Leonard Spray and I were billeted in a house immediately opposite the Kremlin along an embankment of the river called the Sophieskaya. It was, indeed, more than a house, being the palace of a pre-war monopolist in sugar, and most handsomely furnished in the French Empire style, with elegant salons on whose walls hung some valuable pictures, among which I remember a Corot, and a Greuze.
We arrived in the dark, after a visit to the Soviet Foreign Office and an interview with a melancholy, soft-spoken, cross-eyed Jew, by name Weinstein, who was in charge of foreign visitors and correspondents. A pretty Lettish girl, shuffling along in bedroom slippers, opened the door to us, and locked us in afterward. Then the housekeeper, a tall Swede who spoke a little of all languages, conducted us up a noble stairway, richly carved, to our bedroom, which was an immense gilded salon without a bed. This lack of sleeping accommodation was remedied by four Red soldiers who came staggering in under bits of an enormous four-poster which they fixed up in a corner of the room. Spray took possession of it, and I slept on a broad divan.
It was bitterly cold, and we were almost frozen to death. I shall never forget how Spray used to wrap himself up in the blankets to the top of his head, like an Eskimo in his sleeping bag. That house was full of strange people whom we used to pass in the corridors, including a deputation of Chinese Mandarins from the Far Eastern Republic, and a mission of Turks from Angora. One evening while we were there, Tchicherin, the Foreign Minister, with whom I had a long interview, gave a banquet on the third anniversary of the Soviet Republic to all the missions represented in Moscow. It was a very handsome affair. All the leading Bolshevikswere in evening dress, the Chinese Mandarins wore cloth of gold, wine flowed copiously, and watching from the doorway of my bedroom, I wondered what had happened to Bolshevism and Communism, and what equality there was between those well-fed, elegantly dressed gentlemen, dining richly in their noble rooms, and those millions of starving peasants who were waiting for death, and dying, in the Volga valley, or even the population of Moscow itself, not starving altogether, but pinched, and half hungry in their ragged sheepskins.
Spray and I explored the life of Moscow, freely, as I must admit, for never once were we aware of any deliberate espionage about us, though often there were watchful eyes.
We had arrived in time to witness a complete reversal of the Communistic system by what Lenin called the “New Economic Laws.” On October 17, 1921, while we were there, Lenin made an historic speech in which he admitted, with amazing frankness, the complete breakdown of the Communistic way of life which he had imposed upon the people. He explained, with a kind of vigorous brutality of speech, that owing to the hostility and ignorance of the peasants, who resisted the requisition of their food stuffs, and the failure of world revolution which prevented any international trade with Russia, industry had disintegrated, factories were abandoned, transport had broken down, and the system of rationing which had been in force in the cities, could no longer be maintained.
The cardinal theory of Communism was that in return for service to the State, every individual in the State received equal rations of food, clothes, education, and amusements. That was the ideal, but it could no longer be fulfilled, for the causes given.
“We have suffered a severe defeat on the economic front,” said Lenin. “Our only safety lies in a rapid retreat upon prepared positions.”
He then outlined the “New Economic Laws,” which abolished the rationing system, re-established the use of money, permitted “private trading” which had been the unpardonable crime, and even invited the introduction of foreign capital.
We saw the immediate, though gradual and tentative effect of this reversal of policy. It was visible in the market places of Moscow, where peasants freely sold the produce of their farms under the eyes of Red soldiers who previously would have seized and flung them into prison for trading in that way.
Among these peasants stood long lines of men and women who as I saw at a glance were people of the old régime—aristocrats and intellectuals. Shabby as most of them were, haggard and wan, unshaven and unwashed (how could they wash without soap?), their faces, and above all their eyes, betrayed them. They stood, those ladies and gentlemen of Imperial Russia, holding out little articles which they had saved or hidden during the time of revolution. The women carried their underclothing, or their fur coats, tippets, and caps, embroidered linen, old shoes and boots, their engagement rings, brooches, household ornaments. The men—mostly old fellows—held out woollen vests, socks, pipes, rugs, books, many odds and ends of their ancient life. Who bought these things I could never tell, though I saw peasant women and old soldiers fingering them, and asking the price, and generally shrugging their shoulders and walking away.
I spoke to some of the ladies there in French or German, and at first they were very much afraid and would not answer, or left the market place immediately, lest this were some police trap which would endanger their liberty or life. Almost all of them, as I found afterward, had been imprisoned for doing secretly the very thing which they now dared to do in the open market place, but with trembling fear at first.
In the same way, timidly, with nervous foreboding, little groups of families or friends opened a few shops in the Arbat, furnishing them with relics of their old homes, and stocking them with a strange assortment of goods.
Two restaurants opened, one called “The English Restaurant,” where Spray and I used to dine, almost alone, except for a Red Commissioner or two who came in for coffee and a secret inspection, and now and then a few ladies, furtively, for a plate of soup. The restaurant keepers were of good family and ancient rank. The lady spoke English and French, and told me many tales of her tragic life during the years of revolution. Behind the bar was a pretty, smiling girl of sixteen or so, amazed and delighted to see two English customers. Her father, dressed like a seafaring man, was charming in his courtesy to us, but always afraid.
Even now I dare not write too freely about the people we met by hazard, or by introduction, lest any words of mine should do them harm. There was one family, of noble blood, who lived in two squalid rooms divided by a curtain from a public corridor. The two daughters had one pair of decent boots between them. They took turns to go out “visiting” at the British Mission which gave Sunday afternoon receptions to a little group of ladies, and taught them the fox trot and two step and other dances which had become a mania in many Western nations, but were utterly unknown in Russia, cut off from all the world.
The old gentleman their father, and their charming mother, had dirty hands. There was no soap in Russia, and in those rooms no chance of hot water, except for tea. I marveled at their courage (though the old man wept a little), and at the courage of all those people of the old régime, who were living in direst poverty, in perpetual fear of prison, or worse than that. They saw the ruin of Russia, but still had hope that out of all thatagony, and all their tears, some new hope would dawn for the country they loved. So many people told me, and among them one bedridden lady, near to death, I think, who said that there would be a new and nobler Russia born out of all this terror and tribulation.
Moscow was not starving to death, though many in it were always hungry. When the American Relief Administration opened a soup kitchen in the famous old restaurant, The Hermitage, thousands of children came to be fed, but, on the whole, they were not famine-stricken—only underfed and uncertain of the next day’s meal.
