Comic papers on both sides of the Atlantic have adopted the marriages between American women and English men of the upper classes as a standing joke; one of those jokes of which the public never gets tired, whose infinite variety repetition does not stale. The fun lies in the idea of barter. The Englishman has a title. The American woman has dollars. He lays a coronet at her feet. She hands money bags to him. Essentially the joke is the same on whichever side of the Atlantic it is made. But there is a slight difference in the way the parts of it are emphasized. The tendency among American humorists is to dwell a little on the greed of the Englishman, who is represented as incapable of earning money for himself. The English jester lays more stress on the American woman's desire to be called "my lady," and pokes sly fun at the true democrat's fondness for titles. I appreciate the joke thoroughly wherever it is made, and I invariably laugh heartily at it. But I decline to take it as anything more than a joke. It is not a precise and scientific explanation of fact.

There are a great many marriages between American women of large or moderate fortune and English men, or other Europeans, of title. That is the fact. No doubt the dollars are as attractive to noblemen as they are to anybody else. There are a number of pleasant things, steam yachts, for instance, which can be got by those who have dollars, but not by those who are without them. They may occasionally be the determining factor in the choice of a wife. But I feel sure that most Englishmen, when they marry American women, do so because they like them. They marry the woman, not the money. In the same way a title is a very pleasant thing to have. I have never enjoyed the sensation and never shall, but I know that it must be most agreeable to be styled "Your Grace," or to have a coronet embroidered on a pocket handkerchief. But I do not believe that American women marry coronets. They marry men. The coronet counts, I daresay, but the man counts more.

It is interesting to notice that, although there are many marriages between American women and Englishmen, there are comparatively few marriages between English women and American men. If it were a mere question of exchanging money for titles we might expect English women of title to marry American men. There are a great many English women with titles and a great many rich American men. They might marry each other, but they do not, not, at all events, in large numbers. It is true that the woman cannot, unless she is a princess, give her husband a title, as a man can give a title to his wife. But it is no small thing to have a wife with a title. It is a pleasure well worth buying, if it is to be bought. But apparently it is not. The English woman of title prefers to marry an English man, however rich Americans may be. The American man prefers American women, though none of them have titles. Exact statistics about these marriages are not available, but we may take the vitality of current jokes as an indication of what the facts are. The joke about the marriage between Miss Sadie K. Bock, daughter of the well-known dollar dictator of Capernaum, Pa., U.S.A., and the Viscount Fitzeffingham Plantagenet, is fresh and always popular. But no one ever made a joke about a marriage between the dollar dictator's son and Lady Ermyntrude. There would be no point in that joke if it were made because the thing does not happen, or does not happen often enough to strike the popular imagination.

The truth appears to be that American women, apart from any question of their dowries, are attractive both to English and American men. English men, on the other hand, are attractive both to English and American women.

I occupy in this investigation the position of an unprejudiced outsider. I am neither English nor American, but Irish, and I can afford to discuss the matter without passion, since Irish women are admittedly more attractive than any others in the world and Irish men are seldom tempted to marry outside their own people. A very wise English lady, one who has much experience of life, once said that young Englishmen of good position are lured into marrying music hall dancers, a thing which occasionally happens to them, because they find these ladies more entertaining and exciting than girls of their own class. I do not know whether this is true or not, but if it is it helps to explain the attractiveness of American women. There is always a certain unexpectedness about them. They are always stimulating and agreeable. It is much more difficult to account for the attractiveness of the English man.

The manners of a well-bred English man are not superior to those of a well-bred American man. Nor are they inferior. Looked at superficially, they are the same. As far as mere conventional behavior toward women is concerned, there is no difference between an Englishman and an American. A well-mannered Englishman rises up and opens the door for a woman when she leaves the room. So does a well-mannered American. The Englishman hands tea, bread and butter or cake to a woman before he takes tea, bread and butter or cake for himself. So does the American. The outward acts are identical. But there is a subtle difference in the spirit which inspires them. The English man does these things because he is chivalrous. His manners are based on the theory "Noblesse oblige." The woman belongs to the weaker sex, he to the stronger. All courtesy is therefore due to her. This is the theory which underlies the behavior of Englishmen to women. Good manners are a survival, one of the few survivals, of the old idea of chivalry; and chivalry was the nobly conceived homage of the strong to the weak, of the superior to the inferior. The American, performing exactly the same outward acts, is reverent. And reverence is essentially the opposite of chivalry. It is not the homage of the strong to the weak, but the obeisance of the inferior in the presence of a superior.

This difference of spirit underlies the whole relationship of men to women in England and America. It helps to explain the fact that the feminist movement in England is much fiercer than it is in America. The English feminist is up against chivalry and wants equality. The American woman, though she may claim rights, has no inducement to destroy reverence.

I should be very sorry to think, I should be mad to say, that this difference in spirit has anything to do with the attractiveness of Englishmen, considered not as temporary companions, but as husbands. But there are, or once were, people who held the theory that the natural woman—and all women are perhaps more or less natural—prefers as a husband the kind of man who asserts himself as her superior. "O. Henry" has a story of a woman who learned to respect and love her husband only after she had goaded him into beating her. Up to that point she had despised him thoroughly. Other novelists, deep students of human nature all of them, have worked on the same scheme. They are quite wrong, of course. But if they were right they might quote the Englishman's invincible chivalry as the reason of his attractiveness; maintaining, cynically, that a woman prefers, in a husband, that kind of homage to the reverence that the American man continually offers her.

The American man strikes me as more alert than the Englishman. If this were noticeable only in New York, I should attribute the alertness to the climate. The air of New York is extraordinarily stimulating. The stranger feels himself tireless, as if he could go on doing things of an exhausting kind all day long without intervals for rest. It would be small wonder if the natives of the place were eager beyond other men. But they are not more eager and alert than other Americans. Therefore we cannot blame, or thank, the climate for these qualities. They must depend upon some peculiarity of the American nervous system, unless indeed they are the result of living under the American constitution. A man would naturally feel it his duty to be as alert as he could if he felt that his country was preeminently the land of progress and that all the other countries in the world were more or less old-fashioned and effete. But wherever the alertness comes from it is certainly one of the characteristics of the American man.

