Having fulfilled my duty as chairman, in that I have told you nothing that you did not know before--except, perhaps, my swimming feat, which never got into the Press because I have a very bad publicity agent--I will not detain you longer from what you are really wanting to get at; but ask Mr. Leacock to proceed at once with his lecture on "Frenzied Fiction." CONTENTS I. THE BALANCE OF TRADE IN IMPRESSIONS II. I AM INTERVIEWED BY THE PRESS III. IMPRESSIONS OF LONDON IV. A CLEAR VIEW OF THE GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS OF ENGLAND V. OXFORD AS I SEE IT VI. THE BRITISH AND THE AMERICAN PRESS VII. BUSINESS IN ENGLAND VIII. IS PROHIBITION COMING TO ENGLAND? IX. "WE HAVE WITH US TO-NIGHT" X. HAVE THE ENGLISH ANY SENSE OF HUMOUR? MY DISCOVERY OF ENGLAND I. The Balance of Trade in Impressions FOR some years past a rising tide of lecturers and literary men from England has washed upon the shores of our North American continent. The purpose of each one of them is to make a new discovery of America. They come over to us travelling in great simplicity, and they return in the ducal suite of the Aquitania. They carry away with them their impressions of America, and when they reach England they sell them. This export of impressions has now been going on so long that the balance of trade in impressions is all disturbed. There is no doubt that the Americans and Canadians have been too generous in this matter of giving away impressions. We emit them with the careless ease of a glow worm, and like the glow-worm ask for nothing in return. But this irregular and one-sided traffic has now assumed such great proportions that we are compelled to ask whether it is right to allow these people to carry away from us impressions of the very highest commercial value without giving us any pecuniary compensation whatever. British lecturers have been known to land in New York, pass the customs, drive uptown in a closed taxi, and then forward to England from the closed taxi itself ten dollars' worth of impressions of American national character. I have myself seen an English literary man,--the biggest, I believe: he had at least the appearance of it; sit in the corridor of a fashionable New York hotel and look gloomily into his hat, and then from his very hat produce an estimate of the genius of Amer ica at twenty cents a word. The nice question as to whose twenty cents that was never seems to have occurred to him.