American Embassy
London
Sunday, 24 Aug., 1913.

DEAR H.S.H.:

. . . You know there's been much discussion of the decadence of the
English people. I don't believe a word of it. They have an awful
slum, I hear, as everybody knows, and they have an idle class.
Worse, from an equal-opportunity point-of-view, they have a very
large servant-class, and a large class that depends on the nobility
and the rich. All these are economic and social drawbacks. But they
have always had all these--except that the slum has become larger
in modern years. And I don't see or find any reason to believe in
the theory of decadence. The world never saw a finer lot of men
than the best of their ruling class. You may search the world and
you may search history for finer men than Lord Morley, Sir Edward
Grey, Mr. Harcourt, and other members of the present Cabinet. And I
meet such men everywhere--gently bred, high-minded, physically fit,
intellectually cultivated, patriotic. If the devotion to old forms
and the inertia which makes any change almost impossible strike an
American as out-of-date, you must remember that in the grand old
times of England, they had all these things and had them worse than
they are now. I can't see that the race is breaking down or giving
out. Consider how their political morals have been pulled up since
the days of the rotten boroughs; consider how their court-life is
now high and decent, and think what it once was. British trade is
larger this year than it ever was, Englishmen are richer then they
ever were and more of them are rich. They write and speak and play
cricket, and govern, and fight as well as they have ever
done--excepting, of course, the writing of Shakespeare.

Another conclusion that is confirmed the more you see of English
life is their high art of living. When they make their money, they
stop money-making and cultivate their minds and their gardens and
entertain their friends and do all the high arts of living--to
perfection. Three days ago a retired soldier gave a garden-party in
my honour, twenty-five miles out of London. There was his historic
house, a part of it 500 years old; there were his ten acres of
garden, his lawn, his trees; and they walk with you over it all;
they sit out-of-doors; they serve tea;