Description

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All this must begin with an apology and not an apologia. When I went wandering about the Statesdisguised as a lecturer, I was well aware that I was not sufficiently well disguised to be a spy. I waseven in the worst possible position to be a sight-seer. A lecturer to American audiences can hardlybe in the holiday mood of a sight-seer. It is rather the audience that is sight-seeing; even if it is seeinga rather melancholy sight. Some say that people come to see the lecturer and not to hear him; inwhich case it seems rather a pity that he should disturb and distress their minds with a lecture. Hemight merely display himself on a stand or platform for a stipulated sum; or be exhibited like amonster in a menagerie. The circus elephant is not expected to make a speech. But it is equally truethat the circus elephant is not allowed to write a book. His impressions of travel would be somewhatsketchy and perhaps a little over-specialised. In merely travelling from circus to circus he would, soto speak, move in rather narrow circles. Jumbo the great elephant (with whom I am hardly soambitious as to compare myself), before he eventually went to the Barnum show, passed aconsiderable and I trust happy part of his life in Regent's Park. But if he had written a book onEngland, founded on his impressions of the Zoo, it might have been a little disproportionate andeven misleading in its version of the flora and fauna of that country. He might imagine that lions andleopards were commoner than they are in our hedgerows and country lanes, or that the head andneck of a giraffe was as native to our landscapes as a village spire. And that is why I apologise inanticipation for a probable lack of proportion in this work. Like the elephant, I may have seen toomuch of a special enclosure where a special sort of lions are gathered together. I may exaggerate theterritorial, as distinct from the vertical space occupied by the spiritual giraffe; for the giraffe maysurely be regarded as an example of Uplift, and is even, in a manner of speaking, a high-brow.Above all, I shall probably make generalisations that are much too general; and are insufficientthrough being exaggerative. To this sort of doubt all my impressions are subject; and among themthe negative generalisation with which I shall begin this rambling meditation on American hotels.