Our luck, which had up to that point been as good as luck could be, failed us miserably when we started for Chicago. The very day before we left New York there was a blizzard and a snowstorm. Not in New York itself. There was only a very strong wind there. Nor in Chicago, but all over the district which lay between. One train was held up for eighteen hours in a snowdrift. The last fragments of food in the restaurant car were consumed, and the passengers arrived chilled and desperately hungry at their destination. We might have been in that train. It was not, indeed, possible for us to leave New York a day sooner than we did; but I cannot see why the blizzard could not have waited a little. Twenty-four hours' delay would have made no difference to it. It might even have gathered force. To us it would have made all the difference in the world. We missed a great experience. That is why I say that our luck failed us at this point.

It would not, at the moment, have been a pleasant experience, and I do not pretend that we should have enjoyed either the cold or the hunger; and we are not the sort of people who, under such circumstances, secure the last sardine. We should, owing to our feebleness in self-assertion, have been among the first to go foodless. But afterwards we could have thought about it and all our lives told steadily improving stories about the adventure. The recollection of it would have added zest to every remaining hour of comfort in our lives. What is a short spell of suffering compared to such enduring joys? But in these matters we have been singularly unlucky through life. We have never been in a shipwreck or a railway accident or been forced to escape from a burning house. Only once did a horse run away with us, and it fell almost immediately after making its dash for liberty. No burglar has roused us to do battle with him in the middle of the night. It seems hard, when we have been denied all the great adventures of life, to miss by the narrow margin of a single day the minor excitement of being snowed up in a train.

However, it is useless to complain. The thing was not to be and it was not. Our journey was commonplace and unadventurous. We hired what is called a drawing-room car on our train. This is an extravagant thing to do. For people of our humble means it is almost criminally reckless. Some day when we cannot afford to have our boots re-soled, when we are looking at the loaves in the windows of bakers' shops with vain desire, when we have neither money nor credit left to us, we shall think with poignant regret of the huge sums we spent on that drawing-room car. We shall be sorry, at least one of us will be sorry that we were not more careful when he or she, the survivor, cannot afford a simple tombstone to mark the grave of the other. But at the moment the money, in spite of Atlantic City, being actually in our pockets, we felt that the drawing-room car was an absolute necessity. I should take it again if I were going to Chicago. But then we are not yet reduced to penury.

The alternative to a drawing-room car, on most trains, is a section in a Pullman sleeping-car. Against this we rose in revolt. I cannot imagine how the Americans, who are in many ways much more highly civilized than Europeans, tolerate the existence of Pullman sleeping-cars. I am not physically—though I am in every other way—an exceptionally modest man. I have, for instance, no objection to mixed bathing, and it does not make me blush to meet one of the housemaids in a hotel when, dressed only in my pajamas, I am searching for the bathroom. But I do object to undressing in the corridor of a Pullman sleeping-car, and I cannot, not being a professional acrobat, undress in my berth. For a lady the thing is, of course, much worse. Besides the undressing and the still more difficult dressing again, there is the business of washing in the morning, washing and, for most men, shaving. You go into a sort of dressing-room to do that. There are not nearly basins enough. There is not room enough. Somebody is sure to walk on your sponge, will walk on your toothbrush, too, unless you happen to be a clerk, and therefore practiced in the art of holding things behind your ear.

I think Americans are beginning to recognize that these sleeping-cars are barbarous. I met one lady who told me that she would always gladly sacrifice a new dress in order to spend the money on a drawing-room car. I entirely sympathize with her; but, even if you are prepared for these heroic extravagances, you cannot always get a drawing-room car. There was one occasion on which we failed, though we telegraphed three days before to engage one. On some of the best trains of the best lines there are also what are called "compartments." These are comparable in comfort to the cabins of the International Company of Wagon Lits on the Continental trains de luxe, though inferior to the London and North Western Railway Company's sleeper. No one has any right to grumble who secures a compartment. Unfortunately, it is not every railway company which has them, and it is by no means every train on which they are run.

The drawing-room car, when you get it, is in itself a comfortable thing to travel in. There is a good deal of room in it. There is satisfactory lavatory accommodation. The attendants are civil and competent. Any one who can sleep in a train at all could sleep in a drawing-room car if only he were not waked up every time the train stops or starts. Trains must stop occasionally, of course. But there is no real need for emphasizing the stops as American trains do. It is possible—I know this, because both the French and English trains do it—to stop without giving inexperienced passengers the impression that there has been a collision. Stopping is not a thing a train ought to be proud of. There is no reason why the attention of passengers should be drawn to it forcibly. For starting with a bang there is, of course, more excuse. To start at all is a triumph. It is a victory of mind over inert matter, and any one who accomplishes it wants, naturally and properly, to be admired. I can understand the annoyance of the train, conscious of being able to start, at feeling that its passengers, who ought to be praising it, are perhaps sound asleep. Yet I cannot help thinking that all the admiration any train ought to want might be secured without excessive violence. Suppose a notice were hung up in every coach: "This train will stop twice during the night and after each stop will start again. Passengers are requested to realize that this is not an easy thing to do. They will therefore admire the train." No passenger with a spark of decent feeling in him would refuse an appreciative pat to the engine in the morning. We do as much for horses who cannot drag us nearly so far or half so fast. We do it for dogs who do not drag us at all, only fetch things for us. We should certainly treat engines with the same kindness if they were a little tenderer to us. But I refuse to pat, stroke or in any way fondle an engine which, out of mere vanity, wakes me up by starting boisterously.

We ran during the night through the tail of the snowstorm which had stopped the train the day before. We had left New York in pleasant autumn weather, on one of those days which, without being cold, has an exhilarating nip about it. We arrived in Chicago in what seemed to us midsummer weather, though I believe it was not really hot for Chicago. We passed on our way through a snow-covered district and had the greatest difficulty in keeping warm during the night. This is one of the advantages of traveling in America. The distances are so immense that in the course of a single journey you have the chance of trying several kinds of climate. In England you get the same result by staying in one place. But the American plan is much better. There, having discovered a climate which suits you, you can settle down in it with a fair amount of confidence that it will remain what it is for a week or two at a time. In England, whether you travel about or stay still, you have got to accustom yourself to continual variety.

