People of Destiny: Americans as I saw them at Home and Abroad

I had the luck to go to New York for the first time when the ordinary life of that City of Adventure-always so vital and dynamic in activity-was intensified by the emotion of historic days. The war was over, and the warriors were coming home with the triumph of victory as the reward of courage; but peace was still delayed and there had not yet crept over the spirits of the people the staleness and disillusionment that always follow the ending of war, when men say: "What was the use of it, after all? Where are gratitude and justice? Who pays me for the loss of my leg?"...

The emotion of New York life was visible in its streets. The city itself, monstrous, yet dreamlike and mystical as one sees it first rising to fantastic shapes through the haze of dawn above the waters of the Hudson, seemed to be excited by its own historical significance. There was a vibration about it as sunlight splashed its gold upon the topmost stories of the skyscrapers and sparkled in the thousand windows of the Woolworth Tower and flung black bars of shadow across the lower blocks. Banners were flying everywhere in the streets that go straight and long between those perpendicular cliffs of masonry, and the wind that comes blowing up the two rivers ruffled them. They were banners of rejoicing, but reminders also of the service and sacrifice of each house from which they were hanging, with golden stars of death above the heads of the living crowds surging there below them. In those decorations of New York I saw the imagination of a people conscious of their own power, and with a dramatic instinct able to impress the multitudes with the glory and splendor of their achievement. It was the same sense of drama that is revealed commercially in the genius of advertisement which startled me when I first walked down Broadway, dazzled by moving pictures of light, by flashing signs that shouted to me from high heaven to buy chewing-gum and to go on chewing; and squirming, wriggling, revolving snakes of changing color that burned letters of fire into my brain, so that even now in remembrance my eyes are scorched with the imprint of a monstrous kitten unrolling an endless reel of cotton. The "Welcome Home" of American troops was an advertisement of American manhood, idealized by emotion; and it was designed, surely, by an artist whose imagination had been touched by the audacity of the master-builders of New York who climb to the sky with their houses. I think it was inspired also by the vision of the moving-picture kings who resurrect the gorgeous life of Babylon, and re-establish the court of Cleopatra, for Theda Bara, the "Movie Queen." When the men of the Twenty-seventh Division of New York came marching home down Fifth Avenue they passed through triumphal arches of white plaster that seemed solid enough to last for centuries, though they had grown high, like Jack's beanstalk, in a single night; and the troops glanced sideways at a vast display of Indian trophies with tattered colors like those of sunburnt wigwams where the spears of the "braves" were piled above the shields of fallen warriors.

"Like an undergraduate's cozy corner," said an unkind wit, and New York laughed, but liked the symbolism of those shields and went on with astonished eyes to gaze at the masterpiece of Chalfin, the designer of it all, which was a necklace like a net of precious jewels, suspended, between two white pillars surmounted by stars, across the Avenue. At night strong searchlights played upon this necklace, and at the end of those bars of white radiance, shot through the darkness, the hanging jewels swayed and glittered with a thousand delicate colors like diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Night after night, as I drove down Fifth Avenue, I turned in the car to look back at the astonishing picture of that triumphal archway, and saw how the long tide of cars behind was caught by the searchlights so that all their metal was like burnished gold and silver; and how the faces of dense crowds staring up at the suspended necklace were all white-dead-white as Pierrot's; and how the sky above New York and the tall clifflike masses of masonry on each side of Fifth Avenue were fingered by the outer radiance of the brightness that was blinding in the heart of the city. To me, a stranger in New York, unused to the height of its buildings and to the rush of traffic in its streets, these illuminations of victory were the crowning touch of fantasy, and I seemed to be in a dream of some City of the Future, among people of a new civilization, strange and wonderful. The soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Division were not overcome by emotion at this display in their honor. "That's all right," they said, grinning at the cheering crowds, "and when do we eat?" Those words reminded me of Tommy Atkins, who would go through the hanging-gardens of Babylon itself-if the time-machine were switched back-with the same shrewd humor.

The adventure of life in New York, always startling and exciting, I am certain, to a man or woman who enters its swirl as a stranger, was more stirring at the time of my first visit because of this eddying influence of war's back-wash. The city was overcrowded with visitors from all parts of the United States who had come in to meet their home-coming soldiers, and having met them stayed awhile to give these boys a good time after their exile. This floating population of New York flowed into all the hotels and restaurants and theaters. Two new hotels-the Commodore and the Pennsylvania-were opened just before I came, and, with two thousand bedrooms each, had no room to spare, and did not reduce the population of the Plaza, Vanderbilt, Manhattan, Biltmore, or Ritz-Carlton. I watched the social life in those palaces and found it more entertaining than the most sensational "movie" with a continuous performance. The architects of those American hotels have vied with one another in creating an atmosphere of richness and luxury. They have been prodigal in the use of marble pillars and balustrades, more magnificent than Roman. They have gone to the extreme limit of taste in gilding the paneled walls and ceilings from which they have suspended enormous candelabra like those in the palace of Versailles. I lost myself in the vastness of tea-rooms and lounges, and when invited to a banquet found it necessary to bring my ticket, because often there are a dozen banquets in progress in one hotel, and there is a banqueting-room on every floor. When I passed up in the elevator of one hotel I saw the different crowds in the corridors surging toward those great lighted rooms where the tables were spread with flowers, and from which came gusts of "jazz" music or the opening bars of "The Star-spangled Banner."

In all the dining-rooms there rises the gusty noise of many conversations above the music of an orchestra determined to be heard, and between the bars of a Leslie Stuart waltz, or on the last beat of the "Humoreske," a colored waiter says, "Chicken okra, sah?" or "Clam chowder?" and one hears the laughing words of a girl who asks, "Do you mind if I powder my nose?" and does so with a glance at a little gold mirror and a dab from a little gold box. The vastness, and the overwhelming luxury, of the New York hotels was my first and strongest impression in this city, after I had recovered from the sensation of the high fantastic buildings; but it occurred to me very quickly that this luxury of architecture and decoration has no close reference to the life of the people. They are only visitors in la vie de luxe-and do not belong to it, and do not let it enter into their souls or bodies. In a wealthier, more expansive way, they are like the city clerks and their girls in London who pay eighteenpence for a meal in marble halls at Lyon's Popular Café and sit around a gilded menu-card, saying, "Isn't it wonderful ... and shall we go home by tram?" There are many rich people in New York-more, I suppose, than in any other city of the world-but, apart from cosmopolitan men and women who have luxury beneath their skins, there is no innate sense of it in the social life of these people. In the hotel palaces, as well as in the private mansions along Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, all their outward splendor does not alter the simplicity and honesty of their character. They remain essentially "middle-class" and have none of the easy licentiousness of that European aristocracy which, before the war, flaunted its wealth and its vice in Paris, Vienna, Monte Carlo, and other haunts where the cocottes of the world assembled to barter their beauty, and where idle men went from boredom to boredom in search of subtle forms of pleasure. American women of wealth spend vast sums of money on dress, and there is the glitter of diamonds at many dinner-tables, but most of them have too much shrewdness of humor to play the "vamp," and the social code to which they belong is swept clean by common sense. "My dear," said an American hostess who belongs to one of the old rich families of New York, "forgive me for wearing my diamonds to-night. It must shock you, coming from scenes of ruin and desolation." This dowager duchess of New York, as I like to think of her, wore her diamonds as the mayor of a provincial town in England wears his chain of office, but as she sat at the head of her table in one of the big mansions of New York I saw that wealth had not cumbered the soul of this masterful lady, whose views on life are as direct and simple as those of Abraham Lincoln. She was the middle-class housewife in spite of the footmen who stood in fear of her.

Essentially middle-class in the best sense of the word were the crowds I met in the hotels. The men were making money-lots of it-by hard work. They had taken a few days off, or left business early, to meet their soldier-sons in these gilded halls where they had a sense of satisfaction in spending large numbers of dollars in a short time.

"This is my boy from 'over there'! Just come back."

I heard that introduction many times, and saw the look of pride behind the glasses that were worn by a gray-eyed man, who had his hand on the arm of an upstanding fellow in field uniform, tall and lean and hard. "It's good to be back," said one of these young officers, and as he sat at table he looked round the huge salon with its cut-glass candelabra, where scores of little dinner-parties were in progress to the strident music of a stringed band, and then, with a queer little smile about his lips, as though thinking of the contrast between this scene and "over there," said, "Darned good!" In their evening frocks the women were elegant-they know how to dress at night-and now and then the fresh, frank beauty of one of these American girls startled my eyes by its witchery of youth and health. Some of them are décolleté to the ultimate limit of a milliner's audacity, and foolishly I suffered from a sense of confusion sometimes because of the physical revelations of elderly ladies whose virtue, I am sure, is as that of C?sar's wife. The frail queens of beauty in the lotus-garden of life's enchanted places would envy some of the frocks that come out of Fifth Avenue, and scream with horror at their prices. But although the American woman with a wealthy husband likes to put on the flimsy robes of Circe, it is only as she would go to a fancy-dress ball in a frock that would make her brother say: "Gee!... And where did you get that bit of fluff?" She is Circe, with the Suffrage, and high ideals of life, and strong views on the League of Nations. She makes up her face like a French comédienne, but she has, nine times out of ten, the kind heart of a parson's wife in rural England and a frank, good-natured wit which faces the realities of life with the candor of a clean mind.

