very observing. After every storm the tea-leaves still wash up all
along Massachusetts Bay," alluding to the fact that loads of tea on
ships were tossed over by the Americans during the quarrel with England
before the Revolution.

The daring of the American woman impressed me. This same lady asked me
not to remain with the men to smoke but go on the veranda with her,
where _tete-a-tete_ she produced a gold cigarette-case and offered me a
cigarette. This I found not uncommon. American women of the fast sets
drink at the clubs; an insidious drink--the "high-ball"--is a common
one, yet I never saw a woman under the influence of wine or liquor. The
amount of both consumed in America, is amazing. The consumption per head
in the United States for beer alone is ten and a half gallons for each
of the eighty millions. My friend, a prohibitionist, a member of a
political party whose object is to ruin the wine industry of the world,
put it stronger, and, backed by facts, said that if the wine, beer,
whisky, gin, and alcoholic drinks of all kinds and the tea and coffee
drank yearly by the Americans could be collected it would make a lake
two miles square and ten feet deep. The alcoholic drinks alone if
collected would fill a canal one hundred miles long, one hundred feet
wide, and ten feet deep. May their saints propitiate this insatiate
thirst!

It would amuse you to hear the American women of literary tendency boast
of their schools, yet when educational facilities are considered the
average American is ignorant. They are educated in lines. Thus a girl
graduate will speak French with a good accent, or she will converse in
Milwaukee German. She can prove her statement in conic sections or
algebra, but when it comes to actual knowledge she is deficient. This is
due to the ignorance of the teachers in the public schools and their
lack of inborn culture. No better test of the futility of the American
public-school education can be seen than the average girl product of
the public school of the lower class in a city like Chicago or New York.
Americans affect to despise Chinese methods because the Chinese girl or
boy is not crammed with a thousand thoughts of no relative value. China
has existed thousands of years; her people are happy; happiness and
content are the chief virtues, and if China is ever overthrown it will
be not because, as the Americans put it, she is behind the times, but
because the fever of unrest and the craze for