After breakfast, when the train had passed the snow-covered region and the air became a little warmer, we sat on the platform at the end of the observation car and looked out at the country through which we were going. Nothing could conceivably be more monotonous. The land was quite flat, the railway line was absolutely straight. The train sped on at a uniform pace of about forty miles an hour. As far back as the eye could see were the rails of the track, narrowing and narrowing until they looked like a single sharp line, ruled with remorseless precision from some point at an infinite distance in the east. On each side of us were broad spaces of flat land, reaching, still flat, to the horizons north and south of us. Every half-hour or so we passed a village, a collection of meanly conceived, two-storied houses with a hideous little church standing just apart from them. Hour after hour we rushed on with no other change of scenery, no mountain, no lake, no river, just flat land, with a straight line ruled on it. It was incredibly monotonous. I suppose that the life of the people who inhabit that region is as interesting, in reality, as any other life. The seasons change there, I hope. Harvests ripen, cows calve, men die; but on us, strangers from a very different land, the unvarying flatness of it all lay like an intolerable weight.

Yet that journey gave me, more than anything else I saw, a sense of the greatness of the American people. There is, I suppose, some one thing in the history of every nation which impresses the man who realizes, even dimly, the meaning of it, more than anything else does. Elizabethan England's buccaneering adventures to the Spanish main seem to me to make intelligible the peculiar greatness of England more than anything else her people have ever done. Revolutionary France in arms against Europe is France at her most glorious, with her special splendor at its brightest. So my imagination fixes on America's settlement of her vast central plain as the greatest thing in her story. Her fight for independence was fine, of course; but many other nations have fought such wars and won, or, just as finely, lost. Her civil war stirs thoughts of greatness in any one who reads it. But this tremendous journey of the American people from the east to the Mississippi shores, halfway across a continent, was something greater than any war.

First, no doubt, hunters went out from the narrow strip of settled seaboard land. They pushed their adventurous way across the Alleghanies, finding passes, camping in strange fastnesses. They came upon the westward-flowing waters of the great network of rivers which drain into the Mississippi. They made their long, dim trails. They fought, with equal cunning, bands of Indian braves. They returned, in love with wildness, weaned from the ways of civilization, to tell their tales of strange places by the firesides of sober men. Or they did not return. They were great men, and their achievements very great, but not the greatest.

More wonderful was the accomplishment of those long streams of settlers who crossed Virginia and Pennsylvania to find the upper reaches of the waterways which should lead and bear them mile by mile to the Mississippi shore. It is barely a century since these men, home lovers, not wanderers with the call of the wild in their ears, home builders, not hunters, went floating in rude arks down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee. With unimaginable courage and faith they took with them women, children, cattle, and household plenishing. Somewhere each ark grounded and the work of settlement began. I saw the woods which stretch for miles over rolling hills and round lakes beyond that curious colony of very wealthy people at Tuxedo. My imagination pictured for me, as I gazed at these woods, the outpost settlements of one hundred years ago. The "half-faced camp," rudest of the dwellings of civilized man, was built. Trees were "girdled" or cut down with patient toil. A small clearing was made amid the interminable miles of forest land. I imagined the men, lean and grim, the anxious women, ever on the alert because of the perpetual menace of the Indians who might lurk a stone's throw off among the shadows of the trees.

We can guess at the satisfaction of each triumph won; the day when the lean-to shed with its open side gave place to the log hut, still rude enough; the day when some great tree, sapless from its "girdling," was hewn down at last; the adding of acre after acre of cleared land; the incredibly swift growth of villages and towns; the pushing out of settlements, south and north, into yet stranger wildernesses, away from the friendly banks of the waterways. The courage and endurance of these settlers must have been far beyond that required of soldiers, explorers or adventurers. Step by step, almost literally step by step, they made this wonderful journey, conquering every acre as they passed it. Yet we know very little about them. Homer made a list of the ships which sailed for Troy. Who has chronicled the arks and rafts of these still braver men? Camoens wrote his Luciad to glorify the voyage of Vasco da Gama round the African coast. All England's Elizabethan literature is, rightly understood, an interpretation of the spirit of Drake and Raleigh. No one has written an epic of these American pioneer settlers. Yet surely if ever men deserved such commemoration they did.

Our train ran on and on at forty miles an hour, and my spirit was cowed by the vast monotony. What sort of spirit had the men who faced it first, to whom the conquest of a mile was a great achievement, to whom it must have seemed that there was no end to it at all? I wonder whether there was in them some great kind of faith, of which we have lost the secret now, a belief that God Himself had bidden them go forward? Or perhaps there was strong in them that instinct for the conquest of nature which, whether he knew it or not, has always been in man, which has made him greater than the beasts, only a little lower than the angels. Or perhaps it was hunger for life itself, not for a fuller or a richer life, but for the bare material existence, which sent them on, threatened by want in civilized places, to look for ground where things would grow, where the fruit of their toil would not be taken from them. To find a parallel for the achievement of these men the mind must go back to dim ages before history began, when our ancestors—why and how we cannot guess—learned to light fires, chip flints, snare beasts, make laws; groped through a palpable obscurity toward justice and right, fought those impossible battles of theirs which have won for us the kingship of the world. Theirs was an achievement greater indeed than that of America's pioneer settlers, but of the same kind.

I went to church in New York on Thanksgiving Day, and I, though a stranger, was given the privilege of reading aloud that wonderful chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy which tells how God led His people through a great and terrible wilderness. I forgot, as I read it, all about Israel and Sinai. I remembered how the people among whom I was had journeyed across their vast continent. They are not my people. Their glory is none of mine. Their Thanksgiving Day had nothing to do with me, but emotion thrilled me strangely as I read. I wondered, thanked, and bent my head with fear, so great was the past which is remembered, so terrible the warning which follows the recital. "Beware lest thou at all forget the Lord thy God."