With it goes sanguineness. Every man who undertakes any enterprise looks at it from two points of view. He thinks how very nice life will be if the enterprise succeeds. He also considers how disagreeable things will become if, for any reason, it fails to come off. The Englishman, unless he is a politician, is temperamentally inclined to give full weight to the possibility of failure. The American dwells rather on the prospects of success. There are, of course, a great many sanguine Englishmen. Most Members of Parliament, for instance, must be extraordinarily hopeful, otherwise they would not go on expecting to get things done by voting and listening to speeches. Some Americans, though not many, are cautious to the point of being almost pessimistic. But, broadly speaking, Americans are more sanguine than Englishmen. That is why so many new faiths, and new foods, come from America. Only a very hopeful people could have invented Christian Science or expect to be benefited by eating patent foods at breakfast time. That is also, I imagine, why Americans drink so much iced water. Conscious of the dangers of being too sanguine, they try to cool down their spirits in the way which is generally recognized as best for reducing excessive hopefulness. To pour cold water on anything is a proverbial expression. The Americans pour gallons of very cold water down their throats, which shows that they are on the watch against the defects of their high qualities.

With the alertness and hopefulness there goes, inevitably, a certain restlessness. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't" is a proverb which appeals to the English man. It could never be popular in America. The American, if he made up his mind to go in for the acquaintance of devils at all, would be inclined to try the newer kinds, not merely because he would be hopeful about them, but because he would feel sure that the old ones would bore him. He would never settle down to a monotonous cat and dog life with a thoroughly familiar devil. The Englishman prefers to remain where he is unless the odds are in favor of a change being a change for the better. The American will make a change unless he thinks it likely to be a change for the worse.

We were greatly struck while we were in America by the fact that there were very few gardens there. The season of the year, late autumn, was not, indeed, favorable to gardens. Still I think we should have recognized flower beds and the remains of flowers if we had seen them. At first we were inclined to think that Americans do not care for flowers; but we were constantly assured, on unimpeachable authority, that they do. And we were not dependent on mere assertion. We saw that Americans adorn their rooms with cut flowers, sometimes at huge expense. They must therefore like flowers. They also, we were told, like growing them; but as a matter of fact they do not grow them to anything like the same extent that flowers are grown in England or Ireland. We used to ask why people who like flowers and would like to grow them have so few gardens. We got several answers. The climate, of course, was one. But it is not fair to make the climate responsible for too many things. Besides the climate, as I have said before, is not the same all over America. It is difficult to believe that it is everywhere fatal to gardening.

Another answer—a much more satisfactory one—was that it takes time to create a garden, and Americans do not usually stay long enough in one house to make it worth while to start gardening. It is plainly an unsatisfactory thing to inaugurate a herbaceous border in 1914 if you are likely to leave it early in 1915. As for yew hedges and delights of that kind, no one plants them unless he has a good hope that his son will be there to enjoy them after he has gone. The American, so we were told, and so of course believed, is always looking forward to moving into a new house. This is because he is alert, sanguine and a lover of change. The Englishman is inclined to settle down in one house, and it is very difficult to root him out of it. Therefore gardens are commonly possible in England and rarely so in America.

We did indeed see some gardens in America, and they were tended with all the care which flower lovers display everywhere. We saw in them plants brought from very different places, round which there doubtless gathered all sorts of associations, whose blossoms were redolent with the perfume of happy memories as well as their own natural scents. But these gardens belonged to men who either through the necessity of their particular occupation or through some eccentricity of character felt that they were likely to remain in one place.

Gardens are generally best loved and most carefully tended by women. I have known men who took a real interest in plants, but for the most part men who spend their leisure hours in gardens occupy themselves in mowing the grass or scuffling the walks. They will trim the edges of flowerbeds with shears, they will sometimes even dig, but their hearts are not with the growing plants. Often they confess as much openly, saying without shame that mowing is capital exercise after office hours, or that the celery bed must be properly trenched if it is to come to perfection. No one who works in this spirit is a gardener, nor is a man who merely desires a tidy trimness. To the real gardener neatness is an unimportant detail. It is better that a flower should grow in a bed with ragged edges than that it should wither slowly in the middle of the trimmest of lawns. It is women, far oftener than men, who possess or are possessed by the instinct for getting things to grow. It is after all a sort of mother instinct, since flowers, like children, only respond to those who love them. Probably every woman who has the mother instinct has the garden instinct too, and most women, we may be thankful for it, are potentially good mothers.

Perhaps it is the fact that he is content to stay still long enough to render gardens possible which makes the Englishman attractive as a husband. It is easy to understand that there is something very fascinating to a garden lover in the prospect of attachment to one particular spot. It is a great thing to feel: "Here I shall live until the end of living comes, and then my sons will live here after me. All the rockeries I build, all the trees I plant, all my pergolas and rose hedges are for delight in coming years, for delight still in the years beyond my span of living." This instinct for a settled home, of which a garden is the symbol, is surely stronger in woman than in any man. Woman is after all the stable part of humanity. Man fights, invents, frets, fusses and passes. Woman is the link between the generations. Man makes life possible and great. It is woman who continues life, hands it on. Her nature requires stability. She feels after settledness in the hope of finding it.

If I were a philosopher I should pursue these speculations and write several pages about men and women which it would be very difficult for any one to understand. But I have no taste for hunting elusive thoughts among the shadows of vague words. I am content to note my little facts; that American men are more restless than Englishmen, that there are fewer gardens in America than in England, that most women like gardens, and that there are more marriages between American women and Englishmen than between English women and American men.

I came across a curious example of American restlessness a little while ago. There was a footman, very expert in his business, who lived and earned good wages in an English house. He was an ambitious footman, and, though his wages were good, he wanted them to be better still. His opportunity came to him. An American wanted a valet and was prepared to pay very large wages indeed. The footman offered his services, and being, as I said, a very good footman, he secured the vacant position, and the wages which were far beyond any he would ever have earned in England. At the end of two years he happened to meet the butler under whom he had served in the English house. The butler congratulated him on his great wealth. The footman, now a valet, replied that there are several things in the world better worth having than money.

"I haven't," he said, "slept a fortnight at a time in the same bed since I left you, and it's killing me."

Now that would not have killed or gone near killing an American born footman, if there is such a thing as an American born footman. He would have enjoyed it, just as his master did; for that American, being very wealthy, could if he liked have slept in the same bed every night for a year, every night for many years, until indeed the bed wore out. He preferred to vary his beds as much as possible. He had, no doubt, many beds which were in a sense his own, beds in town houses, beds in shooting boxes, beds in fishing lodges, beds in Europe, beds which he had bought with money and to which he had an indefeasible title as proprietor. But not one of these was, as an Englishman would understand the words, his own bed. There was not one to which he came back after wandering as to a familiar resting place. They were all just couches to sleep on, to be occupied for a night or two, indistinguishable from those which he hired in hotels.

