in one thing, such as science, they are going back
in another thing, such as art. What is less fully realised is that this
is true even as between different methods of science. The perfection of
wireless telegraphy might well be followed by the gross imperfection of
wires. The very enthusiasm of American science brings this out very
vividly. The telephone in New York works miracles all day long. Replies
from remote places come as promptly as in a private talk; nobody cuts
anybody off; nobody says, 'Sorry you've been troubled.' But then the
postal service of New York does not work at all. At least I could never
discover it working. Letters lingered in it for days and days, as in
some wild village of the Pyrenees. When I asked a taxi-driver to drive
me to a post-office, a look of far-off vision and adventure came into
his eyes, and he said he had once heard of a post-office somewhere near
West Ninety-Seventh Street. Men are not efficient in everything, but
only in the fashionable thing. This may be a mark of the march of
science; it does certainly in one sense deserve the description of
youth. We can imagine a very young person forgetting the old toy in the
excitement of a new one.

But on the other hand, American manners contain much that is called
young in the contrary sense; in the sense of an earlier stage of
history. There are whole patches and particular aspects that seem to me
quite Early Victorian. I cannot help having this sensation, for
instance, about the arrangement for smoking in the railway carriages.
There are no smoking carriages, as a rule; but a corner of each of the
great cars is curtained off mysteriously, that a man may go behind the
curtain and smoke. Nobody thinks of a woman doing so. It is regarded as
a dark, bohemian, and almost brutally masculine indulgence; exactly as
it was regarded by the dowagers in Thackeray's novels. Indeed, this is
one of the many such cases in which extremes meet; the extremes of
stuffy antiquity and cranky modernity. The American dowager is sorry
that tobacco was ever introduced; and the American suffragette and
social reformer is considering whether tobacco ought not to be
abolished. The tone of American society suggests some sort of
compromise, by which women will be allowed to smoke, but men forbidden
to do so.

In one respect, however, America is very old indeed. In one respect
America is more historic than England; I might almost say more
archaeological than Engla