy price to us in Ireland. It consists of 
 several courses, and we think it quite a grand 
 dinner. It seems to the American that he is 
 at last reduced to the traditional Irish diet of 
 potatoes and potheen whisky. It is this way 
 of thinking about Ireland which takes the 
 sweetness out of the American's genuine 
 affection for our country. We do not mind 
 admitting that we are half a century behind 
 America in every respect, but we like to think 
 that we are making some progress. 
 
 An American's eyes soften when you talk 
 to him about Ireland, and you feel that at 
 any moment he may say " dear land," so deep 
 is his sentimental pity and affection for our 
 country. But his eyes harden when you 
 mention Irishmen, and you feel that at any 
 moment he may say something very nasty 
 about them. The plain fact is that Irishmen 
 are not very popular in America. We have, it 
 appears, managed the American's municipal 
 politics for him in several of his principal 
 cities, and he does not like it. But I am not 
 sure that his resentment is quite just. Some- 
 body must manage municipal politics every- 
 where. For a good many years the American 
 would not manage them himself. He was too 
 
262 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 busy making money to bother himself about 
 municipal politics. We took over the job — at 
 a price. He paid the price with a shrug of 
 the shoulders. I cannot see that he has much 
 to complain about. Lately he has kicked — 
 not against the size of the price : it is not the 
 American way to higgle about money — but 
 against there being any price at all. He has 
 got it into his head that municipal politics 
 ought to be run " free gratis and for nothing " 
 by high-souled patriotic men. I sincerely hope 
 that he will realise his ideal, though I doubt 
 whether any politics anywhere can be run in 
 that way. It will certainly be better for my 
 fellow-countrymen to earn their bread in any 
 way rather than by politics. But there is no 
 sense in being angry with us or abusing us. 
 We worked the machine and took our wages. 
 The American watched the machine running 
 and paid the wages. There was not much to 
 choose between him and us. 
 
 There is another reason why we are not as 
 popular as we might be — as no doubt we ought 
 to be — in America. We have remained Irish. 
 One of the most wonderful things about 
 America is its power of absorbing people. 
 Men and women flow into it from all corners 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 263 
 
 of the world, and in a very short time, in a 
 couple of generations, become American. I 
 have seen it stated that the very shapes of the 
 skulls of immigrants alter in America ; that 
 the son of an Italian man has an American 
 not an Italian skull, even if his mother also 
 came from Italy. Whether this change really 
 takes place in the bones of immigrants I do 
 not know. Quite as surprising a change cer- 
 tainly does take place in their nature. They 
 cease to be foreigners and become American. 
 But the Irish have never been thoroughly 
 Americanised. Their American citizenship 
 becomes a great and dear thing to them, but 
 they are still in some sense citizens of Ireland. 
 If a question ever arose in which American 
 interests clashed with Irish interests there 
 might well be a solid Irish vote in favour of 
 sacrificing America to Ireland. The Irish are 
 a partial exception to the rule that America 
 absorbs its immigrants. It has not thoroughly 
 absorbed us. 
 
 This is the shape which the Irish problem 
 has assumed in America. Here at home the 
 question is : is England to govern Irishmen ? 
 It has obviously failed to make Englishmen 
 of us. On the other side of the Atlantic the 
 
264 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 question is : are Irishmen to govern America ? 
 Americahas not succeeded in making Americans 
 of all of us so far. 
 
 So far. But the position of Irishmen in 
 America is changing. There was a time when 
 we took our place in the American social order 
 as hewers of wood and drawers of water. We 
 were the navvies, the labourers, the men who 
 handled the pickaxe and spade. Now it is 
 men of other races who do this work, Italians 
 and Slavs. We have risen in the scale. The 
 Irish emigrant who lands in New York to-day 
 starts higher up than the Irish emigrant of 
 twenty-five years ago. So long as we were 
 at the bottom of the social scale we were 
 bound together by a community of interest 
 and outlook as well as by nationality. We 
 were easily organised as a voting unit. But 
 men, as they rise in the world, tend more 
 and more to become individuals. They have 
 differing interests. They look at things in 
 different ways. They are far more difficult 
 to organise. The sense of original nationality 
 wiU remain to us, no doubt, as it remains 
 among Americans of Scottish descent. But 
 it may cease to be an effective political force. 
 
