certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel;
because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of
machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only
talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But
I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the
New York hotel. And that is unfortunately a rather fatal one. It is that
far away in the remote desolation of Yellow Dog, among those outlying
and outlandish rocks that almost seem to rise beyond the sunset, there
is undoubtedly an hotel of exactly the same sort, with all its floors
exactly the same.

Anyhow the general plan of the American hotel is commonly the same, and,
as I have said, it is a very sound one so far as it goes. When I first
went into one of the big New York hotels, the first impression was
certainly its bigness. It was called the Biltmore; and I wondered how
many national humorists had made the obvious comment of wishing they had
built less. But it was not merely the Babylonian size and scale of such
things, it was the way in which they are used. They are used almost as
public streets, or rather as public squares. My first impression was
that I was in some sort of high street or market-place during a carnival
or a revolution. True, the people looked rather rich for a revolution
and rather grave for a carnival; but they were congested in great crowds
that moved slowly like people passing through an overcrowded railway
station. Even in the dizzy heights of such a sky-scraper there could not
possibly be room for all those people to sleep in the hotel, or even to
dine in it. And, as a matter of fact, they did nothing whatever except
drift into it and drift out again. Most of them had no more to do with
the hotel than I have with Buckingham Palace. I have never been in
Buckingham Palace, and I have very seldom, thank God, been in the big
hotels of this type that exist in London or Paris. But I cannot believe
that mobs are perpetually pouring through the Hotel Cecil or the Savoy
in this fashion, calmly coming in at one door and going out of the
other. But this fact is part of the fundamental structure of the
American hotel; it is built upon a compromise that makes it possible.
The whole of the lower floor is thrown open to the public streets and
treated as a public square. But above it and all round it runs another
floor in the form of a sort of deep gallery