We should have been hard indeed to please if we had not enjoyed our visits to Chicago and Memphis. We should be ungrateful now if we confessed that there was any note of disappointment in the memory of the joyous time we had. Yet there is one thing we regret about that journey of ours to the Middle West and South. We should dearly have liked to see a dozen other places, smaller and less important, which lay along the railway line between Chicago and Memphis, and between Memphis and Indianapolis. We made the former of these journeys entirely, and the latter partly, by day. Some unimaginative friends warned us beforehand that these journeys were dull, that it would be better to sleep through them if possible, rather than spend hours looking out of railway carriage windows at uninteresting landscapes. These friends were entirely wrong. The journeys were anything but dull. The trains dragged us through a whole series of small towns, and, after the manner of many American trains, gave us ample opportunity of looking at the houses and the streets.

In other countries trains are obliged to hide themselves as much as possible when they come to towns. They go into tunnels when they can or wander round the backs of mean houses so that the traveler sees nothing except patches of half bald earth sown with discarded tins and rows of shirts and stockings hanging out to dry. European peoples, it appears, do not welcome trains. In America the train seems to be an honored guest. It is allowed, perhaps invited, to wander along or across the chief streets. I have been told by a very angry critic that this way of stating the fact is wrong, misleading, and abominably unjust to the American people. The towns, he says, did not invite the train, but the train, being there first, so to speak, invited the towns to exist. Very likely this is so. But it seems to me to matter but little whether the train or the town came first. The noticeable thing is that the town evidently likes the train. It is just as sure a mark of affection to lay out a main street alongside the railway line as it would be to invite the railway to run its line down the middle of the main street. An English town, if it found that a railway was established on its site before it got there would angrily turn its back to the line, would, even at the cost of great inconvenience, run its streets away from the railway. The American plan from the point of view of the passenger is far better. He gets the most delightful glances of human activity and is set wondering at ways of life that are strange to him.

Our imagination would, I think, have in any case been equal to the task of conjuring up mental pictures of what life is like in these small isolated inland towns. We should, no doubt, have gone grievously wrong, but we should have enjoyed ourselves even without guidance. Fortunately we were not left to our own imaginative blunderings. We had with us a volume of Mr. Irvin Cobb's stories for the possession of which we selfishly disputed. It gave us just what we wanted, a sure groundwork for our imaginings. We peopled those little towns with the men and women whom Mr. Cobb revealed to us. His humor and his delightful tenderness gave us real glimpses of the lives, the hopes, the fears, the prejudices and memories of many people who otherwise would have been quite strange to us. Each little town as we came to it was inhabited by friendly men and women. Thanks to Mr. Cobb they were our friends. All that was wanted was that we should be theirs. Hence the bitter disappointment at not being able to stop at one after the other of the towns, at being denied the chance of completing a friendship with people whom we already liked. But it may well be that we should not really have got to know them any better. We have not, alas! Mr. Cobb's gift of gentle humor or his power of sympathetic understanding. Also it takes years to get to know anyone. We could not, in any case, have stayed for years in all these towns. Life has not years enough in it.

Besides the towns there were the people we met on the trains. There was, for instance, a man who went up and down selling apples and grapes in little paper bags. We bought from him and while buying we heard him speak. There was no doubt about the matter. He was an Irishman, and not merely an Irishman by descent, the son or grandson of an emigrant, but one who had quite recently left Ireland. His voice to our ears was like well-remembered music. I know the feeling of joy which comes with landing from an English-manned steamer on the quay in Dublin and hearing again the Irish intonation and the Irish turns of phrase. But that is an expected pleasure. It is nothing compared to the sudden delight of hearing an Irish voice in some place thousands of miles from Ireland where the last thing you expect to happen is a meeting with an Irishman. I remember being told of an Irishwoman who was traveling from Singapore to Ceylon in a steamer. She lay in her cabin, helplessly ill with some fever contracted during her stay in the Far East. She seemed incapable of taking an interest in anything until two men came to mend something in the corridor outside her cabin door. They talked together and at the sound of their voices the sick lady roused herself. She had found something in life which still interested her. She wanted very much to know whether the men came from County Antrim or County Down. She was sure their homes were in one or the other. The Irish voices had stirred her.

We were neither sick nor apathetic, but we were roused to fresh vitality by the sound of our Irish apple seller's voice. He came from County Wicklow. He told us so, needlessly indeed, for we knew it by his talk. He had been in America for two years, had drifted westward from New York, was selling apples in a train. Did he like America? Was he happy? Was he doing well? and—crucial, test question—would he like to go back to Ireland?

"I would so, if there was any way I could get my living there."

I suppose that is the way it is with the most of us. We have it fixed somehow in our minds that a living is easier got anywhere than at home. Perhaps it is. Yet surely apples might be sold in Ireland with as good a hope of profit as in Illinois or Tennessee. Baskets are cheap at home, and a basket is the sole outfit required for that trade. The apples themselves are as easy to come by in the one place as in the other. But possibly there are better openings in America. The profession may be overcrowded at home. Many professions are, medicine, for instance, and the law. Apple selling may be in the like case. At all events, here was an Irishman, doing fairly well by his own account in the middle west of America yet with a sincere desire to go back again to Ireland if only he could get a living there.