With its dilapidated houses, many of them wrecked by gunfire in the first days of the revolution, Moscow had a melancholy look, and few of its people, outside the Commissar and Soviet official class had any margin beyond the barest needs of life. But the people in the mass looked healthy, and they were not deprived of all light and beauty in life. The opera, and two or three theaters were open, crowded every night by the “proletariat” in working clothes. In the Imperial box of the opera, with its eagles covered under the Red Flag, sat a group of mechanics with their wives, and between the acts the foyer was crowded with what looked like the “lower middle class,” as we should see them in some music hall on the Surrey side of London. The opera and the ballet were as beautiful as in the old days, maintaining their historic traditions, though all else had gone in Russia, and it was strange to see this stage splendor in a Republic of ruin.... But not yet had I seen the famine.
I came closer to the effects of famine in Petrograd. That city, grim but magnificent as I saw it under heavy snow, had a sinister and tragic look. During the war its population had been 3,000,000 and more. When Spray and I walked along the Nevski Prospekt, where all the shops but six or seven were barricaded with wooden planks, there were only 750,000 people in the whole ofthis great city. Palaces, Government offices, great banks, city offices, huge blocks of buildings, were uninhabited and unlighted. Many of those who had been government officials, rich merchants, factory owners, were shoveling snow upon the streets, or dragging loads of wood on sledges over the slippery roads. They wore bowler hats, black coats with ragged collars of astrachan, the clothes of a “genteel” world that had gone down into the great gulfs of revolution.
At every street corner were men and women selling cigarettes. Some of those women, and one I especially remember, were thinly clad, shivering in the biting wind, and obviously starved. The very look of them made me shiver in my soul.
In Petrograd I went to a home for refugees from the famine region. All round the city were great camps of these people, who had come in a tide of flight—hundreds of thousands—when the harvest of 1921 was burnt as black as that of 1920 in the awful drought. Four thousand or so were in one of the old Imperial barracks, and they had come three thousand miles to reach this refuge at the end of their journey. Outside, in Petrograd, there was a hard, grim frost. In these bare whitewashed rooms there was no heat, for lack of fuel, and men, women and children lay about in heaps, huddled together in their sheepskins for human warmth, tormented by vermin, fever-stricken, weak. Too weak to stand, some of them, even to take their place in line for the daily ration of potato soup. A doctor there took us round. He pointed to those with typhus, and said, “There’s no hope for them. They’ll be dead to-morrow or next day.”
When we crossed a courtyard, he stopped a moment to thrust back a heavy door. “Our morgue,” he said. “Three-days’ dead.” Inside was a pile of dead bodies, men, women and children, flung one on top of the other like rubbish for the refuse heap. Hands and legsobtruded from the mass of corruption. It was the end of their journey.
But the opera was very brilliant in Petrograd, some distance from that heap of mud-colored corpses. I went to the Marinsky theater and heard “Carmen.” It was marvelously staged, admirably sung, and there was a packed audience of “trade unionists,” as I was told, on free tickets, but as everybody in Russia had to belong to a trade union or die, it did not specify the character of the people closely. I think most of them were of the clerical class, with a few mechanics. On the way back we followed a party of young men and women walking in snow boots and wrapped to their ears in ragged furs or woollen shawls. They were laughing gayly. Their voices rang out on the still frosty air under the steely glint of stars.... So there were still people who could laugh and make love in Russia!
How did they live, these people? I never could find out in actual detail. Russian money meant nothing to me. When I changed ten pounds in Moscow, I received four big bundles of notes, containing three million roubles. My first experience with the purchasing power of this money was when I wanted to buy a pair of boots in the market place. They were good top boots, splendid looking for snow and mud, but when I was asked one million roubles, I was abashed. Yet, after all, it was not much in English money. But what did it mean to those Russians?
I found out that the average wage for a mechanic, or Soviet official, or University professor, was 150,000 roubles a month. That sounded well until I came up against those boots, and later discovered that in Petrograd a pound of bread cost 80,000 roubles, a pound of tea 120,000 roubles, ten cigarettes 60,000 roubles. How, then, could any human soul live on 150,000 roubles a month? I asked many of them, and some said, “Wedon’t live. We die,” but others said, “We supplement our wages by speculation.” For some time I was puzzled by that word speculation, until I found that it meant bartering. Secretly, and at risk of imprisonment or death, until the “New Economic Laws,” there was a general system of exchange in goods. A man with a second pair of boots exchanged them for a sack of potatoes, kept some and bartered the others for tea, or bread, or meat, kept some of that, and bartered the rest for a woollen vest, a fur waistcoat, or a tin of sardines, smuggled in from Riga. And so on, in a highly complicated, difficult and dangerous system of “underground trade.” But in spite of “speculation,” life was hard, and almost impossible for elderly folk, and the sick, and frail women. For years hundreds of thousands of them had lived on bread and tea and small rations of soused herrings and millet seed. Now there were no rations, but still bread and tea, for those who had the money.
“What do you think of Bolshevism?” asked Spray one night in the Sugar king’s palace. We lay in bed, with only our mouths and noses out.
I asked him three questions in return. Was there liberty in Russia? Was there equality? Was there a higher type of civilization and human happiness here than in Western Europe, or any chance of it? I asked the questions without prejudice, and we discussed them between the low divan and the four-poster bed, in that great gilded salon opposite the Kremlin, where, in some secret room, Lenin sat that night scheming out some way of saving Russia from the fate into which he had led it, to test his theory of the Communistic state.
We could find no liberty. The two chief papers published—Pravda, andIzvestia—were propaganda sheets under Government control. There was no freedom of speech or opinion. There was no equality, even of misery—surely the first test of the Communistic state. Between the Soviet Commissars, even the “trade-union” audience of the Marinsky theater, and the peasants, the workers, the underfed masses, there was a gulf as wide as between the profiteers and unemployed of England, wide though lower down the scale of life on both sides. Civilization, human happiness? Well, there was the Marinsky theater, and those laughing boys and girls. Human nature adapted itself marvelously to the hardest conditions of life. Perhaps there were happy people in Russia, but for the most part, Spray and I had met only those who told us tragic tales, of imprisonings, executions, deaths, misery.
When we left Moscow and traveled across Russia to Kazan, and took a boat down the Volga, and sledges across the snow fields to the villages where Famine dwelt, we left human happiness behind us and saw nothing but suffering and despair, hunger and pestilence.
It was again due to the American Relief Administration that we were able to make that journey. Colonel Haskell, chief of the A.R.A., and a man of indomitable energy, iron will power, and exquisite courtesy, invited Spray and myself to join his own party which was going to Kazan on a tour of inspection under his command, and after that he would provide us with a ship for the Volga voyage. Without that immense help of the A.R.A., all-powerful in Russia because it was the one source of hope in the famine region, I should have seen nothing outside Moscow. It was they who controlled the railways, got the trains to move, and forced officials to work.