I found "gay life" in New York immensely and soberly respectable. One could take one's maiden aunt into the heart of it and not get hot by her blushes. In fact, it is the American maiden aunt who sets the pace of the fox-trot and the one-step in dancing-rooms where there are music and afternoon tea. Several times I supped "English breakfast tea"-I suspect Sir Thomas Lipton had something to do with it-at five o'clock on bright afternoons, watching the scene at Sherry's and Delmonico's. It seemed to me that this dancing habit was a most curious and over-rated form of social pleasure. It was as though American society had said, "Let us be devilishly gay!" but started too early in the day, with desperate sobriety. Many couples left the tea-table for the polished boards and joined the throng which surged and eddied in circles of narrow circumference, jostled by other dancers. Youth did not have it all its own way. On the contrary, I noticed that bald-headed gentlemen with some width of waistbands were in the majority, dancing with pridigious gravity and the maiden aunts. They were mostly visitors, I am told, from other cities-Bostonians escaping from the restrictions of their Early Victorian atmosphere, senators who voted for prohibition in their own states, business men who had booked reservations on midnight trains from Grand Central Terminal. Here and there young officers of the army and navy led out pretty girls, and with linked arms, and faces very close together, danced in a kind of coma, which they seemed to enjoy, though without any sparkle in their eyes. There were also officers of other nations-a young Frenchman appealing to the great heart of the American people on behalf of devastated France, and dancing for the sake of people scorched by the horrors of war, to say nothing of the little American girl whose yellow fringe was on his Croix de Guerre; and young English officers belonging to the British Mission, and engaged in propaganda-oh, frightful word!-of which a thé dansant at Delmonico's was, no doubt, a serious part of duty. One figure that caught my eye gave the keynote to the moral and spiritual character of the scene. It was the figure of a stout old lady wearing a hat with a huge feather which waggled over her nose as she danced the one-step with earnest vivacity, and an old gentleman with side-whiskers. She panted as she came back to the tea-table, and said, "Say, that makes me feel young!" It occurred to me that she might be Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch on a visit to New York, and anyhow her presence assured me that afternoon dancing at Delmonico's need not form the theme of any moralist in search of vice in high places. It is not only respectable, it is domestic. Savonarola himself would not have denounced such innocent amusement. Nor did I find anything to shock the sensibilities of high-souled ethics in such midnight haunts as the Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden, except the inanity of all such shows where large numbers of pretty girls and others disport themselves in flowing draperies and colored lights before groups of tired people who can hardly hide their boredom, but yawn laughingly over their cocktails and say, "Isn't she wonderful?" when Mollie King sings a song about a variety of smiles, and discuss the personality of President Wilson between comic turns of the Dooley brothers. That at least is what happened in my little group on the roof of the Century Theater, where a manufacturer of barbed wire-I wonder if they were his barbs on which I tore myself in Flanders fields-initiated me into the mystery of a Bacardi cocktail followed by a stinger, from which I was rescued, in the nick of time, by a kind lady on my right who took pity on my innocence. A famous playwright opposite, as sober as a judge, as courteous as Beau Brummell, passed the time of day, which was a wee small hour of morning, with little ladies who came into the limelight, until suddenly he said, with a sigh of infinite impatience, "Haven't we enjoyed ourselves enough? I want my bed"; so interrupting a serious discussion between a war correspondent and a cartoonist on the exact truth about German atrocities, to the monstrous melody of a jazz band. Human nature is the same in New York as in other cities of the world. Passion, weakness, folly, are not eliminated from the relations between American men and women. But to find vice and decadence in American society one has to go in search of it; and I did not go. I found New York society tolerant in its views, frank in its expression of opinion, fond of laughter, and wonderfully sincere. Wealth does not spoil its fresh and healthy outlook on life, and its people are idealists at heart, with a reverence for the old-fashioned virtues and an admiration for those who "make good" in whatever job to which they put their hands.

After all, hotel life, and restaurant life, and the glamorous world of the Great White Way, do not reveal the real soul of New York. They are no more a revelation of normal existence than boulevard life in Paris represents the daily round of the average Parisian. They are the happy hunting-grounds of the transient, and the real New-Yorker only visits them in hours of leisure and boredom.

Another side of the adventure of life in New York is "downtown," where the subways and the overhead railways pour out tides of humanity who do not earn their dollars without hard work and long hours of it. I should never have found my way to Bowling Green and Wall Street without a guide, because the underground world of the subways, where electric trains go rushing like shuttles through the warp and woof of a monstrous network, is utterly confusing to a stranger. But with the guide, who led me by the hand and laughed at my childlike bewilderment, I came into the heart of New York business life and saw its types in their natural environment. It is an alarming world to the wanderer who comes there suddenly. I confess that when I first walked through those deep gorges, between the mighty walls of houses as high as mountains in a surge of humanity in a hurry, I felt dazed and cowardly. I had a conviction that my nerve-power would never survive the stress and strain of such a life in such a place. I nearly dislocated my neck by gazing up at the heights of the skyscrapers, rising story on story to fifty or sixty floors. In a House of a Thousand Windows I took the elevator to the top story and wished I hadn't when the girl in charge of the lift asked, "What floor?" and was answered by a quiet gentleman who said, "Thirty-one." That was our first stop, and in the few seconds we took to reach this altitude I had a vision of this vast human ant-heap, with scores of offices on each floor, and typewriters clicking in all of them, and girl-clerks taking down letters from hard-faced young men juggling with figures which, by the rise or drop of a decimal point, mean the difference between millions of dollars in the markets of the world. Each man and woman there in this House of a Thousand Windows had a human soul, with its own little drama of life, its loves and hopes and illusions, but in the vastness of one skyscraper, in the whirlpool of commerce, in the machinery of money-making, the humanities of life seemed to be destroyed and these people to be no more than slaves of modern civilization, ruthless of their individual happiness. What could they know of art, beauty, leisure, the quiet pools of thought?... Out in Wall Street there was pandemonium. The outside brokers-the curb men-were bidding against one another for stocks not quoted on the New York Exchange-the Standard Oil Company among them-and their hoarse cries mingled in a raucous chorus. I stood outside a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely it was a madhouse, surrounded by other homes for incurably insane! This particular house was a narrow, not very tall, building of reddish brown brick, like a Georgian house in London, and out of each window, which was barred, poked two rows of faces, one above the other, as though the room inside were divided by a false floor. In the small window-frames sat single figures, in crouched positions, with telephone receivers on their ears and their faces staring at the crowd in the street below. Each one of those human faces, belonging to young men of healthy appearance, was making most hideous grimaces, and each grimace was accompanied by strange, incomprehensible gestures of the man's fingers. With a thumb and two fingers, or a thumb and three fingers, they poked through the windows with violent efforts to attract the notice of individuals in the street. I saw, indeed, that all this fingering had some hidden meaning and that the maniacs as I had first taken them to be were signaling messages to the curb brokers, who wore caps of different colors in order to be distinguished from their fellows. Up and down the street, and from the topmost as well as from the lower stories of many buildings, I saw the grimaces and the gestures of the window-men, and the noise and tumult in the street became more furious. It was a lively day in Wall Street, and I thanked God that my fate had not led me into such a life. It seemed worse than war....

Not really so, after all. It was only the outward appearance of things that distressed one's soul. Looking closer, I saw that all these young men on the curb seemed very cheery fellows, and were enjoying themselves as much as boys in a Rugby "scrum." There was nothing wrong with their nerves. There was nothing wrong with a crowd of young business men and women with whom I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called Robin's, not far from the Stock Exchange. These were the working-bees of the great hive which is New York. They were in the front-line trenches of the struggle for existence, and they seemed as cheerful as our fighting-men who were always less gloomy than the fellows at the rear in the safe back-waters of war. Business men and lady-clerks, typists, and secretaries, were all mingled at the little tables where the backs of chairs touched, and there was a loud, incessant chatter like the noise of a parrot-house. I overheard some fragments of conversation at the tables close to me.

"They don't seem to be getting on with the Peace Conference," said a young man with large spectacles. "All the little nations are trying to grab a bit of their neighbors' ground."

"I saw the cutest little hat-" said a girl whose third finger was stained with red ink.

"Have you seen that play by Maeterlinck?" asked an elderly man so like President Wilson's portraits that he seemed to be the twin brother of that much-discussed man.

These people were human all through, not at all dehumanized, after all, because they lived maybe on the thirty-first story of a New York skyscraper. I dare say also that their work is not so strenuous as it looks from the outside, and that they earn more dollars a week than business men and women of their own class in England, so that they have more margin for the pleasures of life, for the purchase of a "cute little hat," even for a play by Maeterlinck.

After business hours many of these people hurry away from New York to suburbs, where they get quickly beyond the turmoil of the city in places with bustling little high streets of their own and good shops and, on the outskirts, neat little houses of wooden framework, in gardens where flowers grow between great rocks which crop out of the soil along the Connecticut shore. They are the "commuters," or, as we should say in England, the season-ticket-holders, and, as I did some "commuting" myself during a ten weeks' visit to America, I used to see them make a dash for their trains between five and six in the afternoon or late at night after theater-going in New York. I never tired of the sight of those crowds in the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal or in the Pennsylvania Station, and saw the very spirit of the United States in those vast buildings which typify modern progress. In England a railway station is, as a rule, the ugliest, most squalid place in any great city; but in America it is, even in provincial towns, a great adventure in architecture, where the mind is uplifted by nobility of design and imagination is inspired by spaciousness, light, color, and silence. It is strangely, uncannily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsylvania Station, as one comes down a long broad flight of steps to the vast floor space below a high dome-painted blue like a summer sky, with golden stars atwinkling-uplifted on enormous arches. It is like entering a great cathedral, and, though hundreds of people are scurrying about, there is a hush through the hall because of its immense height, in which all sound is lost, and there is no noise of footsteps and only a low murmur of voices. So it is also in the Grand Central Terminal, where I found myself many times before the last train left. There is no sign of railway lines or engines, or the squalor of sidings and sheds. All that is hidden away until one is admitted to the tracks before the trains start. Instead, there are fruit-stalls and flower-stalls bright with color, and book-stalls piled high with current literature from which every mind can take its choice, and candy-stalls where the aching jaw may find its chewing-gum, and link up meditation with mastication, on the way to New Rochelle-"forty-five minutes from Broadway"-or to the ruralities of Rye, Mamaroneck, and Port Chester, this side of high life in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Some of the male commuters have a habit of playing cards between New York and New Rochelle, showing an activity of mind not dulled by their day's work in town. But others indulge in conversational quartets, and on these journeys I heard more than I wanted to know about the private life of President Wilson, and things I wanted to learn about the experiences of American soldiers in France, the state of feeling between America and England, and the philosophy of success by men who had succeeded. It was a philosophy of simple virtue enforced by will-power and a fighting spirit. "Don't hit often," said one of these philosophers, who began life as an errand-boy and now designs the neckwear of society, "but, when you do, hit hard and clean. No man is worth his salt unless he loses his temper at the right time."

In the last train to Greenwich were American soldiers and mariners just back from France, who slept in corners of the smoking-coach and wakened with a start at New Rochelle, with a dazed look in their eyes, as though wondering whether they had merely dreamed of being home again and were still in the glades of the Argonne forest.... The powder was patchy on the nose of a tired lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a man in evening clothes chewing an unlighted cigar and thinking, with a little smile about his lips, of something that had happened in the evening. Two typist-girls with their mothers had been to a lecture by Captain Carpenter, V.C., one of the heroes of Zeebrugge. They were "crazy" about him. They loved his description of the "blunt end" and the "pointed end" of the ship. They had absorbed a lot of knowledge about naval tactics; and they were going to buy his photograph to put over their desks....

