t nearer to Bulgaria, she is nearer to Bulgars; if she is not nearer
to Bohemia, she is nearer to Bohemians. In my New York hotel the head
waiter in the dining-room was a Bohemian; the head waiter in the
grill-room was a Bulgar. Americans have nationalities at the end of the
street which for us are at the ends of the earth. I did my best to
persuade my countrymen not to appeal to the American as if he were a
rather dowdy Englishman, who had been rusticating in the provinces and
had not heard the latest news about the town. I shall record later some
of those arresting realities which the traveller does not expect; and
which, in some cases I fear, he actually does not see because he does
not expect. I shall try to do justice to the psychology of what Mr.
Belloc has called 'Eye-Openers in Travel.' But there are some things
about America that a man ought to see even with his eyes shut. One is
that a state that came into existence solely through its repudiation and
abhorrence of the British Crown is not likely to be a respectful copy of
the British Constitution. Another is that the chief mark of the
Declaration of Independence is something that is not only absent from
the British Constitution, but something which all our constitutionalists
have invariably thanked God, with the jolliest boasting and bragging,
that they had kept out of the British Constitution. It is the thing
called abstraction or academic logic. It is the thing which such jolly
people call theory; and which those who can practise it call thought.
And the theory or thought is the very last to which English people are
accustomed, either by their social structure or their traditional
teaching. It is the theory of equality. It is the pure classic
conception that no man must aspire to be anything more than a citizen,
and that no man should endure to be anything less. It is by no means
especially intelligible to an Englishman, who tends at his best to the
virtues of the gentleman and at his worst to the vices of the snob. The
idealism of England, or if you will the romance of England, has not been
primarily the romance of the citizen. But the idealism of America, we
may safely say, still revolves entirely round the citizen and his
romance. The realities are quite another matter, and we shall consider
in its place the question of whether the ideal will be able to shape
the realities or will merely be beaten shapeless by them. The ideal is
besieged by inequalities of