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* * * * *
FROM DUBLIN TO CHICAGO
* * * * *
FROM DUBLIN
TO CHICAGO
SOME NOTES ON A TOUR IN AMERICA
BY
GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM
AUTHOR OF "SPANISH GOLD," "GENERAL JOHN REGAN," "THE LOST TRIBES,"
"THE RED HAND OF ULSTER," ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1914
BY
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
* * * * *
Printed in 1914
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE 9
CHAPTER II
PRESSMEN AND POLITICIANS 40
CHAPTER III
THE "HUSTLING" LEGEND 66
CHAPTER IV
HOLIDAY FEVER 93
CHAPTER V
THE IRON TRAIL 113
CHAPTER VI
ADVANCE, CHICAGO! 132
CHAPTER VII
MEMPHIS AND THE NEGRO 149
CHAPTER VIII
THE LAND OF THE FREE 177
CHAPTER IX
WOMAN IN THE STATES 210
CHAPTER X
MEN AND HUSBANDS 229
CHAPTER XI
THE OPEN DOOR 247
CHAPTER XII
COLLEGES AND STUDENTS 270
CHAPTER XIII
THE IRISHMAN ABROAD 299
FROM DUBLIN TO
CHICAGO
CHAPTER I
THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE
"From Dublin to Chicago." You can take the phrase as the epitome of a
tragedy, the long, slow, century and a half old tragedy of the flight of
the Irish people from their own country, the flight of the younger men
and women of our race from the land of their birth to the "Oilean Úr,"
the new island of promise and hope across the Atlantic. Much might be
written very feelingly about that exodus. The first part of it began in
reality long ago, in the middle of the 18th century, when the farmers of
north-east Ulster were making their struggle for conditions of life
which were economically possible. When the land war of those days was
being waged and the fighters on the one side were called "Hearts of
Steel," that war which resulted in the establishment of the once famous
Ulster Custom, hopeless men fled with their families from Belfast, from
Derry, and from many smaller northern ports. They settled in America and
avenged their wrongs in the course of the War of Independence. For the
rest of Ireland the great exodus began later. Not until the middle of
the 19th century when the famine of 1846 and the following years showed
unmistakably that the social order of Connaught and Munster was
impossible. It continued, that exodus, all through the years of the
later land war. It is still going on, though the stream is feebler
to-day. I could write a good deal about this exodus, could tell of
forsaken cottages, of sorrowful departures, of broken hearts left
behind. But it was not in the spirit of tragedy that we made our
expedition to America, from Dublin to Chicago.
The phrase has another connotation. It carries with it a sense of
adventuring. It was often, almost always, the bravest and most
adventurous of our people who went. It was those who feared their fate
too much who stayed at home. There is something fascinating in all the
records of adventuring. We think of Vasco da Gama pushing his way along
an unknown coast till he rounded the Cape of Good Hope. We think of
Columbus sailing after the setting sun, and our hearts are lifted up.
Less daring, but surely hardly less romantic, were the goings forth of
our Irish boys and girls. They went to seek sustenance, fortune, life at
its fullest and freest in an unknown land in unguessed ways. I like to
think of the hope and courage of those who went. They had songs—in the
earlier days of the adventuring—one seldom hears them now—which
express the spirit of their going. I remember taking a long drive,
twenty years ago, through a summer night with a young farmer who for the
most part was tongue-tied and silent enough. But the twilight of that
June evening moved him beyond his self-restraint and he sang to me with
immense emotion:
"To the West! to the West! To the Land of the Free!" I was vaguely
uncomfortable then, not understanding what was in his heart. I know a
little better now. He was a man with a home, settled and safe, with a
moderate comfort secured to him, but the spirit of adventuring was in
his blood, and America represented to him in some vague way the Hy
Brasil, the Isles of the Blest, which had long ago captivated the
imagination of his ancestors.
Well, we went adventuring, too; but compared to theirs our adventure was
very tame, very unworthy. Our ship was swift and safe, or nearly safe.
It seemed hardly worth while to make our wills before we started. There
were waiting for us on the other side friends who would guide our steps
and guard us from—there were no dangers—all avoidable discomfort. We
even had a friend, such is our astounding good fortune, who offered to
go with us and actually did meet us in New York. He had spent much time
in America and was well accustomed to the ways of that country. We were
dining in his company, I remember, in the familiar comfort of a London
club, when the news that we were really to go to America first came to
us.
