the course of discovering my error, however, I thought I began to
understand certain American ideas and instincts that lie behind this
American idiom. For as I have urged before, and shall often urge again,
the road to international friendship is through really understanding
jokes. It is in a sense through taking jokes seriously. It is quite
legitimate to laugh at a man who walks down the street in three white
hats and a green dressing gown, because it is unfamiliar; but after all
the man has _some_ reason for what he does; and until we know the reason
we do not understand the story, or even understand the joke. So the
outlander will always seem outlandish in custom or costume; but serious
relations depend on our getting beyond the fact of difference to the
things wherein it differs. A good symbolical figure for all this may be
found among the people who say, perhaps with a self-revealing
simplicity, that they are bound to go to a lecture.

If I were asked for a single symbolic figure summing up the whole of
what seems eccentric and interesting about America to an Englishman, I
should be satisfied to select that one lady who complained of Mrs.
Asquith's lecture and wanted her money back. I do not mean that she was
typically American in complaining; far from it. I, for one, have a great
and guilty knowledge of all that amiable American audiences will endure
without complaint. I do not mean that she was typically American in
wanting her money; quite the contrary. That sort of American spends
money rather than hoards it; and when we convict them of vulgarity we
acquit them of avarice. Where she was typically American, summing up a
truth individual and indescribable in any other way, is that she used
these words: 'I've risen from a sick-bed to come and hear her, and I
want my money back.'

The element in that which really amuses an Englishman is precisely the
element which, properly analysed, ought to make him admire an American.
But my point is that only by going through the amusement can he reach
the admiration. The amusement is in the vision of a tragic sacrifice for
what is avowedly a rather trivial object. Mrs. Asquith is a candid lady
of considerable humour; and I feel sure she does not regard the
experience of hearing her read her diary as an ecstasy for which the
sick should thus suffer martyrdom. She also is English; and had no other
claim but to amuse Americans and possibly to be amused by them. This
being so, i