mates are indeed aware that
I do not talk like that, but I fancy that the same fact would have
dawned on the journalist to whom I had been talking. And even this
trivial point carries with it the two truths which must be, I fear, the
rather monotonous moral of these pages. The first is that America and
England can be far better friends when sharply divided than when
shapelessly amalgamated. These two journalists were false reporters, but
they were true translators. They were not so much interviewers as
interpreters. And the second is that in any such difference it is often
wholesome to look beneath the surface for a superiority. For ability to
translate does imply ability to understand; and many of these
journalists really did understand. I think there are many English
journalists who would be more puzzled by so simple an idea as the
plutocratic foundation of Prohibition. But the American knew at once
that I meant it was a matter of dollar sign; probably because he knew
very well that it is.

Then again there is a curious convention by which American interviewing
makes itself out much worse than it is. The reports are far more rowdy
and insolent than the conversations. This is probably a part of the fact
that a certain vivacity, which to some seems vitality and to some
vulgarity, is not only an ambition but an ideal. It must always be
grasped that this vulgarity is an ideal even more than it is a reality.
It is an ideal when it is not a reality. A very quiet and intelligent
young man, in a soft black hat and tortoise-shell spectacles, will ask
for an interview with unimpeachable politeness, wait for his living
subject with unimpeachable patience, talk to him quite sensibly for
twenty minutes, and go noiselessly away. Then in the newspaper next
morning you will read how he beat the bedroom door in, and pursued his
victim on to the roof or dragged him from under the bed, and tore from
him replies to all sorts of bald and ruthless questions printed in large
black letters. I was often interviewed in the evening, and had no notion
of how atrociously I had been insulted till I saw it in the paper next
morning. I had no notion I had been on the rack of an inquisitor until I
saw it in plain print; and then of course I believed it, with a faith
and docility unknown in any previous epoch of history. An interesting
essay might be written upon points upon which nations affect more vices
than they possess; and it might deal more ful