"I'd better go, too," he said, "you'll want some one to take care of
you. I don't think that either one or other of you is to be trusted to
the American newspaper reporters without an experienced friend at your
elbows."
Next time we dined in our friend's company it was in the restaurant of
the Ritz Carlton in New York, and very glad we were to see him, though
the newspaper reporter in America is by no means the dangerous wild
beast he is supposed to be.
There was thus little enough of real adventuring about our journey to
America. Yet to us it was a strange and wonderful thing. We felt as
Charles Kingsley did when he wrote "At Last," for a visit to America had
long been a dream with us. There are other places in the world to which
we wanted and still want to go. Egypt is one of them, for we desire to
see the deserts where St. Antony fasted and prayed. The South Pacific
Archipelago is another, for we are lovers of Stevenson; but for me, at
least, the United States came first. I wanted to see them more than I
wanted to see the Nitrian Desert or Samoa. It was not Niagara that laid
hold on my imagination, or the Mississippi, though I did want to see it
because of "Huckleberry Finn." What I desired most was to meet American
people in their own native land, to see for myself what they had made of
their continent, to understand, if I could, how they felt and thought,
to hear what they talked about, to experience their way of living. I
wanted to see Irish friends whom I had known as boys and girls. I had
been intimate with many of them before they went out. I had seen them,
changed almost beyond recognition, when they returned, on rare short
visits to their homes. I wanted to know what they were doing out there,
to see with my own eyes what it was which made new men and women of
them. I wanted to know why some of them succeeded and grew rich, why
others, not inferior according to our Irish judgment, came back beaten
and disillusioned to settle down again into the old ways. Neither Egypt
nor Samoa, not India, not Jerusalem itself, promised so much to me as
America did.
There is besides a certain practical advantage, in our particular case,
which America has over any other country to which we could travel. The
Americans speak English. This is a small matter, no doubt, to good
linguists, but we are both of us singularly stupid about foreign
tongues. My French, for instance, is despicable. It is good enough for
use in Italy. It serves all practical purposes in Spain and Portugal,
but it is a very poor means of conveying my thoughts in France. For some
reason the French people have great difficulty in understanding it, and
their version of the language is almost incomprehensible to me, though I
can carry on long conversations with people of any other nation when
they speak French. It is the same with my Italian, my German and my
Portuguese. They are none of them much good to me in the countries to
which they are supposed to belong. This is a severe handicap when
traveling. We both hate the feeling that we are mere tourists. We do not
like to be confined to hotels with polyglot head waiters in them, or to
be afraid to stir out of the channels buoyed out with Cook's
interpreters. We see sights, indeed, visit picture galleries,
cathedrals, gape at mountains and waterfalls; but we never penetrate
into the inside of the life of these foreign countries. We are never
able to philosophize pleasantly about the way in which people live in
them. The best we can do is to wander after nightfall along the side
streets of cities, or to rub shoulders with the shopping crowd during
the afternoon in Naples or Lisbon. America is foreign enough. It is as
foreign as any European country, as foreign as any country in the world
in which people wear ordinary clothes. I dare say Algiers is more
foreign. I am sure that Borneo must be. But New York is just as strange
a place as Paris or Rome and therefore just as interesting, with this
advantage for us that we could understand, after a few days, every word
that was spoken round us.
Indeed this similarity of language was something of a disappointment to
us. We did not actually expect to hear people say "I guess" at the
beginning of every sentence. We knew that was as impossible as the
frequent "Begorras" with which we Irish are credited. But we had read
several delightful American books, one called "Rules of the Game" with
particular attention, and we thought the American language would be more
vigorously picturesque than it turns out to be. The American in books
uses phrases and employs metaphors which are a continual joy. His
conversation is a series of stimulating shocks. In real life he does not
keep up to that level. He talks very much as an Englishman does. There
are, indeed, ways of pronouncing certain words which are strange and
very pleasant. I would give a good deal to be able to say "very" and
"America" as these words are said across the Atlantic. "Vurry" does not
represent the sound, nor does "Amurrica," but I have tried in vain to
pick up that vowel. I suppose I am tone deaf. I either caricature it as
"vurry" or relapse into the lean English version of the word. There are
also some familiar words which are used in ways strange to me.
