No British author of standing has visited the United States and come back in love with the American people. Dickens loathed them, Thackeray could not put up with them, Mathew Arnold despised them, and Browning laughed at them, while as for Tennyson he absolutely refused to go near them. Even the sensational litterateurs of our own generation, such as Hall Caine or Bernard Shaw, have failed to find much or anything to shriek about. The Bishop of London and Father Vaughan are not authors but diplomats. Rudyard Kipling has been in America more than once, and remains dumb as to the whole concern. Mr. Zangwill is equally travelled and equally silent. Mr. Wells, who went out for the purpose, has written his book and said practically nothing. All of them, and others who might be named, recognise that what ought to be said would be better unsaid—unpleasant for the Americans, and consequently likely to provoke bad feeling. It is gentlest to the Americans to write of them without paying a preliminary visit to their native air. What would happen if a person who wields a plain blunt pen were to make a call upon them and set forth his impressions in good cold type and without fear or pity, no man may tell. Probably the Americans would shoot him. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER VI THE PRESIDENT It is said that killing a man will not prevent him from going to Chicago, and you may be certain that nothing will prevent an American from getting himself elected President of the United States if he can possibly manage it. The United States Presidency is believed by the patriotic American to be the very finest position that mortal man could possibly desire to occupy, outshining in glory and honour, if not exactly in importance, all “the effete thrones of Yurrup” rolled into one paroxysm of purple. Tremendous and almighty as the United States Presidency may be, however, its real lustre and attraction for the American imagination lies in the fact that it is within the possible attainment of any and every United States citizen who does not happen to be a nigger. Of course, your United States President has sometimes been a very different affair from the United States Presidency. But that is neither here nor there; because a man who can write “President U.S.” after his name is, on the face of it, clearly entitled to think that he casts a large shadow. And he does. Though the history books will tell you otherwise, astute people—which phrase includes a fair handful of Americans—are of opinion that the Republic of the United States has had only a matter of three Presidents. The first of them was George Washington, who, let it be said, set the fashion of not relishing the job; the second of them was Abraham Lincoln, rail splitter, lawyer, statesman and martyr; and the third American President—one blushes with pride to name him—is none other than Theodore Roosevelt, now more or less happily reigning.