I am told that the English are learning the habit of restlessness from the Americans, as indeed they have learned many other things. If they learn it thoroughly they will, I think, have to give up the hope of being able to marry wealthy American women. Their titles will not purchase desirable brides for them if they are no longer able to offer settled homes. According to a very learned German historian, it was the introduction of the "stabilitas loci" ideal into the western rules which made monasticism the popular career it was in the church. It is his old fondness for settling down and staying there which made the Englishman so popular as a husband.

Americans are forced by the restlessness of their nature to move about frequently from house to house, but they have arranged that each temporary abode is very comfortable. They are ahead of the English in their domestic arrangements. I pay this tribute to them very unwillingly, because I myself am more at my ease in an inconveniently arranged house. That is because I am accustomed to inconvenience. The English houses are greatly superior to the Irish, therefore to go straight from an Irish house to an American, from Connaught to Chicago, is to plunge oneself too suddenly into strangely civilized surroundings. I admire, but I fear it would be years before I could enjoy, an American house. I go to bed most contentedly in a bedroom in which a single candle lights a little circle round it, leaving dim, fascinating spaces in which anything may lurk. I like when the candle is extinguished to see a faint glow of light from a fire reflected on the ceiling. I find it pleasant to remember, after I have got into bed, that I do not know in what part of the room I left the matches, that if I awake in the night and want the light I must go on a dangerous and exciting quest, feeling my way toward the dressing table, sweeping one thing after another off it while I pass my hand along in search of the matchbox. The glare of the electric light robs bed-going of its romance. The convenient switch beside my hand cuts me off from all chance of midnight adventure.

I like to get out of bed on a frosty morning and find myself in a thoroughly cold room. The effort to do this very trying thing braces me for the day. I slip a hand, an arm, a foot, from the blankets, feel the nip of the air, draw them back again, go through a period of intense mental struggle, make a gallant effort, fling all the bedclothes from me and stand shivering on the floor. I feel then that I am a strong, virtuous man, fit to go forth and conquer. The glow of righteousness becomes even more delightful if I find a film of ice on the water of my jug and break it with the handle of a toothbrush. All this is denied me in an American house. Getting out of bed there is no real test of moral courage. The room is pleasantly warm, a sponge is soft and pliable, not a frozen stone.

I like, where this is still possible, to have my bath in a large tin dish, shallow and flat, which stands in the middle of the bedroom floor with a mat under it. There are fine old Irish houses in which this delightful way of bathing still survives. Alas! they are, even in Ireland, getting fewer every day. The next best thing is to wander down chilly corridors in search of the single bathroom which the house contains. This is, fortunately, still necessary in most English and nearly all Irish houses. Any one who is fond of the amusement of reading house agents' advertisements must have noticed the English economy in bathrooms. "Handsome mansion, four reception rooms, lounge hall, billiard room, fifteen bedrooms, bath, hot and cold." I do not believe that there is a house like that in all America. Imagine the excitement of living in it when all the fifteen bedrooms are full. It stimulates a man to feel, as he sallies forth with his towel over his arm, that any one of the other fourteen inhabitants may have reached the bath before him, that thirteen people may possibly be waiting in a queue outside the door. To get into the bathroom in a house of that kind at the first attempt must be like holding a hand at bridge with four aces, four kings, four queens and a knave in it, a thing worth living and waiting for. In America all this is denied us. A bathroom, luxuriously arranged, adjoins each bedroom. Washing is made so ridiculously easy that there ceases to be any virtue in it. No one would say in America that cleanliness is next to godliness. There is no connection between the two things. It would be as sensible to say that breathing is a subordinate kind of virtue. In England a dressing gown is well-nigh a necessity. I know a thoughtful host who provides one for his guests; a warm voluminous garment in which it is possible to go comfortably to the bathroom. In America a dressing gown, for a man, is a useless incumbrance. I dragged one with me, but I shall never take it again; for, like many other things, it is misnamed. It is only when one has to stop dressing that a dressing gown is any use.

In these matters of the heating of houses and the arrangement of baths I prefer what I am accustomed to, but I know that I am little better than a barbarian. I might, if I had lived in the days when matches were first invented, have sighed for my flint and steel, but I hope I should have recognized the superiority of matches. I might, in the early days of railways, have wished to go on traveling in stage coaches, but I should have known that steam engines are really better things than horses at dragging heavy weights for long distances. Thus I cling to the romance of icy bedrooms and inconvenient baths, but I acknowledge freely that the Americans have found the better way and made a step forward along the road of human progress.

I am not, however, so obstinately conservative as to fail in appreciating some other points in the American mastery of the domestic arts. I may long for chilly rooms and remote baths, but I thoroughly enjoy clean towels. Never have I met so many clean towels as in America. The English middle-class housekeeper is behind her French sister in the provision of towels, but the American is ahead even of France. The American towel is indeed small, the bath towel particularly small; but that seems to me a trifling matter, hardly worth mentioning, when the supply is abundant. I would rather any day have three small apples than one large one, and my feeling about towels is the same. It is a real pleasure to find a row of clean ones waiting every time it becomes necessary to wash. It is certainly a mark of superior civilization to realize the importance of house linen in daily life. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the American fails in the matter of sheets. What you get are good, very good, smooth and cool. You are constantly given clean ones. But they are not long enough. In England the sheet on your bed covers your feet completely and leaves a broad flap at the other end which you can turn over the blankets and tuck under your chin. In America you must either leave your feet sheetless or be content with a mere ribbon of linen under your chin, a narrow strip which will certainly wriggle away during the night. This may not be the fault of the American housekeeper. There may be some kind of linen drapers' trust which baffles the efforts of reformers. I have heard that in one of the western states, where the suffrage has been granted to women, a law has been passed that all sheets must be made eighteen inches longer than they usually are in the other American states. That law is a strong proof of the advantages to the community of allowing women to vote. It also seems to show that the American woman, at all events, is alive to the necessity of reform in this matter of sheets, and is determined to do her best to remedy a defect in her household management.

The disuse of doors in those parts of the house which are inhabited during the daytime is a very interesting feature of American domestic life. The first action of an Englishman when he enters a room is to shut the door. His first duty when leaving it, if any one remains inside, is to shut the door. No well-trained servant ever leaves a door open unless specially requested to do so. Children, from their very earliest years, are taught to shut doors, and punished—it is one of the few things for which a child is systematically punished now—for leaving doors open. An English mother calls after her child as he leaves the room the single word "door," or, if she is a very polite and affectionate mother, two words, "door, dear," or "door, please." An American child would not understand a request made in this elliptical form. It knows of course what a door is, just as it knows what a wall is, but it would be puzzled by the mere utterance of the word, just as an English child would be if its mother suddenly called to it, "wall," or "wall, dear," or "wall, please." The American child would wonder what its mother wanted to say about a door. The English child understands thoroughly in the same way as we all understand what a dentist means when he says, "Open, please." It is never our favorite books, our tightly clenched hands, or our screwed up eyes which he wants us to open, always our mouths. The word "open" is enough for us. So the word "door" through a long association of ideas at once suggests to the English child the idea of shutting it.