"Through," for instance, is a word which I am thoroughly accustomed to,
and "cereal" is one which I often come across in books dealing with
agriculture. But I was puzzled one morning when an attentive American
parlor maid, with her eye on my porridge plate, asked me whether I was
"through with the cereal." Solicitors on this side of the Atlantic are
regarded as more or less respectable members of society. Some of their
clients may consider them crafty, but no one would class them, as actors
used to be classed, with vagabonds. It was therefore a surprise to me to
read a notice on an office door: "Solicitors and beggars are forbidden
to enter this building." I made enquiries about what the solicitors had
done to deserve this, and found that "solicitor," in that part of
America, perhaps all over America, means, not a kind of lawyer, but one
who solicits subscriptions, either for some charity or for his own use
and benefit.
There are other words, "Baggage check," for instance, which could not be
familiar to us, because we have not got the thing to which they belong
in the British Isles. And a highly picturesque vigorous phrase meets one
now and then. There was an occasion in which a laundry annoyed us very
much. It did not bring back some clothes which had gone to be washed. We
complained to a pleasant and highly vital young lady who controlled all
the telephones in our hotel. She took our side in the dispute at once,
seized the nearest receiver, and promised to "lay out that laundry right
now." We went up to our rooms comforted with the vision of a whole staff
of washer women lying in rows like corpses, with napkins tied under
their chins, and white sheets over them. Americans ought not to swear,
and do, in fact, swear much less than English people in ordinary
conversation. The Englishman, when things go wrong with him, is almost
forced to say "Damn" in order to express his feelings. His way of
speaking his native language offers him no alternative. The American has
at command a small battery of phrases far more helpful than any oath. It
is no temptation to damn a laundry when you can "lay it out" by
telephone.
I like the American use of the word "right" in such phrases as "right
here," "right now," and "right away." When you are told, by telephone,
as you are told almost everything in America, that your luggage will be
sent up to your room in the hotel "right now," you are conscious of the
friendliness of intention in the hall porter, which the English phrase
"at once" wholly fails to convey. Even if you have to wait several hours
before you actually get the luggage you know that every effort is being
made to meet your wishes. You may perhaps have got into a bath and find
yourself, for the want of clean clothes, forced to decide between
staying there, going straight to bed, and getting back into the dirty
garments in which you have traveled. But you have no business to
complain. The "right now" ought to comfort you. Especially when it is
repeated cheerily, while you stand dripping and embarrassed at the
receiver to make a final appeal. The word "right" in these phrases does
not intensify, it modifies, the immediateness of the now. This is one of
the things to which you must get accustomed in America. But it is a
friendly phrase, offering and inviting brotherliness of the most
desirable kind. That it means no more than the "Anon, sir, anon," of
Shakespeare's tapster is not the fault of anybody. Some sacrifices must
be made for the sake of friendliness.
But taken as a whole the American language is very little different from
English. I imagine the tendency to diverge has been checked by the
growing frequency of intercourse between the two countries. So many
Americans come to England and so many English go to America that the
languages are being reduced to one dead level. What used to be called
"Americanisms" are current in common talk on this side of the Atlantic
and on the other there is a regrettable tendency to drop even the fine
old forms which the English themselves lost long ago. "Gotten" still
survives in America instead of the degraded "got," but I am afraid it is
losing its hold. "Wheel" is in all ways preferable to bicycle, and may
perhaps become naturalized here. I cannot imagine that the Americans
will be so foolish as to give it up. Whether "an automobile ride" is
preferable to "a drive in a motor" I do not know. They both strike me as
vile phrases, and it is difficult to choose between them.
America, as a country to travel in, had for us another attraction
besides its language. Some people have relations in Spain to whom they
can go and in whose houses they can stay as guests. Others have
relatives of the same convenient kind in Austria and even in Russia.
Many people have friends in France and Germany. We are not so fortunate.
When we go to those countries we spend our time in hotels, or at best in
pensions. We do not discover intimate things about the people there. It
is impossible for us to learn, except through books, and they seldom
tell us the things we want to know, whether the Austrians are morose or
cheerful at breakfast time, and whether the Germans when at home hate
fresh air as bitterly as they hate it when traveling. And these are just
the sort of things which it is most interesting to know about any
people. The politics of a foreign country are more easily studied in the
pages of periodicals like "The Nineteenth Century" than in the daily
press of the country itself. Statistics about trade and population can
be read up in books devoted to the purpose. All sorts of other
information are supplied by the invaluable Baedeker, so that it is in no
way necessary to go to Venice in order to find out things about St.
