“Why, certainly.”
“Then it appears to me that you have legislated honesty, regard for human life, regard for character, abhorrence of unnatural vice, good faith, and sobriety. I was told on the train coming up, by a gentleman who was shocked at the sight of a man beating his horse, that you even had laws against cruelty to animals.”
“Yes, and I am happy to say that they are enforced to such a degree that a man cannot kill a cat cruelly without being punished for it.” The Altrurian did not follow up his advantage, and I resolved not to be outdone in magnanimity. “Come, I will own that you have the best of me on those points. I must say you’ve trapped me very neatly, too; I can enjoy a thing of that kind when it’s well done, and I frankly knock under. But I had in mind something altogether different when I spoke. I was thinking of those idealists who want to bind us hand and foot and render us the slaves of a state where the most intimate relations of life shall be penetrated by legislation and the very hearthstone shall be a tablet of laws.”
“Isn’t marriage a rather intimate relation of life?” asked the Altrurian. “And I understood that gentleman on the train to say that you had laws against cruelty to children, and societies established to see them enforced. You don’t consider such laws an invasion of the home, do you, or a violation of its immunities? I imagine,” he went on, “that the difference between your civilization and ours is only one of degree, after all, and that America and Altruria are really one at heart.”
I thought his compliment a bit hyperbolical, but I saw that it was honestly meant, and as we Americans are first of all patriots, and vain for our country before we are vain for ourselves, I was not proof against the flattery it conveyed to me civically if not personally.
We were now drawing near the hotel, and I felt a certain glow of pleasure in its gay effect on the pretty knoll where it stood. In its artless and accidental architecture it was not unlike one of our immense coastwise steamboats. The twilight had thickened to dusk, and the edifice was brilliantly lighted with electrics, story above story, which streamed into the gloom around like the lights of saloon and state-room. The corner of wood making into the meadow hid the station; there was no other building in sight; the hotel seemed riding at anchor on the swell of a placid sea. I was going to call the Altrurian’s attention to this fanciful resemblance when I remembered that he had not been in our country long enough to have seen a Fall River boat, and I made toward the house without wasting the comparison upon him. But I treasured it up in my own mind, intending some day to make a literary use of it.
The guests were sitting in friendly groups about the piazzas or in rows against the walls, the ladies with their gossip and the gentlemen with their cigars. The night had fallen cool after a hot day, and they all had the effect of having cast off care with the burden of the week that was past, and to be steeping themselves in the innocent and simple enjoyment of the hour. They were mostly middle-aged married folk, but some were old enough to have sons and daughters among the young people who went and came in a long, wandering promenade of the piazzas, or wove themselves through the waltz past the open windows of the great parlor; the music seemed one with the light that streamed far out on the lawn flanking the piazzas. Every one was well-dressed and comfortable and at peace, and I felt that our hotel was in some sort a microcosm of the republic.
We involuntarily paused, and I heard the Altrurian murmur: “Charming, charming! This is really delightful!”
“Yes, isn’t it?” I returned, with a glow of pride. “Our hotel here is a type of the summer hotel everywhere; it’s characteristic in not having anything characteristic about it; and I rather like the notion of the people in it being so much like the people in all the others that you would feel yourself at home wherever you met such a company in such a house. All over the country, north and south, wherever you find a group of hills or a pleasant bit of water or a stretch of coast, you’ll find some such refuge as this for our weary toilers. We began to discover some time ago that it would not do to cut open the goose that laid our golden eggs, even if it looked like an eagle, and kept on perching on our banners just as if nothing had happened. We discovered that, if we continued to kill ourselves with hard work, there would be no Americans pretty soon.”
The Altrurian laughed. “How delightfully you put it! How quaint! How picturesque! Excuse me, but I can’t help expressing my pleasure in it. Our own humor is so very different.”