THE LAND OF THE FREE
We should have been hard indeed to please if we had not enjoyed our
visits to Chicago and Memphis. We should be ungrateful now if we
confessed that there was any note of disappointment in the memory of the
joyous time we had. Yet there is one thing we regret about that journey
of ours to the Middle West and South. We should dearly have liked to see
a dozen other places, smaller and less important, which lay along the
railway line between Chicago and Memphis, and between Memphis and
Indianapolis. We made the former of these journeys entirely, and the
latter partly, by day. Some unimaginative friends warned us beforehand
that these journeys were dull, that it would be better to sleep through
them if possible, rather than spend hours looking out of railway
carriage windows at uninteresting landscapes. These friends were
entirely wrong. The journeys were anything but dull. The trains dragged
us through a whole series of small towns, and, after the manner of many
American trains, gave us ample opportunity of looking at the houses and
the streets.
In other countries trains are obliged to hide themselves as much as
possible when they come to towns. They go into tunnels when they can or
wander round the backs of mean houses so that the traveler sees nothing
except patches of half bald earth sown with discarded tins and rows of
shirts and stockings hanging out to dry. European peoples, it appears,
do not welcome trains. In America the train seems to be an honored
guest. It is allowed, perhaps invited, to wander along or across the
chief streets. I have been told by a very angry critic that this way of
stating the fact is wrong, misleading, and abominably unjust to the
American people. The towns, he says, did not invite the train, but the
train, being there first, so to speak, invited the towns to exist. Very
likely this is so. But it seems to me to matter but little whether the
train or the town came first. The noticeable thing is that the town
evidently likes the train. It is just as sure a mark of affection to lay
out a main street alongside the railway line as it would be to invite
the railway to run its line down the middle of the main street. An
English town, if it found that a railway was established on its site
before it got there would angrily turn its back to the line, would, even
at the cost of great inconvenience, run its streets away from the
railway. The American plan from the point of view of the passenger is
far better. He gets the most delightful glances of human activity and is
set wondering at ways of life that are strange to him.
Our imagination would, I think, have in any case been equal to the task
of conjuring up mental pictures of what life is like in these small
isolated inland towns. We should, no doubt, have gone grievously wrong,
but we should have enjoyed ourselves even without guidance. Fortunately
we were not left to our own imaginative blunderings. We had with us a
volume of Mr. Irvin Cobb's stories for the possession of which we
selfishly disputed. It gave us just what we wanted, a sure groundwork
for our imaginings. We peopled those little towns with the men and women
whom Mr. Cobb revealed to us. His humor and his delightful tenderness
gave us real glimpses of the lives, the hopes, the fears, the prejudices
and memories of many people who otherwise would have been quite strange
to us. Each little town as we came to it was inhabited by friendly men
and women. Thanks to Mr. Cobb they were our friends. All that was wanted
was that we should be theirs. Hence the bitter disappointment at not
being able to stop at one after the other of the towns, at being denied
the chance of completing a friendship with people whom we already liked.
But it may well be that we should not really have got to know them any
better. We have not, alas! Mr. Cobb's gift of gentle humor or his power
of sympathetic understanding. Also it takes years to get to know anyone.
We could not, in any case, have stayed for years in all these towns.
Life has not years enough in it.
Besides the towns there were the people we met on the trains. There was,
for instance, a man who went up and down selling apples and grapes in
little paper bags. We bought from him and while buying we heard him
speak. There was no doubt about the matter. He was an Irishman, and not
merely an Irishman by descent, the son or grandson of an emigrant, but
one who had quite recently left Ireland. His voice to our ears was like
well-remembered music. I know the feeling of joy which comes with
landing from an English-manned steamer on the quay in Dublin and hearing
again the Irish intonation and the Irish turns of phrase. But that is an
expected pleasure. It is nothing compared to the sudden delight of
hearing an Irish voice in some place thousands of miles from Ireland
where the last thing you expect to happen is a meeting with an Irishman.
I remember being told of an Irishwoman who was traveling from Singapore
to Ceylon in a steamer. She lay in her cabin, helplessly ill with some
fever contracted during her stay in the Far East. She seemed incapable
of taking an interest in anything until two men came to mend something
in the corridor outside her cabin door. They talked together and at the
sound of their voices the sick lady roused herself. She had found
something in life which still interested her. She wanted very much to
know whether the men came from County Antrim or County Down. She was
sure their homes were in one or the other. The Irish voices had stirred
her.