An Englishman is thoroughly uncomfortable in a room with the door open. An American's feeling about shut doors was very well expressed to me by a lady who had been paying a number of visits to friends in England.

"English houses," she said, "always seem to me like hotels. When you go into them you see nothing except shut doors."

If, after due apologies, you ask why Americans have no doors between their sitting-rooms, or why, when they have doors, they do not use them, you always get the same answer.

"Doors," they say, "are necessary in England to keep out draughts, because the English do not know how to heat their houses. In our houses all rooms and passages are kept up to an even temperature and we do not require doors."

This is an intelligible but not the real explanation of this curious difference between the Americans and the English. There are some English homes which are centrally heated and in which the temperature is as even, though rarely as high, as in American houses; but the Englishmen who live in them still shut doors. An Englishman would shut the door of the inner chamber of a Turkish bath if there were a door to shut. In summer, when the days are very warm, he opens all the windows he can, but he does not sit with the door open. Temperature has nothing to do with his fondness for doors. In the same way there are in America some houses which are not centrally heated, very old-fashioned houses, but they are as doorless as the others. The fact seems to be not that doors were disused when central heating became common, but that central heating was invented so that people who disliked doors could be warm without them.

I think the lady who told me that the English houses seemed like hotels to her hinted at the real explanation. The open door is a symbol of hospitality. It is the expression of sociability of disposition. The Americans are hospitable and marvelously sociable. They naturally like to live among open doors or with no doors at all, so that any one can walk up to him and speak to him without difficulty. The Englishman, on the other hand, wants to keep other people away from him, even members of his own family. His dearest desire is to have some room of his own into which he can shut himself, where no one has a right to intrude. He calls it his "den," which means the lurking place of a morose and solitary animal. Rabbits, which are sociable creatures, live in burrows. Bees, which have perfected the art of life in community, have hives. The bear has its den. Every room in an old-fashioned English middle-class house is really a den, though sometimes, as in the case of the drawing-room, a den which is meant for the use of several beasts of the same kind at once. A change is indeed coming slowly over English life in this matter. The introduction into the middle classes of what is called by house agents "the lounge hall" is a departure from the "den" theory of domestic life. The "lounge hall" is properly speaking a public room. It is available at all hours of the day and no one claims it specially as his own. It is accessible at once to the stranger who comes into the house from the street. It is still rare in England, but where it exists it marks an approach toward American ideals. The term "living-room" only lately introduced by architects into descriptions of English houses is another sign that we are becoming more sociable than we were. It is not simply another name for a drawing-room. It stands for a new idea, an American idea. The drawing-room—properly the withdrawing-room—is for the use of people who want to escape temporarily from family life. The living-room for those who live it to the full.

In the American house there are no "dens." The American likes to feel that he is in direct personal contact with the members of his family and with his guest. It does not annoy him, even if he happen to be reading a book on economics, to feel that his wife may sit down beside him or his daughter walk past the back of his chair humming a tune without his having had any warning that either of them was at hand. The noise made by a servant collecting knives and plates after dinner, reaching him through a drawn curtain, does not disturb his enjoyment of a cigar. The servant is to him a fellow human being, and the sound of her activities is a pleasant reminder of the comradeship of man. He too has had his moments of activity during the day. A guest in an American house is for the time being a member of the family, not a stranger who, however welcome he may be, does not presume to intrude upon his host's privacy.

The "porch," as it is called, a striking feature of the American house, is another evidence of the spirit of sociability. A "porch" is a glorified and perfected veranda. In summer it is a large open-air sitting-room. In winter it can, by a common arrangement, be made into a kind of sun parlor. It has its roof, supported by wooden posts. When the cold weather comes, frames, like very large window sashes, are fitted between the posts and a glass-sided room is made. It is evident that the life in these porches is of a very public kind. The passer-by, the casual wanderer along the road outside, sees the American family in its porch, can, if he cares to, note what each member of the family is doing. The American has no objection to this publicity. He is not doing anything of which he is the least ashamed. If other people can see him, he can see them in return. The arrangement gratifies his instinct for sociability. The Englishman, on the other hand, hates to be seen. Nothing would induce him to make a habit of sitting in a veranda. Even in the depths of the country, when his house is a long way from the road, he fits thin muslin curtains across the lower part of his windows. These keep out a good deal of light and in that way are annoying to him, but he puts up with gloom rather than run any risk, however small, that a stranger, glancing through the window, might actually see him. Yet the Englishman commonly leads a blameless life in his own home. He seldom employs his leisure in any shameful practices. His casement curtains are simply evidences of an almost morbid love of privacy.

The first thing an Englishman does when he builds a house is to surround it with a high wall. This, indeed, is not an English peculiarity. It prevails all over western Europe. It is a most anti-social custom and ought to be suppressed by law, because it robs many people of a great deal of innocent pleasure. The suburbs of Dublin, to take an example, ought to be very beautiful. There are mountains to the south and hills to the west and north of the city, all of them lovely in outline and coloring. There is a wide and beautiful bay on the east. But the casual wayfarer cannot see either the mountains or the bay. He must walk between high yellow walls, walls built, I suppose, round houses; but we can only know this by hearsay. For the walls hide the houses as well as the view. In Sorrento, which is even more exquisitely situated than Dublin, you walk for miles and miles between high walls, white in this case. The only difference between the view you see at Dublin and that which you see at Sorrento is that the patch of sky you see in Dublin is gray, at Sorrento generally blue. At Cintra, one of the world's most famous beauty spots, the walls are gray, and there you cannot even see the sky, because the owners of the houses inside the walls have planted trees and the branches of the trees meet over the road. The Americans do not build walls round their houses. The humblest pedestrian, going afoot through the suburbs of Philadelphia, Indianapolis or any other city, sees not only the houses but anything in the way of a view which lies beyond them.