The observation car, with its sheltered platform at the back of it, is a pleasant feature of the long-distance American train, one which might, with advantage, be copied in Europe. But the best thing, the most wholly satisfactory, about American railway traveling is that certain trains are fined for being late. This happens in England, I think, certainly in Ireland, in the case of mail trains. It does them a lot of good, but gives small gratification to the suffering passengers, because the Post-Office authorities take the money. In America the passengers get the fine. Our train was an hour and a quarter late in getting to Chicago, and we were handed a dollar each as compensation for our annoyance. I felt sorrier than ever that we had not traveled the day before in the train that was delayed by the blizzard. Then we should have got eighteen dollars each and been able to buy several splendid dinners to make up for our starvation.

It is not every train in America which pays for unpunctuality in this way. I am not sure that the rule applies even to express trains all over the continent, nor do I know whether the railway companies deal thus justly with their passengers of their own free will. It seems very unlikely that they do. I am inclined to think that there must be a law on the subject, either a law made by the State of Illinois or, as I hope, one made by Congress itself. However this may be, I have no doubt at all that the law, if it is a law, ought to be made and strictly enforced in every civilized country. I traveled once by a London & North Western Railway express train, which was three hours late; and I suffered a loss, was actually obliged to disperse no less a sum than £2-18-0 in consequence. I tried in vain to make the company see that it ought to pay me back that £2-18-0. I never got a penny. Yet the offense of the American company was a trifling one in comparison. It was one hour and a quarter late in a journey supposed to occupy twenty-three hours. The London & North Western Railway took nine hours over a journey which it professed to do in six. I cannot help feeling that the English company would have got its train to London on that occasion much more rapidly if it had known beforehand that it might have to pay each passenger fifteen shillings at Euston. We hear a great deal on this side of the Atlantic about the scandalous way in which American railway magnates control American legislation. It appears that occasionally, at all events, the legislators exercise a very salutary control over the railways.

Charges of corrupting senates are certainly made against American railway directors. They may conceivably be true. If they are it seems desirable, in the interests of the passengers, that some of the British railways would take in hand the task of corrupting the House of Commons in the American way. The morals of that assembly could in no case be much worse than they are, so there would be little loss in that way, while the gain to the public would be immense if trains, even a few of the best trains, were forced under heavy penalties to keep time.

Chicago possesses one exceedingly good hotel. We know this by experience. The other hotels in the city may be equally good, but we shall never try them. Having found one almost perfect hotel, we shall, whenever we visit that city again, go back to it. But I expect that all the other hotels there are good too, very good; for Chicago appears to take an interest in its hotels. In most cities, perhaps in all other cities, hotels are good or bad according as their managers are efficient or the reverse. The city itself does not care about its hotels any more than it cares about its bootmakers. A London bootmaker might provide very bad leather for the soles of a stranger's boots. "The Times" would not deal with that bootmaker in a special article. It might be very difficult to obtain hot water in one of the great London hotels—I have seen it stated, on the authority of an American, that it is very difficult—but London itself does not care whether it is or not. The soling of boots and the comfort of casual guests are, according to the generally prevailing view, affairs best settled betwen[** between] the people directly interested, the traveler on the one hand and the bootmaker or manager on the other. No one else thinks that he has a right to interfere.

Chicago takes a different view. It has a sense of civic responsibility for its hotels, possibly also for its bootmakers. I did not try the bootmakers and therefore cannot say anything certainly about them. But I am sure about the hotels. It happened that there was a letter awaiting my arrival at the hotel, the very excellent hotel, in which we stayed. This letter was not immediately delivered to me. I believe that I ought to have asked for it, that the hotel manager expects guests to ask for letters, and that I had no reasonable ground of complaint when the letter was not delivered to me. Nor did I complain. I am far too meek a man to complain about anything in a large hotel. I am desperately afraid of hotel officials. They are all much grander than I am and occupy far more important positions in the world. I should not grumble if a princess trod on my toe. Princesses have a right, owing to the splendour of their position, to trample on me. But I would rather grumble at a princess than complain to a head waiter or the clerk in charge of the offices of a large hotel. Princesses are common clay compared to these functionaries. But even if I were a very brave man, and even if I believed that one man was as good as another and I the equal of the manager of a large hotel, I should not have complained about the failure to deliver that letter. The hotel when we were there was very full, and full of the most important kind of people, doctors. It was not to be expected that such a trifle as a letter for me would engage the attention of anybody.

Next morning there was a paragraph in one of the leading Chicago papers about my letter and the manager of the hotel was told plainly, in clear print, that he must do his business better than he did. I was astonished when the manager, taking me solemnly apart, showed me the paragraph, astonished and terror-stricken. I apologized at once for daring to have a letter addressed to me at his hotel. I apologized for not asking for it when I arrived. I apologized for the trouble his staff had been put to in carrying the letter up to my room in the end. Then I stopped apologizing because, to my amazement, the manager began. He apologized so amply that I came gradually to feel as if I were not entirely in the wrong. Also I realized why it is that this hotel—and no doubt all the others in Chicago—is so superlatively good. Chicago keeps an eye on them. The press is alive to the fact that every citizen of a great city, even a hotel manager, should do not merely his duty but more, should practice counsels of perfection, perform works of supererogation, deliver letters which are not asked for.

The incident is in itself unimportant, but it seems to me to illustrate the spirit of Chicago. It is a great city and is determined to get things done right. It has besides, and this is its rare distinction, an unfaltering conviction that it can get things done right. Most communities are conscious of some limitations of their powers. For Chicago there are no limitations at all anywhere. Whatever ought to be done Chicago will do. Nothing is too small, nothing too great to be attempted and carried through. It may be an insignificant matter, like the comfort of a helpless and foolish stranger. It may be a problem against which civilized society has broken its teeth for centuries, like the evil of prostitution. Chicago is convinced that it can be got right and Chicago means to do it.

I admire this sublime self-confidence. I ought always to be happy when I am among men who have it, because I was born in Belfast and the first air I breathed was charged with exactly this same intensely bracing ozone of strong-willedness.

Belfast is very like Chicago. If a Belfast man were taken while asleep and transported on a magic carpet to Chicago, he would not, on waking up, feel that anything very strange had happened to him. The outward circumstances of life would indeed be different, but he would find himself in all essential respects at home. He would talk to men who said "We will," with a conviction that their "We will" is the last word which can or need be said on any subject; just as he had all his life before talked to men who said, "We won't," with the same certainty that beyond their "We won't" there was nothing.