We were neither sick nor apathetic, but we were roused to fresh vitality
by the sound of our Irish apple seller's voice. He came from County
Wicklow. He told us so, needlessly indeed, for we knew it by his talk.
He had been in America for two years, had drifted westward from New
York, was selling apples in a train. Did he like America? Was he happy?
Was he doing well? and—crucial, test question—would he like to go back
to Ireland?
"I would so, if there was any way I could get my living there."
I suppose that is the way it is with the most of us. We have it fixed
somehow in our minds that a living is easier got anywhere than at home.
Perhaps it is. Yet surely apples might be sold in Ireland with as good a
hope of profit as in Illinois or Tennessee. Baskets are cheap at home,
and a basket is the sole outfit required for that trade. The apples
themselves are as easy to come by in the one place as in the other. But
possibly there are better openings in America. The profession may be
overcrowded at home. Many professions are, medicine, for instance, and
the law. Apple selling may be in the like case. At all events, here was
an Irishman, doing fairly well by his own account in the middle west of
America yet with a sincere desire to go back again to Ireland if only he
could get a living there.
There was another man whom we met and talked to with great pleasure. Our
train lingered, as trains sometimes will, for an hour or more at a
junction. It was waiting for another train which ought to have met ours,
but did not. We sat on the platform of the observation car, and gazed at
the blinking signal lights, for the darkness had come. Suddenly a man
climbed over the rail of the car and sat down beside us. He had, as we
could see, a very dirty face, and very dirty hands. He wore clothes like
those of an engine stoker. He was, I think, employed in shunting trains.
He apologized for startling us and expressed the hope that we had not
mistaken him for a murderous red Indian. He was a humorist, and he had
seen at a glance that we were innocent strangers, the sort of people who
might expect an American train to be held up by red Indians with
scalping knives. He told us a long story about a lady who was walking
from coach to coach of a train while he was engaged in shunting it about
and was detaching some coaches from it. She was crossing the bridge
between two coaches at an unlucky moment and found herself suddenly on
the line between two portions of the train. The expression of her face
had greatly amused our friend. His account of the incident greatly
amused us. But the most interesting thing about this man, the most
interesting thing to us, was his unaffected friendliness. In England a
signal man or a shunter would not climb into a train, sit down beside a
passenger and chat to him. A miserable consciousness of class
distinction would render this kind of intercourse as impossible on the
one side as on the other. Neither the passenger nor the shunter would be
comfortable, not even if the passenger were a Liberal politician, or a
newly made Liberal peer. In America this sense of class distinction does
not seem to exist. I have heard English people complain that Americans
are disrespectful. I should rather use the word unrespectful, if such a
word existed. For disrespectful seems to imply that respect is somehow
due, and I do not see why it should be. I am quite prepared to sign my
assent to the democratic creed that one man is as good as another. I
even go further than most Democrats and say that one man is generally
better than the other, whenever it happen that I am the other. I see no
reason why a railway signal man should not talk to me or to anyone else
in the friendly tones of an equal, provided of course that he does not
turn out to be a bore. It is a glory and not a shame of American society
that it refuses to recognize class distinction.
My only complaint is that America has not gone far enough in the path of
democratic equality. There are Americans who take tips. Now men neither
take tips from nor give tips to their equals. If a friend were to slip
sixpence into my hand when saying good-by I should resent it bitterly.
Unless I were quite sure that he was either drunk or mad, I should feel
that he was deliberately treating me as his inferior. I should admit
that I was his inferior if I pocketed the tip. I should feel bound to
touch my hat to him and say "Thank you, Sir," or "Much obliged to your
honor." No man is in any way degraded by taking wages for the work he
does, whatever that work may be, cleaning boots or lecturing in a
University. But a man does lower himself when, in addition to his wages,
he accepts gifts of money from strangers. He is being paid then not for
courtesy or civility, which he ought to show in any case, but for
servility; and that no one can render except to a recognized superior.
The tip in a country where class distinctions are a regular part of the
social order is right enough. It is at all events a natural outcome of
the theory that some men by reason of their station in life are superior
to others. In a social order which is based upon the principle of
equality among men the tip has no proper place.
The distinction between tips and wages is a real one, although it is
sometimes obscured by the fact that the wages of some kinds of work are
paid entirely or almost entirely in the form of tips. A waiter in a
restaurant or an hotel lives, I believe, mainly on tips. Tips are his
wages. Nevertheless he places himself in a position of inferiority by
allowing himself to be paid in this way. It is plain that this is so.
