own people at home, while on the surface are
all manner of queer, confusing dazzlements of local peculiarities which
jump to the stranger's vision and set him blinking. Yet more difficult
does the feat appear when it is realised that the American people is
scattered over a continent some three thousand miles across--so that San
Francisco is little nearer to New York than is Liverpool--and that the
section of the people with whom the Englishman necessarily comes first
and, unless he penetrates both far and deep into the people, most
closely in contact is precisely that class from which it is least safe
to draw conclusions as to the thoughts, manners, or politics of the
people as a whole. Therefore it is that one of the most acute observers
informed Europe that in America "a gentleman had only to take to
politics to become immediately _declasse_"--which, speaking of the
politics of the country as a whole, is purely absurd. The visiting
Englishman has generally found the whole sphere of municipal and local
politics a novel field to him and has naturally been interested. Probing
it, he comes upon all manner of tales of corruption and wickedness. He
does not see that the body of American "politics," as the word is
understood in England, is moderately free from these taints, but he
tells the world of the corruption in that sphere of politics which he
has studied merely because it does not exist at home and is new to him;
and all the world knows that American politics are indescribably
corrupt.

Similarly the visiting European goes into polite society and is amazed
at the peculiar qualities of some of the persons whom he meets there. He
tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the
society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background
which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is
too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. There is no one to explain
fully to the English people that while in England educated society keeps
pretty well to itself, there are in America no hurdles--or none that a
lively animal may not easily leap--to keep the black sheep away from the
white, or the white from straying off anywhere among the black, so that
a large part of the English people has imbibed the notion that there are
really no refined or cultured circles in the United States.

Whenever a financial fraud of a large size is discovered in America, the
world is told of it, ju