We have no more understanding of the soul of America over here than they have over there of the British temperament. We are as far apart as some thousands of miles of ocean and a common ancestry can make us. We speak the same tongue but not the same language.

The many British born subjects who until 1914 yearly migrated to America did not help to a better comprehension of us, for they were men and women who left their homes to make a living denied them by the restricted opportunities of our insular position, and the bare fact that they found in the United States what they could not find at home would acclimatize them far quicker than any other influence; while their children, growing up to a material prosperity much in advance of the social status of their parents, would prefer to ignore a country left by the latter in humbler circumstances, so that it would not be in human nature not to become passionately Americanized in a single generation.

The buoyant quality of young America's hopefulness is to me at leastthe most attractive feature of life over there. Daily she receives into her arms the penniless orphans and derelicts of the whole world, and daily these orphans and derelicts emerge from their despairing poverty into brighter and more prosperous material conditions. Well might she write over the gateway to this Tower of Babel "Gather fresh hope, all ye who enter here.''

Desperation at failure is there almost unknown. Optimism is the prevailing note of the poor. In England (before the War opened up opportunities to the masses) a youth starting out in the world began his career with doubt, often with dismay; he was quite convinced that he would not make a good

thing of it, because of his self-depreciation, and quite convinced too that there was nothing else for which he was better fitted. He had that got-to-do-something-may-as-well-do-this attitude that is never a happy augury for success. This humble frame of mind may be more attractive socially, but is certainly less effective economically.

The American youth on the other hand is full of self-confidence that, given the opportunity, he will "make good, or if that opportunity stay out too long, he will "put it over" all the same. "Put it over' means in the Yankee glossary much the same as "making good,'' with this difference that you "put it over on to someone else." That is the mainspring of American business. You have got, not only to show you can "get busy' to some purpose, but also that you can get busier and better than the other man, and the queer thing about this game is that though the other man may not like being worsted in the fight, it appears to act rather as a spur to him than as a discouragement. Moreover, the other men in the deal are not irritated by any successful piece of bluff but rather entertained by it. On the whole I should say they prefer doing business with a gambler who ignores defeat to doing it with a stickler for professional sincerity. So that if a man fails because his luck does not "see him through," indulgently everyone is ready to give the "poor fellow another start," whereas if he fails because he dare not take risks, most people are simply intolerant of his failure.

The more practical view of this state of affairs is that it conduces to an attitude of mind in which no American ever gives up the hope of becoming a millionaire until he is laid in the grave, while the Englishman who goes bankrupt in means is also bankrupt in hopes. For

in England failure is not respectable, and bankruptcy is dishonest.

When I say that the United States Constitution is one of Democracy but of Democracy ruled by the Bell-boy, it is perhaps necessary to explain what exactly is the Bell-boy. He is the youth who presides over the destinies of hotel visitors, and incidentally over the oscillations of the lift or "elevator"; your comfort depends on the alacrity with which the Bell-boy answers your telephone; and when he has carried your messages and cables back and forwards a sufficiently long time to gain some smattering of your negotiations, as likely as not in that country of miraculous fortunes he will set up in your own line and "put it over on" to some of your best customers. This is where the quality of hope comes in, there is never any knowing when the Bell-boy may not jump your claim from information overheard or gathered in the "elevator''! It is not pretty from a spotless point of view in an English landscape, but it is picturesque as a buccaneering horizon of adventure.

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Now, it needs no more than this to demonstrate quite clearly why we, on this side, cannot put ourselves in the line of sight of people over there, and that same Bell-boy may be, and is probably, the son of your tenant who emigrated because he could not make his farm pay without the capital that banks were not ready to lend him without any security but the sweat of his brow; and the fact that his father left the old home with bitterness in his heart is precisely why his son, the Bell-boy, should show how little he owes to his sire's country. Yet it was not possible to spend some months in the United States at the outbreak of the war without realizing that deep down in the heart of all there exists a certain family affection for us. True, it undergoes rather some of those qualifications that grow up in the mind of every child about parent or guardian,

the kind of qualification that reasons something in this way: "The Governor is an old-fashioned fogey with manners and customs dating back to the year one, but after all, he is a gentleman!''; but I am not sure that is not largely due to our own fault.