Part of the adventure of life in New York is the acquisition of unexpected knowledge by means of lectures; and Carnegie Hall is the Mecca of lecturers. Having been one of the lecturers, I can speak from personal experience when I say that a man who stands for the first time on the naked desert of that platform, looking toward rows of white faces and white shirt-fronts to the farthest limit of the topmost galleries, feels humility creep into his soul until he shrinks to the size of Hop-o'-My-Thumb and is the smallest, loneliest thing in the whole wide world. A microbe is a monster to him, and he quakes with terror when he hears the first squeak of his tiny voice in the vast spaciousness under that high, vaulted roof. On that first night of mine I would have sold myself, with white shirt, cuff-links, and quaking body, for a two-cent piece, if any one had been fool enough to buy me and let me off that awful ordeal. And yet, looking back on it now, I know that it was the finest hour of my life, and a wonderful reward for small service, when all those people rose to greet me, and there came up to me out of that audience a spiritual friendship so warm and generous that I felt it like the touch of kindly hands about me, and recovered from my fright. Afterward, as always happens in America, there was a procession of people who came onto the platform to shake hands and say words of thanks, so that one gets into actual touch with all kinds of people and their friendship becomes personal. In that way I made thousands of friends in America and feel toward them all a lasting gratitude because of the generous, warm-hearted, splendid things they said as they passed with a quick hand-clasp. The lecture habit in America is deep-rooted and widespread. Every small town has its lecture-hall, and is in competition with every other town near by for lecturers who have some special fame or knowledge. In New York there is an endless series of lectures, not only in places like Carnegie Hall and ?olian Hall, but in clubs and churches. Great audiences, made up of rich society people as well as the "intellectuals" and the professional classes, gather in force to hear any man whose personality makes him interesting or who has something to say which they want to hear. In many cases personality is sufficient. People of New York will cheerfully pay five dollars to see a famous man, and not think their money wasted if his words are lost in empty space, or if they know already as much as he can tell them about the subject of his speech. Marshal Joffre had no need to prepare orations. When he said, "Messieurs et mesdames" they cheered him for ten minutes, and when, after that, he said, "je suis enchanté" they cheered him for ten minutes more. They like to see the men who have done things, the men who count for something, and to study the personality of a man about whom they have read. If he has something to tell them, so much the better, and if he is not renowned he must tell them something pretty good if he wants their money and their patience. I have no doubt that the habit of lecture-going is one of the greatest influences at work in the education of the American people. The knowledge they acquire in this way does not bite very deep, and it leaves, I fancy, only a superficial impression, but it awakens their intelligence and imagination, directs their thoughts to some of the big problems of life, and is a better way of spending an evening than idle gossip or a variety entertainment. The League for Political Education which I had the honor of addressing in Carnegie Hall has a series of lectures-three times a week, I think-which are attended by people engaged in every kind of educative and social work in New York, and at a luncheon afterward I listened to a number of speeches by public men and women more inspiring in their sincerity of idealism than anything I have heard in similar assemblies. All these people were engaged in practical work for the welfare of their fellow-creatures, as pioneers of progress in the adventure of life in New York, and the women especially, like Jane Addams, impressed me by the real beauty of their personality.

Another phase of life which interested me was the club world of the city, and in these clubs I met most of the men and many of the women who count in the intellectual activity of New York. I came in touch there with every stratum of thought and tradition which makes up the structure of American politics and ideas. I met the conservatives of the Union Club who live in an atmosphere of dignified austerity (reminding me of the Athen?um Club in London, where the very waiters have the air of bishops and the political philosophy of the late Lord Salisbury), and who confided to me with quiet gravity their personal and unprintable opinions of Mr. Wilson; I became an honorary member of the Union League Club, hardly less conservative in its traditional outlook and having a membership which includes many leading business and professional men of New York City. It was here that I saw a touching ceremony which is one of my best memories of the United States, when the negro troops of a fighting regiment marched up Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, and gave back their colors for safe-keeping to the Union League Club, which had presented them when they went to war. Ex-Governor Hughes, speaking from the balcony, praised them for their valor in the great conflict for the world's liberty, when they fought for the country which had given them their own freedom by no light sacrifice of blood. By their service in France they had gained a glory for their citizenship in the United States and stood equal with their white comrades in the gratitude of the American people. There were tears in the eyes of colored officers when, after a luncheon in the Union League Club, they heard other words like those, giving honor to the spirit of their race.... Up the wide stairway of the club, in the softly glowing light which comes through a stained-glass window, the colors of the darky regiment hang as a memorial of courage and sacrifice....

I was the guest of the Arts Club amid a crowd of painters, poets, musicians, and writing-men, who sat at long tables in paneled rooms decorated with pictures and caricatures which were the work of their own members. Clouds of tobacco smoke made wreaths above the board. A soldier-poet rose between the courses and sang his own songs to the chorus of his comrades. It was a jolly night among jolly good fellows, who had wit, and the gift of laughter, and large hearts which beat in sympathy for those who suffered in the war.... In the City Club I had a room when I wanted it, and the hall porter and the bell-boys, and the elevator-man, and the clerks in the office, shook hands with me when I went in and out, so that I felt at home there, after a splendid night when crowds of ladies joined the men to listen to my story of the war, and when a famous glee-party sang songs to me across rose garlands on the banquet table. The City Club has a number of habitués who play dominoes on quiet nights, and in deep leather chairs discuss the destiny of nations as men who pull the wires which make the puppets dance. It is the home of the foreign correspondents in New York, who know the inside of international politics, and whose president is (or was, at the time of my visit) a kindly, human, English soul with a genius for fellowship which has made a little League of Nations in this New York house. I met him first, as a comrade of the pen, in the Street of Adventure, where London journalists rub shoulders on their way to history; and in New York his friendship was a generous and helpful gift, and by his good words I made many other friends.

It seemed to me that New York is a city where friendship is quickly made, and I found that the best part of my adventure in the city. Day after day, when dusk was creeping into the streets and lights began to gleam in all the windows of the houses that reach up to the stars, I drove down the long highway of Fifth Avenue with a certainty that before the evening was out I should meet a number of friendly souls who would make me welcome at their tables and reveal their convictions and ideals with a candor which does not come to English people until their ice of reserve is broken or thawed. And that was always so. At a small dinner-party or a big reception, in one of the great mansions of New York, or in a suite of rooms high above the traffic of the street, conversation was free-and-easy, with or without the aid of a cocktail, and laughter came in gusts, and American men and women spoke of the realities of life frankly and without camouflage, with a directness and sincerity that touched the essential truth of things. In one room Melba sang with eternal girlhood in her voice, while painters and diplomats, novelists, and wits, famous actresses and princesses of New York, were hushed into silence for a while, until, when the spell was broken, there rose again a merry tumult of tongues. In another room a group of "intellectuals," tired of talking about war and peace, played charades like children in the nursery, and sat down to drawing games with shouts of mirth at a woman's head with the body of a fish and the legs of a bird. In another house the King's Jester of New York, who goes from party to party like a French wit-the little Abbé Morellet-in the salons of France before the Revolution, destroyed the dignity of decorous people by a caricature of German opera and an imitation of a German husband eating in a public restaurant. I knew the weakness that comes from a surfeit of laughter.... I did not tire of these social adventures in New York, and I came to see something of the spirit of the people as it was revealed in the cosmopolitan city. I found that spirit touched, in spite of social merriment, by the tragedy of war, and anxious about the outcome of peace. I found these people conscious of new responsibilities thrust upon them by fate, and groping in their minds for some guidance, for some clear light upon their duty and destiny in the reshaping of the world by the history that has happened. Europe, three thousand miles away, is still a mystery to them, full of unknown forces and peoples and passions which they cannot understand, though they read all their Sunday papers, with all their bulky supplements. When I went among them they were divided by the conflict of political differences with passionate emotion, and torn between conflicting ideals of patriotism and humanity. But most of them put on one side, with a fine disdain, all meanness of thought and action and the dirty squalor of financial interests. Sure of their power among nations, the people I met-and I met many of the best-were anxious to rise to their high chance in history and to do the Big Thing in a big way, when they saw the straight road ahead.

When I left New York they were raising their fifth great Victory Loan, and the streets were draped in banners bearing the great V for Victory and for the number of the loan. Their sense of drama was at work again to make this enterprise successful, and their genius of advertisement was in action to put a spell upon the people. The face of a farmer was on the posters in many streets, and that sturdy old fellow upon whose industry the wealth of America depends so much, because it is founded in the soil, put his hand in his pocket and said, "Sure, we'll see it through!"

From my brief visit one conviction came to me. It is that whatever line of action the American people take in the new world that is now being born out of the tumult of war, they will see it through, by any sacrifice and at any cost.

* * *

As a professional onlooker of life (and it is a poor profession, as I must admit) it has always been my habit to study national and social types in any country where I happen to be. I find an untiring interest in this, and prefer to sit in a French café, for example, watching the people who come in and out, and hearing scraps of conversation that pass across the table, to the most thrilling theatrical entertainment. And I find more interest in "common" people than in the uncommonly distinguished, by fame and power.

To me the types in a London omnibus or a suburban train are more absorbing as a study than a group of generals or a party of statesmen, and I like to discover the lives of the world's nobodies, their way of thought and their outlook on the world, by the character in their faces and their little social habits. In that way one gets a sense of the social drama of a country and of the national ideals and purpose. So when I went to the United States after four and a half years in the war zone, where I had been watching another kind of drama, hideous and horrible in spite of all its heroism, I fell into my old habit of searching for types and studying characters. I had unusual opportunity. New York and many other cities opened their hearts and their houses to me in a most generous way, and I met great numbers of people of every class and kind.

The first people I met, before I had stepped off my ship of adventure, were young newspaper men who searched the ship like a sieve for any passenger who had something in his life or brain worth telling to the world. I was scared of them, having heard that they could extract the very secrets of one's soul by examination of the third degree; but I found them human and friendly fellows who greeted me cheerily and did not take up much time when they set me up like a lay-figure on the boat deck, turned on the "movie"-machine, snap-shotted me from various angles, and offered me American cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I met many other newspaper men and women in the United States; those who control the power of the press-the masters of the machine which shapes the mind of peoples-and those who feed its wheels with words. Because I had some history to tell, the word-writers lay in wait for me, found my telephone number in any hotel of any town before I knew it myself, tapped at my bedroom door when I was in the transition stage between day and evening clothes, and asked questions about many things of which I knew nothing at all, so that I had to camouflage my abysmal depths of ignorance.