There was another man whom we met and talked to with great pleasure. Our train lingered, as trains sometimes will, for an hour or more at a junction. It was waiting for another train which ought to have met ours, but did not. We sat on the platform of the observation car, and gazed at the blinking signal lights, for the darkness had come. Suddenly a man climbed over the rail of the car and sat down beside us. He had, as we could see, a very dirty face, and very dirty hands. He wore clothes like those of an engine stoker. He was, I think, employed in shunting trains. He apologized for startling us and expressed the hope that we had not mistaken him for a murderous red Indian. He was a humorist, and he had seen at a glance that we were innocent strangers, the sort of people who might expect an American train to be held up by red Indians with scalping knives. He told us a long story about a lady who was walking from coach to coach of a train while he was engaged in shunting it about and was detaching some coaches from it. She was crossing the bridge between two coaches at an unlucky moment and found herself suddenly on the line between two portions of the train. The expression of her face had greatly amused our friend. His account of the incident greatly amused us. But the most interesting thing about this man, the most interesting thing to us, was his unaffected friendliness. In England a signal man or a shunter would not climb into a train, sit down beside a passenger and chat to him. A miserable consciousness of class distinction would render this kind of intercourse as impossible on the one side as on the other. Neither the passenger nor the shunter would be comfortable, not even if the passenger were a Liberal politician, or a newly made Liberal peer. In America this sense of class distinction does not seem to exist. I have heard English people complain that Americans are disrespectful. I should rather use the word unrespectful, if such a word existed. For disrespectful seems to imply that respect is somehow due, and I do not see why it should be. I am quite prepared to sign my assent to the democratic creed that one man is as good as another. I even go further than most Democrats and say that one man is generally better than the other, whenever it happen that I am the other. I see no reason why a railway signal man should not talk to me or to anyone else in the friendly tones of an equal, provided of course that he does not turn out to be a bore. It is a glory and not a shame of American society that it refuses to recognize class distinction.

My only complaint is that America has not gone far enough in the path of democratic equality. There are Americans who take tips. Now men neither take tips from nor give tips to their equals. If a friend were to slip sixpence into my hand when saying good-by I should resent it bitterly. Unless I were quite sure that he was either drunk or mad, I should feel that he was deliberately treating me as his inferior. I should admit that I was his inferior if I pocketed the tip. I should feel bound to touch my hat to him and say "Thank you, Sir," or "Much obliged to your honor." No man is in any way degraded by taking wages for the work he does, whatever that work may be, cleaning boots or lecturing in a University. But a man does lower himself when, in addition to his wages, he accepts gifts of money from strangers. He is being paid then not for courtesy or civility, which he ought to show in any case, but for servility; and that no one can render except to a recognized superior. The tip in a country where class distinctions are a regular part of the social order is right enough. It is at all events a natural outcome of the theory that some men by reason of their station in life are superior to others. In a social order which is based upon the principle of equality among men the tip has no proper place.

The distinction between tips and wages is a real one, although it is sometimes obscured by the fact that the wages of some kinds of work are paid entirely or almost entirely in the form of tips. A waiter in a restaurant or an hotel lives, I believe, mainly on tips. Tips are his wages. Nevertheless he places himself in a position of inferiority by allowing himself to be paid in this way. It is plain that this is so. There is a sharp line which divides those who are tipped from those who are not. It may, for instance, be the misfortune of anyone to require the services of a hospital nurse; but we do not tip her however kind and attentive she may be. She gets her wages, her salary, a fixed sum. It would be insulting to offer her, in addition, five shillings for herself. Hers is a profession which neither involves nor is supposed to involve any loss of self respect. On the other hand the chambermaid who makes the beds in an hotel is tipped. She expects it. And her profession, in the popular estimation at least, does involve a certain loss of self respect. The best class of young women are unwilling to be domestic servants, but are not unwilling to be hospital nurses. Yet the hospital nurse works as hard as, if not harder than, a housemaid. She does the same kind of work. There is no real difference between making the bed of a man who is sick and making the bed of a man who is well. In either case it is a matter of handling sheets and blankets. But a suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of a housemaid and none to that of a hospital nurse. The reason is that the one woman belongs to the class which takes tips, while the other belongs to the class which does not.

