"You seem to be having trouble in your packing houses over in America?"

We were.

"Very disgraceful, those exposures."

They were. It was May, 1906.

"Your Government seems to be doing something about it. It's certainly
scandalous. Such abuses should never have been possible in the first
place. It oughtn't to require your Government to stop it. It shouldn't
have started."

"I fancy the facts aren't quite so bad as that sensational novel about
Chicago makes them out," said the American. "At least I have been told
so."

"It all sounds characteristic to me," said the Sam Johnson. "It's quite
the sort of thing one expects to hear from the States."

"It is characteristic," said the American. "In spite of all the years
that the sea has separated us, we're still inveterately like you, a
bullying, dishonest lot--though we've had nothing quite so bad yet as
your opium trade with China."

The Sam Johnson said no more.

At a ranch in Wyoming were a number of Americans and one Englishman, a
man of note, bearing a celebrated name. He was telling the company what
one could do in the way of amusement in the evening in London.

"And if there's nothing at the theatres and everything else fails, you
can always go to one of the restaurants and hear the Americans eat."

There you have them, my anecdotes. They are chosen from many. I hope
and believe that, between them all, they cover the ground; that, taken
together as I want you to take them after you have taken them singly,
they make my several points clear. As I see it, they reveal the chief
whys and wherefores of friction between English and Americans. It is
also my hope that I have been equally disagreeable to everybody. If I am
to be banished from both countries, I shall try not to pass my exile in
Switzerland, which is indeed a lovely place, but just now too full of
celebrated Germans.

Beyond my two early points, the right to privacy and the mother-tongue,
what are the generalizations to be drawn from my data? I should like
to dodge spelling them out, I should immensely prefer to leave it here.
Some readers know it already, knew it before I began; while for others,
what has been said will be enough. These, if they have the will
to friendship instead of the will to hate, will get rid of their
anti-English complex, supposing that they had one, and understand better
in future what has not been clear to them before. But I seem to feel
that some readers there may be wh