It was a four-days’ journey to Kazan. The carriages were verminous, and Spray was tortured again—and we crawled slowly through the dreary woods and plains. Colonel Haskell and his staff carried good rations which they shared with us, and at night, when our darkness was illumined by candlelight, we played poker for Russian roubles, gambling wildly, as it seemed, in thousands ofroubles, but losing or winning no more than a few shillings.
One man on board impressed me beyond words. It was Governor Goodrich of Indiana, who had come to report to Washington on the agricultural conditions and prospects of Russia, and the truth about the Famine. He was an elderly man with the fresh complexion of a new-born babe, and a powerful clear-cut face, wonderfully softened by the look of benevolence in his eyes and the whimsical smile about his lips. “Governor Jem” he used to be called in Indiana, and he must have been a gallant fellow in his youth, before he became lame in one leg. Now he had come as a knight-errant to Russia, for the rescue of a stricken people. I think no man of greater quality ever went into Russia, or ever came out of it, and it was due not a little to his report (which he allowed me to read) that the Government of the United States, acting through the American Relief Association, fed ten million Russians every day in the famine regions, and saved that number from certain death by hunger or disease.
Kazan lay under a heavy mantle of snow. It was now the capital of the “Tartar Republic,” a province of Soviet Russia, on the edge of the richest grain-growing districts of the Volga valley, where now there was no grain. It was a garden city, with many great houses where the nobles of Imperial Russia had taken their pleasure in summer months, now inhabited by misery, hunger, and disease.
There were forty homes here for abandoned children—abandoned not by the cruelty of their parents but by their love, because they could not bear to see their little ones wailing over empty platters. I went into a number of them, and they were all alike in general character. In one of them were fifteen hundred children, naked, or merely clothed in little ragged shirts. Their clothes hadbeen burnt because of the lice in them, which spread typhus fever. There were no other clothes to replace their ragged old sheepskins and woollen garments. There was no heat in the rooms, for lack of fuel. There was no furniture. On the bare boards they huddled together, these little wizened things, with deep, sunken eyes, and tight-drawn skin, like little bald-headed monkeys. There were many homes like that, and worse than that, because many of the children were dying, and the rooms reeked with their fever, and the very doorposts crawled with lice.
I went into the hospitals, and they were dreadful. Because there was no fuel for heat, these people, stricken with typhus, dysentery, all manner of hunger diseases, were huddled together in unventilated wards for human warmth. Many of the beds had been burnt for fuel and most of them lay on mattresses or the bare boards. Those who had beds lay four together, two one way and two the other. There were no medicines, no anaesthetics, no soap, no dressings. The nurses were starving, and dying of the diseases they could not cure. They came clamoring round the doctor of the A.R.A. with whom I went, begging for food in a wild animal way which made his heart go sick.
But there was an opera, even in Kazan! It was true that the stench of it was pretty bad, and that its audience tightened their belts from time to time in lieu of supper, but Madam Butterfly delighted them, they thrilled to the “Carmen” of a Persian prima donna.
One night the ladies and gentlemen of the opera invaded the headquarters of the A.R.A. after midnight. They were hungry, and made no secret about it. So the young Americans of the Kazan headquarters brewed cocoa in a saucepan, with the help of one of the ladies, and scraped up some bully beef and beans and a loaf or two and some apples, and odds and ends. Not much fora banquet! Spray and I whispered together! I fetched out the last hunk of our round red cheese. It was received with a chorus of approval. It died a sacrificial death in the cause of art and beauty. The Persian prima donna had an insatiable appetite.... Out in the streets of Kazan were starving wanderers, and in the station lay the latest of the abandoned children.
The last boat to go down the Volga before the ice came was put under command of the press representative of the A.R.A., my good friend Murphy, a most kind and generous-hearted soul. Spray and I were the only passengers. We three explored the ship before she left the quayside. She had been a rescue ship for the fugitives from famine, and was in a noisome state. We dared not linger in the sleeping cabins. The very washbasins were crawling. That night Murphy and I slept on the table in the dining saloon—the safest place. Spray gave himself up for lost and curled up on the floor, where he tossed all night. I was cook on that voyage, and did rather well with boiled beans and a mess of pottage. We went down to Tetiushi, and found ourselves among the people of famine....
After two droughts in successive years, there was no harvest of any account. The Red soldiers had requisitioned the peasants’ reserves of grain for rationing the cities. Without reserves they had no means of life. The Soviet Government had supplied them with seed grain for the next harvest, and they had sown it, not expecting to reap it. They had also sent, lately, some barges of potatoes, but they lay there rotting. To carry them to the villages, horses were needed for the sledges, but there was no fodder, and the horses were dying, or dead. So we discovered the State of Tetiushi.
By a message from the Prime Minister of the Tartar Republic, four horses were found for us, and two sledges, after many hours of waiting, and we set out across thesnow to the villages. They were very silent when we entered. They seemed abandoned. But we saw in one or two of their timbered houses little wizened faces staring at us from the windows. They were faces like those I had seen in the homes for abandoned children, monkeylike. We went into the cottages and found there peasant families waiting for a visitor who tarried, which was Death.
They showed us the last food they had—if they had any left. It was a brownish powder, made of leaves ground up and mixed with the husks of grain. Others showed us bits of hard stuff like lead. It was a bluish clay dug from a hillside called Bitarjisk. It had some nutritive value, but it swelled when eaten, and was the cause of dreadful agony to children. Peasant women, weeping very quietly, showed us their naked children, with distended stomachs, the sign of starvation in its last stage. From other cottages they came to where we stood, crossing themselves at the doorways, in the Russian way, and then lamenting.
Handsome Russian peasants, with blue eyes and straw-colored beards, struck their breasts with a gesture of absolute despair, and said—we had a Russian with us who spoke English—that death could not be long delayed, for all of them. The last cows had been killed for lack of fodder. There was no milk for the children, as for a long time there had been no bread. Here and there a woman wailed loudly, or grasped my wrist with her skinny hand and spoke fiercely, as though I denied her food. I remember one cottage in which a whole family lay dying, and nearly dead. It was the Famine....
I will not write more about the horrors here. In many articles, and in my novel “The Middle of the Road” I have given the picture of it, and the agony of it.
