pick up our
impoliteness with the first words of our language, or our slang, which
they make their adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that it
is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it better than
language, and as no manners are easier than manners, they prefer the
impoliteness they find waiting them here. I have no doubt that their
morals improve; we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry pistols
instead of knives; they shoot instead of stabbing."

"Have you been attacked with any particular type of revolver since your
return?" we inquired, caustically.

"I have been careful not to give offence."

"Then why are you so severe upon your fellow-savages, especially the
minors of foreign extraction?"

"I was giving the instances which I supposed I was asked for; and I am
only saying that I have found our manners merely worse quantitatively,
or in the proportion of our increasing population. But this prompt
succession of the new Americans to the heritage of the old Americans is
truly grievous. They must so soon outnumber us, three to one, ten to
one, twenty, fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities in
geometrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed--"

"Oh, you landed at Boston!" we exclaimed, as if this accounted for
everything; but we were really only trying to gain time. "If you had
landed at New York, do you think your sensibilities would have suffered
in the same degree?" We added, inconsequently enough, "We always
supposed that Boston was exemplary in the matters you are complaining
of."

"And when you interrupted me, with a want of breeding which is no doubt
national rather than individual, I was going on to say that I found much
alleviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had forgotten. I
moan the sort of caressing irony which has come to be the most
characteristic expression of our native kindliness. There can be no
doubt of our kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old race-suicidal
stock are not, we are kind; and I think that our expression of our most
national mood has acquired a fineness, a delicacy, with our people of
all degrees, unknown to any other irony in the world. Do you remember
_The House with the Green Shutters_--I can never think of the book
without a pang of personal grief for the too-early death of the
author--how the bitter, ironical temper of the Scotch villagers is
realized? Well, our ironical temper is just the antithesis of that. It
is all