Chicago is, indeed, greater than Belfast, not merely in the number of its inhabitants and the importance of its business, but in the fact that it asserts where Belfast denies. It is a greater and harder thing to say "Yes" than "No." But there is a spiritual kinship between the two places in that both of them mean what they say and are quite sure that they can make good their "yes" and "no" against the world. If all the rest of America finds itself up against Chicago as the British empire is at present up against Belfast, the result will be the bewilderment of the rest of America.

I was in Chicago only for a short time. I did not see any of the things which visitors usually see there. I went there with certain prejudices. I had read, like every one else, Mr. Upton Sinclair's account of the slaughter of pigs in Chicago. I had read several times over the late Mr. Frank Norris's "The Pit." I had read and heard many things about the wonderful work of Miss Jane Addams. I had a vague idea that Chicago was both better and worse than other places, that God and the devil had joined battle there more definitely than elsewhere, that the points at issue were plainer, that there was something nearer to a straight fight in Chicago between good and evil than we find in other places.

In Chicago I felt the armies would be less ignorant, the alarms a little less confused. I am not sure now that this is so. It may be quite as hard in Chicago as it is anywhere else to find out quite certainly what is right; which, in certain tangled matters, is God's side and which the devil's. But I do not believe that the Chicago man, any more than the Belfast man, is tormented with the paralysis of indecision. He may and very likely will do a great many things which will turn out in the end not to be good things. But he will do them quite unfalteringly. When, having done them, he has time to look round at the far side of them, he may discover that there was some mistake about them somewhere. Then he will undo them and do something else instead with the same vigorous conviction. He will, in any case, keep on doing things and believing in them.

I was in a large bookseller's shop while I was in Chicago. It was so large that it was impossible to discover with any certainty what pleases Chicago most in the way of literature. There seemed to me to be copies of every book I had ever heard of waiting there for buyers, and, I presume, they would not wait unless buyers were likely to come. But I was struck with the very large number of books dealing with those subjects which may be classed roughly under the term Eugenics. There were more of these books in that shop than I had ever seen before. I should not have guessed that there were so many in the world. I may, of course, have received a wrong impression. This particular shop had its books arranged according to subjects. There was not, as generally in England and Ireland, a counter devoted to the latest publications, or a series of shelves given over to books priced at a shilling. In this shop all books on economics, for example, whether old or new, cheap or dear, were in one place; all books on music in another; and so forth. The idea underlying the arrangement being that a customer knows more or less the subject he wants to read about and is pleased to find all books on that subject ready waiting for him in rows. Our idea, on the other hand, that which underlies the arrangements of our shops, is that a customer wants, perhaps a new book, perhaps a ten-and-sixpenny book, perhaps a shilling book, without minding much what the book is about. He is best suited by finding all the new books in one place, all the ten-and-sixpenny books in another, and all the shilling books in a third. I do not know which is the better plan, but that adopted in the Chicago shop has the effect of making the casual customer realize the very large number of books there are on every subject. I may therefore have been deceived about the popularity of books on eugenics in Chicago. There may be no more on sale there than elsewhere. But I think there are. Of some of these books there were very large numbers, twenty or thirty copies of a single book all standing in a row. Plainly it was anticipated that there were in Chicago twenty or thirty people who would want that particular book. I never, in any book shop elsewhere, saw more than five or six copies of a eugenic book in stock at the same time. I also noticed that the majority of these books were cheap; not detailed and elaborate treatises on, let us say, Weissmannism and the mechanism of heredity; but short handbooks, statements of conclusions supposed to be arrived at and practical advice suited to plain people. I formed the opinion that the study of eugenics is popular in Chicago, more popular than elsewhere, and that a good many people believe that some good is to be got out of knowing what science has to teach on these subjects.

I was told by a man who ought to have known that these books are steadily becoming more popular. The demand for them was very small five years ago. It is very large now and becoming steadily larger. This seems to me a very interesting thing. For a long time people were content just to take children as they came, and they did not bother much about the hows and the whys of the business. Grown-up men and women did not indeed believe that storks dropped babies down chimneys or that doctors brought them in bags. But they might just as well have believed these things for all the difference such knowledge as they had made in their way of conducting the business. Their philosophy was summed up in a proverb. "When God sends the mouth He sends the food to fill it." To go further into details struck people, twenty years ago, as rather a disgusting proceeding.

Now we have all, everywhere, grown out of this primitive innocence. We have been driven away from our old casual ways of reproducing ourselves, and are forced to think about what we are doing. There is nothing very interesting or curious about this. It is simply a rather unpleasant fact. What is interesting is that Chicago seems to be thinking more than the rest of us, is at all events more interested than the rest of us in the range of subjects which I have very roughly called eugenics. Chicago is, apparently, buying more books on these subjects, and presumably buys them in order to read them. Is this a symptom of the existence of a latent vein of weakness in Chicago?

I am not a very good judge of a question of this sort. The whole subject of Eugenics and all the other subjects which are associated with it are extremely distasteful to me. I like to think of young men and young women falling in love with each other and getting married because they are in love without considering overmuch the almost inevitable consequences until these are forced upon them. I fancy that in an entirely healthy community things would be managed in this way, and that the result, generally speaking and taking a wide number of cases into consideration, would be a race of wholesome, sound children, fairly well endowed with natural powers and fitted to meet the struggle of life. But Chicago evidently thinks otherwise. The subject of Eugenics is studied there, and, as a consequence of the study, a number of clergy of various churches have declared that they will not marry people who are suffering from certain diseases. They have all reason on their side. I admit it. I have nothing to urge against them except an old-fashioned prejudice in favor of the fullest possible liberty to the individual. Yet I cannot help feeling that it is not a sign of strength in a community that it should think very much about these things. A man seldom worries about his digestion or reads books about his stomach until his stomach and his digestion have gone wrong and begun to worry him. A great interest in what is going on in our insides is either a sign that things are not going on properly or else a deliberate invitation to our insides to give us trouble. It is the same with the community. But I should not like to think that anything either is or soon will be the matter with Chicago. It would be a lamentable loss to the world if Chicago's definite "I will" were to weaken, if the native hue of this magnificent, self-confident resolution were to be sicklied o'er with a pale cast of thought.

