es into
a paragraph. I said I forgave him for waking me up, but was quite
unaware that I had even mentioned our royal family.

The next day I read that I had said I was:

"On smoking terms with Queen Mary."

You may say that certain journalism of a similar kind panders to the
same curiosity in what is low and vulgar over here, but it is more
harmful in the States because the press has more power.

So far from guiding public opinion, the papers in America stimulate all
that is worthless and credulous; and you may search in vain to find
careful criticism either upon art, music or international affairs.

England has been called a nation of shop-keepers, but I think we spend
as much time upon the moors and playing fields as Americans do in
elevators and offices.

Perhaps we waste too much time on grass and games; but it has encouraged
a certain aloofness and leisure, which produces a quiet mind.

Whether it is from the difficulties of the climate and the overheated
rooms, the voices of even the nicest people appeared to me to be loud,
and however generously you may have been entertained, you are left with
a sense of suffocation, which it would be difficult to explain.

The excuse of being a young country will not continue to cover the rush
and noise and lack of privacy that prevail; and the number of small
children that I have seen in hotels, shops and restaurants that go to
bed at midnight after sucking candy between enormous meals, is not
promising for a nation which is always growing up.

The ingrained idea that, because there is no king and they despise
titles, the Americans are a free people is pathetically untrue; and you
have only to watch the working of the Prohibition law to see the dangers
of repressive legislation. There is a perpetual interference with
personal liberty over there that would not be tolerated in England for a
week.

It is probably due to our passion for understatement and that we have
inherited wise and tested regulations that the British are a law abiding
race; but I think if the Americans were given a chance they would be the
same. I can only say, if they are not, Democracy will prove as great a
failure as Czardom.

It is enormously to the credit of the American public that they have
never chosen a bad character in their presidents and have produced, in
Abraham Lincoln, a man of genius, ability and courage who will live for
ever in the hearts and minds of every country in the world.