This is not because America is a republic and therefore democratic in spirit. Portugal is a republic too, having very vigorously got rid of its king, but the walls of Cintra are as high as ever. No one in the world is more democratic than an English Liberal, but the most uncompromising Liberals build walls round their houses as high as those of any Tory. The absence of walls in America is simply another evidence of the wonderful sociability of the people. Walls outside houses are like doors inside. The European likes both because the desire of privacy is in his blood. The American likes neither.

The "Country Club" is an institution which could flourish only among a very sociable people. There are of course clubs of many sorts in England. There is the club proper, the club without qualification, which is found at its very best in London. In books like Whitaker's Almanac, which classify clubs, it is described as "social," but this is only intended to distinguish it from political or sporting clubs. There is no suggestion that it is sociable, and in fact it is not. It is possible to belong to a club in London for years without knowing a dozen of your fellow members. It often seems as if the members of these clubs went to them mainly for the purpose of not getting to know each other; a misfortune which might happen to them anywhere else, but from which they are secure in their clubs. There are also all over England clubs specially devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, yacht clubs and so forth. In these the members are drawn together by their interest in a common pursuit, and are forced into some sort of acquaintanceship. But these are very different in spirit and intention from the American Country Club. It exists as a kind of center of the social life of the neighborhood. There may be and often are golf links connected with it. There are tennis courts, sometimes swimming baths. There is always a ball-room. There are luncheon rooms, tea rooms, reading rooms. In connection with one such club which I saw there are sailing matches for a one design class of boats. But neither golf nor tennis, dancing nor sailing, is the object of the club's existence. Sport is encouraged by these clubs for the sake of general sociability. In England sociability is a by-product of an interest in sport.

The Country Club at Tuxedo is not perhaps the oldest, but it is one of the oldest institutions of the kind in America. In connection with it a man can enjoy almost any kind of recreation from a Turkish bath to a game of tennis, either the lawn or the far rarer original kind. At the proper time of year there are dances, and a débutante acquires, I believe, a certain prestige by "coming out" at one of them. But the club exists primarily as the social center of Tuxedo. It is in one way the ideal, the perfect country club. It not only fosters, it regulates and governs the social life of the place.

Tuxedo has been spoken of as a millionaire's colony. It is a settlement, if not of millionaires, at all events of wealthy people. The park, an immense tract of land, is owned by the club. Ground for building can be obtained only by those who are elected members of the club and who are prepared to spend a certain sum as a minimum on the building of their houses. In theory the place is reserved for people who either do or will know each other socially, who are approximately on the same level as regards wealth and who all want to meet each other frequently, for one purpose or another, in the club. In practice, certain difficulties necessarily arise. A man may be elected a member of the club and build a house. He may be a thoroughly desirable person, but in course of time he dies. His son may be very undesirable, or his son may sell the house to some one whom the club is not willing to admit to membership. But Tuxedo society, instead of becoming, as might have been expected, a very narrow clique, seems to be singularly broad minded and tolerant. The difficulty of preserving the character of the place and keeping a large society together as, in all its essentials, a club, is very much less than might be expected. The place is extremely interesting to any observer of American social life. The club regulates everything. It runs a private police force for the park. It keeps up roads. It supplies electric light and, what is hardly less necessary in America, ice to all the houses. It levies, though I suppose without any actual legal warrant, regular rates. The fact that the experiment was not wrecked long ago on the rocks of snobbery goes to show that society in America is singularly fluid compared to that of any European country. That a considerable number of people should want to live together in such a way is a witness to the sociability of America. No other country club has realized its ideal as the club at Tuxedo has, but every country club—and you find them all over America—has something of the spirit of Tuxedo.

Tuxedo is immensely interesting in another way. Nowhere else in the world, I suppose, is it possible to see so many different kinds of domestic architecture gathered together in a comparatively small space. A walk round the shores of the lake gives you an opportunity of seeing houses built in the dignified and spacious colonial style, a happy modification of the English Georgian. Beside one of these, close to it, may be a house like that of a Mexican rancher, and the hill behind is crowned with a French château. There are houses which must have had Italian models, others which suggest memories of Tudor manor houses, others built after the fashion of Queen Anne's time. There are houses whose architects evidently had an eclectic appreciation of all the houses built anywhere or at any time, who had tried to embody the most desirable features of very various styles in one building. The general effect of a view of Tuxedo is exceedingly bewildering at first, but almost every house is the expression of some individual tastes, either good or bad. An architect may start, apparently very often does start, with the idea of building a house with twelve rooms in it at a cost of four thousand pounds. Having thus settled size and price, he may go ahead, trusting to luck about the appearance. Or an architect may start with the idea of building a house in a certain style, or to express some feeling, dignity, homeliness, grandeur, or anything else. The architects who built the Tuxedo houses all seem to have gone to work on the latter plan.

If the Tuxedo experiment in social life fails and the club goes into liquidation, the United States Government might do worse than buy the whole place as it stands and turn it into a college of domestic architecture. The students could, without traveling more than a mile or two, study every known kind of country house. But, indeed, a college of this sort seems less needed in America than anywhere else. It is not only the insides of the houses which are well planned. The outsides of the newer houses are for the most part beautiful to look at. And one can see them, there being no walls.

The municipal elections in New York which resulted in the defeat of Tammany were fought out with great vigor in all the usual ways. There were speeches, bands and flags. The newspapers were full of the sayings of the different candidates, and the leader writers of each party seemed to be highly successful in cornering the speakers of the other party. It was shown clearly every day that orators shamelessly contradicted themselves, went back on their own principles, and must, if they had any respect for logic or decency, either retract their latest remarks or explain them. All this was very interesting to us. It would have been interesting to any one. It was particularly interesting to us because it was almost new to us. Elections are, I suppose, fought in more or less the same way everywhere; but in Connaught we hardly ever have elections. An independent candidate bubbles up occasionally, but as a rule we are content to return to Parliament the proper man, that is to say the man whom somebody, we never quite know who, says we ought to return.

I gathered the impression that elections must be an exciting sport for those engaged in them. I do not think that the "pomp and circumstance" of the business, the outward manifestations of activity, can make much difference to the result. Speeches, for instance, are certainly thrilling things to make, and I can understand how it is that orators welcome elections as heaven sent opportunities for the exercise of their art. But the people who listen to the speeches always seem to have their minds made up beforehand whether they agree with the speaker or not. They know what he is going to say and are prepared with hoots or cheers. I never heard of any one who came to hoot remaining to cheer. I doubt whether there is a single modern instance of a speech having affected the destiny of a vote. A very good speech might indeed produce some effect if it were not that there is always an equally good speech made at the same time on the other side. Election speeches are like tug boats pulling different ways at the opposite ends of a large ship. They neutralize each other and the ship drifts gently, sideways, with the tide.