It is easy to see that in a country like America into which immigrants are continually flowing from Europe there is sure to be a large number of people—Italian waiters for instance, and Swedish and Irish domestic servants—who have not yet grasped the American theory of social equality. They have grown up in countries where the theory does not prevail. They naturally and inevitably expect and take tips, the largesse of their recognized superiors. No one accustomed to European life grudges them their tips. But there are, unfortunately, many American citizens, born and bred in America, with the American theory of equality in their minds, who also take tips and are very much aggrieved if they do not get them. Yet they, by word and manner, are continually asserting their position of equality with those who tip them. This is where the American theory of equality between man and man breaks down. The driver of a taxicab for instance can have it one way or the other. He cannot have it both. He may, like a doctor, a lawyer, or a plumber, take his regular fee, the sum marked down on the dial of his cab, and treat his passenger as an equal. Or he may take, as a tip, an extra twenty cents, in which case he sacrifices his equality and proclaims himself the inferior of the man who tips him, a member of a tippable class. There ought to be no tippable class of American citizens. The English complaint of the disrespectfulness of Americans is, in my opinion, a foolish one, unless the American expects and takes tips. Then the complaint is well founded and just. The tipper pays for respectfulness when he gives a tip and what he pays for he ought to get.

It is, I think, quite possible that the custom of tipping has something to do with the difficulty, so acute in America, of getting domestic servants. It is widely felt that domestic service in some way degrades the man or woman who engages in it. There is no real reason why it should. It is not in itself degrading to do things for other people, even to render intimate personal service to other people. The dentist who fills a tooth for me does something for me, renders me a special kind of personal service. He loses no self respect by supplying me with a sound instrument for chewing food. Why should the person who cooks the food which that tooth will chew lose self respect by doing so? There is no real distinction between these two kinds of service. Nor is there anything in the contention that the domestic servant is degraded by abrogating her own will and taking orders from someone else. Nine men out of ten take orders from somebody. From the soldier on the battlefield, the most honorable of men, to the clerk in a bank, we are almost all of us obeying orders, doing not what we ourselves think best or pleasantest but what someone in authority thinks right. What is the difference between obeying when you are told to clean a gun and obeying when you are told to wash a jug? The real reason why a suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of domestic service is that domestic servants belong to the tippable class. Society can, if it likes, raise domestic service to a place among the honorable professions, by ceasing to tip and paying wages which do not require to be supplemented by tips. If this were done there would be far less difficulty in keeping up the supply of domestic servants.

I find myself on much more difficult ground when I pass on to discuss the impression made on me by the claim of America to be, in some special way, a free country.

"To the West! to the West! to the land of the free." So my farmer friend sang to me twenty years ago. The tradition survives. The American citizen believes that a man is freer in America than he is for instance in England. If freedom means the power of the individual to do what he likes without being interfered with by laws then no man can ever be quite free anywhere except on a desert island. I, as an individual, may earnestly desire to go out into a crowded thoroughfare and shoot at the street cars with a revolver. I am not free to do this in any civilized country in the world. For people with desires of that kind there is no such thing as liberty. The freedom of the individual is everywhere a compromise between his personal inclination and the general sense of the community. Men are more free where the community makes fewer laws, less free where the community makes more. In England I can, if I like, buy, and drink at dinner, a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of any train which has a restaurant car, in any part of the country. In certain states in America I cannot buy a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of the train. There is a law which stops me. It may be a very good law. The infringement of my liberty which it entails may be for my good and the good of society in general; but where that law exists I am certainly less free than where it does not exist.

The tendency of modern democratic states is to make more and more laws and thereby to confine within ever narrower limits the freedom of the individual man. A few years ago an Englishman could send his child to school or keep his child at home without any education just as he chose. Now he must send his child to school. The law insists on it. The Irishman, in most parts of Ireland, can still, if he likes, allow his child to grow up without ever going to school. There is no law to interfere with him. In that particular respect Ireland is freer than England, for England has gone further along the path of curtailing individual liberty. In the matter of buying beer England is freer than America, because you can buy beer anywhere in England if you go to a house licensed to sell beer. In some parts of America there are no houses licensed to sell beer and you cannot buy it. America has, in this particular respect, gone further than England along the path of curtailing individual liberty.

There are several other things about which there are laws in America which do not exist in England and with regard to which America is not so free a country as England is. But there are also laws in England which do not exist in America. The Englishman is more or less accustomed to his laws. He has got into the habit of obeying them and they do not seem to interfere with his freedom. The American laws, to which he is not accustomed, strike him as unwarrantable examples of minor tyranny. But it is likely that the American is, in the same way, accustomed to his laws and is not irritated by them. He has got into the way of not wanting to buy beer in Texas, and does not feel that his liberty is curtailed by the existence of a law which it does not occur to him to break. He may be, on the other hand, profoundly annoyed by English laws, to which he is not accustomed. It may strike him, when he comes to England, that his liberty is being continually interfered with just as an Englishman feels himself continually hampered in America. I can, for instance, understand that an American in England might feel that his liberty was most unwarrantably interfered with by the law which obliges him to have a penny stamp on every check he writes. It must strike him as monstrous that he cannot get his own money out of a bank without paying the government for being allowed to do so. After all it is his money and the Government is not even a banker. Why should he pay for taking a sovereign from the little pile of sovereigns which his banker keeps for him when he would not have to pay for taking one out of a stocking if he adopted the old-fashioned plan of keeping his money there? The Englishman feels no annoyance at the payment of this penny. He is so entirely accustomed to it that it seems to him a violation of one of the laws of nature to write a check on a simple, unstamped piece of paper.

