hat the bell-boys in
hotels seem perennially carrying along all the corridors, day and
night, year in and year out.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Lady Theodora Guest, sister of the Duke of Westminster, in her
book, "A Round Trip in North America," bears the same testimony: "Over
eleven thousand miles of railway travelling and miles untold of
driving besides, without an accident or a semblance of one. No
_contretemps_ of any kind, except the little delay at Hope from the
'washout,' which did not matter the least; lovely weather, and
universal kindness and courtesy from man, woman, and child."

[31]
"Had you seen but those roads before they were made,
You would hold up your hands and bless General Wade."

[32] This epithet must not confirm the usual erroneous belief that
Florida means "the flowery State." It is so called because discovered
on Easter Day (Spanish _Pascua Florida_).

XIII

The American Note

Those who have done me the honour to read through the earlier pages of
this volume will probably find nothing in the present chapter that has
not already been implied in them, if not expressed. Indeed, I should
not consider these pages written to any purpose if they did not give
some indication of what I believe to be the dominant trend of American
civilisation. A certain amount of condensed explication and
recapitulation may not, however, be out of place.

In spite of the heterogeneous elements of which American civilisation
consists, and in spite of the ever-ready pitfalls of spurious
generalisation, it seems to me that there is very distinctly an
American note, different in pitch and tone from any note in the
European concert. The scale to which it belongs is not, indeed, one
out of all relation to that of the older hemisphere, in the way, for
example, in which the laws governing Chinese music seem to stand apart
from all relations to those on which the Sonata Appassionata is
constructed. "The American," as Emerson said, "is only the
continuation of the English genius into new conditions, more or less
propitious;" and the American note, as I understand it, is, with
allowance for modifications by other nationalities, after all merely
the New World incarnation of a British potentiality.

To sum it up in one word is hardly practicable; even a Carlylean
epithet could scarcely focus the content of this idea. It includes a
sense of illimitable expansion and possibility; an almost childlike
confidence in human