issions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and general lack of
perspective which my narrative exhibits, I should assert the thing which
is not. I have not the slightest doubt that a considerable number of
persons are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for on the
subject of America I do not even know enough to be fully aware of my own
ignorance. Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection and
rashness of this book. When I regard the map and see the trifling
extent of the ground that I covered--a scrap tucked away in the
northeast corner of the vast multi-colored territory--I marvel at the
assurance I displayed in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet to see
your United States. Any Englishman visiting the country for the second
time, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world and enter
by San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver before
Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner,
and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice question
how many of the opinions formed on the first visit--and especially the
most convinced and positive opinions--would survive the ordeal of the
second.

As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not prepared
ultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward. There is
naught in them which is not liable to be recanted. The one possible
justification of them is that they offer to the reader the one thing
that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed observer
could not offer--namely, an immediate account (as accurate as I could
make it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on a mind
receptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social historian, the most
conscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that first
impact after further intercourse had scattered them.

THE END

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