It cannot be seriously maintained that bands or flags help voters to make up their minds. In nine cases out of ten it is impossible to tell for which side a band is playing, and therefore unlikely that it will draw voters to one side rather than the other. In the tenth case, when the band, by selecting some particular tune, makes its meaning clear, the music is not of a quality which moves the listener to any feeling of gratitude to the candidate who pays for it. I should, I think, feel bound to vote for a man who gave me "panem et circenses," but I should expect good bread and an attractive circus. I should not dream of voting for a candidate who provided me with inferior music. The flags are a real addition to the gaiety of city life. The ordinary elector loves to see them fluttering about. But the ordinary elector is not by any means a fool. He knows that the flags will be taken down very soon after the election is over. If any candidate promised to keep his flags flying as a permanent decoration of the city streets he might capture a few votes. But we all know that none of them will do anything as useful as that.

Nor do I think that the editors of newspapers produce much effect by showing up the inconsistencies of politicians and pinning them down to-day, when they are driven to say something quite different, to the things which, under stress of other circumstances, they said yesterday. It does not take a clever man, like a newspaper editor, to corner a politician. Any fool can do that, and the performance of an obviously easy trick does not move an audience at all. An acrobat who merely hops across the stage on one leg gets no applause and the box office returns fall away. The thing is too easy. It is the man who does something really hard, balances himself on the end of an umbrella and juggles with twenty balls at once, who attracts the public. If a newspaper editor at an election time would, instead of showing up the other side, offer proofs that the men on his own side are consistent, logical and high-principled, he would have enormous influence with the voters. "Any one," so the ordinary man would reason, "who can prove things like that about politicians must be amazingly clever. If he is amazingly clever, far cleverer than I ever hope to be, then there is a strong probability that his side is the right one. I shall vote for it." The ordinary man, so we ought to recollect, is not nearly such a fool as is generally supposed. He is quite capable of reasoning, and he would reason, I am sure, just in the way I have suggested, if he were given a chance.

The keen interest which we took in the showy side of electioneering made us diligent readers of the newspapers. We were rewarded beyond our hopes. We came across, on the very evening of the election itself, a little paragraph, tucked away in a corner, which we might very easily have missed if we had been less earnest students. In a certain district in New York, so this paragraph told us, there was a queue of voters waiting outside a polling station. Among them was a man who was known to be or was suspected of being hostile to Tammany. It was likely that he would cast his vote on the other side. There were, looking thoughtfully at the queue, certain men described by the newspaper as "gangsters" in the pay of the Tammany organization. They seized the voter whose principles seemed to them objectionable and dragged him out of the queue, plainly in order to prevent his recording his vote. So far there was nothing of very special interest in the paragraph. We knew beforehand—even in Ireland we know this—that voters are a good deal influenced by the strength of the party machine. The strength is seldom displayed in its nakedly physical form on this side of the Atlantic, but it is always there and is really the determining force in most elections. It was the thing which happened next which gave the incident its value. A university student who happened to be engaged in social work in the neighborhood saw what was done. He was one man and there were several "gangsters," but he attacked them at once. He was, as might be supposed, as he himself must surely have foreseen, worsted in the fray which followed. The gangsters, after the manner of their kind, mauled, beat and kicked him to such an extent that he had to be carried to a hospital. It did not appear that this university student was a party man, eager for the triumph of his side as the gangsters were for the victory of theirs. He seems to have acted on the simple principle that a man who has a right to vote ought not to be interfered with in the exercise of that right. He was on the side of justice and liberty. He was not concerned with politics of either kind.

I do not know what happened to that student afterwards. I searched the papers in vain for any further reference to the incident. I wanted to know whether the voter voted in the end. I wanted to know what was done to the gangsters. I wanted to know whether the student recovered from his injuries or not. I wanted, above all, to know whether anyone recognized how fine a thing that student did. I never discovered another paragraph about the incident.

I was talking some time afterwards to an English friend, the friend to whom I have already referred, who knows America very well and who offered to take care of me while I was there. I told him the story of the voter and the Tammany gangsters.

"These things," he said, "happen over here. They are constantly happening. One gets into the way of not being shocked by them. But there always is that university student somewhere round, when they do happen."

It is an amazingly high tribute to the American universities. If my friend is right, if blatant force and abominable injustice do indeed find themselves faced, always and as a matter of course, by a university student, then the universities are doing a very splendid work. And I am inclined to think that my friend is right. There is another story of the same kind, one of many which might be told. This one came to me, not in a newspaper but from the lips of a man who told me that he was a witness of what happened.

There was—I forget where—a kind of settlement, half camp, half town, built in a lonely place for the workmen of a company which was conducting some mining or engineering enterprise. The town, if I am to call it a town, was owned and ruled by the company. The workmen were of various nationalities, and, taken as a whole, a rough lot. It was, no doubt, difficult to keep them contented, difficult enough to keep them at all in such a place. It would probably be unjust to say that the company encouraged immorality; but the existence of disorderly houses in the place was winked at. The men wanted them. The officials of the company, we may suppose, found their line of least resistance in ignoring an evil which they may have felt they could not cure. After a while, during one summer vacation, there came to the place a university student. He was not a miner or an engineer and had no particular business with the company. He was, apparently, on a kind of mission; but whether he was preaching Christianity or social reform of a general kind I was not told. He was the inevitable university student of my friend's remark.

He found himself face to face with an evil thing which he at all events would not ignore. He made his protest. Now no man of the world, certainly no business man, objects to a proper protest, temperately made, provided the protester does not go too far. The man of the world is tolerant. He is a consistent believer in the policy of living and letting live. He recognizes that people with principles must be allowed to state them. It is in order to be stated that principles exist. But he holds that in common fairness he ought to be allowed to ignore these statements of principle. That was just what this university student could not understand. He went on protesting more and more forcibly until he made the officials uncomfortable and the men exceedingly angry. It was the men, either with, or, as I hope, without the knowledge of their superiors, who first threatened, then beat that university student, beat him on the head with a sandbag and finally drove him from the place with a warning that he had better not return again.

He did return, bringing with him certain officers of the law. He was a man of some strength of character and the recollection of the beating did not cause him to hesitate. Unfortunately the officers of the law could not do much. The disorderly houses were all quite orderly when they appeared. They were small shops selling apples, matches and other innocent things. There was no evidence to be got that anything worse had ever gone on in them than the sale of apples and matches. The previous inhabitants of these houses were picnicking in the woods for a few days. All that the officers of the law were able to do was to conduct the university student safely out of the place. That was difficult enough.