On the whole, although the citizens of both countries feel free enough when they are at home, there is probably less freedom, that is to say there are more laws, in America than in England. America is more thoroughly democratic in constitution than England is and therefore less free. This seems a paradox, but is in reality a simple statement of obvious fact, nor is there any difficulty in seeing the reason for it. Democracies produce professional politicians. The professional politician differs from the amateur or voluntary politician exactly as any professional differs from any amateur. An amateur carpenter saws wood and hammers nails for the fun of the thing, and stops sawing and hammering as soon as sawing and hammering cease to amuse him. The professional carpenter must go on sawing and hammering even if he does not want to, because it is in this way that he earns his bread. He therefore gets a great deal more sawing and hammering done in a year than any amateur does. It is the same with politicians. The amateur politician makes a law now and then when he feels like it. When law-making ceases to interest him he goes off to hunt or fish. The professional politician must go on making laws even though the business has become inexpressibly wearisome. Thus it is that in states where there are professional politicians, in democratic states, there are more laws, and therefore less freedom, than in states which only have amateur politicians. America, being slightly more democratic than England, has slightly more laws and slightly less freedom.

But it would be easy to make too much of this difference between England and America.

The freedom which men value most is very little affected by laws. Laws neither give nor withhold it. Freedom is really an atmosphere in which we are able to breathe without anxiety or fear. There are some societies in which a man must be constantly watching himself lest he should give expression to a thought or an opinion which is liable to offend some powerful interest or outrage some cherished conviction. All sorts of unpleasant consequences follow incautious utterance of an unpopular opinion, or even the discovery that unpopular opinions are held. It may be that the rash individual is looked on very coldly. It may be that those who seem to be his friends gradually draw away from him. It may be—this is not so unpleasant but quite unpleasant enough—that he is assailed in newspapers and held up in their columns to public odium. It may be that he is made to suffer in more material ways, that he loses business or runs the risk of being deprived of some position which he holds. In very uncivilized communities he is sometimes actually treated with physical violence. The windows of his house are broken or he is mobbed. The dread of some or all of these penalties makes him very cautious. He goes through life glancing timidly from side to side, always anxious, always a little frightened and therefore—since fear is the real antithesis of liberty—never free.

All communities suffer from spasmodic fits of this kind of intolerance. In England in the year 1900 it was not safe to be a pro-Boer, and England at that time was not a free country. England is now free to quite an extraordinary extent. A man may hold and express almost any conceivable opinion without suffering for it. He can stand up in a public assembly and say hard things about England herself, point out her faults in plain and even bitter language. The English people as a whole remain totally indifferent to what he says about them. If the hard thing is said wittily they laugh. If it is said dully they yawn. In neither case do they display any signs of anger. They succeed in giving the stranger in their midst the impression that nothing he does or says matters in the least so long as he avoids crossing the indefinable line which separates "good form" from bad. His manners may get him into trouble. His opinions will not.

America is free too in this same way, but is not, I think, so free as England. There are several subjects about which it is not wise to talk quite freely in America. The ordinary middle class American, the man with whom one falls into casual conversation in a train, is sensitive about criticism of his country and its institutions in a way that the ordinary Englishman is not. It may very well be that in this he is the Englishman's superior. A perfectly detached judge of humanity, some epicurean deity observing all things with passion-less calm and weighing all emotion in the scales of absolute justice—might, quite conceivably, rank a slightly resentful patriotism higher than tolerant apathy. We Irishmen are not tolerant of criticism, and I sincerely hope that ours is the better part. We do not like the expression of opinions which differ from our own and are inclined to suppress them with some violence when we can. As a nation we value truth far more than liberty; truth being, of course, the thing which we ourselves believe; obviously that, for we would not believe it unless we were quite sure that it was true. Americans are not so whole hearted as we are in this matter. The more highly educated Americans are even inclined to drift into a tolerant agnosticism which is almost English. But most Americans are still a little intolerant of strange opinions and still have enough conscious patriotism to resent criticism.

It is the fault of a great quality. No society can be both enthusiastic and free. It is the tips and the equality over again. We can not have things both ways. If society allows a man, without pain or penalty, to say exactly what he means, it is always because that society is convinced, deep down in its soul, that he cannot possibly mean what he says. A man is free to speak what he chooses, to criticize, to abuse, to sneer, wherever his fellow men have made up their minds that it does not matter what he says how keenly he criticizes, abuses or sneers. On the other hand, a society which is very much in earnest about anything,—and a great many Americans are—will not suffer differences of opinion patiently and will always be resentful of criticism. Say to an Englishman that American football is superior to the Rugby Union game. He will look at you with a sleepy expression in his eyes, and, after a short pause, politeness requiring some answer from him, he will say: "Is it really?" His tone suggests that he does not care whether it is or not, but that he means to go on playing the Rugby Union game if he plays at all, a point about which he has not quite made up his mind. Say to an American that Rugby Union football is superior to his game and he will look at you with highly alert but slightly troubled eyes. He wants to respect you if he can, and he does not like to hear you saying a thing which cannot possibly be true. But he too is polite.