At present, at all events, there is very little sign of any such disaster. It happened that while we were in Chicago there was some sort of Congress of literary men. They dined together, of course, as all civilized men do when they meet to take counsel together on any subject except the making of laws. In all probability laws would be better made if Parliaments were dining clubs; but this is too wide a subject for me to discuss. The literary men who met in Chicago had a dinner, and I was highly honored by receiving an invitation to it. I wish it had been possible for me to be there. I could not manage it, but I did the next best thing, I read the report of the proceedings in the papers on the following morning. One speaker said that he looked forward to the day when Chicago would be the world center of literature, music and art. He was not, of course, a stranger, one of the literary men who had gathered there from various parts of America. He was a citizen of Chicago. No stranger would have ventured to say so magnificent a thing. As long as Chicago says things like that, simply and unaffectedly, and believes them, Chicago can study eugenics as much as it likes, might even devote itself to Christian Science or take to Spiritualism. It would still remain strong and sane. For this was not a silly boast, made in the name of a community which knows nothing of literature, music or art. Chicago knows perfectly well what literature is and what art is. Chicago understands what England has done in literature and art, what France has done, what Germany has done. Chicago has even a very good idea of what Athens did. If I were to say that I looked forward to inventing a perfect flying machine I should be a fool, because I know nothing whatever about flying machines and have not the dimmest idea of what the difficulties of making them are. If Chicago were as ignorant about literature and art as I am about aeronautics, its hope of becoming the world center of these things would be fit matter for a comic paper. What makes this boast so impressive is just the fact that Chicago knows quite well what it means.

There are no bounds to what a man can do except his own self-distrust. There is nothing beyond the reach of a city which unfalteringly believes in itself. No other city believes in itself quite so whole-heartedly as Chicago does, and I expect Chicago will be the world center of literature, music and art. There is nothing to stop it, unless indeed Chicago itself gives up the idea and chooses to be something else instead. It may, I hope it will, decide to be the New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl and streets of gold and a tree of life growing in the midst of it. Then Chicago will be the New Jerusalem and I shall humbly sue to be admitted as a citizen. My petition will, I am sure, be granted, for the hospitality of the people of Chicago seems to me to exceed, if that be possible, the hospitality of other parts of America. I am not sure that I should be altogether happy there, even under the new, perfected conditions of life; but perhaps I may. I was indeed born in Belfast, and as a young man shared its spirit. That gives me hope. But I left Belfast early in life. I have dwelt much among other peoples, and learned self-distrust. It may be too late for me to go back to my youth and learn confidence again. If it is too late, I shall not be really happy in Chicago.

Chicago is generous as well as strong. There is no note of petty jealousy in its judgment of other cities. Memphis belongs to the South and is very different from the cities of the East and the middle West. It is easily conceivable that Chicago might be a little contemptuous of Memphis, just as Belfast is more than a little contemptuous of Dublin. But Chicago displays a fine spirit. I was assured, more than once, when I was in Chicago, that Memphis is a good business city, and I suppose that no higher praise could be given than that. I never met a Belfast man who would say as much for Dublin. But, of course, Chicago is not in this matter so highly tried as Belfast is. Memphis does not assume an air of social superiority to Chicago as Dublin does to Belfast. It is not therefore so very hard for Chicago to be generous in her judgment.

Perhaps "generous" is the wrong word to use; "just" would be better. No generosity is required, because Memphis really is one of those places in which business is efficiently done. Timber, I understand, is one of the things in which Memphis deals. Cotton is another. I do not know which of the two is a greater source of trade, but cotton is the more impressive to the stranger. The place is full of cotton. Mule carts drag great bales of it to and from railway stations. Sternwheel steamers full of it ply up and down the Mississippi. I shall never again take out a pocket handkerchief—I use the cheaper, not the linen or silken handkerchief—without looking to see if there is a little piece of white fluff sticking on my sleeve. When I next visit one of the vast whirling mills of Lancashire I shall think of a large quiet room in Memphis full of tables on which are laid little bundles of cotton, each bearing a neat ticket with mysterious numbers and letters written on it. As I watch the operatives tending the huge machines which spin their endless threads, I shall think of the men who handle the samples of the cotton crop in that Memphis office. They take the stuff between their fingers and thumbs and slowly pull it apart, looking attentively at the fine fibers which stretch and separate as the gentle pull is completed. By some exquisite sensitiveness of touch and some subtle skill of glance they can tell to within an eighth of an inch how long these fibers are. And on the length of the fiber depends to a great extent the value of the crop of the particular plantation from which that sample comes. Outside the windows of the room is the Mississippi,—a broad, sluggish, gray river when I saw it; where the deeply laden steamers splash their way from riverside plantations to Memphis and then down to New Orleans, where much of the cotton is shipped to Europe.

Beyond the room where the cotton is graded is an office, a sunlit pleasant place with comfortable writing desks and a case full of various books. You might fancy yourself in the private room of some cultivated lawyer in an English country town, if it were not that in a corner of that office there stands one of those machines which, with an infinite amount of fussy ticking, disgorge a steady stream of ribbon stamped with figures. In New York and Liverpool men are shouting furiously at each other across the floors of Cotton Exchanges. Prices are made, raised, lowered by their shouts. Transactions involving huge sums of money are settled by a gesture or two and a shouted number. A hand thrust forward, palm outward, sells what twenty panting steamers carry to the Memphis quays. A nod and a swiftly penciled note buys on the assurance that the men with the sensitive fingers have rightly judged the exact length of a fiber, impalpable to most of us. All the time the shouting and the gestures are going on thousands of miles away this machine, with detached and unexcited indifference, is stamping a record of the frenzied bidding, there in the sunlit Memphis office. Chicago is no more than just when it says that Memphis is a city where business is done.

