ppreciate our humour, and
therefore you say that we haven't any. And if we don't appreciate
your humour that proves again that we haven't any. So you'll never
understand why it makes me smile, sometimes gently and sometimes
rather bitterly, to think about your nation; but I'll tell you just
the same.

"In the first place, what you call 'America' is only a small fraction
of the American continent, not even as large as British North America.
And in the second place what you call your 'nation'--well, some rude
person once said of it that it isn't really a nation at all, but just
a picnic. I won't go so far as that, but I hardly suppose you will be
much better pleased if I call it a League of Nations. That is a phrase
that you hate, because your President WILSON loves it.

"By the way, I must be very careful how I speak of your President,
because you're so sensitive on that subject. You allow yourselves to
abuse him as the head of a political party, but if other nations so
much as question his omniscience he suddenly becomes the Head of
a Sovereign State. An English Cabinet Minister once told me how an
American gave vent in conversation to the most violent language in
regard to the policy of the President of the day, and when at the end
the Englishman very quietly said, 'I am inclined to agree with you,'
the American turned on him in a fury, saying: 'Sir, I didn't come here
to have my country insulted!'

"However, to return to your League of Nations. In England (where I
come from) they are just now reviving a play by Mr. ISRAEL ZANGWILL,
in which, if I recall it rightly, he makes out your country to be the
Melting Pot into which every sort of fancy alien type is thrown, and
turned out a pattern American citizen, a member of a United Family. I
wish I could believe it. It seems to us that your German, even after
passing through the Melting Pot, remains a German; that your Irishman,
however much he Americanises himself for purposes of political power
and graft, remains an Irishman. You never seem to get together as a
nation, except when you go to war, and even then you don't keep it
up, for you're not together now, although you're still at war with
Germany. The rest of the time you seem to spend in having Elections
and 'placating' (I think that's what you call it) the German interest,
or the negro interest, or the Sinn Fein interest.

"And this brings me to the point that makes me smile most of all--when
it doesn't make m