"There may be," he says, "some points of superiority about the English game—but on the whole—think of the organization of our forwards. Think of the amount of thought required. Think of the rapid decisions which have to be made. Think of——But come and see the match next Saturday and then you'll understand."

There is still another kind of freedom—freedom to behave as we like, freedom of manners. This is almost as important as freedom to speak and think without fear of consequences. Indeed, for most people it is more important. Only a few of us think, or want to say what we think. All of us have to behave, to have manners of some sort either good or bad. It is curious to notice that, while men everywhere are acquiescing without much protest to the curtailment of the sort of freedom which is affected by law, they are steadily claiming and securing more and more freedom of manners. We are far less bound by conventions than we used to be. There was a time when everybody possessed and once a week wore what were called "Sunday clothes." One hardly ever hears the phrase now, and men go to church in coats which would have struck their grandmothers as distinctly unsuited to a place of worship. Sunday clothes were a bondage and we have broken free. There was, very long ago, a definite code of manners binding upon men and women when they met together. When it prevailed the intercourse between the sexes must have been singularly stiff and uncomfortable. There were many things which a woman could not do without losing her character for womanliness, and many things which a man could not do in the company of ladies—smoke, for instance.

It is, I think, women and not men who decide how much of this sort of liberty people are to enjoy. If I am right about this, then American women are more generous than English women. There is much more freedom in the matter of clothes in America than England. I remember hearing an Englishwoman complain that no matter how she tried she never could succeed in dressing correctly in America. In England she knew exactly the kind of gown to wear at an afternoon party, at a small dinner, at a large dinner, at an evening reception, in the box of a theater. In America she perpetually found herself wearing the wrong thing. I imagine that in reality she did not wear the wrong thing, because there is no such rigid standard of appropriateness of dress in America as there is in England. More latitude is allowed, and if a gown is hardly ever correct it is also hardly ever wrong. Every man who sits in the stalls of a London theater must display eighteen inches of white shirt above the top button of his waistcoat. In America he may wear a blue flannel shirt if he likes, and nobody cares whether it is visible beneath his tie or not. In England a man who dines in a very smart restaurant must wear a tail coat and a white tie. In America he can, if he chooses, wear a tail coat and a black tie, or a short coat and a white tie. There is no fixed rule determining the connection between coats and ties.

It is not only the class of people who dine in smart restaurants and sit in stalls of theaters which is subject to rules of this kind. Every class has its own conventions, and, so far as my observation goes, every class is a little freer in America than it is in England. No English chauffeur with any self-respect would consent to drive a motor car about London unless he were wearing some kind of uniform. In America the most magnificent cars are frequently driven by chauffeurs in gray tweed suits with ordinary caps on their heads.

I am nearly sure that it is women, the women of our own class, who decide what clothes we shall wear and what clothes they will wear themselves. I am quite sure that it is they who regulate the degree of formal stiffness there is to be in our intercourse with them. English women have to a very considerable extent given up requiring from men those symbols of respect which had long ago ceased to be anything but the mere conventional survivals of the mediæval idea of chivalry. Men and women in England meet on friendlier and more equal terms than they used to. American women have gone even further than the English in setting themselves and us free from the old restrictions. They invite comradeship and have, as far as possible, swept away the barriers to free intercourse between sex and sex.

To some people liberty of any sort, liberty for its own sake, will always seem a desirable thing. These will prefer the manners of America to those of England, but will cling to their admiration of the Englishman's tolerance of criticism. There are others—it is a matter of temperament—who prefer restraint, who like to talk cautiously, who cling to social conventions. To them it will be a comfort to know that in one respect the American woman is not so free as her English sister. In England a woman may, without loss of reputation, smoke almost anywhere, anywhere that men smoke, except in the streets and the entrance halls of theaters. In New York there are only two or three restaurants in which a woman is allowed to smoke. Even if she is indifferent to her reputation and does not mind being considered fast, she cannot smoke in the other restaurants. The head waiter comes and stops her if she tries. This may be quite right. I do not know whether it is or not. Many very strong arguments may be and are brought against women smoking. It is, I am thankful to say, no business of mine to weigh them against the other arguments which go to show that women are as well entitled to the solace of tobacco as men are. What interests me far more than the arguments on either side is the fact that American women are in this one respect much less free than English women. The women of both nations smoke, but the American woman must do it in privacy or semi-privacy. The Englishwoman inhales her cigarette with untroubled enjoyment in any restaurant in London. She must dress herself strictly as convention prescribes for each occasion. She must be a little careful in her intercourse with men. She has not yet got a vote. But she may smoke. The American woman has much more freedom in the matter of clothes. She can be as friendly with a man as she likes. In several states she has a vote. But society in general frowns on her smoking and sets its policeman, the head waiter, to prevent her doing it. I should myself prefer a cigarette to a vote; but I am fond of tobacco, and all elections bore me, so I am not an unprejudiced judge. American women may be in this matter, as indeed they certainly are in other matters, nobler than I am. They may gladly sacrifice tobacco for the sake of the franchise, but I do not see why they should not have both.