It is said that two million of these people died. That is Nansen’s figures. That twenty million did not die isdue to the magnificent work of the A.R.A. and the Save the Children Fund who, against all political prejudice and for humanity’s sake, achieved a great rescue of these stricken folk. As I have said, the A.R.A. alone fed ten million people a day in the famine area, and I pay a tribute here to the courage and efficiency and devotion of those young Americans whose work I saw, and of whose friendship I am proud. Our people did less, having less means, but it was work well and nobly done in the spirit of Christianity kept alight in a dark and cruel world, which is this jungle of Europe.
In the spring of 1919, while the Peace Conference was sitting in Paris, I made my first visit to the United States, and lectured in many American cities. I went there again in 1920 and 1921, and on the third visit traveled from New York to San Francisco.
I regard these American visits as the greatest experience of my life, apart from the War, and they added enormously to the knowledge of world forces and the human problem which I had been studying among the peoples of Europe. I was, and still remain, convinced that the United States will shape, for good or ill—and I believe for good—the future destiny of the world, for these people, in the mass, have a dynamic energy, a clear-cut quality of character, and a power not only of material wealth, but of practical idealism, from which an enormous impetus may be given to human progress, in the direction of the common well-being, international peace, liberty, decency, and average prosperity of individual life.
During those three visits, when I talked with innumerable men and women of great intelligence and honesty of thought, I was “made wise,” as they call it, to many of the darker aspects of American life. I was not unconscious of a strong strain of intolerance; a dangerous gulf between the very rich and—not the very poor, there are few of those—but well-paid, speeded-up, ugly-living, dissatisfied labor; something rather hysterical in mass emotion when worked up by the wire-pullers and the spellbinders; and the noisy, blatant, loud-mouthed boasting vulgarity of the mob. I saw the unloveliness of “Main Street,” I met “Babbitt” in his club, parlor car, andprivate house. But though I did not shut my eyes to all that, and much more than that—a good deal of it belongs to civilization as well as to the United States—I saw also the qualities that outweigh these defects, and, in my judgment, contain a great hope for the world. I met, everywhere, numbers of men and women who have what seems to me a clean, sane, level-headed outlook on life and its problems. They believe in peace, in a good chance for the individual, in a decent standard of life for all people, in honesty and truth. They are impatient of dirt, however picturesque, of ruin, however romantic, of hampering tradition, however ancient. They are, in the mass, common-sense, practical, and good-natured folk, who, in the business of life, cut formalities and get down to the job.
But behind all that common sense and their practicality, they are deeply sentimental, simply and sincerely emotional, quick to respond to any call upon their pity or their charity, and when stirred that way, enormously generous. I agree with General Swinton, the inventor of the “Tanks” who, after a tour in the United States, told me, with a touch of exaggeration, that he thought the Americans, as a nation, were the only idealists left in the world. Europe is cynical, remembering too much history, and suffering too much disillusionment. The United States, looking always to the future, and not much backward to the past, is hopeful, confident of human progress, and strangely and wonderfully eager to find a philosopher’s stone of human happiness, for which we, in Europe, have almost abandoned search.
I think that, as a people, they are more ready than any other to do some great work of rescue for humanity (I have told how they fed ten million people a day in Russia), and to adopt and carry out an ideal on behalf of humanity in the way of peace and reconstruction, at some personal sacrifice to themselves. That is possibleat least in the United States, and it may almost be said that it is impossible in any other nation.
As a personal experience, my first visit to the United States was exciting and rather overwhelming, in an extremely pleasant way, except for my extreme nervousness. For the first time in my life I was made to believe (except for secret doubts and a sense of humor) that I was a person of some importance. By good fortune, of which I was not aware until my arrival in New York, I had gained the good opinion, and almost personal popularity, of an immense American public from coast to coast. I do not minimize the pleasure of that, the real joy of it, for there is no reward in the world so good to a man who for years has been an obscure writer, as to realize at last that his words have been read and remembered, with emotion, by millions of fellow mortals, almost by a whole nation—and this had happened to me. It happened by the great luck that since the entry of the United States into the War my daily dispatches from the Western front had been published inThe New York Times, and a syndicate of newspapers covering the whole country. Day after day during those years of enormous history, I appeared with the grape fruit and the cereal at millions of American breakfast tables, and because of the things I had to tell, and perhaps, a little, the way in which I told them (I tried to give the picture and the pity of the things I saw), I got home to the bosom and business (to use Francis Bacon’s words) of the American merchant, lawyer, and city man, to the lady whom he provides with a Packard or a Ford (according to his rung on the social ladder) and to the bright young thing who is beginning to take an interest in the drama of life outside her dancing school or her college rooms. My articles were read on lonely farms, in tenement houses, by Irish servant girls, Slav foundry workers, German metal workers, clerks and telephone girls, as well as byall manner of folk in Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and the Main Street of many towns. I am not making a boast of that, for if I had written like an archangel instead of like a war correspondent (there’s a difference), I should not have secured those readers unlessThe New York Timesand its syndicate had stepped in where angels fear to tread—in Chicago, and other American cities. But it was my luck, and, as I say, pleasant and encouraging.
People wanted to see the fellow whose name had become familiar to them over the breakfast table. They wanted to see what manner of man he was (and some were disappointed); they wanted to know if he could speak as he wrote (and presently they knew he didn’t); they wanted to pay back by hospitality, by booking seats for the theaters, by friendly words afterward, for some of the things he had written at a time when they had wanted to know.
One of the first little thrills I had was when I stood at the desk of the Vanderbilt hotel, ten minutes after getting away from the dockside, where scores of telegrams were waiting for me, inviting me to speak at all sorts of places with strange and alarming names, and having picked up the receiver in answer to the urgent calls, heard the voice of a telephone girl saying, “Welcome to our city, Philip Gibbs!... and here’s another call for you.” I have always remembered that little human message from the girl at the switchboard.
I was still a journalist, though about to become a lecturer, andThe New York Timesdesired me to write a series of articles recording—rapidly!—my first impressions of New York. It still seems to me a miracle that I was able to do so, for I was caught up by the social life of New York like a straw in a whirlpool, and my head was dazed by the immensity of the city, by its noise, its light, its rush of traffic, its overheated rooms, its newspaper reporters, its camera men, and, when I staggeredto my bedroom for a moment’s respite, by the incessant tinkle of the telephone which rang me up from scores of addresses in New York city, from Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, the Lord knows where.
I wrote those articles, blindly, subconsciously, like a man in a nightmare, and they came out rather like that, with a sort of wild impressionism of confused scenes, which seemed to please the American people.
They were vastly amused, I was told, by one phrase which came from my nerve ganglia all quivering with the first walk through Broadway at night. I confessed that I felt “like a trench cootie under the fire of ten thousand guns.” Now a cootie is a louse, as I had lately learnt, and that simile tickled my readers to death, as some of them said, though it expressed in utter truthfulness the terror of my sensation as a traffic dodger down the Great White Way.