They know their job, those American reporters, and I was impressed especially by the young women. There was one girl who sat squarely in front of me, fixed me with candid gray eyes, and for an hour put me through an examination about my sad past until I had revealed everything. There is nothing that girl doesn't know about me, and I should blush to meet her again. She did not take a single note-by that I knew her as a good journalist-and wrote two columns of revelation with most deadly accuracy and a beautiful style. Another girl followed me round a picture-gallery listening to casual remarks among a group of friends, and wrote an article on art-criticism which left me breathless with admiration at her wit and knowledge, of which I took the credit. One young man, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, boarded the train at New York, bought me a drawing-room for private conversation, and by the time we reached Philadelphia made it entirely futile for me to give a lecture, because he had it all in his memory, and wrote the entire history of everything I had seen and thought through years of war, in next day's paper. I liked a young Harvard man who came to see me in Boston. He had a modesty and a winning manner which made me rack my brains to tell him something good, and I admired his type, so clean and boyish and quick in intelligence. He belonged to the stuff of young America, as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for service whatever the risk. I met the editorial staffs of many newspapers, and was given a luncheon by the proprietor and editors of one great newspaper in New York which is perhaps the biggest power in the United States to-day. All the men round me were literary types, and I saw in their faces the imprint of hard thought, and of hard work more strenuous, I imagine, than in the newspaper life of any other country of the world. They all had an absorbing interest in the international situation after the armistice, and knew a good deal about the secret workings of European policy. A young correspondent just back from Russia made a speech summing up his experiences and conclusions, which were of a startling kind, told with the utmost simplicity and bluntness. The proprietor took me into his private room, and outlined his general policy on world affairs, of which the first item on his program was friendship with England.... I found among newspaper men a sense of responsibility with which they are not generally credited, and wonderfully alert and open minds; also, apart from their own party politics and prejudices, a desire for fair play and truth. The Yellow Press still has its power, and it is a malign influence in the United States, but the newspapers of good repute are conducted by men of principle and conviction, and their editorial and literary staffs have a high level of talent, representing much, I think, of the best intelligence of America.

A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS

The women of America seem to me to have a fair share of that intelligence, and I met many types of them who were interesting as social studies. Several states are still resisting woman suffrage, but as far as equality goes in all affairs of daily life outside political power the women of America have long claimed and gained it. During the war they showed in every class, like the women of England, that they could take on men's jobs and do them as well as men in most cases, and better than men in some cases. They drove motor-lorries and machines; they were dairy farmers and agriculturists; they became munition-workers, carpenters, clerks, and elevator-girls, and the womanhood of America rallied up with a wonderful and devoted spirit in a great campaign of work for the Red Cross and all manner of comforts for the troops, who, by a lamentable breakdown in transport organization, never received many of the gifts sent to them by women old and young whose eyes and fingers ached with so much stitching during the long evenings of war. Apart altogether from war-work, American women have made themselves the better halves of men, and the men know it and are deferential to the opinions and desires of their women-folk. It is natural that women should have a wider knowledge of literature and ideas in a scheme of life where men have their noses down to the grindstone of work for long hours every day. That is what most American husbands have to do in a struggle for existence which strives up to the possession of a Ford car, generally known as a "Tin Lizzie" or a "Flivver," on the way to a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on Long Island or the Connecticut shore, an occasional visit to Tiffany's in Fifth Avenue for a diamond brooch, or some other trinket symbolizing success, a holiday at Palm Beach, week-ends at Atlantic City, and a relief from boredom after office hours at the Forty-fourth Street Theater or the Winter Garden. That represents the social ambition of the average business man on the road to fortune, and it costs a goodly pile of dollars to be heaped up by hard work, at a high strain of nervous tension. Meanwhile the women are keeping themselves as beautiful as God made them, with slight improvements according to their own ideas, which are generally wrong; decorating their homes; increasing their housekeeping expenses, and reading prodigiously. They read a vast number of books and magazines, so making it possible for men like myself-slaves of the pen-to exist in an otherwise cruel world.

Before the American lady of leisure gets up to breakfast (generally she doesn't) and uses her lip-salve and powder-puff for the first time in the day, she has her counterpane spread with the morning's newspapers, which are folded into the size of small blankets. There is the New York Times for respectability, the Tribune for political "pep," and the World for social reform. The little lady glances first of all at the picture supplements while she sips her orange juice, reads the head-lines while she gets on with the rolled oats, and with the second cup of coffee settles down to the solid reading-matter of international sensations (skipping, as a rule, the ends of columns "continued on page 4"), until it is time to interview the cook, who again gives notice to leave because of the conduct of the chauffeur or the catlike qualities of the parlor-maid, and handles the telephone to give her Orders of the Day. For some little time after that the telephone is kept busy at both ends, and, with a cigarette threatening to burn a Buhl cabinet, the lady of leisure talks to several friends in New York, answers a call from the Western Union, and receives a night-letter sent over the wire. "No, I am absolutely engaged on Monday, dear. Tuesday? So sorry I am fixed up that day, too. Yes, and Thursday is quite out of the question. Friday? Oh, hell, make it Monday, then!" That is a well-worn New York joke, and I found it funny and true to life, because it is as difficult to avoid invitations in New York as collisions in Fifth Avenue. There is a little red book on the Buhl cabinet in which the American lady puts down her engagements and the excuses she gave for breaking others (it is useful to remember those), and she calculates that as far as the present day's work is planned she will have time to finish the new novel by John Galsworthy, to get through a pamphlet on bolshevism which was mentioned at dinner by an extremely interesting young man just back from Russia, to buy a set of summer furs in the neighborhood of Forty-second Street (Herbert, poor dear! says they are utterly unnecessary), to lunch at the Ritz-Carlton with a party of friends, including the man who made such a sensation with his lecture on France at the Carnegie Hall (she will get a lot of first-hand knowledge about the French situation), and to look in at the thé bavardage with dear Beatrice de H., where some of the company of the French theater will meet French-speaking Americans and pretend to understand them. Then there is a nice free evening, for once (oh, that little white lie in the red book!), when she will wallow in the latest masterpiece of H. G. Wells and learn all about God and humanity as revealed by that extraordinary genius with a sense of humor.

So the American lady of leisure keeps up-to-date with the world's lighter thought and skims the surface of the deeper knowledge, using her own common sense as an acid test of truth when the imagination of a novelist runs away with him, and widening her outlook on the problems of life with deliberate desire to understand. It makes her conversation at the dinner-table sparkling, and the men-folk are conscious that she knows more than they do about current literature and international history. She has her dates right, within a century or two, in any talk about medieval England, and she knows who killed Henri IV of France, who were the lovers of Marie de Medici, why Lloyd George quarreled with Lord Northcliffe, and what the ambassador said to the leaders of Russian bolshevism when he met them secretly in Holland. It is useful to know those things in any social gathering of intellectuals, and I met several ladies of American society in New York who had a wide range of knowledge of that kind.

Many American ladies, with well-to-do husbands, and with money of their own, which is very useful to them in time of need, do not regard life merely as a game out of which they are trying to get the most fun, but with more serious views; and I think some of those find it hard to satisfy their aspirations, and go about with a touch, or more, of heartache beneath their furs. I met some women who spoke with a certain irony which reflected the spent light of old illusions, and others who had a kind of wistfulness in their eyes, as though searching for the unattainable happiness. The Tired Business Man as a husband has his limitations, like most men. Often his long hours of absence at the office and his dullness at home make his wife rather companionless, and her novel-reading habits tend to emphasize the loss, and force upon her mind the desire for more satisfying comradeship. Generally some man who enters her circle seems to offer the chance of this. He has high ideals, or the pose of them. His silences seem suggestive of deep unutterable thoughts-though he may be thinking of nothing more important than a smudge on his white waistcoat-he has a tenderness in his gray (or black, or brown) eyes which is rather thrilling to a woman chilled by the lack-luster look of the man who is used to her presence and takes her for granted.... The Tired Business Man ought to be careful, lest he should become too tired to enter into the interests of his wife and to give her the minimum of comradeship which all women demand. The American Woman of Society, outside the Catholic Church, which still insists upon the old law, seems to me quicker than most others to cut her losses in the marriage gamble, if she finds, or thinks she finds, that she is losing too heavily for her peace of heart. Less than women in European countries will she tolerate deceit or spiritual cruelty, and the law offers her a way of escape, expensive but certain, from a partnership which has been broken. Society, in New York at least, is tolerant to women who have dissolved their married partnership, and there is no stoning-sisterhood to fling mud and missiles at those who have already paid for error by many tears. Yet I doubt whether, in many cases, the liberty they find makes for happiness. There is always the fear of a second mistake worse than the first, and, anyhow, some unattached women I met, women who could afford to live alone, not without a certain luxury of independence, seemed disillusioned as to the romance of life, and the honesty of men, and their own chance of happiness. Their furs and their diamonds were no medicine for the bitterness of their souls, nor for the hunger in their hearts.

But I found a great class of women in America too busy, too interested, and too inspired by common sense to be worried by that kind of emotional distress-the middle-class women who flung themselves into war-work, as before, and now, in time of peace, the activities of charity and education and domestic life have called to them for service. There was a woman doctor I met who seemed to me as fine a type of American womanhood as one could have the luck to meet, and yet, in spite of uncommon ability, a common type in her cheery and practical character. When the war broke out her husband, who was a doctor also, was called to serve in the American army, and his wife, who had passed her medical examinations in the same college with him, but had never practised, carried on his work, in spite of four children. They came first and her devotion to them was not altered, but that did not prevent her from attending to a growing list of patients at a time when influenza was raging in her district. She went about in a car which she drove herself, with the courage and cheerfulness of a gallant soldier. In her little battlefield there were many tragedies, because death took away the youngest-born or the eldest-born from many American homes, and her heart was often heavy; but she resisted all gloomy meditations and kept her nerve and her spirit by-singing. As she drove her car from the house of one patient to another she sang loudly to herself, over the wheel, any little old song that came into her head-"Hey-diddle-diddle, the cat and the fiddle," or "Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he,"-to the profound astonishment of passers-by, who shook their heads and said, "It's a good thing there's going to be Prohibition." But she saved the lives of many women and children in time of plague-for the influenza reached the height of plague-and did not lose her sense of humor or her fine, hearty laugh, or her graciousness of womanhood. When "the army," as she called her husband, came back, she could say, "I kept your flag flying, old man, and you'll not find any difference at home." I saw the husband and wife in their home together. While friends were singing round the piano, these two held hands like young lovers, away back in a shady corner of the room.