There is a sharp line which divides those who are tipped from those who
are not. It may, for instance, be the misfortune of anyone to require
the services of a hospital nurse; but we do not tip her however kind and
attentive she may be. She gets her wages, her salary, a fixed sum. It
would be insulting to offer her, in addition, five shillings for
herself. Hers is a profession which neither involves nor is supposed to
involve any loss of self respect. On the other hand the chambermaid who
makes the beds in an hotel is tipped. She expects it. And her
profession, in the popular estimation at least, does involve a certain
loss of self respect. The best class of young women are unwilling to be
domestic servants, but are not unwilling to be hospital nurses. Yet the
hospital nurse works as hard as, if not harder than, a housemaid. She
does the same kind of work. There is no real difference between making
the bed of a man who is sick and making the bed of a man who is well. In
either case it is a matter of handling sheets and blankets. But a
suggestion of inferiority clings to the profession of a housemaid and
none to that of a hospital nurse. The reason is that the one woman
belongs to the class which takes tips, while the other belongs to the
class which does not.
It is easy to see that in a country like America into which immigrants
are continually flowing from Europe there is sure to be a large number
of people—Italian waiters for instance, and Swedish and Irish domestic
servants—who have not yet grasped the American theory of social
equality. They have grown up in countries where the theory does not
prevail. They naturally and inevitably expect and take tips, the
largesse of their recognized superiors. No one accustomed to European
life grudges them their tips. But there are, unfortunately, many
American citizens, born and bred in America, with the American theory of
equality in their minds, who also take tips and are very much aggrieved
if they do not get them. Yet they, by word and manner, are continually
asserting their position of equality with those who tip them. This is
where the American theory of equality between man and man breaks down.
The driver of a taxicab for instance can have it one way or the other.
He cannot have it both. He may, like a doctor, a lawyer, or a plumber,
take his regular fee, the sum marked down on the dial of his cab, and
treat his passenger as an equal. Or he may take, as a tip, an extra
twenty cents, in which case he sacrifices his equality and proclaims
himself the inferior of the man who tips him, a member of a tippable
class. There ought to be no tippable class of American citizens. The
English complaint of the disrespectfulness of Americans is, in my
opinion, a foolish one, unless the American expects and takes tips. Then
the complaint is well founded and just. The tipper pays for
respectfulness when he gives a tip and what he pays for he ought to get.
It is, I think, quite possible that the custom of tipping has something
to do with the difficulty, so acute in America, of getting domestic
servants. It is widely felt that domestic service in some way degrades
the man or woman who engages in it. There is no real reason why it
should. It is not in itself degrading to do things for other people,
even to render intimate personal service to other people. The dentist
who fills a tooth for me does something for me, renders me a special
kind of personal service. He loses no self respect by supplying me with
a sound instrument for chewing food. Why should the person who cooks the
food which that tooth will chew lose self respect by doing so? There is
no real distinction between these two kinds of service. Nor is there
anything in the contention that the domestic servant is degraded by
abrogating her own will and taking orders from someone else. Nine men
out of ten take orders from somebody. From the soldier on the
battlefield, the most honorable of men, to the clerk in a bank, we are
almost all of us obeying orders, doing not what we ourselves think best
or pleasantest but what someone in authority thinks right. What is the
difference between obeying when you are told to clean a gun and obeying
when you are told to wash a jug? The real reason why a suggestion of
inferiority clings to the profession of domestic service is that
domestic servants belong to the tippable class. Society can, if it
likes, raise domestic service to a place among the honorable
professions, by ceasing to tip and paying wages which do not require to
be supplemented by tips. If this were done there would be far less
difficulty in keeping up the supply of domestic servants.
I find myself on much more difficult ground when I pass on to discuss
the impression made on me by the claim of America to be, in some special
way, a free country.
"To the West! to the West! to the land of the free." So my farmer friend
sang to me twenty years ago. The tradition survives. The American
citizen believes that a man is freer in America than he is for instance
in England. If freedom means the power of the individual to do what he
likes without being interfered with by laws then no man can ever be
quite free anywhere except on a desert island. I, as an individual, may
earnestly desire to go out into a crowded thoroughfare and shoot at the
street cars with a revolver. I am not free to do this in any civilized
country in the world. For people with desires of that kind there is no
such thing as liberty. The freedom of the individual is everywhere a
compromise between his personal inclination and the general sense of the
community. Men are more free where the community makes fewer laws, less
free where the community makes more. In England I can, if I like, buy,
and drink at dinner, a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of any train
which has a restaurant car, in any part of the country. In certain
states in America I cannot buy a bottle of beer in the restaurant car of
the train. There is a law which stops me. It may be a very good law. The
infringement of my liberty which it entails may be for my good and the
good of society in general; but where that law exists I am certainly
less free than where it does not exist.
