t thing in America or one of the very oldest things in
England. It might mean a grey ruin at Stratford or a white exhibition at
Earl's Court.

It is when we come to this interpretation of international symbols that
we make most of the international mistakes. Without the smallest error
of detail, I will promise to prove that Oriental women are independent
because they wear trousers, or Oriental men subject because they wear
skirts. Merely to apply it to this case, I will take the example of two
very commonplace and trivial objects of modern life--a walking stick and
a fur coat.

As it happened, I travelled about America with two sticks, like a
Japanese nobleman with his two swords. I fear the simile is too stately.
I bore more resemblance to a cripple with two crutches or a highly
ineffectual version of the devil on two sticks. I carried them both
because I valued them both, and did not wish to risk losing either of
them in my erratic travels. One is a very plain grey stick from the
woods of Buckinghamshire, but as I took it with me to Palestine it
partakes of the character of a pilgrim's staff. When I can say that I
have taken the same stick to Jerusalem and to Chicago, I think the stick
and I may both have a rest. The other, which I value even more, was
given me by the Knights of Columbus at Yale, and I wish I could think
that their chivalric title allowed me to regard it as a sword.

Now, I do not know whether the Americans I met, struck by the fastidious
foppery of my dress and appearance, concluded that it is the custom of
elegant English dandies to carry two walking sticks. But I do know that
it is much less common among Americans than among Englishmen to carry
even one. The point, however, is not merely that more sticks are carried
by Englishmen than by Americans; it is that the sticks which are carried
by Americans stand for something entirely different.

In America a stick is commonly called a cane, and it has about it
something of the atmosphere which the poet described as the nice conduct
of the clouded cane. It would be an exaggeration to say that when the
citizens of the United States see a man carrying a light stick, they
deduce that if he does that he does nothing else. But there is about it
a faint flavour of luxury and lounging, and most of the energetic
citizens of this energetic society avoid it by instinct.

Now, in an Englishman like myself, carrying a stick may imply lounging,
but it does not i