Except that part of life which is ministered to in mechanical ways, they resist conveniences. They don't really like bathrooms yet. They prefer great tin tubs, and they use bowls and pitchers when a bathroom is next door. The telephone—Lord deliver us!—I've given it up. They know nothing about it. (It is a government concern, but so is the telegraph and the post-office, and they are remarkably good and swift.) You can't buy a newspaper on the street, except in the afternoon. Cigar-stores are as scarce as hen's teeth. Barber-shops are all "hairdressers"—dirty and wretched beyond description. You can't get a decent pen; their newspapers are as big as tablecloths. In this aquarium in which we live (it rains every day) they have only three vegetables and two of them are cabbages. They grow all kinds of fruit in hothouses, and (I can't explain this) good land in admirable cultivation thirty miles from London sells for about half what good corn land in Iowa brings. Lloyd George has scared the land-owners to death.
Party politics runs so high that many Tories will not invite Liberals to dinner. They are almost at the point of civil war. I asked the Prime Minister the other day how he was going to prevent war. He didn't give any clear answer. During this recess of Parliament, though there's no election pending, all the Cabinet are all the time going about making speeches on Ireland. They talk to me about it.
"What would you do?"
"Send 'em all to the United States," say I.
"No, no."
They have had the Irish question three hundred years and they wouldn't be happy without it. One old Tory talked me deaf abusing the Liberal Government.
"You do this way in the United States—hate one another, don't you?"
"No," said I, "we live like angels in perfect harmony except a few weeks before election."
"The devil you do! You don't hate one another? What do you do for enemies? I couldn't get along without enemies to swear at."
If you think it's all play, you fool yourself; I mean this job. There's no end of the work. It consists of these parts: Receiving people for two hours every day, some on some sort of business, some merely "to pay respects," attending to a large (and exceedingly miscellaneous) mail; going to the Foreign Office on all sorts of errands; looking up the oddest assortment of information that you ever heard of; making reports to Washington on all sorts of things; then the so-called social duties—giving dinners, receptions, etc., and attending them. I hear the most important news I get at so-called social functions. Then the court functions; and the meetings and speeches! The American Ambassador must go all over England and explain every American thing. You'd never recover from the shock if you could hear me speaking about Education, Agriculture, the observance of Christmas, the Navy, the Anglo-Saxon, Mexico, the Monroe Doctrine, Co-education, Woman Suffrage, Medicine, Law, Radio-Activity, Flying, the Supreme Court, the President as a Man of letters, Hookworm, the Negro—just get down the Encyclopædia and continue the list. I've done this every week-night for a month, hand running, with a few afternoon performances thrown in! I have missed only one engagement in these seven months; and that was merely a private luncheon. I have been late only once. I have the best chauffeur in the world—he deserves credit for much of that. Of course, I don't get time to read a book. In fact, I can't keep up with what goes on at home. To read a newspaper eight or ten days old, when they come in bundles of three or four—is impossible. What isn't telegraphed here, I miss; and that means I miss most things.