The tendency of modern democratic states is to make more and more laws
and thereby to confine within ever narrower limits the freedom of the
individual man. A few years ago an Englishman could send his child to
school or keep his child at home without any education just as he chose.
Now he must send his child to school. The law insists on it. The
Irishman, in most parts of Ireland, can still, if he likes, allow his
child to grow up without ever going to school. There is no law to
interfere with him. In that particular respect Ireland is freer than
England, for England has gone further along the path of curtailing
individual liberty. In the matter of buying beer England is freer than
America, because you can buy beer anywhere in England if you go to a
house licensed to sell beer. In some parts of America there are no
houses licensed to sell beer and you cannot buy it. America has, in this
particular respect, gone further than England along the path of
curtailing individual liberty.
There are several other things about which there are laws in America
which do not exist in England and with regard to which America is not so
free a country as England is. But there are also laws in England which
do not exist in America. The Englishman is more or less accustomed to
his laws. He has got into the habit of obeying them and they do not seem
to interfere with his freedom. The American laws, to which he is not
accustomed, strike him as unwarrantable examples of minor tyranny. But
it is likely that the American is, in the same way, accustomed to his
laws and is not irritated by them. He has got into the way of not
wanting to buy beer in Texas, and does not feel that his liberty is
curtailed by the existence of a law which it does not occur to him to
break. He may be, on the other hand, profoundly annoyed by English laws,
to which he is not accustomed. It may strike him, when he comes to
England, that his liberty is being continually interfered with just as
an Englishman feels himself continually hampered in America. I can, for
instance, understand that an American in England might feel that his
liberty was most unwarrantably interfered with by the law which obliges
him to have a penny stamp on every check he writes. It must strike him
as monstrous that he cannot get his own money out of a bank without
paying the government for being allowed to do so. After all it is his
money and the Government is not even a banker. Why should he pay for
taking a sovereign from the little pile of sovereigns which his banker
keeps for him when he would not have to pay for taking one out of a
stocking if he adopted the old-fashioned plan of keeping his money
there? The Englishman feels no annoyance at the payment of this penny.
He is so entirely accustomed to it that it seems to him a violation of
one of the laws of nature to write a check on a simple, unstamped piece
of paper.
On the whole, although the citizens of both countries feel free enough
when they are at home, there is probably less freedom, that is to say
there are more laws, in America than in England. America is more
thoroughly democratic in constitution than England is and therefore less
free. This seems a paradox, but is in reality a simple statement of
obvious fact, nor is there any difficulty in seeing the reason for it.
Democracies produce professional politicians. The professional
politician differs from the amateur or voluntary politician exactly as
any professional differs from any amateur. An amateur carpenter saws
wood and hammers nails for the fun of the thing, and stops sawing and
hammering as soon as sawing and hammering cease to amuse him. The
professional carpenter must go on sawing and hammering even if he does
not want to, because it is in this way that he earns his bread. He
therefore gets a great deal more sawing and hammering done in a year
than any amateur does. It is the same with politicians. The amateur
politician makes a law now and then when he feels like it. When
law-making ceases to interest him he goes off to hunt or fish. The
professional politician must go on making laws even though the business
has become inexpressibly wearisome. Thus it is that in states where
there are professional politicians, in democratic states, there are more
laws, and therefore less freedom, than in states which only have amateur
politicians. America, being slightly more democratic than England, has
slightly more laws and slightly less freedom.
But it would be easy to make too much of this difference between England
and America.
