Sir Scorp sprang with ease to Lorenzo, the magnificent, to the princes of Italy, to Rome and the Cæsars for illustration. He cited France and Louis. Democracy, he declared, is never going to do for all what the established princes could do. Democracy is going to be the death of art. Not so, I thought and said, for democracy can never alter the unalterable difference between high and low, rich and poor, little brain and big brain, strength and weakness. It cannot abolish difference and make a level plane. It simply permits the several planes to rise higher together. What is happening is that the human pot is boiling again. Nations are undergoing a transition period. We are in a maelstrom, which means change and reconstruction. America is going to flower next and grandly, and perhaps after that Africa, or Australia. Then, say, South America, and we come back to Europe by way of India, China, Japan and through Russia. All in turn and new great things from each again. Let’s hope so. A pretty speculation, anyhow. At my suggestion of American supremacy, Sir Scorp, although he protested, no doubt honestly, that he preferred the American to any other foreign race, was on me in a minute with vital criticism and I think some measure of insular solidarity. The English do not love the Americans--that is sure. They admire their traits--some of them, but they resent their commercial progress. The wretched Americans will not listen to the wise British. They will not adhere to their noble and magnificent traditions. They go and do things quite out of order and the way in which they should be done, and then they come over to England and flaunt the fact in the noble Britisher’s face. This is above all things sad. It is evil, crass, reprehensible, anything you will, and the Englishman resents it. He even resents it when he is an Irish Englishman. He dislikes the German much--fears the outcome of a war from that quarter--but really he dislikes the American more. I honestly think he considers America far more dangerous than Germany. What are you going to do with that vast realm which is “the states”? It is upsetting the whole world by its nasty progressiveness, and this it should not be permitted to do. England should really lead. England should have invented all the things which the Americans have invented. England should be permitted to dictate to-day and to set the order of forms and procedures, but somehow it isn’t doing it. And, hang it all! the Americans _are_. We progressed through various other things,--an American operatic manager who was then in London attempting to revise English opera, an American tobacco company which had made a failure of selling tobacco to the English, but finally weariness claimed us all, and we retired for the night, determined to make Oxford on the morrow if the weather faired in the least.