I met another husband and wife who interested me as types of American life, though not in their home. It was at a banquet attended by about two hundred people. The husband was the chairman of the party, and he had a wonderful way of making little speeches in which he called upon distinguished people to talk to the company, revealing in each case the special reason why that man or woman should have a hearing. He did this with wit and knowledge, and in each case indeed it was a privilege to hear the speaker who followed, because all the men and women here were engaged in some social work of importance in the life of great American cities, and were idealists who had put their theories into practice by personal service and self-sacrifice. The little man who was the chairman paid a compliment to his own wife, and I found she was sitting by my side. She had gray hair, but very young, bright, humorous eyes, and an almost terrible truthfulness of speech. I was startled by some things she said about the war, and the psychology of men and women under the spell of war. They were true, but dangerous to speak aloud as this woman spoke them. Later, she talked of the heritage of hatred that had been bequeathed by war to the people of the world. "Let us kill hatred," she said. "It is the survival of the cave instinct in man which comes out of its hiding-places under the name of patriotism and justice." I do not know what link there was between this and some other thought which prompted her to show me photographs of two big, sturdy boys who, she told me, were her adopted children. It was a queer, touching story, about these children. "I adopted them not for their sake, but for mine," she said. She was a lonely woman, well married, with leisure and money, and the temptation of selfishness. It was to prevent selfishness creeping into her heart that she sent round to an orphanage for two boy-babies. They were provided, and she brought them up as her own, and found-so she assured me-that they grew up with a marked likeness in feature to herself and her sisters. She had a theory about that-the idea that by some kind of predestination souls reach through space to one another, and find the home where love is waiting for them. I was skeptical of that, having known the London slums, but I was interested in the practical experience of the bright little American woman, who "selfishly," as she said, to cure selfishness, had given two abandoned babies of the world the gift of love, and a great chance in the adventure of life. She was a tremendous protagonist of environment against the influence of heredity. "Environment puts it over heredity all the time," she said.

This special charity on her part is not typical of American women, who do not, any more than women of other countries, go about adopting other people's babies, but I think that her frankness of speech to a stranger like myself, and her curious mixture of idealism and practicality, combined with a certain shrewdness of humor, are qualities that come to people in America. She herself, indeed, is a case of "environment," because she is foreign in blood, and American only by marriage.

In New York I had the advantage of meeting one lady who seemed to me typical of the old-fashioned "leaders" of American society such as Henry James described in his novels. She lives in one of the great mansions along Fifth Avenue, and the very appearance of her butler is a guaranty of riches and respectability. She made no disguise of her wealth, and was proud of it in a simple way, as an English aristocrat is proud of his ancestry and family treasures. But she acknowledges its responsibilities and takes them seriously with a sense of duty. She had received lessons in public speaking, in order to hold her own at committee meetings, and she doles out large sums in charity to public institutions and deserving cases, with a grim determination to unmask the professional beggar and the fraudulent society. She seemed to have a broad-hearted tolerance for the younger generation and a special affection for boys of all ages, whom she likes to feed up, and to keep amused by treating them to the circus or the "movies"; but I fancy that she is a stern disciplinarian with her family as well as her servants, and that her own relatives stand in awe of this masterful old lady who has a high sense of honor, and demands obedience, honesty, and service from those who look for her favors and her money. I detected a shrewd humor in her and an abiding common sense, and at her own dinner-table she had a way of cross-examining her guests, who were men of political importance and women of social influence, like a judge who desires to get at the evidence without listening to unnecessary verbiage. She is the widow of a successful business man, but I perceived in her the sense of personal power and family traditions which belonged to the old type of dowager-duchess in England. Among butterfly women of European cities she would appear an austere and terrible figure in her virtue and her diamonds, but to small American boys, eating candies at her side in the circus, she is the kind and thoughtful aunt.

It was in Boston that I met some other types of American women, not long enough to know them well, but enough to see superficial differences of character between them and their friends of New York. Needless to say, I had read a good deal about Boston before going there. In England the Bostonian tradition is familiar to us by the glory of such masters as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emerson, Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, so that I had a friendly feeling when I went about the city and saw its streets and prim houses, reminiscent of Cheltenham and other English towns of ancient respectability and modern culture. After a lecture there many Bostonians came onto the platform, and I heard at once a difference in accent from the intonation of New York. It was a little more precise, with a careful avoidance of slang phrases. The people who spoke to me were earnest souls, with an idealism which seemed to lift them above the personal prejudices of party politics. I should imagine that some of them are republican rather than democratic in instinct, but those at least who were in my audience supported the idea of the League of Nations, and for that reason did not wish to see President Wilson boiled in oil or roasted at a slow fire. From my brief glimpses of Boston society I should imagine that the Puritan spirit still lingers there among the "best families" and that in little matters of etiquette and social custom they adhere to the rules of the Early Victorian era of English life.

I was convinced of this by one trivial incident I observed in a hotel at Boston. A lady, obviously in transit from New York, by the public way in which she used her powder-puff, and by a certain cosmopolitan easiness of manner, produced a gold cigarette-case from her muff, and began to smoke without thinking twice about it. She had taken just three whiffs when a colored waiter approached in the most deferential manner and begged her to put out her cigarette, because smoking was not allowed in the public rooms. The lady from New York looked amazed for a moment. Then she laughed, dropped her cigarette into her coffee-cup, and said: "Oh yes-I guess I forgot I was in Boston!" In that word Boston she expressed a world of propriety, conventional morality, and social austerity, a long, long way from the liberty of New York. I had been told that a Boston audience would be very cold and unenthusiastic, not because they would be out of sympathy with the lecturer, but because they were "very English" in their dislike of emotional expression. My experience was not like that, as I was relieved to find, and, on the contrary, those Bostonians at the Symphony Hall applauded with most generous warmth and even rose and cheered when I had finished my story of the heroic deeds of English soldiers. It was a Boston girl who made the apologia of her people. "I am sure," she said, "that all those men and women who rose to applaud went down on their knees that night and asked God to forgive them for having broken their rule of life."

No doubt Boston society, as far as it includes the old families rooted in it for generations, is conservative in its point of view, and looks askance at noisy innovations like modern American dances, jazz bands, and the jolly vulgarities of youth. But, judging from my passing glimpses of college girls in the town, I should say that youth puts up a healthy opposition to the "old fogy" philosophy, and breaks the conventions now and then with a crash. One girl I met suggests to me that Boston produces character by intensive culture, and is apt to be startled by the result. Her father was a well-known lawyer, and she inherited his gift of learning and logic, so that when he died she had the idea of carrying on his work. The war was on, and somewhere over on the western front was a young English soldier whom she had met on board ship and might, according to the chances of war, never meet again. Anyhow, she was restless, and desired work. She decided to study for the law examinations and to be called to the bar; and to keep her company, her mother, who was her best comrade, went into college with her, and shared her rooms. I like that idea of the mother and daughter reading and working together. It seems to me a good picture. In due time she was called to the bar, and entered the chambers where her father had worked, and did so well that a great lawyer who gave her his cases to prepare spoke rare words of praise about her. Then the war ended, one day, quite suddenly, the young English soldier arrived in Boston, and, after a few preliminary inquiries as to his chance of luck, said, "When shall we get married?" He was in a hurry to settle down, and the mother of the girl was scared by his grim determination to carry her comrade away. Yet he was considerate. "I should hate to cause your mother any worry by hurrying things on so fast as Monday," he said. "Let us make it Tuesday." But the wedding took place on the Saturday before the Tuesday, and the young lady barrister of Boston was whisked away four days after the English officer came to America with a dream in his heart of which he desired the fulfilment. Boston was startled. This romance was altogether too rapid for its peace of mind. Why, there was no time to buy the girl a wedding-present!... The street boys of Boston were most startled by the English officer's best man-his brother-whose tall hat, tail-coat, and white spats were more wonderful than anything they had seen before.

I was not long enough in many towns of America to detect their various characteristics. Philadelphia, I was told in New York, was so slow that it was safe for people to fall out of windows-they just wafted down like gossamer-but I found it a pleasant, bustling place, with a delightful Old World atmosphere, like a bit of Queen Anne-England, round Independence Hall.... Pittsburgh by night, looking down on its blast-furnaces from a hill outside, appeared to me like a town behind the battle-lines under heavy gun-fire, and I am convinced that the workers in those factories are in the front-line trenches of life and deserve gold medals for their heroism. I had not been in the town ten minutes before a young lady with the poetical name of Penelope rang me up on the telephone and implored me to take a walk out by night to see this strange and wonderful picture, and I was glad of her advice, though she did not offer to go as my guide. Another girl made herself acquainted, and I found she has a hero-worship for a fellow war correspondent, once of Pittsburgh, whose career she had followed through many battlefields.

I saw Washington in glamorous sunlight under a blue sky, and found my spirit lifted up by the white beauty of its buildings and the spaciousness of its public gardens. I had luncheon with the British ambassador, curious to find myself in an English household, with people discussing America from the English point of view in the political heart of the United States; and I visited the War College and met American generals and officers in the very brain-center of that great army which I had seen on the roads of France and on the battlefields. This was the University of War as far as the American people are concerned, and there were diagrams on the blackboards in the lecture-hall describing the strategy of the western front, while in the library officers and clerks were tabulating the history of the great massacre in Europe for future guidance, which by the grace of God and the League of Nations will be unnecessary for generations to come. I talked with these officers and found them just such earnest, serious scientific men as I had met in American Headquarters in France, where they were conducting war, not in our casual, breezy way, but as school-masters arranging a college demonstration, and overweighted by responsibility. It was in a room in the Capitol that I met one little lady with a complete geographical knowledge of the great halls and corridors of that splendid building, and an Irish way with her in her dealings with American Congressmen and Senators. Before the war I used to meet her in a little drawing-room not far away from Kensington Palace, London, and I imagined in my innocence that she was exclusively interested in literature and drama. But in one of the luncheon-rooms of the Capitol-where I lined up at the counter for a deep-dish pie from a colored waitress-I found that she was dealing with more inflammable articles than those appearing in newspaper columns, being an organizing secretary of the Sinn Fein movement in the United States. She was happy in her work, and spoke of Irish rebellion in that bright and placid way which belongs, as I have often noticed, to revolutionary spirits who help to set nations on fire and drench the world in blood. Anybody looking at her eating that deep-dish pie in the luncheon-room of the American Houses of Parliament would have put her down as a harmless little lady, engaged, perhaps, in statistical work on behalf of Prohibition. But I knew the flame in her soul, kindled by Irish history, was of the same fire which I saw burning in the eyes of great mobs whom I saw passing one day in procession down Fifth Avenue, with anti-English banners above their heads.

