e is no doubt that the
Americans and Canadians have been too generous in this matter of giving
away impressions. We emit them with the careless ease of a glow worm,
and like the glow-worm ask for nothing in return.

But this irregular and one-sided traffic has now assumed such great
proportions that we are compelled to ask whether it is right to allow
these people to carry away from us impressions of the very highest
commercial value without giving us any pecuniary compensation whatever.
British lecturers have been known to land in New York, pass the customs,
drive uptown in a closed taxi, and then forward to England from the
closed taxi itself ten dollars' worth of impressions of American
national character. I have myself seen an English literary man,--the
biggest, I believe: he had at least the appearance of it; sit in the
corridor of a fashionable New York hotel and look gloomily into his hat,
and then from his very hat produce an estimate of the genius of Amer ica
at twenty cents a word. The nice question as to whose twenty cents that
was never seems to have occurred to him.

I am not writing in the faintest spirit of jealousy. I quite admit the
extraordinary ability that is involved in this peculiar susceptibility
to impressions. I have estimated that some of these English visitors
have been able to receive impressions at the rate of four to the second;
in fact, they seem to get them every time they see twenty cents. But
without jealousy or complaint, I do feel that somehow these impressions
are inadequate and fail to depict us as we really are.

Let me illustrate what I mean. Here are some of the impressions of New
York, gathered from visitors' discoveries of America, and reproduced not
perhaps word for word but as closely as I can remember them. "New York",
writes one, "nestling at the foot of the Hudson, gave me an impression
of cosiness, of tiny graciousness: in short, of weeness." But compare
this--"New York," according to another discoverer of America, "gave me
an impression of size, of vastness; there seemed to be a big ness about
it not found in smaller places." A third visitor writes, "New York
struck me as hard, cruel, almost inhuman." This, I think, was because
his taxi driver had charged him three dollars. "The first thing that
struck me in New York," writes another, "was the Statue of Liberty."
But, after all, that was only natural: it was the first thing that could
reach him.

Nor is it only the i