rops, or who
drops because he stops working. It is the great achievement of American
civilisation that in that country it really is not cant to talk about
the dignity of labour. There is something that might almost be called
the sanctity of labour; but it is subject to the profound law that when
anything less than the highest becomes a sanctity, it tends also to
become a superstition. When the candlestick-maker does not blow out his
brains upon the flute there is always a danger that he may blow them out
somewhere else, owing to depressed conditions in the candlestick market.

Now certainly one of the first impressions of America, or at any rate
of New York, which is by no means the same thing as America, is that of
a sort of mob of business men, behaving in many ways in a fashion very
different from that of the swarms of London city men who go up every day
to the city. They sit about in groups with Red-Indian gravity, as if
passing the pipe of peace; though, in fact, most of them are smoking
cigars and some of them are eating cigars. The latter strikes me as one
of the most peculiar of transatlantic tastes, more peculiar than that of
chewing gum. A man will sit for hours consuming a cigar as if it were a
sugar-stick; but I should imagine it to be a very disagreeable
sugar-stick. Why he attempts to enjoy a cigar without lighting it I do
not know; whether it is a more economical way of carrying a mere symbol
of commercial conversation; or whether something of the same queer
outlandish morality that draws such a distinction between beer and
ginger beer draws an equally ethical distinction between touching
tobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be easy to make a merely
external sketch full of things equally strange; for this can always be
done in a strange country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners
looking alike; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with
spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because they all like
to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude
we realise the futility of any such external sketch. Unless we can see
that these are something more than men smoking cigars and talking about
dollars we had much better not see them at all.

It is customary to condemn the American as a materialist because of his
worship of success. But indeed this very worship, like any worship,
even devil-worship, proves him rather a mystic than a materialist. The
French