I should have liked to see more of Chicago. There seemed to me in that great city an intense intellectual activity, of conscious and deliberate energy. Removed by a thousand miles from New York with its more cosmopolitan crowds and constant influx of European visitors, it is self-centered and independent, and out of its immense population there are many minds emerging to make it a center of musical, artistic, and educational life, apart altogether from its business dynamics. I became swallowed up in the crowds along Michigan Avenue, and was caught in the breeze that blew stiffly down the highway of this "windy city," and studied the shops and theaters and picture-palaces with a growing consciousness that here was a world almost as great as New York and, I imagine, more essentially American in character and views. That first morning of my visit I was the guest of a club called the Cliff-dwellers, where the chairman rapped for order on the table with a club that might have protected the home of Prehistoric Man, and addressed a gathering of good fellows who, as journalists, authors, painters, and musicians, are farthest removed from that simple child of nature who went out hunting for his dinner, and bashed his wife when she gnawed the meatiest bone. It was in the time of armistice, and these men were deeply anxious about the new problems which faced America and about the reshaping of the world's philosophy. They were generous and honest in their praise of England's mighty effort in the war, and they were enthusiastic to a man in the belief that an Anglo-American alliance was the best guaranty of the League of Nations, and the best hope for the safety of civilization. I came away with the belief that out of Chicago would come help for the idealists of our future civilization, out of Chicago, whatever men may say of its Pit, and its slaughter-yards, and its jungle of industry and life. For on the walls of the Cliff-dwellers were paintings of men who have beauty in their hearts, and in the eyes of the men I met was a look of gravity and thoughtfulness in face of the world's agonies and conflict. But I was aware, also, that among the seething crowds of that city were mobs of foreign-born people who have the spirit of revolution in their hearts, and others who demand more of the joy of life and less of its struggle, and men of baseness and brutality, coarsened by the struggle through which they have to push and thrust in order to get a living. I listened to Germans and foreign Jews in some of the streets of Chicago, and saw in imagination the flames and smoke of passion that stir above the Melting-pot.

I have memories in Chicago of a little theatrical manager who took my arm and pressed it tight with new-born affection, and said: "My dearie, I'm doing colossal business-over two thousand dollars a night! It's broken all the records. I go about singing with happiness." Success had made a poet of him. In a private suite of rooms in the most luxurious hotel of Chicago I met one of the theatrical stars of America, and studied her type as one might gaze at a rare bird. She was a queer little bird, I found, with a childish and simple way of speech which disguised a little her immense and penetrating knowledge of human nature as it is found in "one-night stands," in the jungle of life behind the scenes, and in her own grim and gallant fight for fame. Fame had come to her suddenly and overwhelmingly, in Chicago, and New York was waiting for her. The pride of her achievement thrilled her to the finger-tips, and she was as happy as a little girl who has received her first doll as a birthday-present. She talked to me about her technic, about the way in which she had lived in her part before acting it, so that she felt herself to be the heroine in body and soul. But what I liked best-and tried to believe-was her whispered revelation of her ultimate ambition-and that was a quiet marriage with a boy who was "over there," if he did not keep her waiting too long. Marriage, and not fame, was what she wanted most (so she said), but she was going to be very, very careful to make the right one. She had none of the luxurious splendor of those American stars who appear in fiction and photographs. She was a bright little canary, with pluck, and a touch of genius, and a shrewd common sense.

From her type I passed to others, a world away in mode of life-Congressmen, leaders of the women's suffrage societies, ex-governors, business magnates, American officers back from the front, foreign officers begging for American money, British propagandists-a most unlikely crowd-dramatic critics, shipbuilders, and the society of New York suburbs between Mamaroneck and Greenwich, Connecticut. At dinner-parties and evening receptions I met these different actors in the great drama of American life, and found them, in that time of armistice, desperately earnest about the problems of peace, intrigued to the point of passion about the policy of President Wilson, divided hopelessly in ideals and convictions, so that husbands and wives had to declare a No Man's Land between their conflicting views, and looking forward to the future with profound uneasiness because of the threat to the "splendid isolation" of the Monroe Doctrine-they saw it crumbling away from them-and because (more alarming still) they heard from afar the first rumblings of a terrific storm between capital and labor. They spoke of these things frankly, with an evident sincerity and with a fine gravity-women as well as men, young girls as fearlessly and intelligently as bald-headed business men. Many of them deplored the late entry of the United States into the war, because they believed their people would have gained by longer sacrifice. With all their pride in the valor of their men, not one of them in my hearing used a braggart word, or claimed too great a share in the honor of victory. There was fear among them that their President was abandoning principles of vital import to their country, but no single man or woman I met spoke selfishly of America's commercial or political interest, and among all the people with whom I came in touch there was a deep sense of responsibility and a desire to help the world forward by wise action on the part of the United States. Their trouble was that they lacked clear guidance, and were groping blindly about for the right thing to do, in a practical, common-sense way. I had serious conversations in those assemblies, until my head ached, but they were not without a lighter side, and I was often startled by the eager way in which American middle-class society abandons the set etiquette of an evening party for charades, a fox-trot (with the carpets thrown back), a game of "twenty questions," or a riot of laughter between a cocktail and a highball. At those hours the youth of America was revealed. Its society is not so old as our tired, saddened people of Europe, who look back with melancholy upon the four years in which their young men perished, and forward without great hope. The vitality of America has hardly been touched by her sacrifice, and the heart of America is high.

* * *

Some Englishmen, I am told, go to the United States with a spirit of criticism, and search round for things that seem to them objectionable, taking no pains to conceal their hostile point of view.

They are so hopelessly insular that they resent any little differences in social custom between American and English life, and sum up their annoyance by saying, "We don't do that sort of thing in England!" Well, that seems to me a foolish way of approach to any country, and the reason why some types of Englishmen are so unpopular in France, Italy, and other countries, where they go about regarding "the natives," as they call them, with arrogance in their eyes, and talk, as an English officer, not of that type, expressed it to me, "as though they had bad smells at the end of their noses." I am bound to say that during my visit to the United States I found much more to admire than to criticize, and perhaps because I was on the lookout for things to like rather than to dislike I had one of the best times of my life-in some ways the very best-and came away with respect, admiration, and gratitude for the American people. There are so many things I like in their character and way of life that I should be guilty of gushing if I put them all down, but although I have no doubt they have many faults, like most people in this world, I prefer to remember the pleasant, rather than the unpleasant, qualities they possess, especially as they left the most dominant impression on my mind.

I think every Englishman, however critical, would agree that he is struck at once, on his first visit to America, by the clean, bright, progressive spirit of life in the smaller towns beyond the turmoil of New York. I have already described the sensational effect produced upon one's imagination by that great city, and have given some glimpses of various aspects of the social life which I had the good fortune to see with untiring interest; but I confess that the idea of living in New York would affright me because of its wear and tear upon the nerves, and I think that the "commuters" who dwell in the suburbs have good sense and better luck. The realities of America-the average idea, the middle-class home, the domestic qualities upon which a nation is built-are to be found more deeply rooted in the suburbs and smaller towns than in the whirligig of Manhattan Island, to which a million and a half people, I am told, come every day, and from which, after business or pleasure, they go away. To me there was something very attractive in the construction of such places as Rye, Port Chester, Greenwich, and Stamford, an hour away from New York, and many other townships of similar size in other parts of the United States. I liked the style of their houses, those neat buildings of wood with overlapping shingles, and wide porches and verandas where people may sit out on summer days, with shelter from the sun; and I liked especially the old Colonial type of house, as I think it is called, with a tall white pillar on each side of its portico, and well-proportioned windows, so that the rooms have plenty of light, and as much air as the central-heating system permits-and that is not much. To English eyes accustomed to dingy brick houses in the suburbs of big cities, to the dreary squalor of some new little town which straggles around a filthy railway station, with refuse-heaps in undeveloped fields, and a half-finished "High Street," where a sweetstuff-shop, a stationer, and an estate agent establish themselves in the gloomy hope of business, these American villages look wonderfully clean, bright, and pleasant! I noticed that in each one of them there were five institutions in which the spirit of the community was revealed-the bank, the post-office, the school, the church, and the picture-palace. The bank is generally the handsomest building in the place, with a definite attempt to give it some dignity of architecture and richness of decoration. Inside it has marble pillars and panels, brass railings at the receipt of custom, a brightly burnished mechanism for locking up the safe, a tiled floor of spotless cleanliness. The local tradesman feels secure in putting his money in such a place of dignity, the local lady likes to come here in the morning (unless she has overdrawn her account) for a chat with the bank manager or one of his gentlemanly assistants. It is a social rendezvous dedicated to the spirit of success, and the bank manager, who knows the private business and the social adventures of his clients, is in a position of confidence and esteem. He is pleased to shake the finger-tips of a lady through the brass railings; while she is pleased to ask him, "How do you like my new hat?" and laughs when, with grave eyes, he expresses sympathy with her husband. "Twenty years ago he was serving behind the counter in a dry-goods store. Now he has a million dollars to his credit." Everybody brightens at this story of success. The fact that a man starts as a butcher-boy or a bell-boy is all in his favor in social prestige. There is no snobbishness, contemptuous of humble origin, and I found a spirit of good-natured democracy among the people I watched in the local bank.

THE SOCIAL ATMOSPHERE OF AN AMERICAN POST-OFFICE

Competing with the bank in architectural dignity is the village post-office, generally of white stone, or wood, with the local Roll of Honor on the green outside, and, inside, a number of picture-posters calling to the patriotism of the American people to support the Liberty Loan-the fifth when I was there. Small boys at the counter are buying thrift stamps. Chauffeurs who have driven down from country houses are collecting the letters of the family from lockers, with private keys. College girls are exchanging confidences at the counters. I liked the social atmosphere of an American post-office. I seemed to see a visible friendliness here between the state and the people. Then there is the school, and I must say that I was overwhelmed with admiration for the American system of education and for the buildings in which it is given. England lags a long way behind here, with its old-fashioned hotch-potch of elementary schools, church schools, "academies for young gentlemen"-the breeding-grounds of snobs-grammar-schools, and private, second-rate colleges; all of which complications are swept away by the clean simplicity of the American state school, to which boys of every class may go without being handicapped by the caste system which is the curse of England. If the school to which I went at Montclair, or another at Elizabeth, New Jersey, or another at Toledo, is at all typical of American schools generally (and I think that is so), I take my hat off to the educational authorities of America and to the spirit of the people which inspires them.

