from England has washed upon the shores of our North American
continent. The purpose of each one of them is to make a new discovery
of America. They come over to us travelling in great simplicity,
and they return in the ducal suite of the Aquitania. They carry
away with them their impressions of America, and when they reach
England they sell them. This export of impressions has now been
going on so long that the balance of trade in impressions is all
disturbed. There is no doubt that the Americans and Canadians have
been too generous in this matter of giving away impressions. We
emit them with the careless ease of a glow worm, and like the
glow-worm ask for nothing in return.

But this irregular and one-sided traffic has now assumed such great
proportions that we are compelled to ask whether it is right to
allow these people to carry away from us impressions of the very
highest commercial value without giving us any pecuniary compensation
whatever. British lecturers have been known to land in New York,
pass the customs, drive uptown in a closed taxi, and then forward
to England from the closed taxi itself ten dollars' worth of
impressions of American national character. I have myself seen an
English literary man,--the biggest, I believe: he had at least the
appearance of it; sit in the corridor of a fashionable New York
hotel and look gloomily into his hat, and then from his very hat
produce an estimate of the genius of Amer ica at twenty cents a
word. The nice question as to whose twenty cents that was never
seems to have occurred to him.

I am not writing in the faintest spirit of jealousy. I quite admit
the extraordinary ability that is involved in this peculiar
susceptibility to impressions. I have estimated that some of these