 The Ulster Irishman went to America in 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 265 
 
 large numbers before there was any great immi- 
 gration of southern and western Irishmen. He 
 fought his way up in the social scale very 
 quickly, and became thoroughly Americanised. 
 He has had a profound influence on American 
 civilisation and character. It has been the in- 
 fluence of digested food, not the force exer- 
 cised by a lump of dough swallowed hastily. 
 But in time even a lump of dough is digested 
 by a healthy stomach, and the gradual rise of 
 the Irish in the social life of America looks like 
 the beginning of the process of digestion. 
 
 There is something else besides the change 
 in his social position which wiU, in time, make 
 it easier for America to absorb thoroughly the 
 Irish immigrant. The Irish who went to 
 America during the last half of the nineteenth 
 century left their homes with a sense in them of 
 burning wrong. They were men who hated. 
 They hated England and all in Irish life which 
 stood for England. This hate bound them to- 
 gether. Irish political struggles, whether of 
 the Fenian or the Parnell type, appealed to 
 them. Ireland was, in one way or the other, 
 up against England. But all this has changed. 
 Irish politicians are no longer engaged in a 
 struggle with England. They are in alliance 
 
266 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 with one set of Englishmen, and only against 
 another set of Englishmen. There is in Irish 
 politics at home an appeal to the man of party 
 feeling. He is keen enough for his own party, 
 keen enough against the other party, but when 
 he gets to America neither of the parties at 
 home can move him to any special enthusiasm. 
 He no longer, when at home, hates England. 
 He hates, if hate is not too strong a word, some 
 Englishmen. There is a great difference be- 
 tween hating England and hating some English- 
 men, when you are so far away that all Eng- 
 lishmen get blurred. It is easy in Ireland to 
 feel that Codlin is the friend, not Short. It 
 is not so easy to distinguish Codlin from Short, 
 Liberal from Conservative, when they are both 
 no more than little dots, barely visible at a 
 distance of three thousand miles. Codlin gets 
 mixed up with Short. Some of the original 
 party hatred of Short attaches to Codlin, no 
 doubt. But some of the love for Codlin, love 
 which is the fruit of long alliance, passes to 
 Short. 
 
 I do not mean to suggest that the sense of 
 nationality has passed away from Ireland. It 
 has not. In some ways the spirit of nationality 
 is stronger in Ireland to-day than it was at any 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 267 
 
 time during the last century. It has certainly 
 penetrated to classes which used to have no 
 consciousness of nationality at all. There are 
 fewer Irishmen now who are ashamed of being 
 Irish. There are more men now than ever, in 
 every class, who want the good of Ireland as 
 distinguished from that of England, or of any 
 other country. But the sense of nationality 
 has to a very large extent passed out of Irish 
 political life. The platform appeal of the poli- 
 tician to the voter in Ireland now is far oftener 
 an appeal to Irishmen as part of the British 
 democracy, than to Irishmen as members of a 
 nation governed against its will by foreigners. 
 The ideas of John O'Leary, even the ideas of 
 ParneU, have almost vanished from Irish poli- 
 tical life. Instead of them we have the idea of 
 international democracy. 
 
 This change of feeling in Ireland itself will 
 make for a modification of the position of the 
 Irish in America. They will tend, as the older 
 generation passes, to become more American 
 and less Irish. This is already felt in Ireland 
 itself. Of late years there has arisen a strong 
 feeling against emigration. It is reaHsed, as 
 it used not to be, that Ireland loses those who 
 go. The feehng is quite new. The phrase, 
 
268 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 " a greater Ireland beyond the seas," is begin- 
 ning to mean a little less than it did, and the 
 general consciousness of patriotic Irishmen at 
 home is instinctively recognising this. But 
 it is noticeable that the dislike of emigration 
 has not found expression among politicians. 
 The movement is outside politics. The local 
 political boss is frequently an emigration agent 
 and feels no inconsistency in his position. 
 