The school at Montclair was, I remember, a handsome building like one of the English colleges for women at Oxford or Cambridge, with admirably designed rooms, light, airy, and beautiful with their polished paneling. The lecture-hall was a spacious place holding, I suppose, nearly a thousand people, and I was astonished at its proportions when I had my first glimpse of it before lecturing, under the guidance of the head-mistress and some of the ladies on her committee. Those women impressed me as being wise and broad-minded souls, not shut up in narrow educational theories, but with a knowledge of life and human nature, and a keen enthusiasm for their work. At Toledo I saw the best type of provincial school, and certainly as an architectural model it was beyond all words of praise, built in what we call the Tudor style, in red brick, ivy covered, with long oriel windows, so that it lifts up the tone of the whole town because of its dignity and beauty. Here, too, was a fine lecture-hall, easily convertible into a theater, with suitable scenery for any school play. It was a committee of boys who organized the lectures, and one of them acted as my guide over the school-building and showed me, among other educational arrangements, a charming little flat, or apartment-house, completely furnished in every detail in bedroom, sitting-room, and kitchen, for the training of girls in domestic service, cookery, and the decoration of the home. Here, as in many other things, the American mind had reached out to an ideal and linked it up with practical method. Equally good were the workshops where the boys are trained in carpentry and mechanics.... Well, all that kind of thing makes for greatness in a nation. The American people are not, I think, better educated than English people in the actual storing-up of knowledge, but they are educated in better physical conditions, with a brighter atmosphere around them in their class-rooms and in their playgrounds, and with a keener appreciation in the social influences surrounding the schoolhouse of the inherent right of every American boy and girl to have equal opportunities along the road to knowledge and success. It is this sense of opportunity, and the entire absence of snob privileges, which I liked best in these glimpses I gained of young America....

I mentioned another institution which occupies a prominent place in every American township. That is the picture-palace. It is impossible to overrate the influence upon the minds and characters of the people which is exercised by that house of assembly. It has become part of the life of the American people more essentially than we know it in England, though it has spread with a mushroom growth in English towns and villages. But in the United States the picture-palace and "The Silent Drama," as they call it, are more elaborately organized, and the motion pictures are produced with an amount of energy, imagination, and wealth which are far in excess of the similar efforts in England. A visit to the "movies" is the afternoon or evening recreation of every class and age of American citizenship. It is a democratic habit from which few escape. Outside the picture-palace in a little town like Stamford one sees a number of expensive motor-cars drawn up while the lady of leisure gets her daily dose of "romance" and while her chauffeur, in the gallery, watches scenes of high life with the cynical knowledge of a looker-on. Nursemaids alleviate the boredom of domestic service by taking their children to see the pictures for an hour or two, and small boys and girls, with candy or chewing-gum to keep them quiet, puzzle out the meaning of marvelous melodrama, wonder why lovers do such strange things in their adventures on the way to marriage; and they watch with curiosity and surprise the ghastly grimaces of "close-up" heroines in contortions of amorous despair, and the heaving breasts, the rolling eyes, and the sickly smiles of padded heroes, who are suffering, temporarily, from thwarted affection. The history of the world is ransacked for thrilling dramas, and an American audience watches all the riotous splendor and licentiousness of Babylon or ancient Rome, while Theda Bara, the Movie Queen, writhes in amorous ecstasy, or poisons innumerable lovers, or stings herself to death with serpents. Royalists and Roundheads, Pilgrim Fathers and New England witches, the French Revolution and the American Civil War, are phases of history which provide endless pictures of "soul-stirring interest"; but more popular are domestic dramas of modern life, in which the luxury of our present civilization, as it is imagined and exaggerated by the movie managers, reveal to simple folk the wickedness of wealthy villains, the dangers of innocent girlhood, and the appalling adventures of psychology into which human nature is led when "love" takes possession of the heart. It is impossible to say what effect all that has upon the mentality of America. The utter falsity of it all, the treacly sentiment of the "love" episodes, and the flaming vice of the vicious, would have a perverting influence on public imagination if it were taken seriously. But I suppose that the common sense of American people reacts against the absurdity of these melodramas after yielding to the sensation of them. Yet I met one lady who told me she goes every free afternoon to one of these entertainments, with a deliberate choice of film-plays depicting passion and caveman stuff "in order to get a thrill before dinner to relieve the boredom of domesticity." That seems to me as bad as the drug habit, and must in the long run sap the moral and spiritual foundations of a woman's soul. Fortunately, there is a tendency now among the "movie merchants" to employ good authors who will provide them with simple and natural plots, and in any case there is always Charlie Chaplin for laughter, and pictures of scenery and animal life, and the news of the week depicting scenes of current history in all parts of the world. It would be absurd as well as impossible to abolish the film-picture as an influence in American life, and I dare say that, balancing good with bad, the former tips the swing, because of an immense source of relaxation and entertainment provided by the picture-palace in small communities.

What appealed to me more in my brief study of American social life outside New York was another popular institution known as the roadside inn. In some way it is a conscious endeavor to get back to the simplicity and good cheer of old-fashioned times, when the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present generation used to get down from their coaches when the horses were changed, or the snowdrifts were deep, and go gladly to the warmth of a log fire, in a wayside hostelry, while orders were given for a dinner of roast duck, and a bowl of punch was brewed by the ruddy-faced innkeeper. It is a tradition which is kept fresh in the imagination of modern Americans by the genius of Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, and a host of writers and painters who reproduce the atmosphere of English life in the days of coaching, highwaymen, romance, and roast beef. The spirit of Charles Dickens is carefully suggested to all wayfarers in one roadside inn I visited, about an hour away from New York, and called "The Pickwick Inn." It is built in the style of Tudor England, with wooden beams showing through its brickwork and windows divided into little leaded panes, and paneled rooms furnished with wooden settles and gate-leg tables. Colored prints depicting scenes in the immortal history of Mr. Pickwick brighten the walls within. Outside there swings a sign-board such as one sees still outside country inns standing on the edge of village greens in England. I found it a pleasant place, where one could talk better with a friend than in a gilded restaurant of New York, with a jazz band smiting one's eardrums; and the company there was interesting. In spite of the departure of coaching days, which gave life and bustle to the old inns of the past, the motor-car brings travelers and a touch of romance to these modern substitutes. There were several cars outside the "Pickwick," and I guessed by the look of the party within that they had come from New York for a country outing, a simple meal, and private conversation. "Better a dinner of herbs where love is-" Under the portrait of Mr. Pickwick in a quiet corner of one of the old-fashioned rooms a young man and woman sat with their elbows on the table and their chins propped in the palms of their hands, and their faces not so far away that they had any need to shout to each other the confidences which made both pairs of eyes remarkably bright. The young man was one of those square-shouldered, clean-shaven, gray-eyed fellows whom I came to know as a type on the roads to Amiens and Albert. The girl had put her dust-cloak over the back of her chair, but still wore a veil tied round her hat and under her chin-a little pointed chin dug firmly into her palm, and modeled with the same delicacy of line as the lips about which a little smile wavered, and as the nose which kept its distance, with perfect discretion, from that of the young man opposite, so that the waiter might have slipped a menu-card between them. She had a string of pearls round her neck which would certainly have been the first prize of any highwayman holding up her great-grandmamma's coach, and judging from other little signs of luxury as it is revealed in Fifth Avenue, I felt certain that the young lady did not live far from the heart of New York and had command of its treasure-houses.... Two other groups in the room, sitting at separate tables, belonged obviously to one party. They were young people, for the most part, with one elderly lady whose white hair and shrewd, smiling eyes made all things right with youthful adventure, and with one old fogy, bland of countenance and expansive in the waistcoat line, who seemed to regard it as a privilege to pay for the large appetites of the younger company. Anyhow he paid for at least eight portions of chicken okra, followed by eight plates of roast turkey and baked potatoes, and, not counting sundries, nine serves of deep-dish pie. The ninth, unequal, share went, in spite of warnings, protests, and ridicule from free-spoken companions, to a plump girl with a pigtail, obviously home from college for a spell, who said: "I guess I sha'n't die from overeating, though it's the way I'd choose if I had to quit. An appetite is like love. Its dangers are exaggerated, and seldom fatal." This speech, delivered in all solemnity, aroused a tumult of mirth from several young women of grown-up appearance-at least they had advanced beyond the pigtail stage-and under cover of this one of them deliberately "made up" her face till it bloomed like a rose in June. In another corner of the Pickwick Inn sat a lonely man whose appearance interested me a good deal. He was a man of middle age, with black hair turning white, and very dark, melancholy eyes in a pale, ascetic face. I have seen his type many times in the Café de l'Odéon on the "Latin" side of Paris, and I was surprised to find it in a roadside inn of the United States. A friend of mine, watching the direction of my gaze, said, "Yes, that is a remarkable man-one of the best-known architects in America, and, among other things, the designer of the Victory decorations of New York." He came over to our table and I had a talk with him-a strange conversation, in which this man of art spoke mostly of war, from unusual angles of thought. His idea seemed to me that peace is only a preparation for war, and that war is not the abnormal thing which most people think, but the normal, because it is the necessary conflict by which human character and destiny are shaped. He seemed to think that the psychology of the world had become twisted and weakened by too much peace so that the sight of armless or legless men was horrifying, whereas people should be accustomed to such sights and take them for granted, because that, with all pain and suffering, is the price of life. I disagreed with him profoundly, believing that war in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is unnecessary and due to the stupidities of people who are doped by spell-words put upon them by their leaders; but I was interested in getting this viewpoint from a man whose whole life has been devoted to beauty. It seemed to me the strangest paradox.... A roadside inn in the United States is a good place for the study of psychology and social habits in America. One custom which happens here during winter and summer evenings is a local dance given by some inhabitant of the neighborhood who finds more spaciousness here for a party of guests than in his own homestead. The rugs and chairs are put away, and the floor is polished for dancing. Outside, the inn is decorated with colored lamps and lanterns, and a bright light streams through the leaded window-panes across the road from New York. The metal of many machines sparkles in the shadow world beyond the lanterns. Through the open windows, if the night is mild, comes the ragtime music of a string band and the sound of women's laughter. Sometimes queer figures, like ghosts of history, pass through the swing-doors, for it is a fancy-dress dance in the inn, and there is a glimpse of Columbine in her fluffy white skirt, with long white stockings, and with her hand on the arm of a tall young Pierrot; while a lady of the court of Marie Antoinette trips beside the figure of a scarlet Devil, and a little Puritan girl of New England (two hundred years ago) passes in with Monsieur Beaucaire in his white-satin coat and flowered waistcoat and silk stockings above buckled shoes. I like the idea and the customs of the roadside inn, for it helps to make human society sweet and friendly in villages beyond the glare of America's great cities.

