United States is superior to railroad traveling in Europe. Merely from
habit, I prefer European trains on the whole. It is perhaps also merely
from habit that Americans prefer American trains.

* * * * *

As regards methods of transit other than ordinary railroad trains, I
have to admit a certain general disappointment in the United States. The
Elevated systems in the large cities are the terrible result of an
original notion which can only be called unfortunate. They must either
depopulate the streets through which they run or utterly destroy the
sensibility of the inhabitants; and they enormously increase and
complicate the dangers of the traffic beneath them. Indeed, in the view
of the unaccustomed stranger, every Elevated is an affliction so
appallingly hideous that no degree of convenience could atone for its
horror. The New York Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in other
ways less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies of travel
it appeared to me to be inferior to several similar systems in Europe.

The surface-cars in all the large cities that I saw were less smart and
less effective than those in sundry European capitals. In Boston
particularly I cannot forget the excessive discomfort of a journey to
Cambridge, made in the company of a host who had a most beautiful house,
and who gave dinners of the last refinement, but who seemed
unaccountably to look on the car journey as a sort of pleasant
robustious outing. Nor can I forget--also in Boston--the spectacle of
the citizens of Brookline--reputed to be the wealthiest suburb in the
world--strap-hanging and buffeted and flung about on the way home from
church, in surface-cars which really did carry inadequacy and brutality
to excess.