But that terror was easily surpassed when I faced for the first time an audience in the Carnegie Hall. As I drove up with my brother, and saw hundreds of motor cars setting down people in evening dress who had come to have a look at me (and paid good money for it), with the odd chance of hearing something worth while—poor dears!—I was cold with fright. My fear increased until I was stiff with it when, having shaken hands with my brother and received his hearty pat on the shoulder, like a man about to go over the top with the odds against him, I went through a little door and found myself on a large stage, facing a great audience. I was conscious of innumerable faces, white shirt fronts, and eyes—eyes—eyes, staring at me from the great arena of stalls, and from all the galleries up to the roof. As I made my bow, my tongue clave, literally, to the roof of my mouth, my knees weakened, and I felt (as some one afterward told me I looked) as cheap as two cents.
What frightened me excessively was a suddenmovement like a tidal wave among all those people. They stood up, and I became aware that they were paying me a very great honor, but the physical effect of that movement was, for a moment, as though they were all advancing on me, possibly with intent to kill!
My chairman was my good and great comrade, Frederick Palmer, the American war correspondent. I am told he made a fine introductory speech, but I did not hear a word of it, and was only wondering with a sinking heart whether I should get through my first few sentences before I broke down utterly. It was a fearful thought, to make a public fool of myself like that!...
I had one thing in my favor—a strong, far-reaching voice, and I had been told to pitch it to the center of the top gallery. I know they heard. A young foreigner I know—not an American—a most friendly and candid soul, told me that he had heard every word, and wished he hadn’t. Attracted by the title of a book of mine, “The Soul of the War,” he had bought four tickets for himself and friends, believing that at last he would hear the inner meaning of the war and its madness, in which he had found no kind of sense. But when he heard my straightforward narrative of what the British Armies had done, he sighed deeply, and said, “Sold again!” and tried to sleep. My loud, clear-cut sentences hammered into his brain, and would not allow him even that consolation.
That first audience in the Carnegie Hall was immensely kind, extraordinarily generous and long-suffering. They applauded my stories of British heroism as though it had been their own heroes, laughed at my attempts to tell Cockney anecdotes, and did not let me know once that I was boring them excessively. Some spirit of friendship and good will reached up to me and gave me courage. Only once did they laugh in the wrong place, and then they couldn’t help themselves. It was when for the sixth time or more I glanced at my wrist watch and then in a suddenpanic that it had stopped and that I had spoken an hour too long, put it to my ear!
The way off the platform was more difficult than the way on. I had come through one little door, but there were six of them exactly the same. At the conclusion of my speech, I bowed, walked rapidly to one of the doors, and found it would not budge! I returned again and bowed to the audience before trying another door. No, by heaven it wouldn’t open! Again I returned and bowed, and made another shot for a swing door. At the fourth try I went through.... That experience of doors that wouldn’t open became a nightmare of mine in American sleeping cars when I suffocated from overheated pipes.
I have lectured a hundred times since then, made large numbers of speeches (sometimes as many as five a day) in American cities, faced every kind of audience from New York to San Francisco and across the Canadian border, in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and never conquered my nervousness, so that, if I am called upon for a speech at a public dinner in England, now, I suffer all the pangs of stage fright until I am well under way. But at least my experiences in the United States helped me to hide behind a calm and tranquil mask, and not to give myself away so utterly as that first time in Carnegie Hall.
It was on my second visit, and at my opening lecture in the same great hall, that I obtained—by accident—the most wonderful ovation which will ever come to me in this life. It was my night out, as it were, most memorable, most astonishing, most glorious. For itisa glorious sensation, whatever the cynic may say, to be lifted up on waves of enthusiasm, to have a great audience of intelligent people cheering one wildly, as though one’s words were magic.
It was none of my doing. My words were poor commonplace stuff, but I stood for something which the finestaudience in New York liked with all their hearts that night—England, liberty, fair play—and against something which that audience hated, disloyalty to the United States, discourtesy to England, foul play.
It was the Sinn Feiners who did it. A friend of Ireland, and advocate of Dominion Home Rule, I was one of the last men they should have attacked. But because I was an Englishman who dared to lecture before an American audience, they were determined to wreck my meeting, and make a savage demonstration. I was utterly unaware of this plot. I was not speaking on the subject of Ireland. I was talking about Austria, and was trying to tell an anecdote about an Austrian doctor—I never told it!—when from the middle gallery of the Carnegie Hall which was densely packed from floor to ceiling, there came a hoarse question in a stentorian voice with an Irish accent: “Why don’t you take the marbles out of your mouth?” Rather staggered, and believing this to be a criticism of my vocal delivery and “English accent,” I raised my voice, but it was instantly overwhelmed by an uproar of shouts, catcalls, whistlings, derisive laughter, abuse, and a wild wailing of women’s voices rising to a shriek.
For a few moments I could not guess what all the trouble was about. I stood there, alone and motionless, on the platform, suddenly divorced from the audience, which I watched with a sense of profound curiosity. All sorts of strange things were happening. Men were going at each other with fists in the gallery, where there was a seething tumult. In the stalls I was aware of a very fat man in evening dress wedged tightly in his seat and bawling out something from an apoplectic face. Two other men tried to pull him out of his chair. In scattered groups in the stalls were ladies who seemed to be screaming at me. Other ladies seemed to be arguing with them, hushing them down. One lady struck another over thehead with a fan. People were darting about the floor or watching the scrimmage up above. From the front row of the stalls friendly faces were staring up at me and giving me good counsel which I could not hear.
Over and over again I tried to speak above the tumult. I carried on about that Austrian doctor, and then abandoned him for another line of thought. I stuck it out for something like half an hour before there was comparative silence—the police had come in and dragged out the most turbulent demonstrators—and then I continued my speech, interrupted frequently, but not overwhelmed. Everything I said was applauded tremendously. Some reference I made to England’s place in the world brought the audience to its feet, cheering and cheering, waving handkerchiefs and fans, and when I finished, there was a surge up to the platform, and thousands of hands grasped mine, and generous, excited, splendid things were said which set my heart on fire.
As I have said, it was not my doing, and it was not any eloquence of mine which stirred this enthusiasm. But that audience rose up to me because they were passionate to show how utterly they repudiated the things that had been said against England, how fiercely angry they were that a friendly visitor to the United States should be howled down like this in the heart of New York. Again it was my luck, and I was glad of it.
