xii PREFACE 



London, as well as from the acrid candour with 

 which Mr Bart. Kennedy has, more recently, de- 

 scribed them and their country in the columns of 

 the Daily Mail. It takes many folks to make a 

 world, as someone said, and in America I found 

 just as much good and bad as an American would 

 find in England. If I have called a spade a spade, 

 I have used no grosser term, for a man need not 

 make sport of his host's birthmark even if he is not 

 necessarily blind to it. In a land where none mark 

 time, there is so much to praise that a little blemish 

 here and there is not amiss. The nation that has 

 a hemisphere for its birthright has had to encounter 

 terrible difficulties in the making, and the same 

 abuses of trusts and "graft," which is their term 

 for petty larceny on a princely scale, would, in all 

 probability, have been generated in any nation had 

 its moulding been left to the present time. In our 

 envy, moreover, of the inexhaustible resources of 

 the continent and of the irrepressible expansion of 

 its people, we cannot forget the skeleton in the 

 cupboard, the unsolved race problem, the most 

 paralysing influence that ever yet undermined the 

 health of a nation in its childhood. This engross- 

 ing question, the theme of many better qualified 

 than myself to discuss it, is but lightly debated in 

 these pages, but I wish that those who have never 

 visited America would inspire their arguments with 

 a little less of the Uncle- Tom's -Cabin spirit. I 

 wish that some of the poor negro's advocates could 

 know the sensation of being hustled off a sidewalk 

 by a buck nigger in the full flush of emancipation. 

 As one result of my itinerary, I was within a few 

 weeks able to see the coloured population in the 



