“American elections are held in the suicidal atmosphere of drear November, when the candidates roam about, seeking whom they can deceive. If saying what isn’t true so often that you end by believing it yourself, constitutes a liar, and if the lie is a sin to everybody but oneself, it is to be hoped the recording angel charitably shuts up his book and takes a vacation about election time. If one party could gain control of the whole earth, its leaders would start an agitation to make their opponents go to the expense of fencing it in.
“The American press is nothing if not enterprising. Why, if King Edward were to fall downstairs tomorrow and break his meerschaum pipe, New Yorkers would know of it, through their newspapers, five hours before he knew it himself!
“Hades gets most of its paving material from the American metropolis, Apollyon having been given a perpetual contract by the Board of Aldermen. In New York there is such a multiplication of conveniences that an electrician, a telephone girl and a plumber have to occupy one’s flat day and night to keep things in order. It is the antithesis of Philadelphia and of Venice, whose streets are never torn up every second day for subways or to insert more pipes. So disgustingly peaceful is the Quaker City that one can lean out of the window in his pajamas and dip up water for the morning bath without waking up the policeman on the beat; all is so quiet along the Delaware to-night that no sticks of dynamite are piled on the front doorstep and no sky-scrapers are being erected between twilight and dawn to be demolished for something else as soon as the tenants have been elevated to the twentieth story.
“This is the land where the captain of industry is he whose pockets so bulge with other people’s money that the door of the prison is not large enough to admit him; where the golden calf is worshipped as a god and the church is used as a waste-basket for unuttered prayers and for good resolutions, newly born; where to be virtuous is to be a crank, and to be honest is to be lonesome; where the citizens sit on the safety valve of conscience and throw wide open the throttle of energy; where the seat of intellect is in the stomach.
“The principal product of this remarkable country is girls, who tolerate rich papas only until they can buy a duke or a prince at the reigning market quotation. The American girl divides her attention between picture hats, chewing gum and ice cream sodas, beginning the day with an orange phosphate at ten A.M., and finishing it and the pocketbook of her steady company at twelve P.M. with a menu of soft-shell crabs, lobsters and Roman punch eaten without a qualm of conscience or a disordered stomach!
“America is a country where to look after the interests of capital is statesmanship and to do anything for labor is socialism and anarchy; where politicians before election orate upon the identity of interests of the capitalist who lives on The Avenue and the laborer who is kept in the back alley: a point which becomes so obscured the day after election as to require the help of the police and the militia to make clear. It is a youthful, boasting nation which forgets the aphorism that children should be seen and not heard, whose every citizen holds a firecracker in one hand, a Fourth of July oration in the other and wears Declaration of Independence chips upon his shoulders in perpetual challenge to the world.
“America is a nation whose goddess of Liberty was foreign born, baptized in blood, then sent into exile, where, serene and indifferent, she turns her back on the land of her adoption and looks out to sea, a heartless statue! This is a country without a language of its own, with a national hymn that sings only of New England and is set to stolen music, whose only national dance is the cakewalk and most popular tune a rag-time coon song; a land whose people never allow the voice of conscience to speak louder than the bell of the cash register.”
“Despite his century of banishment, Benedict Arnold is still a traitor to his country,” I observed.
“Not at all,” answered Washington. “Why, he doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘traitor’ when separated from its Websterian environment. His so-called betrayal of his country was but an incident to his winning a woman, and where there’s a woman, man will make a way. Before the organization of the Asbestos Society of Sinners, the historians conspired with Pluto to fry us in our own fat, but now, immune in our asbestos attire, it’s Siberia for Satan, and there’s always something doing in the Douma of the Dead. As for me, I’m tired of being called ‘truthful George’: it calls for such plain language that somebody’s feelings are sure to be singed. What’s the use of telling the truth when a lie is so much more believable and—interesting?”
Being busily engaged in writing a letter to the city editor of the New York Universe, I did not notice that the blare of the megaphone had ceased. It was not until the car shot out of the darkness that the letter dropped from my hand. I gasped in astonishment.