I am not sure that this story is true, for I did not read it in a newspaper; but it is very like several others which I heard. They may all be false or very greatly exaggerated, but they show, at least, the existence of a popular myth in which the university student figures, always with the same kind of character. Behind every myth there is some reality. Even solar myths, the vaguest myths there are, lead back ultimately to the sun, which is indubitably there. It seems to me that whether he actually does these fine things or not the American university student has succeeded in impressing the public with the idea that he is the kind of man who might do them. That in itself is no small achievement.

I wanted very much, because of the myth and for other reasons, to see something of American university life. I did see something, a little of it, both at Yale and Princeton.

I have heard it said that the Englishman is more attached to his school than to his university, that in after life he will think of himself as belonging to Eton, to Harrow, to Winchester, rather than to Oxford or to Cambridge. The school, for some reason, rather than the university, is regarded as "the mother" from whom the life of the man's soul flowed, to whom his affection turns. An Oxford man or a Cambridge man is indeed all his life long proud, as he very well may be, of his connection with his university, but his school is the subject of his deepest feeling. Round it rather than the university gathers that emotion which for want of better words may be described as educational patriotism. An Irishman, on the other hand, if he is a graduate of Dublin University, thinks more of "Trinity" than he does of his school. He may have been at one of the most famous English public schools, but his university, to a considerable extent, obliterates the memories of it. He thinks of himself through life as a T. C. D. man.

America is like Ireland in this respect. I find, looking back on my memories of the American men whom I met most frequently, that I know about several of them whether they are Yale men, Princeton men or Harvard men. I do not know about any single one of them what school they belonged to. I never asked any questions on the subject. Such information as I got came to me accidentally. It came to me without my knowing that I was getting it. Only afterwards did I realize that I knew A. to be a Yale man, B. to be a Harvard man and so forth. In England the information which comes unsought about a man concerns his school rather than his university. It is the name of his school which drops from his lips when he begins talking about old days. There are oftener books about his school than about his university on his shelves, photographs of his school on the walls of his study.

I do not know that there is in the American universities any definitely planned and deliberate effort to create or foster this spirit of patriotism. There is certainly no such effort apparent in Dublin University. The spirit is there. That is all that can be said. It pervades these institutions. Only an occasional and more or less eccentric undergraduate escapes its influence.

The patriotism is indeed much more obvious and vocal in America than in Dublin. We had the good luck to be present at a football match between Yale and Colgate Universities. It was not a match of first-rate importance, but an enormous crowd of spectators gathered to witness it. The excitement of the supporters of both sides was intense. There was no possible mistake about the fact that professors and undergraduates, old men who had graduated long ago and boys who were not yet undergraduates, wives, mothers and sisters of graduates and undergraduates, were all eagerly anxious about the result of the game. Yale, in the end, was quite unexpectedly beaten. It is not too much to say that a certain gloom was distinctly noticeable afterward everywhere in New Haven. It hung over people who were not specially interested in athletics of any kind. It affected the spirits of my host's parlormaid.

Very shortly after my return home I watched a football match between Dublin University and Oxford. The play was just as keen and sportsmanlike as the play between Yale and Colgate; but there was nothing like the same general interest in the game. There was a sprinkling of spectators round the ground, an audience which could not compare in size with that of Yale. They were interested in the game, intelligently interested. They applauded good play when they saw it; but there was nothing to correspond to the tense excitement which we witnessed in America. The game was a game. If Dublin won, well and good. If Oxford won, then Dublin must try to do better next time. No one feared defeat as a disaster. No one was prepared to hail victory with wild enthusiasm. A stranger could not have gone through New Haven on the day of the Yale and Colgate football match without being aware that something of great importance was happening. The whole town seemed to be streaming toward the football ground. In Dublin you might have walked not only through the city but through most parts of the college itself on the day of the match against Oxford and you would not have discovered, unless you went into the park, that there was a football match. Yet the pride of a Dublin man in his university is as deep and lasting as that of any American.

The reason of the difference is perhaps to be found in the fact that everything connected with university athletics is far more highly organized in America than on this side of the Atlantic. The undergraduate spectators are drilled to shout together. They practice beforehand songs which they sing on the occasion of the match for the encouragement of their own side. Young men with megaphones stand in front of closely packed rows of undergraduates. They give the signal for shouting. With wavings of their arms they conduct the yells of the crowd as musicians conduct their orchestras. The result is something as different as possible from the casual, accidental applause of our spectators. It is the difference between a winter rainstorm and the shower of an April morning. This organized enthusiasm affects everyone present. Sober-looking men and women shout and wave little flags tumultuously. They cannot help themselves. I understood, after seeing that football match, why it is that America produces more successful religious revivalists than England does. The Americans realize that emotion is highly infectious. They have mastered the art of spreading it. I do not know whether this is a useful art or not. It probably is, if the emotion is a genuine and worthy one; but it is not pleasant to think that one might be swept away, temporarily intoxicated, by the skill of some organizer who is engaged in propagating a morbid enthusiasm. However that may be, love for a university is a thoroughly healthy thing. It cannot be wrong to foster it by songs and shouts or even—a curious reversion to the totem religion of our remote ancestors—by identifying oneself with a bulldog or a tiger.

I met one evening some young men who had graduated in Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards gone over for a post-graduate course to a theological college connected with one of the American universities. We talked about Dublin chiefly, but I made one inquiry from them about their American experience.

"I suppose," I said, "that you have to work a great deal harder here than you did at home?"

Their answer was given with smiling assurance.

"Oh, dear no; nothing like so hard."

I should like very much to have further reliable information on this point. Something might be got, perhaps, by consulting a number of Rhodes scholars at Oxford. My impression, a vague one, is that the ordinary undistinguished American undergraduate is not required to work so hard as an undergraduate of the same kind is in England or Ireland. In an American magazine devoted to education I came across an article which complained that, in the matter of what may be called examination knowledge, the American undergraduate is not the equal of the English undergraduate. He does not know as much when he enters the university and he does not know as much when he leaves it. This was an American opinion. It would be very interesting to have it confirmed or refuted. But no one, on either side of the Atlantic, supposes that the kind of knowledge which is useful in examinations is of the first importance. The value of a university does not depend upon the number of facts which it can drive into the heads of average men; but on whether it can, by means of its teaching and its atmosphere, get the average man into the habit of thinking nobly, largely and sanely. It seems certain that the American university training does have a permanent effect on the men who go through it, an effect like that produced by English schools, and certainly also by English universities, on their students. A man who is, throughout life, loyal to his school or university has not passed through it uninfluenced. It seems likely that the American universities are succeeding in turning out very good citizens. The existence of what I have called the university student myth, the existence of a general opinion that university men are likely to be found on the side of civic righteousness, is a witness to the fact that the universities are doing their main work well.

