A Journey of a Jayhawker

by W. Y. Morgan

In Europe the name “United States” is rarely used. We are “Americans.” The people of Canada are Canadians and the people of the United States have the sole use of the title of Americans. They consider us the whole thing, and we always admit it without argument. There is a general impression in the Old World that all Americans are rich. There is a general impression that sometime we will fight the rest of the world, and I think there is an impression that we will lick. So far as I can see, Americans are treated about as well as dukes, and the ways of traveling are greased for them by everybody along the line. (Grease to be paid for, of course.) In two months’ travel on the continent, usually not knowing the language, we have never missed a train or connection, been mistreated or imposed upon, allowed to suffer inconvenience or annoyance. That is a record it would be hard to equal in America.

ENGLAND.

IN OLD, OLD ENGLAND.

Warwick, England, June 12, 1905.

When the American tourist reaches old England he has a large and well-selected stock of emotions which he can feel, in addition to the thanks in his heart that the short but “nahsty” trip across the Irish sea is at an end. No matter where an individual’s ancestors may have come from, the mother country of America is England. Up to 1776 our history was only English history, our customs English customs, our laws English laws, and when the Continental army began shooting at the British soldiers, the Continental Congress accompanied every volley with a resolution declaring that the colonists had no desire to separate from England, but were only fighting in self-defense. Our laws, our language, our literature are English. The fight of the parliament against the crown has reached practically the same result in England that the revolution of Congress against King George did by a short cut.

This is the land of Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens, who are just as much American as English, except for the accident of birthplace. This is the home of our heroes of medieval times, of Ivanhoe, Richard the Lion-hearted, and the Black Prince. This is the country which is familiar to us by name and history through Scott and Thackeray, Dickens and Lytton, and a hundred other authors whose works are read in the American homes. We are not strangers to such names as Kenilworth, York, Shrewsbury, Chester, Stratford, Oxford, Cambridge, and in fact nearly every town on the map of England. This is more like the visit to a long-absent friend and not an entrance into a foreign land. We are now going among places of which we have read and among the monuments and works of men whom we have held close to our hearts through the pictures painted for us by our authors. We are going to actually see the things we have so often read about and which we have so much dreamed about.

Instead of beginning at London, the great center of trade, we are going to begin here at Warwick, the center of the oldest Old England left on earth. In Warwick we are five miles from Kenilworth, the castle Scott made famous, seven miles from Stratford-on-Avon, where Shakespeare was born, and surrounded by beautiful rural England, with a fine old castle only five minutes walk away, and churches and buildings which were old when Columbus discovered America.

The first stop in England was at Chester, which was a town of importance when Julius Cæsar was doing business. The walls the Romans built were demolished by the Saxons but rebuilt, and Chester was the last place in England to surrender to William the Conqueror. During the Middle Ages it was the scene of more fights and sieges and the walls then completed are the same walls which we walked on this week. The walls are from ten to twenty feet wide at the top, twenty to thirty feet high, and little towers occupy the angles and corners. From the wall of Chester Charles the First saw the parliamentary army defeat his soldiers, and when Chester surrendered, Cromwell’s men had all of England.