 It would be quite easy to exaggerate the 
 present value of the change I have tried to 
 indicate. The old solidarity of the Irish in 
 America remains a fact. It is to Irish friends 
 and relatives that our emigrants go. It is 
 among Irish people that they live when they 
 settle in America. It is Irish people whom 
 they marry. But the tendency is towards a 
 breaking away from this national isolation. 
 
 The movement against emigration at home 
 has much in it besides the instinctive protest 
 of a nation against the loss of its people. It 
 is in part religious, and rests on a fear that faith 
 is more easily lost in America than in Ireland. 
 It is in part, no doubt, the result of shrinking 
 of sensitive and loving souls from the horror 
 of the great sorrow of farewell. 
 
 AU emotions lose their keenness with repeti- 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 269 
 
 tion. The fine rapture of a 307 is never quite 
 so delightful as it was when the joy came first 
 and was strange. The bitterness of sorrow 
 and disappointment gradually loses its inten- 
 sity when sorrow and disappointment become 
 familiar things. Even insults cease after a 
 while to move us to fierce anger. The law 
 is universal ; but there are some emotions 
 which are only very slowly dulled. The sad- 
 ness which comes of watching the departure 
 of a trainful of Irish emigrants is one of these. 
 We are, or ought to be, well accustomed to the 
 sight. Those of us who have lived long in the 
 country parts of Ireland have seen these trains, 
 and travelled a little way in them many times ; 
 but we are still saddened, hardly less saddened, 
 than when we saw them first. 
 
 There is one day in the week on which emi- 
 grants go, and in the west of Ireland one train 
 on that day by which they travel. It goes 
 slowly, stopping at every station, no matter 
 how small, and at every station there is the 
 same scene. The platform is crowded long 
 before the train comes in. There are many 
 old women weeping without restraint, mothers 
 these, or grandmothers of the boys and girls 
 who are going. Their eyes are swollen. 
 
270 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 Their cheeks are tear-stained. Every now and 
 then one of them wails aloud, and the others, 
 catching at the sound, wail with her, their 
 voices rising and falling in a kind of weird 
 melody, like the ancient plain -song of the 
 Church. There are men too, but they are 
 more silent. Very often their eyes are wet. 
 Their lips, tightly pressed, twitch spasmodi- 
 cally. Occasionally an uncontrollable sob 
 breaks from one of them. The boys and girls 
 who are to go are helplessly sorrow-stricken. 
 It is no longer possible for them to weep, for 
 they have wept too much already. They are 
 drooping despairingly. At their feet are car- 
 pet-bags and little yellow tin trunks, each bear- 
 ing a great flaring steamboat label. They 
 wear stiff new clothes ; shoddy tweed suits 
 from the shop of the village draper, dresses and 
 blouses long discussed with some country 
 dressmaker. These pitiful braveries mark 
 them out unmistakably from the men in muddy 
 frieze and the women in wide crimson petti- 
 coats, with shawls over their heads, who have 
 come to say good-bye. 
 
 The train comes in. There is a rush to the 
 carriage doors. Soon the windows of the 
 carriages are filled with tear-stained faces. 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 271 
 
 Hands are stretched out, grasped, held tight. 
 Final kisses are pressed on lips and cheeks. 
 The guard of the train gives his signal at last. 
 The engine whistles. A porter, mercifully 
 brutal, by main force pushes the people back. 
 The train moves slovs^ly, gathers speed. For 
 a while the crowd moves along the platform 
 beside the train. Then a long, sad cry rises, 
 swelling to a pitch of actual agony. Some brave 
 soul somewhere chokes down a sob, waves his 
 hat, and makes a pretence to cheer. Then the 
 scene is over. 
 