Mark's. But very intimate details about the insides of houses, domestic
manners and so forth can only be obtained by staying in private homes.
This we thought we might accomplish in America because we had some
friends there before we started. In reality ready made friends are
unnecessary for the traveler in America. He makes them as he goes along,
for the Americans are an amazingly sociable people and hospitable beyond
all other nations. To us Irish—and we are supposed to be
hospitable—the stranger is a stranger until he is shown in some way to
be a friend. In America he is regarded as a friend unless he makes
himself objectionable, unless he makes himself very objectionable
indeed. We heard of American hospitality before we started. We feel now,
as the Queen of Sheba felt after her visit to King Solomon, that the
half was not told us. To be treated hospitably is always delightful. It
is doubly so when the hospitality enables the fortunate guest to learn
something of a kind of life which is not his own.
For all these reasons—I have enumerated four, I think—we desired
greatly to go to America; and there was still another thing which
attracted us. You cannot go to America except by sea. Even if you are
seasick—and I occasionally am, a little—traveling in a steamer is
greatly to be preferred to traveling in a train. A good steamer is
clean. The best train covers you with smuts. The noise of the train is
nerve-shattering. The noise which a steamer makes, even in a gale, is
soothing. When a train stops and when it starts again it jerks and
bumps. It also runs over things called points and then it bumps more. A
steamer stops far seldomer than a train, and does so very gently and
smoothly. It never actually bumps, and though it very often rolls or
pitches, it does these things in a dignified way with due deliberation.
We chose a slow steamer for our voyage out and if we are fortunate
enough to go to America again we shall choose another slow steamer.
Having made up our minds to go—or rather since these things are really
decided for us and we are never the masters of our movements—having
been shepherded by Destiny into a trip to America we naturally sought
for information about that country. We got a great deal more than we
actually sought. Everyone we met gave us advice and told us what to
expect. Advice is always contradictory, and the only wise thing to do is
to take none of what is offered. But it puzzled us to find that the
accounts we got of the country were equally contradictory. English
people, using a curious phrase of which they seem to be very fond,
prophesied for us "the time of our lives." They said that we should
enjoy ourselves from the day we landed in New York until the day when we
sank exhausted by too much joy, a day which some of them placed a
fortnight off, some three weeks, all of them underestimating, as it
turned out, our capacity for enduring delight. Americans on the other
hand decried the country, and told us that the lot of the traveler in it
was very far from being pleasant. This puzzled us. A very modest and
retiring people might be expected to underestimate the attractions of
their own land. We Irish, for instance, always assert that it rains
three days out of every four in Ireland. But the Americans are not
popularly supposed to be, and in fact are not, particularly modest. I
can only suppose that the Americans we met before we started were in bad
tempers because they were for one reason or another obliged to stay in
England, and that they belittled their country in the spirit of the fox
who said the grapes were sour.
One piece of advice which we got gave us, incidentally and accidentally,
our first glimpse at one of the peculiarities of the American people,
their hatred of letter writing as a means of communication. The advice
was this:
"Do not attempt to take a sealskin coat into America, because there is a
law there against sealskin coats and the Custom House officers will hold
up the garment."
This seemed to us very improbable. I remembered the song I have already
quoted about the "Land of the Free" and could not bring myself to
believe that a great nation, a nation that had fought an expensive war
in order to set its slaves at liberty, could possibly want to interfere
with the wearing apparel of a casual stranger. The Law, which is very
great and majestic everywhere, is, according to the proverb, indifferent
to very small matters. America, which is as great and majestic as any
law, could not possibly be supposed to concern itself with the material
of a woman's coat. So we reasoned. But the warning was given with
authority by one who knew a lady who had tried to bring a sealskin coat
into America and failed. We thought it well to make sure. An inquiry at
the steamboat office was useless. The clerk there declined to say
anything either good or bad about the American Custom House regulations.
I have noticed this same kind of cautious reticence among all Americans
when the subject of customs comes up. I imagine that the people of
ancient Crete avoided speaking about that god of theirs who ate young
girls, and for the same reason. There is no use running risks, and the
American Custom House officer is a person whom it is not well to offend.