Modern business seems to me the most wonderful and romantic thing that the world has ever seen. A doctor in London takes a knife and cuts a bit out of a man's side. By doing that he acquires, if he chooses to exercise it, the right to levy a perpetual tax on the earnings of a railway somewhere in the Argentine Republic. No traveler on that railway knows of his existence. None of the engine drivers, porters, guards or clerks who work the railway have ever heard of that doctor or of the man whose side was cut. But of the fruit of their labors some portion will go to that doctor and to his children after him if he chooses, with the money his victim pays him, to buy part of the stock of that railway company. An obscure writer, living perhaps in some remote corner of Wales, tells a story which catches the fancy of the ladies who subscribe to Mudie's library. He is able, because he has written feelingly of Evangelina's first kiss, to take to himself and assure to his heirs some part of the steel which sweating toilers make in Pittsburgh, or, if that please him better, he can levy a toll upon the gold dug from a mine in South Africa. What do the Pittsburgh steel workers know or care about him or Evangelina or the ladies who thrill over her caress? Why should they give up part of the fruit of their toil because an imaginary man is said to have kissed a girl who never existed? It is very difficult to explain it, but all society, all nations, peoples and languages agree that they must. The whole force of humanity, combined for this purpose only, agrees that the doctor, because of his knife, which has very likely killed its victim, and the novelist because of his silly simpering heroine, shall have an indefeasible right to tax for their own private benefit almost any industry in the whole wide world. This is an unimaginable romance. So is all business; but Memphis brought home the strangeness of it to me most compellingly.

Here is a dainty lady, furclad, scented, pacing with delicate steps across the floor of one of our huge shops. In front of her, not less exquisitely dressed, a handsome man bows low with the courtesy of a great lord of other days:

"Lingerie, madam, this way if you please. The second turning to the left. This way, madam. Miss Jones, if you please. Madam wishes to see——"

And madam, with her insolent eyes, deigns to survey some frothy piles of frilly garments, touches, appraises the material, peers at the stitches of the hems, plucks at inserted strips of lace.

Here are broad acres of black, caked earth and all across them are rows and rows of stunted bushes, like gooseberry bushes, but thinner and much darker. On all their prickly branches hang little tufts of white fluff—cotton. Among the bushes go men, women and children, black, negroes every one of them, dressed in bright yellow, bright blue and flaming red. From their shoulders hang long sacks which trail on the ground behind them. They steadily pick, pick, pick the fluffs of cotton out of the opened pods, and push each little bit into a sack. There you have the beginning of all, the ending of part of this wonderful substance which clothes, so they tell us, nine-tenths of the men and women in the world who wear clothes. What is in between the dainty English lady and the negro in Tennessee?

The plantation owner drives his mule along winding tracks through the fields where the bushes are and watches. He is a man harassed by the unsolvable negro problem, in constant dread of insect pests, oppressed by economic difficulties. Men in mills nearby comb the thick seeds from the raw cotton, press it tight and bind it into huge bales. Men grade and sort the samples of it. Men shout at each other in great marts, buy and sell cotton yet unsorted, unpicked, ungrown; and the record of their doings is flashed across continents and oceans. Ships laden down to the limit of safety plunge through great seas with tired men on their bridges guiding them. In Lancashire, in Russia, in Austria, huge factories set their engines working and their wheels go whirling round. Men and women sweat at the machines. In Derry and a thousand other places women in gaunt bare rooms with sewing machines, or in quiet chambers of French convents with needles in their hands, are working at long strips of cotton fabric. In shops women again, officered by men, are selling countless different stuffs made out of this same cotton fluff.

And the whole complex organization, the last achieved result of man's age-long struggle for civilization, works on the perilous verge of breaking down. The fine lady at the one end of it may buy what she cannot pay for and disturb the delicately balanced calculations of the shopkeeper. Some well-intentioned Government somewhere may insist that the women who sew shall have fire and a share of the sunlight, things which cost money. Inspectors come, with pains and penalties ready in their pockets, and it seems possible that they will dislocate the whole machine. Labor, painfully organized, suddenly claims a larger share of the profits which are flowing in. The wheels of all the factories stop whirling. Their stopping affects every one through the whole length of the tremendous chain, alters the manner of life in the tiniest of the negroes' huts. A sanguine broker may speculate disastrously and the long chain of the organization quivers through its entire length and threatens breaking. A ship owner raises rates, the servants of a railway company go on strike. Some one makes a blunder in estimating the size of a future crop. Negroes prove less satisfactory than usual as workers. The possibilities of a breakdown somewhere are almost uncountable. Yet somehow the thing works. It is a wonderful accomplishment of man that it should work and break down as seldom as it does; but the dread of breakdown is present everywhere.

Everyone, the whole way from the lady who wants lingerie to the negro who picks at the bushes, is beset with anxiety. But fortunately no one ever really feels more than his own immediate share of it. The cotton planter will indeed be affected seriously by an epidemic of speculation in New York, or a strike in Lancashire or the legislation of some well-meaning government. He knows all this, but it does not actually trouble him much. He has his own particular worry and it is at him so constantly that it leaves all the other worries no time to get at him at all. His worry is the negro.

According to the theory of the American constitution the negro is a free man, a brother, as responsible as anyone else for the due ordering of the state. In actual practice the negro is either slowly emerging from the slave status or slowly sinking back to it again. It does not matter which way you look at it, the essential thing is, whichever way he is going, he is not yet settled down in either position. It is impossible—on account of the law—to treat him as a slave. It is impossible—on account of his nature, so I am told—to treat him as a free man. He is somewhere in between the two. He is economically difficult and socially undesirable. But he is the only means yet discovered of getting cotton picked. If anyone would invent a machine for picking cotton he would benefit the world at large immensely and make the cotton planter, save for the fear of certain insects, a happy man. But the shape of the cotton bush renders it very difficult to get the cotton off it except by the use of the human finger and thumb. We are not nearly so clever at inventing things as we think we are. The cotton bush has so far defeated us. The negro, who supplies the finger and thumb, has very nearly defeated us too. It is hard to get him to work at all and still harder to keep him at it. He does not seem to be responsive to the ordinary rules of political economy. If he can earn enough in one day to keep him for three days he sees no sense in working during the other two.

The southern American does not seem to be trying to solve this negro problem. He makes all sorts of makeshift arrangements, tries plans which may work this year and next year but which plainly will not work for very many years. These seem the best he can do. Perhaps they are the best anyone could do. Perhaps it is always wisest to be content to keep things going and to let the remoter future take care of itself. The cotton crop has to be picked somehow this year, and it may have to be picked next year too. After that—well nobody speculates in futures as far ahead as 1916.