There is a story told about Lord Beaconsfield which, if true, goes to show that he was not nearly so astute a man as is generally supposed. A lady, an ardent advocate of Woman Suffrage, once called on him and tried to convince him of the justice of her cause. She was a very pretty lady and she spoke with great enthusiasm. One imagines flashing eyes, heightened color, graceful gestures of the hands. Lord Beaconsfield listened to her and looked at her. When she had finished speaking he said: "You darling!" The lady, we are told, was angry, thinking that she had been insulted. She was perfectly right. The remark, which might under other circumstances have been received with blushing satisfaction, was just then and there a piece of intolerable rudeness. It was stupid besides. But perhaps the great statesman meant to be rude. Perhaps, on the other hand, he was carried away for the moment and ceased to be intelligent. Perhaps the whole story was invented by some malicious person and is entirely without foundation. In any case it is a serious warning to the man who sits down to write about American women. It makes him hesitate, fearfully, before venturing to say the very first thing he must want to say. But he who writes takes his life in his hands. I should be little better than a poltroon if I shrank from uttering the truth.

I was asked by an able and influential editor in New York to write an article on American women. It is not every day that I am thus invited to write articles, so I take a pardonable pride in mentioning the request of this American editor. It was after dinner that he asked me, and a lady who was with us heard him do it. I looked at her before I answered. If she had scowled or even frowned I should not now be writing about American women. She encouraged me with a nod and a smile. Yet she knew—she must have known—what I should write first of all. Upon her head be at least part of the blame. She not merely smiled. She went on to persuade me to write the article. By persuading me she helped to make me quite certain that what I am writing is true.

The American woman is singularly charming.

Is this an insult? I think of the many American women whom I met who were kind enough to talk to me, and I know that this is not what they would like to have written about them. Some of them were very earnest knights errant, who rode about redressing human wrongs. It happens occasionally, not often, of course, but very occasionally, that women with causes are not charming. They are inclined to overemphasize their causes, to keep on hammering at a possible convert, to become just a little tiresome. This is, as far as I could judge, never the case with the American ladies who have causes. Others whom I met were learned and knew all about philosophies dim to me. Others again were highly cultured. I am an ignorant and stupid man. Very clever women sometimes frighten me. I was never frightened in America. Others again, without being learned or particularly cultured, were brilliant. They were all charming. That is the truth. I have written it, and if the skies come tumbling indignantly about my ears they just must tumble. "Impavidum ferient ruinæ;" but I hope nothing so bad as that will happen to me.

There are people in the world who believe that we are born again and again, rising or sinking in the scale of living things at each successive incarnation according as we behave ourselves well or badly in our present state. If this creed were true, I should try very hard indeed to be good, because I should want, next time I am born, to be an American woman. She seems to me to have a better kind of life than the woman of any other nation, or, indeed, than anybody else, man or woman. She is, as I hope I have suggested, more free than her European sister. "So full of burrs," said a great lady of old times, "is this work-a-day world, that our very petticoats will catch them." This is a true estimate of the position of the European woman. They who wear petticoats over here must walk warily with chaperons beside them. But in America there are either fewer burrs or petticoats are made of some better material. The American woman, even when she is quite young, can go freely enough and no scandalous suggestions attach to her unless she does something very outrageous. She has in other ways too a far better time than the English woman. American social life seems to me—the word is one to apologize for—gynocentric. It is arranged with a view to the convenience and delight of women. Men come in where and how they can. The late Mr. Price Collier observed this, and drew from it the deduction that the English man tends on the whole to be more efficient than the American, everything in an English home being sacrificed to his good. That may or may not be true; but I think the American woman is certainly more her own mistress than the Englishwoman, just because America does its best for women and only its second best for men.

I do not pretend to be superior to these advantages. I like a good time as well as any one. But I have other ambitions. And I do not want to be an American woman only for the sake of material gains. She seems to me to deserve her good luck because she has done her business in life exceedingly well, better on the whole than the American man has done his.