This is the way with all democracies. In Russia and Germany a man has to
be careful in speaking about the Czar or the Kaiser. In republics we
shut our mouths when a minor official is mentioned, unless we are among
tried and trusted friends. I myself dislike respecting any one; but if
respect is exacted of me I should rather yield it to a king with a
proper crown on his head than to an ordinary man done up with brass
buttons. However, Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic seem to
like doing obeisance to officials, and their tastes are no affairs of
mine.
Having failed in the steamboat office, I wrote a letter to a high
American official in England—not the Ambassador. I did not like to
trouble him about a sealskin coat. An English official, high, or of
middling station, would have answered me by return of post, because he
is glad of an opportunity of writing a letter. In fact, he likes writing
letters so much that he would have sent me two answers, the first a
brief but courteous acknowledgment of my letter and an assurance that it
was receiving attention; the second an extract from the Act of
Parliament which dealt with my particular problem. The American official
does not like writing letters. No American does. Rather than write a
letter, an American will pursue you, _viva voce_, over hundreds of miles
of telephone wire, or spend an hour of valuable time in having an
interview with you in some more or less inaccessible place. Not even
promotion to a high official position will cause an American to feel
kindly toward a pen. The official to whom I wrote would, I am sure, have
told me all there is to know about the American dislike of sealskin
coats, if he could have got me on a telephone. He could not do that,
because my name is not in the London telephone directory. He would,
although he is a most important person and I am less than the least,
have come to me and talked face to face if he had known where to find
me; but I wrote from a club, and the chances were five to one at least
against his finding me there. There was nothing for it but to write a
letter; but it took him several days to make up his mind to the effort.
His answer, when he did write it, followed me to New York, and the
sealskin coat problem had solved itself then.
I noticed, when in New York, that it takes a posted letter much longer
to get from one street in that city to another quite near at hand than
it does in London for a letter posted in the same way to get from
Denmark Hill to Hampstead. I connect this fact with the dislike of
letter-writing which is prevalent among Americans. But I do not know
which is cause and which is effect. It may be that the American avoids
letters because he knows that they will go to their destination very
slowly. It may be, on the other hand, that the American post-office has
dropped into leisurely ways because it knows that it is seldom used for
business purposes. Love letters it carries, no doubt, for it is
difficult to express tender feelings on a telephone, and impossible to
telegraph them; but love letters are hardly ever urgent. The "Collins"
or "Hospitable Roof" communication must be a letter and must go through
the post, but the writer and the recipient would both be better pleased
if it never arrived at all. Business letters are different things, and I
am sure the American post-office carries comparatively few of them.
I wish that some one with a taste for statistics would make out a table
of the weights of the mail bags carried on Cunard steamers. I am
convinced, and nothing but statistics will make me think differently,
that the westward bound ships carry far more letters than those which
travel eastward. All Englishmen, except for obvious reasons English
journalists, write letters whenever they have a decent excuse. Americans
only write letters when they must. It was, I think, the late Charles
Stewart Parnell who observed that most letters answered themselves if
you leave them alone long enough. This is profoundly true, although
Englishmen do not believe it. I have tried and I know. Americans have
either come across Parnell's remark or worked out the same truth for
themselves. I applaud their wisdom, but I was once sorry that they
practice this form of economy. If we had got an answer to our letter
before we sailed, we should have left the coat behind us. As it was, we
took the coat with us and carried it about America, giving ourselves
indeed a good deal of trouble and reaping very little in the way of
comfort or credit by having it. When we did get the letter it showed us
that the Americans really do object strongly to these coats and have
made a law against them. If we had known that before starting, we should
have left the coat behind us at any cost to our feelings.
