aristocrats, or to be real snobs. But their standards
are secure; and though I do not really travel in a bath-tub, or believe
in the bath-tub philosophy and religion, I will not on this matter
recoil misanthropically from them: I prefer the tub of Dayton to the tub
of Diogenes. On these points there is really something a million times
better than efficiency, and that is something like equality.

In short, the American hotel is not America; but it is American. In some
respects it is as American as the English inn is English. And it is
symbolic of that society in this among other things: that it does tend
too much to uniformity; but that that very uniformity disguises not a
little natural dignity. The old Romans boasted that their republic was a
nation of kings. If we really walked abroad in such a kingdom, we might
very well grow tired of the sight of a crowd of kings, of every man with
a gold crown on his head or an ivory sceptre in his hand. But it is
arguable that we ought not to grow tired of the repetition of crowns and
sceptres, any more than of the repetition of flowers and stars. The
whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb
and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman
would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a
list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. I do not
sneer at the generous effort of the giant; though I think, when all is
said, that it is a criticism of modern machinery that the effort should
be gigantic as well as generous.

While there is so much repetition there is little repose. It is the
pattern of a kaleidoscope rather than a wall-paper; a pattern of figures
running and even leaping like the figures in a zoetrope. But even in the
groups where there was no hustle there was often something of
homelessness. I do not mean merely that they were not dining at home;
but rather that they were not at home even when dining, and dining at
their favourite hotel. They would frequently start up and dart from the
room at a summons from the telephone. It may have been fanciful, but I
could not help feeling a breath of home, as from a flap or flutter of
St. George's Cross, when I first sat down in a Canadian hostelry, and
read the announcement that no such telephonic or other summonses were
allowed in the dining-room. It may have been a coincidence, and there
may be American hotels with this merciful proviso and Can