If the Re-mount scandals and the Army Stores scandals which arose out of England's South African war had occurred in America, I doubt if any party could have stood against the storm that would have been provoked, and, deriving their ideas of the affairs from the cabled reports, Englishmen of all classes would still be shaking their heads over the inconceivable dishonesty in the American public service and the deplorable standard of honour in the American army. It may be necessary and wholesome for a people that occasionally certain kinds of dirty linen should be washed in public; but the speciality of the American "yellow press"[342:1] is the skill which it shows in soiling clean linen in private in order to bring it out into the streets to wash. * * * * * POSTSCRIPT--Reference has been made in the foregoing chapter to the British peerage and I now propose to have the temerity to enter a serious protest against the tone in which even the thoughtful American commonly refers to the House of Lords. I cherish no such hopeless ambition as that of inducing the American newspaper paragrapher to surrender his traditional right to make fun of a British peer on any and every occasion. I am speaking now to the more serious teachers of the American people; for it is a deplorable fact that even the best of those teachers when speaking of the House of Lords use language which is generally flippant, nearly always contemptuous, and not uncommonly uninformed. My own belief (and I think it is that of the majority of thinking Englishmen) is that if the discussion in the House of Lords on any large question be laid side by side with the debate on the same question in the House of Commons and the two be read concurrently, it will almost invariably be seen that the speeches in the Upper House show a marked superiority in breadth of view, expression and grasp of the larger aspects and the underlying principles of the subject. I believe that such a debate in the House of Lords is characterised by more ability and thoroughness than the debate on a similar question in either the Senate or the House of Representatives. It does not appear from the respective membership of the chambers how it could well be otherwise.