Perhaps the scale has something to do with it. Mere bigness, so much worshiped at home, has no value in itself[Pg 273] Many a tiny insect is more beautiful than an elephant. But there is a sense in which size when translated into scale has a legitimate influence. A miniature, an easel painting, and a mural decoration differ in something more than mere size. So far as I know, no attempt has been made to study the effect of the size of a man’s habitation upon him, though as the average man’s grows smaller and smaller it is a subject not without interest. What are all the psychological effects of living in two rooms and a bath as compared with the old roomy house of two generations ago? Over here one feels at times that sense of being “cabin’d, cribb’d, confin’d.” One recalls the picture in Punch of an American motorist driving his car at seventy miles an hour while a man by the roadside calls out, “Remember this is an island!” Even if one has lived only on the Atlantic seaboard, he has felt that there were three thousand miles of open sea in front of him and three thousand miles of his own land behind him, and it has done something, very lasting but very hard to define, to him. But perhaps most of all there is the feeling that at home one is watching one of the greatest experiments in history, an experiment that is somehow partly one’s own responsibility as an American. If one loses one’s way in the subway because the conductor can talk only Hungarian, if some negroes are burned at the stake as though it were the year 800, if a bricklayer gets twenty dollars a day and a professor of economics gets ten, if a town can find no better way to express its enthusiasm for a native son than by running the fire engines up and down the main street, if twenty thousand school children are assembled to see which has the most freckles, if any one of the hundred unaccountable[Pg 274] and fantastic things in the American press come true daily, one wonders what it all signifies and where it is all going to end. But that is just it. One wonders and one wants to wait just a little longer and see. Perhaps the small boy has never lost his love for the circus. III In speaking with American friends at home I find that there is a widespread opinion that the English do not like us and that a tourist or resident here is acutely made aware of the fact. I have spent part of each of the last six years in England and have found very little of this alleged hostility to ourselves.