In Paul Leicester Ford’s delightful word-picture of American political life, “The Honourable Peter Sterling,” the worthy Peter delivers a dinner-table homily on the immorality of five hundred first-class steamboat passengers conspiring to defraud the revenue of their native land by means of false declarations such as most of us signed on the _St. Louis_. I was surprised to find that Peter, a shrewd politician and successful ward-boss, knew so little of human nature. Never from now till the dawn of the millennium abolishes the last Customs House will men and women be convinced that it is immoral or even wrong to smuggle. It is simply a game between the travellers and the officials. If they are caught they pay. If not the man smokes his cigars with an added gusto, and the woman finds a new delight in wearing a dainty costume which all the arts of all the Worths and all the Redferns on earth could never give her—and of such were the voyagers on the _St. Louis_.[1] Before I got to bed that night I had come to the conclusion that no country was ever better described in a single phrase than America was by poor G. W. Steevens when he called it the Land of the Dollar. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Maine to Mexico, you simply can’t get away from it. In other countries people talk about money,—generally and incidentally about pounds, or francs, or marks, or pesetas,—but in America it is dollars first, last, and all the time. Where an Englishman would say a man was keen on making money, an American would say “he’s out for dollars.” On this side we speak of making a fortune, over there it’s “making a pile,”—of dollars understood,—and so on. But there is another sense in which the pungent phrase is true. I am not going to commit myself to the assertion that everything in the States is a dollar, because there are many things which cost more than a dollar. There are also some—a few—which cost less, such as newspapers and tramcar tickets, but, as a rule, when you put your hand into your pocket a dollar comes out—often several—and you don’t have much change. Thus, when I had released my baggage from the lax grip of the United States Customs, I took a carriage ticket at the desk. Three dollars. In London the fare from the station to the hotel would have been about half a crown. The gentleman who put my luggage up received a quarter. If I had offered him less he would probably have declined it and asked me, with scathing irony, to come and have a drink at his expense. Still, that carriage was a carriage, and not a cab; well-hung, well-cushioned, and well-horsed. In fact, I was not many hours in New York before I began to see that, although you pay, you get. Everything from a banquet to a boot-shine is done in better style than it is in England. “We are very full, sir,” said the clerk at the Murray Hill Hotel; “but I can give you a four-dollar room. I daresay you’ll like a comfortable night after your passage.”