It was not the last time I had to face hostile groups. I decided to give a lecture on the Irish situation in which I would tell the straight truth, fair to Ireland, fair to England. The Sinn Feiners rallied up again. The fairer I was to Ireland, the madder they became, while the other part of the audience cheered and cheered. In the midst of the commotion, a tall black figure jumped on to the platform. “Hullo!” I thought. “Here I die!” But it was a Catholic priest, Father Duffy, a famous chaplain of the American Army, who announced himself as anIrish Republican, but pleaded that I should have a fair hearing. They just howled at him. However, by patience and endurance I broke through the storm and said most of what I wanted to say.
The next morning I was rung up on the telephone by an emotional lady. She had a great scheme, for which she desired my approval and collaboration. She had arranged to raise a bodyguard of stalwart society girls who would march to the hall with me, on the evening of my next lecture, and in heroic combat put to flight the Irish girls who were to parade with banners and insulting placards.... I utterly refused to approve of the suggestion.
My lecture agent, Mr. Lee Keedick, enjoyed those “Sinn Fein tea parties,” as they were called, with such enormous gusto, that there were some friendly souls who suggested that he had incited them for publicity purposes! But he missed the best, or the worst. In Chicago, on St. Patrick’s Eve, I was three-quarters of an hour before I could utter a single sentence. It was what the press called next morning a “near riot” and there were some Irish-American soldiers there, in uniform, who fought like tigers before they were ejected by the police.
For the first time in my life I had a police bodyguard wherever I went in Chicago. Two detectives insisted on driving in my taxicab, and they were both Irishmen, but, as one explained in a friendly manner, “It’s not your life we’re troubling about, Boss. It’s our reputation!”
Boston, from Mr. Keedick’s point of view, was a disappointment. A great row was expected there, being the stronghold of the Sinn Fein cause, and when I appeared, behind the stage, there was a large force of police stripped for action. The police inspector came to my dressing room, and demanded permission to precede me on the stage and announce to the audience that if there was any demonstration he would put his men on to them.I refused to give that permission. It seemed to me the wrong kind of introduction for an Englishman to an American audience. As a matter of fact, they behaved like lambs, in the best tradition of Boston, and I was quite disconcerted by their silence, having become used to the other kind of thing which I found exhilarating.
Stranger things happen to an English lecturer in the United States than in any other country. At least they happened to me. I shall never forget, for instance, how in the middle of a speech to the City Club of New York, I was thrust into a taxicab, hurried off to the 44th Street theater, received with a tremendous explosion (a flashlight photo!) in the dressing room of Al Jolson, the funny man, thrust into the middle of a harem scene (scores of beautiful maidens) and told to make a speech on behalf of wounded soldiers while the audience raffled for an original letter from Lloyd George to the American nation.
Surprised by my rapid transmigration from the City Club, and by my presence in an Oriental harem, very hot, rather flustered, and not knowing what to do with my hands, I kept screwing up a bit of paper which had been given to me at the wings, and by the time I had finished my three-minutes’ speech it was a bit of wet, mushy pulp. When I left the stage, a white-faced man in the wings who had been making frantic signs to me, informed me coldly that I had utterly destroyed Lloyd George’s letter to the American nation which had just been raffled for many hundreds of dollars.... After that I went back to finish my speech at the City Club.
When I first visited the United States in 1919, the whole nation was seething with a conflict of opinion between pro-Wilsonites and anti-Wilsonites.
It was not a mere academic controversy which people could discuss hotly but without passion. It divided families. It caused quarrels among lifelong friends. The mere mention of the name of Wilson spoilt the amenities of any dinner party and transformed it into a political meeting.
In my first article forThe New York Times, recording my impressions of America, I slipped out the phrase that “I was all for Wilson.” I received, without exaggeration, hundreds of letters from all parts of the United States, “putting me wise” to the thousand and one reasons why Wilson’s doings in Paris would be utterly repudiated by the Senate and people. He had violated the Constitution. He had acted without authority. He had tried to commit the United States to his scheme of the League of Nations against their convictions and consent. On the other hand, there were many people who still regarded him as the greatest leader in the world and the noblest idealist.
Ignorant, like most Englishmen, of the parties and personalities of American politics, at that time, I kept my ears open to all this, but couldn’t avoid falling into pitfalls. I made a delightful “gaffe,” as the French would say, by turning to one gentleman in the Union Club before he acted as my chairman to the lecture I was giving there, and asked him to tell me something of Wilson’s character and history. It was Mr. CharlesHughes, ex-governor of New York, and defeated candidate for the Presidency against Wilson himself.
It was the last question which I ought to have asked, as people explained to me later. But I shall never forget the fine and thoughtful way in which Mr. Hughes answered my question and the subtlety with which he analyzed Wilson’s character, without a touch of personal animosity or a trace of meanness. I was aware that I was in the presence of a great intellect, and a great gentleman.
I had the opportunity of talking to Mr. Hughes in each of my three visits, and when he was Secretary of Foreign Affairs in Washington, and each time I was more impressed with the conviction that he was likely to become one of the greatest statesmen of the world, and, unlike many great statesmen, had a fine and delicate sense of honor, and a desire for the well-being, not only of the United States but of the human race.
Between my first and second visits Wilson’s tragedy had happened, and the United States had refused to enter the League of Nations. The Republican party had swept the country, inspired by general disgust and disillusionment with the Peace of Versailles, by a tidal wave of public opinion against any administration which would involve the United States in the jungle of Europe’s racial passions, and by a general desire to be rid of a government associated with all the restrictions, orders, annoyances, petty injustice, extravagance, and fever of the War régime. As a friend of mine said, the question put to the electors was not “Are you in favor of the League of Nations?” but “Are you sick and tired of the present administration?” And the answer was, “By God, we are!”
President Harding reigned in place of President Wilson. Owing to the kindness of a brilliant American journalist named Lowell Mellett who had acted for a time as war correspondent on the Western front, and whoseemed to have the liberty of the White House, the Senate, Congress, and every office, drawing-room, and assembly at Washington, I was received by the President, and had a little conversation with him which ended in a message to the British people throughThe Review of Reviews, of which I had become editor. It was a message of affection and esteem for the nation which, he said, all Americans of the old stock regarded still as the Mother Country—a generous and almost dangerous thing to be said by a President of the United States.
A tall, heavy, handsome man, with white hair and ruddy face, the new President seemed to me kind-hearted, honest and well-meaning, without any great gifts of genius or leadership, and a little timid of the enormous responsibility that had come to him. A year later I saw him again, and had the honor of introducing my son Tony. He was surprised that I had a son of that height and age, and it reminded him instantly of an anecdote referring to Chief Justice White and a little lawyer who introduced a tall, husky son to him. “Ah,” said the Chief Justice, “a block of the old chip, I see!”