The problem of the social position of the negro seems to be quite as difficult to solve as that created by his indifference to the laws of political economy. The "man and brother" theory has broken down hopelessly and the line drawn between the white and colored parts of the population in the South is as well defined and distinct as any line can be. The stranger is told horrible tales of negro doings and is convinced that the white men believe them by the precautions they take for the protection of women. There may be a good deal of exaggeration about these stories, and in any case the morality or immorality of the negro is not the most difficult element in the problem. Education, the steady enforcement of law, and the gradual pressure of civilization will no doubt in time render outrages rarer. It is at all events possible to look forward hopefully. The real difficulty seems to me to lie in the strong, contemptuous dislike which white people who are brought into close contact with negroes almost invariably seem to feel for them. In the northern parts of America where negroes form a very small part of the population, this feeling does not exist. A northern American or an Englishman would not feel that he were insulted if he were asked to sit next a negro at a public banquet. A southern American would decline an invitation if he thought it likely that he would be called upon to do such a thing. A southern lady, who happened to be in New York, was offered by a polite stranger a seat in a street car next a negro. She indignantly refused to occupy it. The very offer was an outrage.

The feeling would be intelligible if it were the outcome of instinctive physical prejudice. An Englishwoman, who had hardly ever come into contact with a negro, once found herself seated at tea in the saloon of a steamer opposite a negress who was in charge of some white children. She found it impossible to help herself to cake from the dish from which the negress had helped herself. The idea of doing so filled her with a sense of sickness. Yet she did not feel herself insulted or outraged at being placed where she was. A southern American woman would have felt outraged. But the southern American woman has no instinctive shrinking from physical contact with black people. She is accustomed to it. She has at home a black cook who handles the food of the household, a black nurse who minds the children, perhaps a black maid who performs for her all sorts of intimate acts of service. As servants she has no objection to negroes. There is in her nothing corresponding to the Englishwoman's instinctive shrinking from the touch of a black hand.

Nor is the southern American's contempt for the negroes anything at all analogous to the contempt which most people feel for those who are plainly their inferiors. A brave man has a thoroughly intelligible contempt for one who has shown himself to be a coward. But this is an entirely different thing, different in kind, not merely in degree, from a southern white man's contempt for a negro. It is the existence of this feeling, intensely strong and very difficult to explain, which makes the problem of the negro's social future seem hopeless of solution. No moral or intellectual advance which the negro can make affects this feeling in the slightest. It is not the brutalized negro or the ignorant negro, but the negro, whom the white man refuses to recognize as a possible equal.

Memphis, in spite of its negro problem, seems to me to be rapidly emerging from the ruins of one civilization and to be pressing forward to take a foremost place in another. I do not suppose that Memphis now regrets the past very much or even thinks often of the terrible humiliation of the Civil War and the years of blank hopeless ruin which followed it. There was that indeed in the past which must have left indelible marks behind it. It was not easy for a proud people, essentially aristocratic in their outlook upon life, to accept defeat at the hands of men whom they looked down upon. It is not easy to forget the intolerable injustice which, inevitably, I suppose, followed the defeat. But Memphis is looking forward and not back, is grasping at the possibilities of the future rather than brooding over the past.

But if Memphis and the South generally are content to forget the past, it does not follow that the past has forgotten them. The spirit of the older civilization abides. It haunts the new life like some pathetic ghost, doomed to wander helplessly among people who no longer want to see it. There is a certain suavity about Memphis which the stranger feels directly he touches the life of the place. It is a lingering perfume, delicate, faint but appreciable. I am told that it is to be traced to Europe, that the business men in Memphis have closer relations with England, Austria and Russia than with the northern states of their own country. I am also told that we must look to the origin of it to the Cavalier settlers of the southern states from whom the people who live there now claim descent. I do not like either explanation. A man does not catch suavity by doing business with Lancashire. The quality is not one on which the northern Englishman prides himself, or indeed which is very obvious in his way of living. The blood of those original cavaliers, gentlemen all of them I am sure, must have got a good deal mixed in the course of the last two hundred years, especially as strangers are always pouring into the South. It must be an attenuated fluid now, scarcely capable of flavoring perceptibly a new and vigorous life. I prefer my own hypothesis of a ghost. Some of these creatures smell of sulphur and leave a reek of it behind them when they pay visits to their old homes on earth. Others betray their presence by the damp, cold earthy air they bring with them from the tombs in which their bodies were laid. This Memphis ghost, which no one in Memphis sees, but which yet has its influence on Memphis life, is of quite a different kind. It is scented with pot-pourri, and the delicate rose water which great ladies of bygone generations made and used. It is the ghost of some grande dame like Madame Esmond, who owned slaves and used them with no misgiving about her right to do so, whose pride was very great, whose manners were dignified, whose ways among those of her own caste were exceedingly gracious. There is something, some lingering suggestion of great ladies about Memphis still, in spite of its new commercial prosperity. I think it must be because the spirits of them haunt the place.