 What happens next in the railway carriages ? 
 For a while there is sobbing or silence. Then 
 wonder and the excitement of change begin to 
 take the place of grief. Words are whispered, 
 questions asked. Little stores of money are 
 taken out and counted over. Steamboat 
 tickets are examined, unfolded, folded, put 
 in yet securer places. Already the present is 
 something more than a dull ache ; and the 
 future is looked to as well as the past. 
 
 What happens next to the crowd which was 
 left behind ? In little groups the men and 
 women go slowly back along the country roads 
 to the houses left at dawn, go back to take up 
 the work of every day. Poverty is a merciful 
 
272 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 mistress to those whom she holds in bondage. 
 There are fields to be dug, the cattle to be 
 tended, the bread to be made. The steady- 
 succession of things which must be done dulls 
 the edge of grief. They suffer less who are 
 obliged to work as well as weep. But the 
 sorrow remains. He has but a shallow know- 
 ledge of our people who supposes that because 
 they go about the business of their lives after- 
 wards as they did before there is no lasting 
 reality in their grief. An Irish mother will 
 say : " I had seven childer, but there's only 
 two of them left to me now. I buried two 
 and three is in America." She classes those 
 who have crossed the sea with those who are 
 dead. Both are lost to her. 
 
 Sometimes those who have gone are indeed 
 lost utterly. There comes a letter once, and, 
 after a long interval, another letter. Then 
 no more letters nor any news at all. More 
 often there is some kind of touch kept with the 
 people at home. Letters come at Christmas 
 time, often with very welcome gifts of money 
 in them. There are photographs. Molly, 
 whom we all knew when she was a bare-footed 
 child running home from school, whom we re- 
 member as a half-grown girl climbing into her 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 273 
 
 father's cart on market-days, appears almost 
 as a stranger in her picture. Her clothes are 
 grand beyond our imaginings. Her face has 
 a new look in it. There are few Irish country 
 houses in which such photographs are not 
 shown with a mixture of pride and grief. It 
 is a fine thing that Molly is so grand. It is 
 a sad thing that Molly is so strange. 
 
 Sometimes, but not very often, a boy or a 
 girl comes home again, like a frightened child 
 to a mother. America is too hard for some of 
 us. These are beaten and return to the old 
 poverty, preferring it because the ways of Irish 
 poverty are less strenuous than the ways of 
 American success. Sometimes, but this is 
 rare too, a young man or woman returns, not 
 beaten, but satisfied with moderate success. 
 These bring with them money ; the girl a 
 marriage-portion for herself, the man enough 
 to restock his father's farm, which he looks to 
 inherit in the future. Sometimes older people 
 come back to buy land, build houses, and 
 settle down. But these are always afterwards 
 strangers in Irish life. They never recapture 
 the spirit of it. They have worked in America, 
 thought in America, breathed in America, 
 America has marked them as hers, and they 
 
 s 
 
274 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 are ours no longer though they come back 
 to us. 
 
 Often we have passing visits from those who 
 left us. The new easiness of travelling and 
 the comparative comfort of the journey make 
 these visits commoner than they were. Our 
 friends come back for two months or three. 
 It is wonderful to see how quickly they seem 
 to fall into the old ways. The young man, 
 who was perhaps an insurance agent in New 
 York, will fold away his city clothes and turn 
 to with a loy at cutting turf. The girl, who 
 got out of the train so fine to look at that her 
 own father hardly dared to greet her, will be 
 out next day in the fields making hay with her 
 sisters and brothers. 
 
 But there is a restlessness about these visi- 
 tors of ours. They want us to do new things. 
 They find much amiss which we had not 
 noticed. They are back with us, and glad to 
 be back ; but America is calling them all the 
 time. There is very much that we cannot 
 give. Soon they will go again, and any tears 
 shed at the second parting are ours, not theirs. 
 
