dominate all the
other nationalities of the United States. The Irish are not decaying;
they are not unpractical; they are scarcely even scattered; they are not
even poor. They are the most powerful and practical world-combination
with whom we can decide to be friends or foes; and that is why I thought
first of that still and solid brown house in Buckinghamshire, standing
back in the shadow of the trees.

Among my impressions of America I have deliberately put first the figure
of the Irish-American interviewer, standing on the shore more symbolic
than the statue of Liberty. The Irish interviewer's importance for the
English lay in the fact of his being an Irishman, but there was also
considerable interest in the circumstance of his being an interviewer.
And as certain wild birds sometimes wing their way far out to sea and
are the first signal of the shore, so the first Americans the traveller
meets are often American interviewers; and they are generally birds of a
feather, and they certainly flock together. In this respect, there is a
slight difference in the etiquette of the craft in the two countries,
which I was delighted to discuss with my fellow craftsmen. If I could at
that moment have flown back to Fleet Street I am happy to reflect that
nobody in the world would in the least wish to interview me. I should
attract no more attention than the stone griffin opposite the Law
Courts; both monsters being grotesque but also familiar. But supposing
for the sake of argument that anybody did want to interview me, it is
fairly certain that the fact of one paper publishing such an interview
would rather prevent the other papers from doing so. The repetition of
the same views of the same individual in two places would be considered
rather bad journalism; it would have an air of stolen thunder, not to
say stage thunder.

But in America the fact of my landing and lecturing was evidently
regarded in the same light as a murder or a great fire, or any other
terrible but incurable catastrophe, a matter of interest to all pressmen
concerned with practical events. One of the first questions I was asked
was how I should be disposed to explain the wave of crime in New York.
Naturally I replied that it might possibly be due to the number of
English lecturers who had recently landed. In the mood of the moment it
seemed possible that, if they had all been interviewed, regrettable
incidents might possibly have taken place. But this was onl