Americans are accustomed to hear Englishmen of distinguished attainments come over to lecture them on how they (the Americans) should not do things; they have to listen quietly to teachers from the older civilizations addressing them after the manner of a school-master preaching a homily to unruly pupils; but when the indomitable "Teddy" Roosevelt gave us a bit of our own back at a City feast, we did not think it in quite good taste. We said it was ill-mannered and, though Americans are too much convinced of our social code of etiquette to call it ill-mannered in us when we commit the same tactlessness, they do not like it all the same, and it creates a coolness where none should exist.

We bear ourselves towards the Americans something as do the relatives-inlaw towards the heiress of newly found wealth who has married into a family of ancient lineage: the attitude of ''people like ourselves" (that immortal essence of snobbism once dropped on the floor of the House of Lords!) that is so irritating because so unanswerable, and because the only repartee to the phrase "We don't do that!'' is the riposte "But I do," a reply that sounds merely pert and not final. The fact is that you cannot convince a people that have not had time in their history books to create a standard that they should in common fairness to their neighbors have at least a criterion of behavior. The feelings of your neighbors are obviously a matter of indifference to you if you are a law unto yourselves! And yet in 1914 when the great psychological crisis in the soul of America occurred; when suddenly, like a bolt from the blue, Ger

manic ideals were practised on helpless Belgium; when we really might have reminded America how much hung on the pronouncement of her word of protest, the irreproachable tact of our diplomatic manners forbade us to urge her to say what we hoped from her as a great nation. We held our tongues discreetly with the gentlemanlike feeling that if a nation did not feel what course she should take in such a crisis, it was not for people like ourselves to point it out to her. Herein we showed how little we knew of the soul of America.

I was in the United States when the first glimmering appeared of what Germany's missionary spirit of Kultur meant to civilization. To us who count our Gothic towers by the hundred, and whose libraries are stocked since the early centuries by generation after generation, the burning of Louvain and the destruction of ancient monuments could not bring a greater shock than to a people laboriously bent on piling up an index of history in the shortest possible space of time. What would be the feelings of a multi-millionaire who would gladly have bought up the Town Hall of Ypres, and transplanted it bodily to Fifth Avenue? Think of the pride of Philadelphia if Rheims Cathedral could have reared its western portal "on" one of her avenues! When we observe the loving care with which America tends the smallest monument to her antiquity, we can measure her horror at the obliteration of exquisite works of art. We said to ourselves "Now America will see what these barbarians are doing!" but we did not say to America "Let us see what you are going to do!" England England was

silent!

Then out came the horrible record of bestiality and savagery, the record of those unspeakable crimes that the mind may not dwell on and yet retain its balance. And still England waited to learn how America would take it!

The majority of hyphenated Americans consoled themselves with the reflection that all the newspapers were exaggerating for the sake of copy, and that lies were being told on both sides. The deadly folly of muzzling the British Press was never so apparent as over there. News of how things were going came from all over the world, filtering cunningly through German sources, save only from the British Press. As this was silent about our reverses or our losses known through others it was not believed when we printed stories of our advances. If, argued the philoGerman, you cannot depend on the British Press to tell us what has happened, it is quite capable of telling us what has not happened.

Among the Americans, pure and simple, there was always a pronounced pro-Ally feeling. I will not say that it was strongly pro-British except always among the very wealthy or the cultivated classes who know and love England; but on landing in New York even the Custom House officials asked with interest whether I thought the Allies would "win out." "We are all pro-Allies here," they said, and this first expression of sympathy in a strange land was good to hear. In shops, detecting my English accent, the same cordiality was expressed by the people who served me-(over there salesmen and women are not limited to the state of the weather in their conversation with customers!) Outside the big newspaper offices where the war bulletins were displayed in huge letters and large crowds gathered to read them at all hours of night and day, speakers hired by Teutonic agents were stationed to "put up" a debate on the winning chances or the causes of the War, but though I never saw any great desire on the part of the mob to reply to these now familiar prevarications, I never heard any expressions of sympathy with the German orators. (We could