The freedom which men value most is very little affected by laws. Laws
neither give nor withhold it. Freedom is really an atmosphere in which
we are able to breathe without anxiety or fear. There are some societies
in which a man must be constantly watching himself lest he should give
expression to a thought or an opinion which is liable to offend some
powerful interest or outrage some cherished conviction. All sorts of
unpleasant consequences follow incautious utterance of an unpopular
opinion, or even the discovery that unpopular opinions are held. It may
be that the rash individual is looked on very coldly. It may be that
those who seem to be his friends gradually draw away from him. It may
be—this is not so unpleasant but quite unpleasant enough—that he is
assailed in newspapers and held up in their columns to public odium. It
may be that he is made to suffer in more material ways, that he loses
business or runs the risk of being deprived of some position which he
holds. In very uncivilized communities he is sometimes actually treated
with physical violence. The windows of his house are broken or he is
mobbed. The dread of some or all of these penalties makes him very
cautious. He goes through life glancing timidly from side to side,
always anxious, always a little frightened and therefore—since fear is
the real antithesis of liberty—never free.
All communities suffer from spasmodic fits of this kind of intolerance.
In England in the year 1900 it was not safe to be a pro-Boer, and
England at that time was not a free country. England is now free to
quite an extraordinary extent. A man may hold and express almost any
conceivable opinion without suffering for it. He can stand up in a
public assembly and say hard things about England herself, point out her
faults in plain and even bitter language. The English people as a whole
remain totally indifferent to what he says about them. If the hard thing
is said wittily they laugh. If it is said dully they yawn. In neither
case do they display any signs of anger. They succeed in giving the
stranger in their midst the impression that nothing he does or says
matters in the least so long as he avoids crossing the indefinable line
which separates "good form" from bad. His manners may get him into
trouble. His opinions will not.
America is free too in this same way, but is not, I think, so free as
England. There are several subjects about which it is not wise to talk
quite freely in America. The ordinary middle class American, the man
with whom one falls into casual conversation in a train, is sensitive
about criticism of his country and its institutions in a way that the
ordinary Englishman is not. It may very well be that in this he is the
Englishman's superior. A perfectly detached judge of humanity, some
epicurean deity observing all things with passion-less calm and weighing
all emotion in the scales of absolute justice—might, quite conceivably,
rank a slightly resentful patriotism higher than tolerant apathy. We
Irishmen are not tolerant of criticism, and I sincerely hope that ours
is the better part. We do not like the expression of opinions which
differ from our own and are inclined to suppress them with some violence
when we can. As a nation we value truth far more than liberty; truth
being, of course, the thing which we ourselves believe; obviously that,
for we would not believe it unless we were quite sure that it was true.
Americans are not so whole hearted as we are in this matter. The more
highly educated Americans are even inclined to drift into a tolerant
agnosticism which is almost English. But most Americans are still a
little intolerant of strange opinions and still have enough conscious
patriotism to resent criticism.
It is the fault of a great quality. No society can be both enthusiastic
and free. It is the tips and the equality over again. We can not have
things both ways. If society allows a man, without pain or penalty, to
say exactly what he means, it is always because that society is
convinced, deep down in its soul, that he cannot possibly mean what he
says. A man is free to speak what he chooses, to criticize, to abuse, to
sneer, wherever his fellow men have made up their minds that it does not
matter what he says how keenly he criticizes, abuses or sneers. On the
other hand, a society which is very much in earnest about anything,—and
a great many Americans are—will not suffer differences of opinion
patiently and will always be resentful of criticism. Say to an
Englishman that American football is superior to the Rugby Union game.
He will look at you with a sleepy expression in his eyes, and, after a
short pause, politeness requiring some answer from him, he will say: "Is
it really?" His tone suggests that he does not care whether it is or
not, but that he means to go on playing the Rugby Union game if he plays
at all, a point about which he has not quite made up his mind. Say to an
American that Rugby Union football is superior to his game and he will
look at you with highly alert but slightly troubled eyes. He wants to
respect you if he can, and he does not like to hear you saying a thing
which cannot possibly be true. But he too is polite.
"There may be," he says, "some points of superiority about the English
game—but on the whole—think of the organization of our forwards. Think
of the amount of thought required. Think of the rapid decisions which
have to be made. Think of——But come and see the match next Saturday
and then you'll understand."
There is still another kind of freedom—freedom to behave as we like,
freedom of manners. This is almost as important as freedom to speak and
think without fear of consequences. Indeed, for most people it is more
important. Only a few of us think, or want to say what we think. All of
us have to behave, to have manners of some sort either good or bad. It
is curious to notice that, while men everywhere are acquiescing without
much protest to the curtailment of the sort of freedom which is affected
by law, they are steadily claiming and securing more and more freedom of
manners. We are far less bound by conventions than we used to be. There
was a time when everybody possessed and once a week wore what were
called "Sunday clothes." One hardly ever hears the phrase now, and men
go to church in coats which would have struck their grandmothers as
distinctly unsuited to a place of worship. Sunday clothes were a bondage
and we have broken free. There was, very long ago, a definite code of
manners binding upon men and women when they met together. When it
prevailed the intercourse between the sexes must have been singularly
stiff and uncomfortable. There were many things which a woman could not
do without losing her character for womanliness, and many things which a
man could not do in the company of ladies—smoke, for instance.
