e street was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Zoo, or was yet
more happily situated under the benignant shadow of the Elephant and
Castle. And in the same way the mechanical calculation about the mention
of dollars is entirely useless unless we have some moral understanding
of why they are mentioned. It certainly does not mean merely a love of
money; and if it did, a love of money may mean a great many very
different and even contrary things. The love of money is very different
in a peasant or in a pirate, in a miser or in a gambler, in a great
financier or in a man doing some practical and productive work. Now this
difference in the conversation of American and English business men
arises, I think, from certain much deeper things in the American which
are generally not understood by the Englishman. It also arises from much
deeper things in the Englishman, of which the Englishman is even more
ignorant.

To begin with, I fancy that the American, quite apart from any love of
money, has a great love of measurement. He will mention the exact size
or weight of things, in a way which appears to us as irrelevant. It is
as if we were to say that a man came to see us carrying three feet of
walking stick and four inches of cigar. It is so in cases that have no
possible connection with any avarice or greed for gain. An American will
praise the prodigal generosity of some other man in giving up his own
estate for the good of the poor. But he will generally say that the
philanthropist gave them a 200-acre park, where an Englishman would
think it quite sufficient to say that he gave them a park. There is
something about this precision which seems suitable to the American
atmosphere; to the hard sunlight, and the cloudless skies, and the
glittering detail of the architecture and the landscape; just as the
vaguer English version is consonant to our mistier and more
impressionist scenery. It is also connected perhaps with something more
boyish about the younger civilisation; and corresponds to the passionate
particularity with which a boy will distinguish the uniforms of
regiments, the rigs of ships, or even the colours of tram tickets. It is
a certain godlike appetite for things, as distinct from thoughts.

But there is also, of course, a much deeper cause of the difference; and
it can easily be deduced by noting the real nature of the difference
itself. When two business men in a train are talking about dollars I am
not so fooli