y the mood of
the moment, and even as a mood did not last more than a moment. And
since it has reference to a rather common and a rather unjust conception
of American journalism, I think it well to take it first as a fallacy to
be refuted, though the refutation may require a rather longer approach.

I have generally found that the traveller fails to understand a foreign
country, through treating it as a tendency and not as a balance. But if
a thing were always tending in one direction it would soon tend to
destruction. Everything that merely progresses finally perishes. Every
nation, like every family, exists upon a compromise, and commonly a
rather eccentric compromise; using the word 'eccentric' in the sense of
something that is somehow at once crazy and healthy. Now the foreigner
commonly sees some feature that he thinks fantastic without seeing the
feature that balances it. The ordinary examples are obvious enough. An
Englishman dining inside a hotel on the boulevards thinks the French
eccentric in refusing to open a window. But he does not think the
English eccentric in refusing to carry their chairs and tables out on to
the pavement in Ludgate Circus. An Englishman will go poking about in
little Swiss or Italian villages, in wild mountains or in remote
islands, demanding tea; and never reflects that he is like a Chinaman
who should enter all the wayside public-houses in Kent and Sussex and
demand opium. But the point is not merely that he demands what he cannot
expect to enjoy; it is that he ignores even what he does enjoy. He does
not realise the sublime and starry paradox of the phrase, _vin
ordinaire_, which to him should be a glorious jest like the phrase
'common gold' or 'daily diamonds.' These are the simple and self-evident
cases; but there are many more subtle cases of the same thing; of the
tendency to see that the nation fills up its own gap with its own
substitute; or corrects its own extravagance with its own precaution.
The national antidote generally grows wild in the woods side by side
with the national poison. If it did not, all the natives would be dead.
For it is so, as I have said, that nations necessarily die of the
undiluted poison called progress.

It is so in this much-abused and over-abused example of the American
journalist. The American interviewers really have exceedingly good
manners for the purposes of their trade, granted that it is necessary to
pursue their trade. And even what is c