Someone must surely have written a book on the philosophy of American place names. The subject is an interesting one, and the world has a lot of authors in it. It cannot have escaped them all. But I have not seen the book. If I ever do see it I shall turn straight to the chapter which deals with Memphis and Cairo, for I very much want to know how those two places came to have Egypt for their godfather. Most American place names are easy enough to understand, and they seem to me to surpass, in their fascinating suggestion of romance, our older Irish and English names. It is, of course, interesting to know that all the chesters in England—Colchester, Dorchester, Manchester and Chester itself—were once Roman camps; and that most of the Irish kils—Kilkenny, Kildare, Killaloe, Kilrush—were the churches of once honored saints. But the Romans and the saints are very remote. They were important people in their day no doubt, but it is very hard to feel the personal touch of them now. American place names bring us closer to men with whom we feel that we can sympathize. There is a whole range of names taken straight from old homes, New York, for instance, Boston, New Orleans. We do not need to go back in search of emotions to the original meaning of York or to worry over the derivation of Orleans. It is enough for us that these names suggest all the pathetic nostalgia of exiles. The men who named these places must have been thinking of dearly loved cathedral towers, of the streets and market places of country towns whose every detail was well remembered and much regretted, of homes which they would scarcely hope to see again. It is not hard, either, to catch the spirit of the Puritan settlers in theological and biblical names, in Philadelphia, Salem and so forth. The men who gave these names to their new homes must have felt that like Abraham they had gone forth from their kindred and their people, from the familiar Ur of the Chaldees, to seek a country, to find that better city whose builder and maker is God. Philadelphia is perhaps to-day no more remarkable for the prevalence of brotherly love among its people than any other city is. But there were great thoughts in the minds of the men who named it first; and reading the name to-day, even in a railway guide, our hearts are lifted up into some sort of communion with theirs. Then there are the Indian names, of lakes, mountains and rivers chiefly, but occasionally of cities too. Chicago is a city with an Indian name. Perhaps these are of all the most suggestive of romance. It must have been the hunters and explorers, pioneers of the pioneers, who fixed these names. One imagines these men, hardened with intolerable toil, skilled in all the lore of wild life, brave, adventurous, picking up here and there a word or two of Indian speech, adopting Indian names for places which they had no time to name themselves, handing on these strange syllables to those who came after them to settle and to build. Greater, so it seems, than the romance of the homesick exile, greater than the romance of the Puritan with his Bible in his hand, is the wild adventurousness which comes blown to us across the years in these Indian names.

But there are names like Memphis which entirely baffle the imagination. It is almost impossible to think that the people who named that place were homesick for Egypt. What would Copts be doing on the shores of the Mississippi? How could they have got there? Nor is it easy to think of any emotion which the name Memphis would be likely to stir in the mind of a settler. Memphis means nothing to most men. It is easy to see why there should be an American Rome. A man might never have been in Rome, might have no more than the barest smattering of its history, yet the name would suggest to him thoughts of imperial greatness. Any one who admires imperial greatness would be inclined to call a new city Rome. But Memphis suggests nothing to most of us, and to the few is associated only with the worship of some long forsaken gods. I can understand Indianapolis. There was Indiana to start with, a name which anyone with a taste for sonorous vowel sounds might easily make out of Indian. The Greek termination is natural enough. It gives a very desirable suggestion of classical culture to a scholar. But a scholar would be driven far afield indeed before he searched out Memphis for a name.

I asked several learned and thoughtful people how Memphis came by its name. I got no answer which was really satisfactory. It was suggested to me that cotton grows in Egypt and also in the neighborhood of Memphis. But cotton does not immediately suggest Egypt to the mind. Mummies suggest Egypt. So, though less directly, does corn. If a caché of mummies had been discovered on the banks of the Mississippi it would be easy to account for Memphis. If Tennessee were a great wheat state one could imagine settlers saying "There is corn in Egypt, according to the Scriptures. Let us call our new city by an Egyptian name." But I doubt whether cotton suggested Memphis. It certainly did not suggest Cairo, for Cairo is not a cotton place. I was told,—though without any strong conviction—that the sight of the Mississippi reminded somebody once of the Nile. It would of course remind an Egyptian fellah of the Nile; but the original settlers in Memphis were almost certainly not Egyptian fellaheen. Why should it remind any one else of the Nile? It reminds me of the Shannon, and I should probably have wanted to call Memphis Athlone if I had had a voice in the naming of it. It would remind an Englishman of the Severn, a German of the Rhine, an Austrian of the Danube, a Spaniard—it was, I think, a Spaniard who went there first—of the Guadalquiver. I cannot believe that the sight of a very great river naturally suggests the Nile to anyone who is not familiar with Egypt beforehand.

It is indeed true that both the Mississippi and the Nile have a way of overflowing their banks, but most large rivers do that from time to time. The habit is not so peculiar as to force the thought of the Nile on early observers of the Mississippi. Indeed there is a great difference between the overflowings of the Nile and those of the Mississippi. The Nile, so I have always understood, fertilizes the land round it when it overflows. The Mississippi destroys cotton crops when it breaks loose. South of Memphis for very many miles the river is contained by large dykes, called levees, a word of French origin. These are built up far above the level of the land which they protect. It is a very strange thing to stand on one of these dykes and look down on one side at the roofs of the houses of the village, and on the other side at the river. When we were there the river was very low. Long banks of sand pushed their backs up everywhere in the main stream and there was half a mile of dry land between the river and the bank on which we stood. But at flood time the river comes right up to the dyke, rises along the slope of it, and the level of the water is far above that of the land which the dykes protect. Then the people in the villages near the dyke live in constant fear of inundation, and I saw, beside a house far inland, a boat moored—should I in such a case say tethered?—to a tree in a garden ready for use if the river swept away a dyke. I suppose the people get accustomed to living under such conditions. Men cultivate vines and make excellent wine on the slopes of Vesuvius though Pompeii lies, a bleached skeleton, at their feet. I should myself rather plant cotton behind a dyke, than do that. But I am not nearly so much afraid of water as I am of fire.

I was told that at flood time men patrol the tops of the dykes with loaded rifles in their hands, ready to shoot at sight anyone who attempts to land from a boat. The idea is that unscrupulous people on the left bank, seeing that their own dyke is in danger of collapsing, might try to relieve the pressure on it by digging down a dyke on the right bank and inundating the country behind it. The people on the other side of course take similar precautions. Most men, such unfortunately is human nature, would undoubtedly prefer to see their neighbors' houses and fields flooded rather than their own. But I find it difficult to believe that anyone would be so entirely unscrupulous as to dig down a protecting dyke. The rifle men can scarcely be really necessary but their existence witnesses to the greatness of the peril.

I saw, while I was in Memphis, a place where the river had torn a large piece of land out of the side of a public park. The park stood high above the river and I looked down over the edge of a moderately lofty cliff at the marks of the river's violence. Some unexpected obstacle or some unforeseen alteration in the river bed had sent the mighty current in full force against the land in this particular place. The result was the disappearance of a tract of ground and a semicircle of clay cliff which looked as if it had been made with a gigantic cheese scoop. The river was placid enough when I saw it, a broad but lazy stream. But for the torn edge of the park I should have failed to realize how terrific its force can be. The dykes were convincing. So were the stories of the riflemen. But the other brought the reality home to me almost as well as if I had actually seen a flood.