I am—I wish to make this clear at once—a good feminist. No man is less inclined than I am to endorse the words of the German Emperor and confine woman's activities to "Kirche, Küche und Kinder." I would, if I had my way, give every woman a vote. I would invite her to discuss the most intricate political problems, with a full confidence that she could not possibly make a worse muddle of them than our male politicians do. I should like to see her conducting great businesses, doctoring her neighbors, pleading for them in law courts, driving railway engines, and, if she wanted to, carrying a rifle or steering a submarine. I would place woman in every possible way on an equality with man and confine her with no restriction except those with which she voluntarily impedes her own activities, like petticoats, stays, and blouses which hook up the back. Having made this full confession of faith, I shall not, I hope, be reproached for appearing to recognize a distinction between woman's business in life, the thing which the American woman has done very well, and man's business, which the American man seems to me to have managed rather badly. Strictly speaking, in the ideal state all public affairs are women's just as much as men's. Strictly speaking, again in the ideal state, man is just as responsible as woman for the arts of domestic life. But we are not yet living in the ideal state, and for a long while now the household has been recognized as woman's sphere, while man has resented her interference with anything outside the circle of social and family life.

It is in these matters which have been entrusted to her that the American woman has shown herself superior to the American man. I admit, of course, that the American man has done a great many things very brilliantly. But he does not seem to me to have succeeded in making the business of living, so far as it falls within his province, either comfortable or agreeable. The Englishman has done better. Examples of what I mean absolutely crowd upon me. Take the question of cooking food. The American man, left to his own devices, is not strikingly successful with food. The highest average of cooking in England is to be found in good men's clubs. You may, and often do, get excellent dinners in private houses in England; but you are surer of an excellent dinner in a first rate club. In America it is the other way about. Many men's clubs have skilful cooks, but you are on the whole more likely to get very good food in a woman's club or in a private house than in a man's club. I am not myself an expert in cooked food. The subject has never had a real fascination for me. But I have a sense of taste like my better educated gourmet brethren, and I am convinced that where the American woman has control of the cooking the business is better done than it generally is in England, and far better done than when it is left to American men.

The kindred subjects of drinks, again, marks the superiority of the American woman. For some reason quite obscure to me, women are not supposed to know anything about wine. They either do not like it at all or they like bad kinds of wine. Wine is man's business in all countries. In America wine is dear, and usually of indifferent quality. Man has mismanaged the cellar. On the other hand, women are supposed—again the reason is beyond me—to like eating sweets, to be specialists in that whole range of food which in America goes under the name of candies. Men have not created the demand for candies or secured the supply. They are woman's affair. The consequence is that American candies are better than any others in the world, better even than the French. It is necessary to search New York narrowly and patiently in order to find a good bottle of claret. I speak on this matter as an outsider, for I drink but little claret myself; but I am assured by highly skilled experts that the fact is as I state it. On the other hand—I know this by experience—you can satisfy your soul with an almost infinite variety of chocolates without going three hundred yards from the door of your hotel in New York or Philadelphia.

The one form of alcoholic drink in which America surpasses the rest of the world is the cocktail. I have never yet seen a properly written history of cocktails. The subject still waits its philosopher. But I am inclined to think that the cocktail, the original of the species, Manhattan, Bronx or whatever it may have been, was invented by a woman. True, these drinks are now universally mixed by men. But the inspiration is unquestionably feminine. Formulæ for the making of cocktails exist. I was once asked to review a book which contained several hundred receipts for cocktails. But every one agrees that the formula is of minor importance. The cocktail depends for its excellence not on careful measurements, but on the incalculable and indescribable thing called personality. The most skilful pharmaceutical chemist, trained all his life to the accurate weighing of scruples and measurement of drams, might well fail as a maker of cocktails. He would fail if he did not possess an instinct for the art. Now this is characteristic of all women's work. Man reaches his conclusions by argument, bases his convictions on reason, and is generally wrong. Woman responds to emotion, follows instinct, and is very often right. Man is the drudging scientist, patient, dull. Woman is the dashing empiricist, inconsequential, brilliant. The cocktail must be hers. I shall continue, until strong evidence to the contrary is offered to me, to believe that the credit for this glory of American life belongs to her and not to man.

It would, no doubt, be insulting to say that part of the business of a woman, as distinguished from a man, is to dress well and be agreeable. I should not dream of saying such a thing. But there can be no harm in suggesting that it is the duty of both sexes to do these things. There is no real reason why an idealist, man or woman, should not be pleasant to look at, nor is it necessary that very estimable people should administer snubs to the rest of us. It seems to me that even very good people are better when they have nice manners and pleasanter when they dress well. It is not, I admit, their fault when they are not good looking, but it is their fault if they do not, by means of clothes, make themselves as good looking as they can. There is no excuse for the man or woman who emphasizes a natural ugliness. Man, I regret to say, does not often recognize his duty in these matters. Woman, generally speaking, has done her best. The American woman has made the very most of her opportunities and has succeeded both in looking nice and in being an agreeable companion. In the art of putting on her clothes she has no superior except the Parisienne, and even in Paris itself it is often difficult to tell, without hearing her speak, whether the lady at the next table in a restaurant is French or American. I knew an English mother who sent her daughter to Paris for six months in order that the girl might learn to dress herself. The journey to America would have been longer, but once there the girl would have had just as good a chance of acquiring the art. I am very unskilful in describing clothes, and the finer nuances of costume are far beyond the power of any language at my command to express. But it is possible to appreciate effects without being able to analyze the way in which they are produced. The effect on the emotions of a symphony rendered by a good orchestra is almost as great for the man who does not know exactly what the trombones are doing as it is for the musician who understands that they are adding to the general noise by playing chromatic scales, or whatever it is that trombones do play. It is the same with clothes. I cannot name materials, or discuss styles in technical language, but I am pleasantly conscious that the American woman has the air of being very well dressed.

