take offence, prone to create difficulties, eager to
shed blood, and taking all sorts of occasions to bring the Christian
religion to shame under pretence of vindicating the rights of humanity
in some other country." The spectacle of a section in the United
States apparently ready to step down from its pedestal of honourable
neutrality, and run its head into the ignoble web of European
complications, was indeed one to make both gods and mortals weep. But
I do not believe it expressed the true attitude of the real American
people. Perhaps the personal element enters too largely into my
ascription of superior morality to the Americans in this matter,
because I can never thoroughly enjoy a military pageant, no matter how
brilliant, for thinking of the brutal, animal, inhuman element in our
nature of which it is, after all, the expression: military pomp is to
me merely the surface iridescence of a malarious pool, and the honour
paid to our life destroyers would, from my point of view, be
infinitely better bestowed on life preservers, such as the noble and
intrepid corps of firemen. Sympathisers with this view seem much more
numerous in the United States than in England.[11]

The judgment of an uncommercial traveller on commercial morality may
well be held as a feather-weight in the balance. Such as mine is, it
is gathered mainly from the tone of casual conversation, from which I
should conclude that a considerable proportion of Americans read a
well-known proverb as "All's fair in love or business." Men--I will
not say of a high character and standing, but men of a standing and
character who would not have done it in England--told me instances of
their sharp practices in business, with an evident expectation of my
admiration for their shrewdness, and with no apparent sense of the
slightest moral delinquency. Possibly, when the "rules of the game"
are universally understood, there is less moral obliquity in taking
advantage of them than an outsider imagines. The prevalent belief that
America is more sedulous in the worship of the Golden Calf than any
other country arises largely, I believe, from the fact that the
chances of acquiring wealth are more frequent and easy there than
elsewhere. Opportunity makes the thief. Anyhow, the reproach comes
with a bad grace from the natives of a country which has in its annals
the outbreak of the South Sea Bubble, the railway mania of the Hudson
era, and the revelations of Mr. Hooley.