is it
in vain that these Western democrats have sought the blazonry of their
flag in that great multitude of immortal lights that endure behind the
fires we see, and gathered them into the corner of Old Glory whose
ground is like the glittering night. For veritably, in the spirit as
well as in the symbol, suns and moons and meteors pass and fill our
skies with a fleeting and almost theatrical conflagration; and wherever
the old shadow stoops upon the earth, the stars return.

_A Meditation in a New York Hotel_

All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I went
wandering about the States disguised as a lecturer, I was well aware
that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I was even in
the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American
audiences can hardly be in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is
rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeing a rather
melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not
to hear him; in which case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb
and distress their minds with a lecture. He might merely display himself
on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like a
monster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a
speech. But it is equally true that the circus elephant is not allowed
to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhat sketchy and
perhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to
circus he would, so to speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo the
great elephant (with whom I am hardly so ambitious as to compare
myself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed a
considerable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent's Park. But if
he had written a book on England, founded on his impressions of the Zoo,
it might have been a little disproportionate and even misleading in its
version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that
lions and leopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and
country lanes, or that the head and neck of a giraffe was as native to
our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise in
anticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the
elephant, I may have seen too much of a special enclosure where a
special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate the
territorial, as distinct from the vertical space occu