 There are many histories of Ireland, dealing 
 sometimes with the whole, sometimes with 
 this or that part of her story. They are written 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 275 
 
 with the passion of patriots, with the bitter- 
 ness of enemies, with the bHnd fury of partisans, 
 with the cold justice of scientific men who 
 stand aloof. None of them are wholly satis- 
 factory as histories of England are, or histories 
 of America. No one can write a history of 
 Ireland which will set forth intelligibly Ire- 
 land's place in the world. We wait for the 
 coming of some larger-minded man who will 
 write the history, not of Ireland, but of the 
 Irish. In one respect it is not with us as it 
 is with other nations. Their stories centre in 
 their homes. Their conquerors go forth, but 
 return again. Their thinkers live amid the 
 scenes on which their eyes first opened. Their 
 contributions to human knowledge are con- 
 nected in all men's minds with their own lands. 
 The statesmen of other nations rule their own 
 people, build empires on which their own flag 
 flies. The workmen of other nations, captains 
 of industry or sweating labourers, make wealth 
 in their home lands. It has never been so with 
 us. 
 
 Our historian, when he comes and writes of 
 us, may take as the motto of his book, Virgil's 
 comment on the honey-making of the bees : 
 " Sic vos non vobis." Long ago we spread the 
 
276 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 gospel of the Cross over the dark places of 
 Europe. The monasteries of our raonks, the 
 churches of our missionary preachers were 
 everywhere. But our own land is still the prey 
 of that acrimonious theological bitterness which 
 is, of all things, the most utterly opposed to the 
 spirit of Christ. So we, but not for ourselves, 
 made sweetness. Kant is a German. Berg- 
 son is a Frenchman. All the world knows it. 
 Who knows or cares that John Scotus Erigena 
 or Bishop Berkeley were Irish ? The greatness 
 of their names has shed no lustre over us. Our 
 captains and soldiers have fought and won 
 under every flag in Europe, and under the stars 
 and stripes of America. Under our own flag 
 they rarely fought and never won. Statesmen 
 of our race have been among the governors of 
 almost every nation under the sun. Our own 
 land we have never governed yet. The names 
 of Swift, of Goldsmith, of Sheridan, of a score 
 of other men of letters, add to the glory of the 
 record of English literature, not of ours. Our 
 people, by their toil of mind and muscle, have 
 made other lands rich in manufacture and com- 
 merce. Ireland remains poor. 
 
 That is why there is not, and cannot be, a 
 history of Ireland. It is never in Ireland that 
 
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 277 
 
 our history has been made. The threads of 
 our story are ours — spun at home — but they 
 are woven into splendid fabrics elsewhere, not 
 in Ireland. But the history of the Irish people 
 will be a great work when it is written. There 
 will be strange chapters in it, and none stranger 
 than those which tell of our part in the making 
 of America. It will be a record of mingled 
 good and evil, but it will always have in it the 
 elements of high romance. From the middle 
 of the eighteenth century, when the tide of 
 emigration set westwards from Ulster, down 
 to to-day, when, with slackening force, it flows 
 from Connaught, those who went have always 
 been the men and women for whom life at 
 home seemed hopeless. There was no pro- 
 mise of good for them here. But in spite of 
 the intolerable sadness of their going, in spite 
 of the fact that at home they were beaten men, 
 there was in them some capacity for doing 
 things. We can succeed, it seems, elsewhere, 
 but not here. This is the strange law which 
 has governed our history. We recognise its 
 force everywhere for centuries back. America 
 gives the latest example of its working. An 
 Irishman returns from a visit to America won- 
 dering, despairing, hoping. The wonder is in 
 
278 CONNAUGHT TO CHICAGO 
 
 him because he knows those who went and has 
 seen the manner of their going. Success for 
 them seemed impossible, yet very often they 
 have succeeded. The despair is in him because 
 he knows that it has been always in other lands, 
 not in their own, that our people succeed, and 
 because there is no power which can alter the 
 decrees of destiny. But hope survives in him, 
 flickering, because what our people can do else- 
 where they can certainly do at home if only 
 we can discover the solution of the malignant 
 riddle of our failure. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by Kallantyne, Hanson ^ Co. 
 at Paul's Work, Edinburgh 
 
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