a very inadequate mind.
It is inadequate even in criticising things that may really be inferior
to the things involved here. It is far better to laugh at a negro for
having a black face than to sneer at him for having a sloping skull. It
is proportionally even more preferable to laugh rather than judge in
dealing with highly civilised peoples. Therefore I put at the beginning
two working examples of what I felt about America before I saw it; the
sort of thing that a man has a right to enjoy as a joke, and the sort of
thing he has a duty to understand and respect, because it is the
explanation of the joke.

When I went to the American consulate to regularise my passports, I was
capable of expecting the American consulate to be American. Embassies
and consulates are by tradition like islands of the soil for which they
stand; and I have often found the tradition corresponding to a truth. I
have seen the unmistakable French official living on omelettes and a
little wine and serving his sacred abstractions under the last
palm-trees fringing a desert. In the heat and noise of quarrelling Turks
and Egyptians, I have come suddenly, as with the cool shock of his own
shower-bath, on the listless amiability of the English gentleman. The
officials I interviewed were very American, especially in being very
polite; for whatever may have been the mood or meaning of Martin
Chuzzlewit, I have always found Americans by far the politest people in
the world. They put in my hands a form to be filled up, to all
appearance like other forms I had filled up in other passport offices.
But in reality it was very different from any form I had ever filled up
in my life. At least it was a little like a freer form of the game
called 'Confessions' which my friends and I invented in our youth; an
examination paper containing questions like, 'If you saw a rhinoceros
in the front garden, what would you do?' One of my friends, I remember,
wrote, 'Take the pledge.' But that is another story, and might bring Mr.
Pussyfoot Johnson on the scene before his time.

One of the questions on the paper was, 'Are you an anarchist?' To which
a detached philosopher would naturally feel inclined to answer, 'What
the devil has that to do with you? Are you an atheist?' along with some
playful efforts to cross-examine the official about what constitutes an
[Greek: arche]. Then there was the question, 'Are you in favour of
subverting the government of the United States by