pied by the
spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe may surely be regarded as an example
of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow. Above all,
I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are
insufficient through being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all my
impressions are subject; and among them the negative generalisation with
which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels.

In all my American wanderings I never saw such a thing as an inn. They
may exist; but they do not arrest the traveller upon every road as they
do in England and in Europe. The saloons no longer existed when I was
there, owing to the recent reform which restricted intoxicants to the
wealthier classes. But we feel that the saloons have been there; if one
may so express it, their absence is still present. They remain in the
structure of the street and the idiom of the language. But the saloons
were not inns. If they had been inns, it would have been far harder even
for the power of modern plutocracy to root them out. There will be a
very different chase when the White Hart is hunted to the forests or
when the Red Lion turns to bay. But people could not feel about the
American saloon as they will feel about the English inns. They could not
feel that the Prohibitionist, that vulgar chucker-out, was chucking
Chaucer out of the Tabard and Shakespeare out of the Mermaid. In justice
to the American Prohibitionists it must be realised that they were not
doing quite such desecration; and that many of them felt the saloon a
specially poisonous sort of place. They did feel that drinking-places
were used only as drug-shops. So they have effected the great
reconstruction, by which it will be necessary to use only drug-shops as
drinking-places. But I am not dealing here with the problem of
Prohibition except in so far as it is involved in the statement that the
saloons were in no sense inns. Secondly, of course, there are the
hotels. There are indeed. There are hotels toppling to the stars, hotels
covering the acreage of villages, hotels in multitudinous number like a
mob of Babylonian or Assyrian monuments; but the hotels also are not
inns.

Broadly speaking, there is only one hotel in America. The pattern of it,
which is a very rational pattern, is repeated in cities as remote from
each other as the capitals of European empires. You may find that hotel
rising among the red blooms of the warm spring woo