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"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.