We are not aggressive people, either of us, and we always try to conform
to the customs of the country in which we are, and to respect the
feelings of the inhabitants. We cannot, indeed, afford to do anything
else. Members of powerful, conquering nations go about the world
insisting on having their own way wherever they are. The English, for
instance, have spread the practice of drinking tea in the afternoon all
over Europe. They make it understood that wherever they go afternoon tea
must be obtainable. Other peoples shrug their shoulders and give in. The
Americans have insisted that hotels shall be centrally heated and all
rooms and passages kept up to a very high temperature. No one else wants
this kind of heat, and until the Americans took to traveling in large
numbers we were all content with fireplaces in rooms and chilly
corridors. But the Americans are a great people, and there is hardly a
first-rate hotel left in Europe now which has not got a system of
central heating installed. The French have secured the use of their
language, or a colorable imitation of their language, on all menu cards
and bills of fare. No self-respecting _maître d'hotel_, even if 90% of
his patrons are Americans, English and Germans, would dare to call soup
anything except _potage_ or _consommé_. I think we owe it to the
Russians that ladies can now smoke cigarettes without reproach in all
European restaurants, though they cannot do this yet in America because
very few Russians of the tourist classes go to America. It must be very
gratifying to belong to one of these great nations and to be able to
import a favorite custom or a valued comfort wherever you go. We are
mere Irish. We have never conquered any one ourselves, although we are
rather good at winning other people's battles for them. We have not
money enough to make it worth anybody's while to consider our tastes;
nor, indeed, are we sure enough of ourselves to insist on having our own
way. There is always at the backs of our minds the paralyzing thought
that perhaps the other people may be right and we may be wrong. We
submit rather than struggle.
We like, for instance, good tea at breakfast, strong dark brown tea,
which leaves a distinct stain on the inside of the cup out of which we
drink it. Nobody else in the world likes this kind of tea. If we were a
conquering, domineering people, we should go about Europe and America
saying: "This which we drink is tea. Your miserable concoction is slop
or worse." If we were rich enough and if large numbers of us traveled,
we should establish our kind of tea as an institution. It would be
obtainable everywhere. At first it would be called "_Thé à
l'Irlandaise_" and we should get it by asking for it. Afterwards it
would be "thé" simply, and if a traveler wanted anything else he would
have to ask for that by some special name. But we are not that kind of
people. There are not enough of us, and the few there are have not
sufficient money to make them worth considering. Besides, we are never
self-confident enough to assert that our kind of tea is the true and
superior kind. We are uneasily conscious that it is rude to describe
other people's favorite beverages as "slop" even when they call ours
"poison." And there is always the doubt whether we may not be wrong,
after all. Great peoples do not suffer from this doubt. The American is
perfectly certain that houses ought to be centrally heated. To him there
does not seem to be any possibility of arguing about that. He has
discovered a universal truth, and the rest of the world must learn it
from him.
The German is equally sure that fresh air in a railway carriage brings
death to the person who breathes it. He is as certain about that as he
is that water wets him when it is poured over him. There is no room for
discussion. But we Irish are differently constituted. When any one tells
us that our type of tea reduces those who drink it to the condition of
nervous wrecks and ultimately drives them into lunatic asylums, we
wonder whether perhaps he may not be right. It is true that we have
drunk the stuff for years and felt no bad effects; but there is always
"the plaguy hundredth chance" that the bad effects may have been there
all the time without our noticing them, and that, though we seem sane,
we may be jibbering imbeciles. Thus it is that we never have the heart
to make any real struggle for strong tea.
This same infirmity would have prevented our dragging that coat into
America if we had found out in time that sealskin coats strike Americans
as wicked things. To us it seems plain that seals exist mainly for the
purpose of supplying men, and especially women, with skins; just as
fathers have their place among created things in order to supply money
for the use of their children, or steam in order that it may make
engines work. Left to ourselves, we should accept all these as final
truths and live in the light of them. But the moment any one assails
them with a flat contradiction we begin to doubt. The American says that
the seal, at all events the seal that has the luck to live in Hudson
Bay, ought not to be deprived of his skin, and that men and women must
be content with their own skins, supplemented when necessary by the
fleeces of sheep.
The Englishman or the German would stand up to the American.
"I will," one of them would say, "kill a Hudson Bay seal if I like or
have him killed for me by some one else. I will wear his skin unless you
prevent me by actual force, and I will resist your force as long as I
can."
We do not adopt that attitude. We cannot, for the spirit of defiance is
not in us. When we were assured, as we were in the end, that the
American really has strong feelings about seals, we began to think that
he might be right.
"America," so we argued, "is a much larger country than Ireland. It is
much richer. The buildings in its cities are far higher. Who are we that
we should set up our opinions about tea or skins or anything else
against the settled convictions of so great a people?"
Therefore, though we brought our coat into America, we did so in no
spirit of defiance. Once we found out the truth, we concealed the coat
as much as possible, carrying it about folded up so that only the lining
showed. It was hardly ever worn, only twice, I think, the whole time we
were there. The weather, indeed, was as a rule particularly warm for
that season of the year.