A FAR COUNTRY

By Winston Churchill


BOOK 3.



XVIII.

As the name of our city grew to be more and more a byword for sudden and
fabulous wealth, not only were the Huns and the Slavs, the Czechs and the
Greeks drawn to us, but it became the fashion for distinguished
Englishmen and Frenchmen and sometimes Germans and Italians to pay us a
visit when they made the grand tour of America. They had been told that
they must not miss us; scarcely a week went by in our community--so it
was said--in which a full-fledged millionaire was not turned out. Our
visitors did not always remain a week,--since their rapid journeyings
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the Gulf rarely occupied
more than four,--but in the books embodying their mature comments on the
manners, customs and crudities of American civilization no less than a
chapter was usually devoted to us; and most of the adjectives in their
various languages were exhausted in the attempt to prove how symptomatic
we were of the ambitions and ideals of the Republic. The fact that many
of these gentlemen--literary and otherwise--returned to their own shores
better fed and with larger balances in the banks than when they departed
is neither here nor there. Egyptians are proverbially created to be
spoiled.