I am not attempting to make a comparison between the clothes of very wealthy women of the leisured classes in America and those of women similarly placed in other countries. Aristocracies and plutocracies are cosmopolitan. National characteristics are to a considerable extent smoothed off them. The women of these classes dress almost equally well everywhere. The possibility of comparison exists only when one considers the comparatively poor women of the middle and lower middle classes. It is these who, in America, have the instinct for dressing well unusually highly developed. Some women have this instinct. Others have not. It seems to be distributed geographically. There are cities—no bribe would induce me to name one of them—where the women are usually badly dressed. You walk up and down the chief thoroughfares. You enter the most fashionable restaurants and are oppressed by a sense of prevailing dowdiness. It is not a question of money. The gowns which you see, the coats, the hats have obviously cost great sums. For half the expenditure women in other places look well dressed. It is not a matter of the skill of dressmakers and milliners. A woman who has not got the instinct for clothes might go to—I forget the man's name, but he is the chief costumier in Paris—might give him a free hand to do his best for her, and afterwards she would not look a bit better dressed. It is not, I believe, possible to explain exactly what she lacks. It is an extra sense, as incommunicable as an ear for music. A woman either has it or has not. The American woman has it.

I know—no one knows better than I do—that it is a contemptible thing to take any notice of clothes. The soul is what matters. The body may be in rags. The mind is what counts, and fine feathers do not make fine birds. A great prophet would not be the less a great prophet though his finger nails were black. I hope we should all adore him just the same even if he never washed his face or wore a collar. But just at first, before we got to know him really well, it is possible that we might be a little prejudiced against him if he looked as if he never washed. That is all I wish or mean to say about the American woman's power of dressing herself. It disarms prejudice. The stranger starts fair, so to speak, when he is introduced to her. In the case of women who cannot, or for any reason will not, dress themselves nicely, there are preliminary difficulties in the way of appreciating their real worth.

But the best clothes in the world are no help when it comes to conversation, unless, indeed, one is able to discuss them in detail, and I am not. I have met exquisitely dressed women who were very difficult to talk to. The American woman is not one of these. Besides being well dressed, she is a delightful talker on all subjects. She may or may not be profound. I am not profound myself, so I have no way of judging about that. But profoundness is not wanted in conversation. Its proper place is in scientific books. In conversation it is merely a nuisance, and the American woman, when she is profound, has more sense than to show it. She talks well because she is not in the least shy or self-conscious. Even young American girls are not shy. Brought into sudden contact with a middle-aged man, they treat him as an equal, with a frank sense of comradeship. They have, apparently, no awe of advanced or advancing years. They do not pretend to think that elderly people are in any way their superiors, or display in the presence of the aged that kind of chilling aloofness which is called respect. I detest people who behave as if they respected me because I am older than they are. I recognize at once that they are hypocrites. Boys and girls must know, in their hearts, just as well as we do, that respect is due to the young from the elderly and not the other way about. The ancient Romans understood this: "Maxima debitur reverentia pueris" is in the Latin grammar, and the Latin grammar is a good authority on all subjects connected with ancient Roman civilization.

It is her power of making herself agreeable which is the greatest charm of the American woman, a greater charm than her ability in dressing. I am a man very little practiced in the art of conversation. A dinner party—a party of any kind, but particularly a dinner party—is a thing from which I shrink. I am always very sorry for the two women who are placed beside me. I know that they will have to make great exertions to keep up a conversation with me. I watch them suffering and am myself a prey to excruciating pangs of self-reproach. But my agony is less in America than elsewhere. The American woman must of course suffer as much as the Englishwoman when I take her in to dinner; but she possesses in an extraordinary degree the art of not showing it. She frequently deceives me for several minutes at a time, making me think that she is actually enjoying herself. She is able to do this because she has an amazing vitality and a very acute kind of intelligence. Now, the highest compliment which a woman can pay to a man is to enjoy his company. The American woman understands this and succeeds in pretending she is doing it. She is wise, too. Recognizing that even her powers have their limits, and that no woman, however vital and intelligent, can go on disguising her weariness for very long, she makes her dinners and luncheons as short as possible, shorter than similar functions are in England. She does not attempt anything in the way of a long-distance contest with the heavy stupidity of the ordinary man. Her's is the triumph of the sprinter. For a short time she flashes, sympathizes, subtly flatters, talks with amazing brilliance, charms. Then she escapes. What happens to her next I can only guess, but I imagine that she must be very much exhausted.