“We are now nearing Hellgate, which is at the entrance to New York. Never having been to America, I asked Benedict Arnold to write the remainder of the lecture. You may therefore depend upon this description of the Great Republic as being strictly impartial and without prejudice. As an aside, I may as well tell you that before starting for New York, Arnold took the precaution to put an iron band around his pocketbook. “America, according to the man who sold it, is the land where preachers are paid from $500 to $20,000 according to their ability to dodge Satan and tickle the ears of the wealthy; where no clergyman writes a sermon without a concordance in one hand and a popular novel in the other; where the deacons conduct an auction for the best pews, and where there is a daily round of theatricals by the Sunday School and chicken suppers by the Ladies’ Aid, with collections and religion thrown in for a change on Sunday. “This is the land where the politician shakes poverty by the hand before election and later altogether; where they have a congress of four hundred men to make laws for a supreme court of nine to set aside; where they have prayers on the floor of the national capitol and whiskey in the basement; where men vote for what they do not want for fear they will get what they want by voting for it; where other men stay away from the polls one day and swear about the result the other three-hundred and sixty-four days in the year. “American elections are held in the suicidal atmosphere of drear November, when the candidates roam about, seeking whom they can deceive. If saying what isn’t true so often that you end by believing it yourself, constitutes a liar, and if the lie is a sin to everybody but oneself, it is to be hoped the recording angel charitably shuts up his book and takes a vacation about election time. If one party could gain control of the whole earth, its leaders would start an agitation to make their opponents go to the expense of fencing it in. “The American press is nothing if not enterprising. Why, if King Edward were to fall downstairs tomorrow and break his meerschaum pipe, New Yorkers would know of it, through their newspapers, five hours before he knew it himself!