Author of " Now It Can Be Told "...

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

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

Some Englishmen, I am told, go to the United States with a spirit of criticism, and search round for things that seem to them objectionable, taking no pains to conceal their hostile point of view. They are so hopelessly insular that they resent any little differences in social custom between American and English life, and sum up their annoyance by saying, "We don't do that sort of thing in England!" Well, that seems to me a foolish way of approach to any country, and the reason why some types of

The United States of America has a new meaning in the world, and has entered, by no desire of its own, into the great family of nations, as a rich uncle whose authority and temper must be respected by those who desire his influence in their family quarrels, difficulties, and conditions of life. Before the war the United States was wonderfully aloof from the peoples of Europe. The three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean made it seem enormously far away, and quite beyond the orbit of those passiona

The title I have chosen for this chapter is indiscreet, and, as some readers may think, misleading. At least it needs this explanation—that there is no absolute point of view in England about the United States. "England" does not think (a statement not intended to be humorous at the expense of my own people) any more than any nation may be said to think in a single unanimous way about any subject under the sun. England is a collection of individuals and groups of individuals, each with different

It is only during the war and afterward that European people have come to know anything in a personal way of the great democracy in the United States. Before then America was judged by tourists who came to "do" Europe in a few months or a few weeks. In France, especially, all of them were popularly supposed to be "millionaires," or, at least, exceedingly rich. Many of them were, and in Paris, to which they went in greatest numbers, they were preyed upon by hotel managers and shopkeepers, and wer