It was due to my friend Mellett again that I had the opportunity, and very extraordinary honor, for a foreign journalist, of giving evidence before the House Committee on Naval Disarmament. It was a Committee appointed to report on the possibility of calling the Washington Conference. I was summoned to give evidence in the House of Congress without any time to prepare notes or a speech, and when I took my place like a mouse in a hole in the center of a horseshoe of raised seats occupied by about twenty-five members of the Committee, I was in a state of high tension which I masked by a supreme effort of nerve control. For I was, to some extent, speaking not only on behalf of Great Britain, and taking upon myself the responsibility of expressing the views of my own people, but on behalf of all idealists inall nations who looked to the United States for leadership in the way of international peace. I knew that I must be right in my facts and figures, that I must say nothing that could give offense to the United States, and nothing that would seem like disloyalty to England, while telling the truth, as far as I knew it, without reserve, regarding England’s naval and military burdens, the dangers existing in Europe, and the sentiment of the British people.
After a preliminary statement lasting ten minutes or so, to which the Committee listened in absolute silence, I was closely and shrewdly cross-examined by various members, and had to answer very difficult and searching questions. It was one of my lucky mornings. I came through the ordeal better than I could have hoped. I was warmly congratulated afterward by members of the British Embassy who told me I had said the right things, and I honestly believe I did a tiny bit of good to England and the world that day.The New York Timesand other papers published my address verbatim and it went on to the records of Congress. Anyhow, it did no harm, and I was thankful enough for that.
My lectures on the second visit had nothing to do with the War, except in its effects, and I spoke entirely on the subject of European conditions, always with a strong plea to the United States to come in boldly and throw her moral and economic influence on the side of international peace and reconstruction. From the very first I took the line, which I held with absolute conviction, that Germany would be unable, after the exhaustion of war, to pay the enormous indemnities demanded by the Peace of Versailles, and that if Germany were thrust into the mire and went the way of Austria, Europe would not recover from financial ruin. At the same time I pointed out the rights and justice of France, and gave her view fairly and generously, as I was bound to do, because of my illimitable admiration of French heroism, myenormous pity for French sacrifice, my certain knowledge of French danger. My argument was for economic co-operation between the peoples of Europe, as the only means of saving that civilization, with demobilization of hatreds as well as armies, and a new brotherhood of peoples after the agony and folly of the war.
I risked my popularity with the American people in making speeches like that. I could have got easy applause by calling upon the old god of vengeance against the Germans for at that time in the United States there was less forgiveness than in England for all the evil and suffering caused by Germany, less tolerance of “pacifists,” as much brutality in the average mob. But though I aroused some suspicion, some hostility, on the whole American audiences listened to my argument with wonderful enthusiasm and generosity.
I saw a distinct change of opinion after my first visit (I am not pretending that I had anything to do with it), in favor of closer friendship with Great Britain, and economic co-operation with Europe. In every city to which I went I found at least two or three thousand people according to the size of my place of lecture, quickly and ardently responsive to the idea that America and Great Britain, acting together, might lift the world out of its ruined state and lead civilization to a higher plane. In city clubs, women’s clubs, private dinner parties, drawing-room meetings, I found great numbers of people desperately anxious about the responsibility of the United States toward European nations, eager to do the right thing though doubtful what to do, poignantly desirous of getting some lead higher than that of self-interest (though not conflicting with it), and with a generous warm-hearted sympathy for the British folk. Doubtless these groups were insignificant in numbers to the mass of citizens with whom I never came in touch, among whom there was an old strain of suspicion and hostility toEngland, and all sorts of currents of prejudice, ill will, hatred, even, among Irish, German, and foreign stocks, in addition to the narrow nationalism, the vulgar selfishness of many others. That is true, but the people I met, and to whom I lectured, were theintelligentsia, the leaders of social life, and business life, the wives, mothers, and daughters of the “leading citizens,” the arbiters and, to some extent, the creators of public opinion. Their hopes, ideals, visions, must, sooner or later, be reflected in national tendencies and acts. Only blind observers would now say that the United States has not revealed in recent acts and influence that broadening of outlook which I perceived at work below the surface in 1921, and did something, perhaps—not much—to help, by a simple and truthful report of facts from this side of the world.
In the United States I had, strange as it may seem, a certain authority as an economic expert! This may surprise my intimate friends, and most of all my wife, who knows that I have never been able to count my change, that I have not as much head for figures as a new-born lamb, and that I have never succeeded in making out a list of expenses for journalistic work without gross errors which have put me abominably out of pocket. Yet many of the greatest financiers in the United States—men like the brothers Warburg, and Mr. Mitchell of the National City Bank—invited me to address them on the economic situation in Europe, and agreed with my arguments and conclusions. I remember one dinner at which I expounded my views on that subject to no less than sixty of the leading financial experts in New York, afterward being subjected to a fire of questions which, to my own amazement, I was able to answer. The truth is, as I quickly perceived, that a few very simple laws underlie the whole complicated system of international trade and finance. As long as one held on to those laws, which I did, like grim death, one could not go wrong in one’s analysis of the Europeansituation, and all facts and figures adjusted themselves to these elementary principles.
Money, for example, is only a symbol for the reality of values behind it—in grain, cattle, mineral wealth, labor and credit.
When paper money is issued in advance of a nation’s real values, it is merely a promissory note on future industry and production.
France, Germany, and most European nations were issuing vast quantities of these promissory notes which were not supported, for the most part, by actual wealth.
The prosperity of a country like Germany increased the prosperity of all other countries. Its poverty would lead to less prosperity in all other countries.
Commercial prosperity depends upon the interchange of goods between one country and another, and not upon the possession of money tokens. And so on.
By keeping these facts firmly in my mind, I was able to keep a straight line of common sense in the wild labyrinth of our European problems. But I had also seen the actual life and conditions of many countries of Europe, and could tell what I had seen in a simple, straight way to the business men of the United States. It was what they wanted to know, beyond all other things, and I think they believed my accounts more than those of more important men, because I was not a Government official, or propagandist, but a simple reporter, without an ax to grind, and an eyewitness of the conditions I described.
