a sleeping giant. That which sleeps, so far as
they are concerned, is the huge power of human unanimity and intolerance
in the soul of America. At present the masses in the Middle West are
indifferent to such fancies or faintly attracted by them, as fashions of
culture from the great cities. But any day it may not be so; some
lunatic may cut across their economic rights or their strange and buried
religion; and then he will see something. He will find himself running
like a nigger who has wronged a white woman or a man who has set the
prairie on fire. He will see something which the politicians fan in its
sleep and flatter with the name of the people, which many reactionaries
have cursed with the name of the mob, but which in any case has had
under its feet the crowns of many kings. It was said that the voice of
the people is the voice of God; and this at least is certain, that it
can be the voice of God to the wicked. And the last antics of their
arrogance shall stiffen before something enormous, such as towers in the
last words that Job heard out of the whirlwind; and a voice they never
knew shall tell them that his name is Leviathan, and he is lord over all
the children of pride.

_The Extraordinary American_

When I was in America I had the feeling that it was far more foreign
than France or even than Ireland. And by foreign I mean fascinating
rather than repulsive. I mean that element of strangeness which marks
the frontier of any fairyland, or gives to the traveller himself the
almost eerie title of the stranger. And I saw there more clearly than in
countries counted as more remote from us, in race or religion, a paradox
that is one of the great truths of travel.

We have never even begun to understand a people until we have found
something that we do not understand. So long as we find the character
easy to read, we are reading into it our own character. If when we see
an event we can promptly provide an explanation, we may be pretty
certain that we had ourselves prepared the explanation before we saw the
event. It follows from this that the best picture of a foreign people
can probably be found in a puzzle picture. If we can find an event of
which the meaning is really dark to us, it will probably throw some
light on the truth. I will therefore take from my American experiences
one isolated incident, which certainly could not have happened in any
other country I have ever clapped eyes on. I have really