.

Except that part of life which is ministered to in mechanical ways,
they resist conveniences. They don't really like bathrooms yet.
They prefer great tin tubs, and they use bowls and pitchers when a
bathroom is next door. The telephone--Lord deliver us!--I've given
it up. They know nothing about it. (It is a government concern, but
so is the telegraph and the post-office, and they are remarkably
good and swift.) You can't buy a newspaper on the street, except in
the afternoon. Cigar-stores are as scarce as hen's teeth.
Barber-shops are all "hairdressers"--dirty and wretched beyond
description. You can't get a decent pen; their newspapers are as
big as tablecloths. In this aquarium in which we live (it rains
every day) they have only three vegetables and two of them are
cabbages. They grow all kinds of fruit in hothouses, and (I can't
explain this) good land in admirable cultivation thirty miles from
London sells for about half what good corn land in Iowa brings.
Lloyd George has scared the land-owners to death.

Party politics runs so high that many Tories will not invite
Liberals to dinner. They are almost at the point of civil war. I
asked the Prime Minister the other day how he was going to prevent
war. He didn't give any clear answer. During this recess of
Parliament, though there's no election pending, all the Cabinet are
all the time going about making speeches on Ireland. They talk to
me about it.

"What would you do?"

"Send 'em all to the United States," say I.

"No, no."

They have had the Irish question three hundred years and they
wouldn't be happy without it. One old Tory talked me deaf abusing
the Liberal Government.

"You do this way in the United States--hate one another, don't
you?"

"No," said I, "we live like angels in perfect harmony except a few
weeks before election."

"The devil you do! You don't hate one another? What do you do for
enemies? I couldn't get along without enemies to swear at."

If you think it's all play, you fool yourself; I mean this job.
There's no end of the work. It consists of these parts: Receiving
people for two hours every day, some on some sort of business, some
merely "to pay respects," attending to a large (and exceedingly
miscellaneous) mail; going to the Fo