FOOTNOTE:
[2] Fifty cents a day is very good pay for a miner in Russia, thirty cents is quite a common wage.
VIII AMERICAN HOSPITALITY
It is possible to distinguish two sorts of hospitality, one which is given to a person because of his introductions, and the other which is given to the person who has no introductions, the one given on the strength of a man's importance, the other on the strength of the common love of mankind. America is rich in the one species, she is not so rich in the other.
There is no country in the world where an introduction helps you more than in the United States. In this respect how vastly more hospitable the Americans are than the British! It is wonderful the extent to which an American will put himself to trouble in order to help a properly introduced visitor to see America. It is a real hospitality, and it springs from a great belief in America and in the American people, and a realisation of the fact that if nation and individuals are to co-operate to do things in the world, they must unbend and think of others beside themselves.
To me, in the literary and artistic clubs of New York, in the city institutions and schools, in the houses of the rich and cultured, and in the homes of the poor, America breathed kindness. New York seemed to me more friendly and hospitable than any other great city I had lived in. There also, as in Russia, one person came out and took me by the hand, and was America to me.
But when I shed respectability and the cheap fame of having one's portrait and pages of "write-up" in the papers and put pack on back, and sallied forth merely as a man I found that the other and more precious kind of hospitality was not easily come by. Little is given anonymously in the United States.
Not that the country people despise the tramp, or hate him or set the dogs on him or even refuse him a breakfast now and then, but that they simply won't have him in their houses for the night, and are otherwise indifferent to his hardships. They do not look on the stranger as a fellow-man but as a loose wheel, a utility lying rusting in a field; or at best they look upon him as a man who will "make good," who will get a job later on and earn his living. No one is good enough for the American till he has "made good." But this is the same in all commercialised countries, commercialism kills the old Christian charity, the hospitality of house and mind and heart.