To study a people, however, one must see them in their homes, and I was fortunate in having friends who took me into their home life. When I went there it was at a time when American homes were excited and happy after the armistice, and when the soldiers who had been "over there" were coming back, with victory and honor. In many homes of the United States, scattered far and wide, there was not happiness, but sorrow, because in the victory march down Fifth Avenue there would be for some of the onlookers one figure missing-the figure of some college boy who had gone marching away with smiling eyes and a stiff upper lip, or the figure of some middle-aged fellow who waved his hand to a group of small children and one woman who turned to hide her tears. There were empty chairs in the homesteads of the United States, and empty hearts on Armistice Day-and afterward. But I did not see them, and I thought of the many homes in England desolated by the appalling sacrifice of youth, so that in every town, and in every street, there are houses out of which all hope in life has gone, leaving behind a dreadful dreariness, an incurable loneliness, mocking at Victory. There was one home I went to where a mother of cheery babes waited for her man with an eager joy she did not try to hide. The smallest babe had been born while he was away, a boy baby with the gift of laughter from the fairy godmother; and there was great excitement at the thought of the first interview between father and son. All the community in the neighborhood of this house in Westchester County took a personal interest in this meeting when "the Major" should see his latest born, and when the wife should meet her man again. They had kept his memory green and had cheered up the loneliness of his wife by making a rendezvous of his house. She had played up wonderfully, with a pluck that never failed, and a spirit of comradeship to all her husband's friends, especially if he wore khaki and was far from his own folk. One was always certain of meeting a merry crowd at cocktail time. With some ceremony a party of friends were conducted to the cellar to see how a careful housewife with a hospitable husband got ahead of prohibition.... Then the Major came back, a little overwhelmed by the warmth of his greeting from old friends, a little dazed by the sharp contrast between war and peace, moved to his depths by the first sight of Peter, his boy baby. One day at dinner he described how he had heard the news of Peter in the war zone. He bought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the event-it was the only bottle to be had for love or money-and went round to the mess to call a toast. There were many officers, and the champagne did not give them full glasses, but in a sparkling drop or two they drank to the son of this good officer and good comrade. I was glad to get a glimpse of that American home and of the two small girls in it, who had the habit, which I find pleasant among the children of America, of dropping a bob courtesy to any grown-up visitor. The children of America have the qualities of their nation, simplicity, common sense, and self-reliance. They are not so bashful as English boys and girls, and they are free from the little constraints of nursery etiquette which make so many English children afraid to open their mouths. They are also free entirely from that juvenile snobbishness which is still cultivated in English society, where boys and girls of well-to-do parents are taught to look down with contempt upon children of the poorer classes. I sat down at table many mornings with a small boy and girl who were representative, I have no doubt, of Young America in the making. The boy, Dick, had an insatiable curiosity about the way things work in the world, and about the make-up of the world itself. To satisfy that curiosity he searched the Children's Book of Knowledge, the encyclopedias in the library, and the brain of any likely person, such as the Irish chauffeur and gardener, for scraps of useful information. In games of "twenty questions," played across the luncheon-table, he chose mountains in Asia, or rivers in Africa, or parts of complicated engines, putting the company to shame by their ignorance of geography and mechanics. For sheer personal pleasure he worked out sums in arithmetic when he wakened early in the morning. His ambition is to be an engineer, and he is already designing monster airplanes, and electrical machines of fantastic purpose-like, I suppose, millions of other small boys in America. The girl, aged eight, seemed to me the miniature representative of all American girlhood, and for that reason is a source of apprehension to her mother, who has to camouflage her amusement at this mite's audacity, and looks forward with a thrill of anxiety and delight to the time when Joan will put her hair up and play hell with boys' hearts. Joan has big, wondering eyes, which she already uses for cajolery and blandishment. Joan has a sense of humor which is alarming in an elf of her size. Joan can tell the most almighty "whoppers," with an air of innocence which would deceive an angel. Joan has a passionate temper when thwarted of her will, a haughty arrogance of demeanor before which grown men quail, and a warm-hearted affection for people who please her which exacts forgiveness of all naughtiness. She dances for sheer joy of life, lives in imagination with fairies, screams with desire at the sight of glittering jewels and fine feathers, and weeps passionately at times because she is not old enough to go with her mother to dinner in New York. In another ten years, when she goes to college, there will be the deuce of a row in her rooms, and three years later New York will be invaded by a pair of hazel eyes which will complicate, still further, the adventure of life east and west of Fifth Avenue. Those two young people go forth to school every morning, from a country house in Connecticut, in a "flivver" driven by the Irish chauffeur, with whom they are the best of friends. Now and again they are allowed the use of the Cadillac car and spread themselves under the rugs with an air of luxury and arrogance, redeemed by a wink from Dick, as though to say, "What a game-this life!" and a sweep of Joan's eyelashes conveying the information that a princess of the United States is about to attend the educational establishment which she is pleased to honor with her presence, and where she hopes to be extremely naughty to-day, just to make things hum. This boy and girl are good and close comrades between the times they pull each other's hair, and have a profound respect for each other in spite of an intimate knowledge of their respective frailties and sinfulness. Joan knows that Dick invariably gets his sums right, whereas she invariably gets them wrong. She knows that his truthfulness is impregnable and painful in its deadly accuracy. She knows that his character is as solid as a rock and that he is patient up to the point when by exasperation she asks for a bang on the head, and gets it. Dick knows that Joan is more subtle in imagination than he can ever hope to be, and that she can twist him round her little finger when she sets out deliberately thereto, in order to get the first use of the new toy which came to him on his birthday, the pencil which he has just sharpened for his own drawing, or the picture-book which he has just had as a school prize. "You know mother says you mustn't be so terrible selfish," says Joan, in answer to violent protests, and Dick knows that he must pay the price of peace. He also knows that Joan loves him devotedly, pines for him when he is away even for a little while, and admires his knowledge and efficiency with undisguised hero-worship, except when she wants to queen it over him, for the sake of his soul. I think of them in a little white house perched on flower-covered rocks, within sight of the Sound through a screen of birch trees. Inside the house there are some choice old bits of English and Italian furniture bought by a lady who knows the real from the false, and has a fine eye for the color of her hangings and her chintz-covered chairs. On cool nights a log fire burns in a wide hearth, and the electric lamps are turned out to show the soft light of tall fat candles in wrought-iron torches each side of the hearthstone. Galli-Curci sings from a gramophone between Hawaiian airs or the latest ragtime; or the master of the house-a man of all the talents and the heart of youth-strikes out plaintive little melodies made up "out of his own head," as children say, on a rosewood piano, while the two children play "Pollyanna" on the carpet, and their mother watches through half-shut eyes the picture she has made of the room. It is a pretty picture of an American interior, as a painter might see it....

In New York, as in London, it is the ambition of many people, I find, to seek out a country cottage and get back to the "simple life" for a spell. "A real old place" is the dream of the American business man who has learned to love ancient things after a visit to Europe, or by a sudden revolt against the modern side of civilization. The "real old place" is not easy to find, but I met one couple who had found it not more than thirty miles or so from Madison Square, yet in such a rural and unfrequented spot that it seemed a world away. They had discovered an old mill-house, built more than a hundred and fifty years ago, and unchanged all that time except by the weathering of its beams and panels, and the sinking of its brick floors, and the memories that are stored up in every crack and crevice of that homestead where simple folk wed and bred, worked and died, from one generation to another. The new owners are simple folk, too, though not of the peasant class, and with reverence and sound taste they decline to allow any architect to alter the old structure of the house, but keep it just as it stands. In their courtyard, on a Sunday afternoon, were several motor-cars, and in their parlor a party of friends from New York who had come out to this little old mill-house in the country, and expressed their ecstasy at its quaint simplicity. Some of them invited themselves to supper, whereat the lady of the mill-house laughed at them and said, "I guess you'll have to be content with boiled beans and salad, because my man and I are tired of the fatted calf and all the gross things of city life." To her surprise there was a chorus of "Fine!" and the daintiest girl from New York offered to do the washing-up. Through an open door in the parlor there was a pretty view of another room up a flight of wooden stairs. In such a room one might see the buxom ghost of some American Ph?be of the farm, with bare arms and a low-necked bodice, coiling her hair at an old mirror for the time when John should come a-courting after he had brushed the straw from his hair....

I went into another country cottage, as old as this one and as simple as this. It stands in a meadow somewhere in Sleepy Hollow, low lying by a little stream that flows through its garden, but within quick reach, by a stiff climb, through silver beeches and bracken, and over gray rocks that crop through the soil, to hilltops from which one gazes over the Hudson River and the Sound, and a wide stretch of wooded country with little white towns in the valleys. Here in the cottage lives a New York doctor and his wife, leading the simple life, not as a pose, but in utter sincerity, because they have simplicity in their souls. Every morning the doctor walks away from his cottage to a railway which takes him off to the noisy city, and here until five of the evening he is busy in healing the sufferers of civilization and stupidity-the people who overeat themselves, the children who are too richly fed by foolish mothers, business men whose nerves have broken down by worry and work for the sake of ambition, society women wrecked in the chase of pleasure, and little ones, rickety, blind, or diseased because of the sins of their parents. The little doctor does not deal in medicine and does not believe in it. He treats his patients according to his philosophy of natural science, by which he gives their human nature a chance of freeing itself from the poison that has tainted it and getting back to normal self-healing action. He has devised a machine for playing waves of electricity through his patients by means of which he breaks up the clogging tissue of death in their cell life and regenerates the health of the cell system. He has made some startling cures, and I think the cheerful wisdom of the little man, his simple, childlike heart, and the clean faith that shines out of his eyes are part of the secret of his power. He goes back to his country cottage to tend his flowers and to think deeper into the science of life up there on the hilltop which looks across the Sound among the silvery beeches, where in the spring there is a carpet of bluebells and in the autumn the fire of red bracken. In spring and summer and autumn he rises early and plunges into a pool behind the shelter of trees and bushes, and before dressing runs up and down a stone pathway bordered by the flowers he has grown, and after that dances a little to keep his spirit young.... I liked that glimpse I had of the American doctor in Sleepy Hollow.

I LIKED THE GREETING OF THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR

And I liked all the glimpses I had of American home life in the suburbs of New York and in other townships of the United States. I liked the white woodwork of the houses, and the bright sunlight that swept the sky above them, and the gardens that grew without hedges. I liked the good nature of the people, the healthiness of their outlook on life, their hopefulness in the future, their self-reliance and their sincerity of speech. I liked the children of America, and the college girls who strolled in groups along the lanes, and the crowds who assembled in the morning at the local station to begin a new day's work or a new day's shopping in the big city at their journey's end. They had a keen and vital look, and nodded to one another in a neighborly way as they bought bulky papers from the bookstall and chewing-gum from the candy stall and had their shoes shined with one eye on the ticket office. I liked the greeting of the train conductor to all those people whose faces he knew as familiar friends, and to whom he passed the time o' day with a jesting word or two. I liked the social life of the American middle classes, because it is based, for the most part, on honesty, a kindly feeling toward mankind, and healthiness of mind and body. They are not out to make trouble in the world, and unless somebody asks for it very badly they are not inclined to interfere with other people's business. The thing I liked best in the United States is the belief of its citizens in the progress of mankind toward higher ideals of common sense; and after the madness of a world at war it is good to find such faith, however difficult to believe.

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