Among the men who asked me to tell them a few things they wanted to know, or the things they knew (better than I did) but wanted to discuss, was Mr. Herbert Hoover, for whom I have the deepest admiration and respect, like all who have met him. He came into my room at the Lotus Club one day, unannounced except for a tap at the door by his friend and assistant,Barr Baker. I had just returned from a journey, and my room was littered with shirts, socks, collars, and the contents of my bags. He paid no heed to all that but sat back in an arm chair and after some questions, talked gravely of world affairs. I need not record here that conversation I had with him—the gist of it is in my book of American impressions, “People of Destiny,” but I was glad and proud to sit in the presence of a man—so simple, so frank, so utterly truthful—who organized the greatest work of rescue for suffering humanity ever achieved in the history of the world—the American Relief Administration. But for that work, many millions of men, women, and children in the nations most stricken by war would have died of starvation, and Europe would have been swept from end to end by the scourge of pestilence which follows famine.
I seem to have been bragging a little in what I have lately written, making myself out to be an important person, with unusual gifts. That is not my intention, or my idea. The fact is that the people of the United States give any visitor who arrives with decent credentials a sense of importance, and elevate him for a while above his usual state of insignificance. They herald him with an exaggeration of his virtues, his achievements, his reputation. Any goose is made to believe himself a stately swan, by the warmth of courtesy shown toward him, by the boosting of his publicity agent, and by the genuine desire of American citizens to make a guest “feel good” with himself.
This has a strange and exhilarating effect upon the visitor. It gives him self-confidence. It actually does develop virtues in him. His goose quills actually change into something like swansdown, and his neck distinctly elongates. There is something in the very atmosphere of New York—electric, sparkling, a little intoxicating—which gives a man courage, makes him feel bigger, andnot only feel bigger, butbebigger! This is no fantasy, but actual fact. In the United States I was a more distinguished person than ever I could be in England. I spoke more boldly than ever I could in England. I was rather a brave fellow for those few weeks each year, because so many people believed in my quality of character, in my intelligence, in my powers of truth-telling, whereas in England no one believes in anybody.
So I do not boast or preen myself at all when I write about the wonderful times I have had in the United States. It happens to everybody who does not go out of his way (or hers) as some do, to insult a great-hearted people, to put on “side” in American drawing-rooms, to say with an air of superiority “We don’t do that in England, you know!”
I visited many American colleges, and with solemn ceremony was initiated into the sacred brotherhood of a Greek letter society which is the highest honor that can be given to a foreign visitor by the youth of America.
In Canada—at Winnipeg—I was made a Veteran of the Great War by a gathering of old soldiers.
At Salt Lake City I lectured to 6,000 Mormons—most moral and admirable people—in their Tabernacle, and was received on the platform by a Hallelujah Chorus from sixty Mormon maidens.
In Detroit, where I began my first speech of the day at 9.30 in the morning, I spoke down a funnel on the subject of the Russian Famine, which was “broadcast” to millions of people late that night.
I traveled thousands of miles, and in every smoking carriage talked with groups of men who told me thousands of anecdotes and put me wise to every aspect of American life from the inside.
I was entertained at luncheon, dinner, and supper by the “leading citizens” of scores of cities, and made friends with numbers of charming, courteous, cultured people.
I was interviewed by battalions of reporters who received me as a brother of their craft, and never once let me down by putting into my mouth words I did not wish to say. They were mostly young college men and, though I hate to say it, a keener, better-educated crowd, on the whole, than the average of their kind in English journalism.
I will record only one more of the wonderful things that happened to me as a representative of English journalism in New York.
On the eve of my departure, after my second visit, a dinner was given in my honor at the Biltmore. It was organized by Mrs. MacVickar, who has the organizing genius of a lady Napoleon, and a committee of ladies, and a thousand people were there. They included all the most distinguished people in New York, many of the most distinguished in America, and they were there to testify their friendship to England. They were there also to express their friendship, if I may dare say so, to me, as a man who had tried to serve England, and America, too, in speaking, and in writing, the simple truth. They wrote all their names in a book that was given to me at the dinner, and I keep it as a great treasure, holding the token of a nation’s kindness.
What added a little sauce piquante to the proceedings was the delivery from time to time during the dinner of notes from Sinn Feins parading outside the hotel. The first message I read was not flattering. “You are a dirty English rat. You ought to be deported.” Another informed me that I was a paid agent of the British Government. Another was a general indictment informing all American citizens that it was a disgrace to dine with me, and an act of treachery to their own nation. Another little missive described me as a typical blackguard in a nation of cutthroats. So they followed each other to the high table, where I was the guest of honor....
I had a great time in the United States on each of my three visits, but notwithstanding all I have said, I shall never make another lecture tour in that country. The fatigue of it demands the physique of an Arctic explorer combined with that of an African lion tamer. Several times I nearly succumbed to tinned tomato soup. Twice did I lose my voice in a wind forty below zero, and regain it by doses of medicine which destroyed my digestive organs. Nightly was I roasted alive in sleeping berths. Daily did my head swell to unusual proportions, not in conceit, but in a central heating system which is a terror to Englishmen. Visibly did I wither away as I traveled from city to city, received by deputations of leading citizens on arrival, after a sleep-disturbed night, with the duty ahead of keeping bright and intelligent through a long day’s programme, saying the right thing to the gracious ladies who entertained me at lunch, the bright thing to the City Club which entertained me to dinner, the true thing to all the questions asked about Europe, England, Lloyd George, Prohibition, Mrs. Asquith, the American flapper, Bolshevism, France, and the biological necessity of war, to business men, professors, journalists, poets, financiers, bishops, society leaders in Kansas City, or Grand Rapids, the President of the Mormon church, the editors of the local newspapers, the organizers of my lecture that evening, and the unknown visitors who called on me at the hotel all through the day, and every day.
One can’t keep that sort of thing up. It’s wearing....
I remember that in the Copley Plaza Hotel at Boston, a little old gentleman carrying a black bag tapped at my door and introduced himself by the name of Doctor Gibbs. He said that his hobby in life was to search out Gibbs in the United States, and he found thousands! He presented me with a copy of the Gibbs Family Bulletin, and opening his black bag produced a photograph of his great-grandfather.
It was my son Tony who called my attention to the fact that I was amazingly like that venerable man, who was toothless (he lived before the era of American dentistry) and with hair that had worn thin as the sere and yellow leaf. I decided that I should become exactly like him, “sans hair, sans teeth,” if I continued this career as an English lecturer in America. In order to avoid premature old age, I made a resolve (which I shall probably break) not to make another lecture tour in the United States.
But of all my journalistic adventures, I count these American experiences as my most splendid time, and for the American people I have a deep gratitude and affection. I can only try to repay their kindness by using my pen whenever possible to increase the friendship between our countries, to kill prejudice and slander, and to advocate that unwritten alliance between our two peoples which I believe will one day secure the peace of the world.
THE END