s when,
something more than twenty years after, I crossed on the _Persia_, 376
feet long, of 3500 tonnage, and making a speed of nearly 14 knots an
hour, with her 4000-horse-power engines.

It is April. The sea is rough. We are no sooner under way than the heavy
swell of the waves tosses the boat like a chip. The prow dips down into
great valleys of glassy water. The stern tips high in the air against an
angry sky. The shoulders of the sea bump under the poop of the boat, and
she trembles like a frightened horse under its rider. I have books to
read. My grandmother has provided me with many things for my comfort and
delight. But I cannot eat, not until during the end of the voyage. I lie
in a little stateroom, which I share with an American. He persists in
talking to me, even at night when I am trying to sleep. He tells me of
America. His home is New York City. He has been as far west as Buffalo.
He gives me long descriptions of the Hudson River, and the boats on it
that run to Albany. He talks of America in terms of extravagant eulogy.
The country is free. It has no king. The people rule. I have read a
little and heard something of America. At Oxford we students had
wondered at the anomaly of a republic maintaining the institution of
slavery. I asked him about this. He said that it did not involve any
contradiction; that the United States was founded by white men for white
men; that negroes were a lower order of beings; that their servitude was
justified by the Bible; that a majority of the clergy and the churches
of the country approved of the institution; that the slaves were well
treated, much better housed and fed than the workers of Europe; better
than the free laborers even in America. His thesis was that the business
of life was the obtaining of the means of life; that all the uprisings
in Europe, the French Revolution included, were inspired by hunger; that
the struggle for existence was bound to produce oppression; that the
strong would use and control the weak, make them work, keep them in a
state where they could be worked. All this for trade. He topped off this
analysis with the remark that negro slavery was a benign institution,
exactly in line with the processes of the business of life; that it had
been lied about by a growing fanaticism in the States; New York had
always been in sympathy, for the most part with the Southern States,
where slavery was a necessary institution to the climate and the cotton
i