The hospitality of the Americans has always been, and still is, justly famous, but I suppose the arrangements for its exercise have never been so elaborate or so complete as they were at the time of my visit. You took with you no introductions, had no questions asked about your antecedents, so long as you were a first class passenger. You went straight from the customsdrome to a hospitality bureau, where you stated the probable length of your stay and gave a list of the cities you intended to visit, in return for which an official handed you a complete list of the hosts who were to entertain you at each centre, together with a little sheaf of “emergency introductions” for each—the need for these last came home to me at San Francisco, where I found that my destined host had gone bankrupt and shot himself the day before my arrival. It was without any fuss or elaborateness of introductions etc. that I spent seven months on this hospitable continent, visiting New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Wichita, and Rooseveltville in the course of my stay. I should explain that when I arrived at New York I received a wireless informing me that the business projects which my visit had in view were not, after all, feasible; but my partners agreed with me that since I had had all the fatigue of the journey I might as well travel about and improve my mind a bit before returning to harness.
I have not been to America since, so that I cannot speak as an eye-witness when I contrast the America of forty years ago with the America of to-day. My readers will not, therefore, expect any very full descriptions under this head. I need only remind them that this was before the shifting of the earthquake zone, which made it necessary for our cousins overseas to build all their houses in one storey: that the war between the Wet and the Dry had not yet been fought, and General Murchison was only known as an obscure political agitator; that the repatriation of the negro population, which only set in properly with the granting of Nigerian Home Rule, was at this time hardly thought of; that the immigration of Chinese and Japanese exiles, which was due to the over-population of the Eastern countries before the benefits of our civilization began to tell upon the birth-rate, was still regarded as a menace; that Catholicism, finally, though it had the numerical superiority, was still far from being the dominant religion of the Continent—its progress in Canada was more rapid than its progress further South. It was a very different America, then, that I visited; and I think the best way to avoid continual comparisons between then and now, of which my readers must be sufficiently weary, will be to quote extracts from the letters I wrote home to my mother at the time. She kept all these, and for myself I think the value of old letters in recapturing a lost atmosphere amply atones for the occasional irritation one feels at their out-of-dateness. Let them stand, then, as I find them in my mother’s desk, in the clear, bold typewriting of my girlish days. I should say, however, by way of preface, that at the time of my visit the country was much exercised by the violent, but, as it proved, unsuccessful campaign which was being organized against the importation and use of chewing-gum. Society was everywhere divided into the Sticky Party and the Clean Party, and you have to understand what is meant when I speak of a state “going sticky” or “going clean.”