It is, I think, women and not men who decide how much of this sort of
liberty people are to enjoy. If I am right about this, then American
women are more generous than English women. There is much more freedom
in the matter of clothes in America than England. I remember hearing an
Englishwoman complain that no matter how she tried she never could
succeed in dressing correctly in America. In England she knew exactly
the kind of gown to wear at an afternoon party, at a small dinner, at a
large dinner, at an evening reception, in the box of a theater. In
America she perpetually found herself wearing the wrong thing. I imagine
that in reality she did not wear the _wrong_ thing, because there is no
such rigid standard of appropriateness of dress in America as there is
in England. More latitude is allowed, and if a gown is hardly ever
correct it is also hardly ever wrong. Every man who sits in the stalls
of a London theater must display eighteen inches of white shirt above
the top button of his waistcoat. In America he may wear a blue flannel
shirt if he likes, and nobody cares whether it is visible beneath his
tie or not. In England a man who dines in a very smart restaurant must
wear a tail coat and a white tie. In America he can, if he chooses, wear
a tail coat and a black tie, or a short coat and a white tie. There is
no fixed rule determining the connection between coats and ties.
It is not only the class of people who dine in smart restaurants and sit
in stalls of theaters which is subject to rules of this kind. Every
class has its own conventions, and, so far as my observation goes, every
class is a little freer in America than it is in England. No English
chauffeur with any self-respect would consent to drive a motor car about
London unless he were wearing some kind of uniform. In America the most
magnificent cars are frequently driven by chauffeurs in gray tweed suits
with ordinary caps on their heads.
I am nearly sure that it is women, the women of our own class, who
decide what clothes we shall wear and what clothes they will wear
themselves. I am quite sure that it is they who regulate the degree of
formal stiffness there is to be in our intercourse with them. English
women have to a very considerable extent given up requiring from men
those symbols of respect which had long ago ceased to be anything but
the mere conventional survivals of the mediæval idea of chivalry. Men
and women in England meet on friendlier and more equal terms than they
used to. American women have gone even further than the English in
setting themselves and us free from the old restrictions. They invite
comradeship and have, as far as possible, swept away the barriers to
free intercourse between sex and sex.
To some people liberty of any sort, liberty for its own sake, will
always seem a desirable thing. These will prefer the manners of America
to those of England, but will cling to their admiration of the
Englishman's tolerance of criticism. There are others—it is a matter of
temperament—who prefer restraint, who like to talk cautiously, who
cling to social conventions. To them it will be a comfort to know that
in one respect the American woman is not so free as her English sister.
In England a woman may, without loss of reputation, smoke almost
anywhere, anywhere that men smoke, except in the streets and the
entrance halls of theaters. In New York there are only two or three
restaurants in which a woman is allowed to smoke. Even if she is
indifferent to her reputation and does not mind being considered fast,
she cannot smoke in the other restaurants. The head waiter comes and
stops her if she tries. This may be quite right. I do not know whether
it is or not. Many very strong arguments may be and are brought against
women smoking. It is, I am thankful to say, no business of mine to weigh
them against the other arguments which go to show that women are as well
entitled to the solace of tobacco as men are. What interests me far more
than the arguments on either side is the fact that American women are in
this one respect much less free than English women. The women of both
nations smoke, but the American woman must do it in privacy or
semi-privacy. The Englishwoman inhales her cigarette with untroubled
enjoyment in any restaurant in London. She must dress herself strictly
as convention prescribes for each occasion. She must be a little careful
in her intercourse with men. She has not yet got a vote. But she may
smoke. The American woman has much more freedom in the matter of
clothes. She can be as friendly with a man as she likes. In several
states she has a vote. But society in general frowns on her smoking and
sets its policeman, the head waiter, to prevent her doing it. I should
myself prefer a cigarette to a vote; but I am fond of tobacco, and all
elections bore me, so I am not an unprejudiced judge. American women may
be in this matter, as indeed they certainly are in other matters, nobler
than I am. They may gladly sacrifice tobacco for the sake of the
franchise, but I do not see why they should not have both.