Introducing the American Spirit

THE Herr Director and I were sitting over our coffee in the Café Bauer, Unter den Linden. In the midst of my account of some of the men of America and the idealistic movements in which they are interested, he rudely interrupted with: “You may tell that to some one who has never been in the United States; but not to me who have travelled through the length and breadth of it three times.” He said it in an ungenerous, impatient way, although his last visit was thirty years ago and his journeys across this continent necessarily hurried. I dared not say much more, for I am apt to lose my temper when any one anywhere, criticizes my adopted country or questions my glowing accounts of it.