“MR. LORD FISHER”
(How it got there so quick I can’t imagine.) I was bombed by a photographer as we arrived late at night, and an excellent photograph he took, but it gave me a shock! I had never been done like that! I had the great pleasure of dining with Mr. Woodrow Wilson. I predicted to the reporters he would be the next President for sure! I was told I was about the first to say so—anyhow, the 25 reporters put it down as my news!
I met several great Americans during my visit; but the loveliest meeting I ever had was when, long before, a charming company of American gentlemen came on July 4th to Admiralty House at Bermuda to celebrate “Independence Day!” I got my speech in before theirs! I said George Washington was the greatest Englishman who ever lived! England had never been so prosperous, thanks solely to him, as since his time and now! because he taught us how to associate with our fellow countrymen when they went abroad and set up house for themselves! And that George Washington was the precursor of that magnificent conception of John Bright in his speech of the ages when he foretold a great Commonwealth—yes a great Federation—of all those speaking the same tongue—that tongue which is the “business” tongue of the world—as it expresses in fewer words than any other language what one desires to convey! And I suppose now we have got Palestine that this Federal House of Commons of the future will meet at Jerusalem, the capital of the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, whom we are without doubt, for how otherwise could ever we have so prospered when we have had such idiots to guide us and rule us as those who gave up Heligoland, Tangier, Curaçoa, Corfu, Delagoa Bay, Java, Sumatra, Minorca, etc., etc.? I have been at all the places named, so am able to state from personal knowledge that only congenital idiots could have been guilty of such inconceivable folly as the surrender of them, and again I say: “Let us thank God that we are the lost ten tribes of Israel!” Mr. Lloyd George, in a famous speech long ago in the War, showed how we had been 14 times “too late!” How many more “too lates” since he made that memorable speech? Especially what about our shipbuilding and the German submarine menace and Rationing? (The only favoured trades seem to be Brewing and Racing! Both so flourishing!)
The American barber on board the “Baltic” told me a good story. He was a quaint man, clean shaved and wore black alpaca throughout. Halfway across the Atlantic I was waiting to have my hair cut, when a gentleman bounced in on him, kicking up a devil of a fuss about wanting something at once! The barber, without moving a muscle, calmed him by saying: “Are you leaving to-day, Sir?” But this was his story. He was barber in the train from Chicago to New York that never stops “even for a death” (so he told me) when the train suddenly stopped at a small village and a lady got out. Mr. Thompson, the President of the Railway, was in the train, and asked why? The conductor showed an order signed by a great man of the Railway to stop there. When Mr. Thompson got to New York he asked this great man “What excuse?” and added: “I wouldn’t have done it for my wife!” and the answer he got was: “No more would I!”
But the sequel of the story is that I told this tale at an international cosmopolitan lunch party at Lucerne and said: “The curious thing is I knew the man!” when Mr. Chauncey Depew wiped me out by saying that “he knew the woman!”
This American Barber quaintly praised the Engine Driver of this Chicago train by telling me that “he was always looking for what he didn’t want!” and so had avoided the train going into a River by noticing something wrong with the points!
By kind Permission of “London Opinion.”
America and the Blockade.
“Why Mr. Wilson should expect this country to refrain from exercising a right in return for Germany’s refraining from committing wrongs is not very clear to the ordinary intelligence.”—Daily Paper.