The little, the very little I was able to see of university life helped me to understand how the work is being done. The chapel services, on weekdays and Sundays, were in many ways strange to me and I cannot imagine that I, trained in other rituals, would find digestible the bread of life which they provide. But I was profoundly impressed by the reality of them. Here was no official tribute to a God conceived of as a constitutional monarch to whom respect and loyalty is due but whose will is of no very great importance, a tribute saved perhaps from formality by the mystic devotion of a few; but an effort, groping and tentative no doubt, to get into actual personal touch with a divinity conceived of as not far remote from common life. These chapel services—exercises is the better word for them—can hardly fail to have a profound effect upon the ordinary man. I have stood in the chapel of Oriel College at Oxford and felt that now and then men of the finer kind, worshiping amid the austere dignity of the place, might grow to be saints, might see with their eyes and handle with their hands the mysterious Word of Life. I sat in the chapel at Princeton, I listened to a sermon at Yale, and felt that men of commoner clay might go out from them to face a battering from the fists and boots of Tammany gangsters.

It seems to me significant that Americans have not got the words "don" and "donnish." They are terms of reproach in England, but the very fact that they are in use proves that they are required. They describe what exists. The Americans have no use for the words because they have not got the man or the quality which they name. The teaching staffs of the American universities do not develop the qualities of the don. They do not tend to become a class apart with a special outlook upon life. It is possible to meet a professor—even a professor of English literature—in ordinary society, to talk to him, to be intimate with him and not to discover that he is a professor. Charles Lamb maintained that school-mastering left an indelible mark upon a man, that having school-mastered he never afterward was quite the same as other men. I had a friend once who boasted that he could "spot" a parson however he was dressed, had spotted parsons who were not dressed at all—in Turkish baths. I do not believe that the most careful student of professional mannerisms could detect an American professor out of his lecture room. It is possible that this note of ordinary worldliness in the members of the staff of the American university has a beneficial effect upon the students. It may help to suggest the thought that a university course is no more than a preparation for life, is not, as most of us thought once, a thing complete in itself.

In all good universities there is a broad democratic spirit among the undergraduates. They may, and sometimes do, despise the students of other universities as men of inferior class, but they only despise those of their fellow students in their own university who, according to the peculiar standards of youth, deserve contempt. In American universities this democratic spirit is stronger than it is with us because there is greater opportunity for its development. There are wider differences of wealth—it is difficult to speak of class in America—among the university students there than here. There are no men in English or Irish universities earning their keep by cleaning the boots and pressing the clothes of their better-endowed fellow students. In American universities there are such men and it is quite possible that one of them may be president of an important club, or captain of a team, elected to these posts by the very men whose boots he cleans. If he is fit for such honors they will be given him. The fact that he cleans boots will not stand in his way. The wisdom of medieval schoolmen made room in universities for poor students, sizars, servitors. The American universities, with their committees of employment for students who want to earn, are doing the old thing in a new way; and public opinion among the graduates themselves approves.

On the subject of the higher university education of girls American opinion is sharply divided. There are people there, just as there are in England, who say that the whole thing is a mistake, that it is better for girls not to go to college on any terms, under any system. I suppose that we must call these people reactionary. There cannot be very many of them anywhere. It was a surprise to me to find any at all in America. They are not, I think, very influential. Among those who favor the higher education of girls there are many who believe whole-heartedly in co-education. I had no opportunity of seeing a co-educational college, but I listened to a detailed description of the life in one from a lady who had lived it. According to her co-education is the one perfect system yet hit upon. Its critics urge two curiously inconsistent objections to it. One man, who is a philosopher and also seemed to know what he was talking about, told me that boys and girls educated together lose the sense of sex mystery, which lies at the base of romantic love and consequently do not want to marry. According to his theory, based upon a careful observation of facts, the students of co-educational universities never fall in love with each other or with anyone else. If the system were widely adopted and had this effect upon the students everywhere, the results would certainly be very unfortunate. Another critic, equally well informed, said that the real objection to co-education is that the students do little else except fall in love with each other. This, though no doubt educative in a broad sense of the word, is not exactly the kind of education we send boys and girls to universities to get. It must be very gratifying to the friends of the system to feel that these two objections cannot both be sound.

Co-educational colleges are chiefly to be found in the West, among the newer states. In the East girls get their higher education for the most part in colleges of their own. Smith College for instance has no connection with any of the men's universities. Nor has Vassar nor Bryn Mawr. These institutions have their own staffs, their own courses and examinations, their own rules, and confer their own degrees. Barnard College, on the other hand, is closely connected with Columbia University, occupying much the same position as Girton and St. Margaret's Hall do with regard to Cambridge and Oxford, scarcely as intimately joined to Columbia as Trinity Hall is to Dublin University. I had the opportunity of learning something of the life of Smith College. I was immensely impressed by the spirit of the place, as indeed I was by that of all the girls' schools and colleges which I saw. There was an infectious kind of eagerness about both pupils and teachers. There is a feeling of hopefulness. It is as if life were looked upon as a great and joyful adventure in which many discoveries of good things may be expected, much strenuous work may be done gladly, in which no disillusion waits for those who are of good heart. Not the girls alone, but those who teach and guide them, are young, young in the way which defies the passing of years to make them old. We are not young because we have seen eighteen summers and no more, or old, because we have seen eighty. We are old when we have shut the doors of our hearts against the desire of new things and steeled ourselves against the hope of good. We are young if we refuse, even when our heads are gray, to believe that disappointment inevitably waits for us. The world and everything in it belongs to the young. It is this pervading sense of youthfulness which makes the American girls' colleges so fascinating to a stranger. It is not difficult to believe that the girls who come out of them are able to take their places by the side of men in business life, or if the commoner and happier lot waits them, are well fitted to be the partners of men who do great things and the mothers of men who will do greater things still.

I take it that the American universities, both those for men and women, are the greatest things in America to-day. This, curiously enough, is not the American idea. The ordinary American citizen is proud of every single thing in his country except his universities. He is always a little apologetic about them. He compares his country with England and is convinced that America is superior in every respect, except the matter of universities. When he speaks of the English universities he shows a certain sense of reverence and makes mention of his own much in the spirit of Touchstone who introduced Audrey as "a poor thing, but my own."