Home Thoughts From Abroad

I

THE currents of Chance lately washed me up on the shores of a little-visited European country which I soon found to be in some respects perhaps the most interesting in the world, at the moment. I can be more at ease in writing about it if I give it the thin disguise of a pseudonym, so let me call it Amenia. It deserves this name not only because it is a very beautiful land, but also because its inhabitants are so uncommonly amiable and gracious to strangers; I find that they have an international reputation throughout all Europe for this trait. They will take no offense, I am sure, at my masking their country under a fanciful name, for I am merely following an oldfashioned convention which had its root in delicacy, like the convention that governs the British House of Commons, where one member may pretty well say what he likes about another member, provided he do not name him.

What made Amenia so interesting to me, as a visitor fresh from America, can be summed up in a sentence. From our point of view, nearly everything in Amenia is wrong, and yet the country manages to get on remarkably well. By every rule of the game, Amenia ought not to get on at all, but it somehow does. Its politics are frightfully wrong, its economics are wrong, its views of a proper constitution of human society are practically

all wrong; yet there the wretched country is, impenitently racking along, quite as if its fundamental theories of collective human life were as sound as ours.

I submit that to a student of civilization this is an interesting state of things, and doubly so at the moment. For example, Amenia is solvent, as I hear few countries are; certainly those I see and read about seem mostly busted. The publice egestas, privaiim opulentia, which Sallust puts into the mouth of Cato as evidence of a nation’s decline, is visible everywhere. I notice in a London paper to-day the statement that our own national debt now amounts to twenty-two and a quarter billion dollars; also that Britain’s national debt is eleven times as much as it was in 1913. My notion is that it would take a bit of scratching to get that amount of money together in either country. Amenia has only a trifle of debt, which worries nobody, and which she could clean up on short notice without overstraining herself. Amenia, moreover, pays as she goes. Amidst the general fiscal dilapidation of the last four years, Amenia has balanced her budget each year. I was told that in the good days when our bankers were dusting money around Europe all so freely, some of them urged a loan on Amenia, but the government said no, much obliged, they thought they would try to squeeze along on their own. Again, business in Amenia is very fair — nothing startling, but probably up to Sam Weller’s standard of normality — while in other countries it is apparently slack. Again, Amenia seems to have no unwieldy labor surplus. Everyone able to work has some sort of job which perhaps will not make his everlasting fortune, but which manages to keep him going; and in this respect, too, other countries are not so well off, according to all I hear.

In drawing comparisons between Amenia and other countries, however, I have not the least idea of advertising Amenia as a happy hunting ground for American visitors, and making it out so attractive that everyone will wish to go there. Not at all. On the contrary, I think that for many reasons the average run of our tourists would do better elsewhere; Amenia, I should say, is probably not quite their kind of thing. Still less would I suggest that we ought to copy Amenia’s ways and views and ideals. Amenia did not impress me in this stark fashion, either as bait for the vagrant impulse to ‘go places and do things,’ or as an institutional model. It impressed me only as an incentive to a study of absolutes. What I saw there turned my mind back on itself, and made me reëxamine a number of matters which we tend to put down as absolute; absolutely Good, absolutely Bad, absolutely True or False, absolutely Right or Wrong. What my conclusions were, or whether I came to any, is of no importance. The only thing I wish to dwell on is the sheer pleasure of being in a situation that moves one strongly to review the chose jugée, to reopen questions that mere use-and-wont has led us to regard as definitively closed, and let one’s consciousness play over them freely. There are few exercises more exhilarating than this, and Amenia is one of the few spots left in a highly uninteresting world that stimulate one to pursue it.

II

I shall put down my impressions at haphazard as they occur to me, with no special care for arrangement. In the first place, I found that there is a great deal of illiteracy in Amenia; and by the way, I was led to this discovery by the conspicuous and delightful absence of roadside advertising signs. I was told that the Amenians are 50 per cent illiterate; some put it higher. Having no passion for statistics, I did not take the trouble to look up the official figures; it was enough for my purposes to know that most of the people I saw about me were unable to read or write.

In our view, this is of course wrong. It is an absolute of our social faith that illiteracy is Bad. This is one of the very few points, indeed I think the only one, at which Mr. Jefferson succeeded in striking his belief deeply into the American consciousness. He put literacy as a condition of good citizenship, and the people accepted his view; which was in itself, perhaps, an indication that the matter would stand a little sifting. No one now, I imagine, has any doubt that general literacy is a Good-in-Itself — that is to say, an absolute. This belief is a republican heirloom, passed on in complete integrity, and unexamined, from the casket of eighteenth-century political theory to its present place in Columbia’s shining crown.

Just so. I noticed, however, that the capital of Amenia is remarkable for its bookstores; it has relatively more and better bookstores, I believe, than any city in the world. In fact, the only commercial exhibits there that strike a stranger’s eye are the bookstores and jewelry stores; the rest are unimpressive. Leaving aside all questions of comparative quality, I tried to estimate how many bookstores New York would have in the same ratio, first, to its actual population, and second, to its proportion of literacy; but the figures were so incredibly fantastic that I did not think it worth while even to make a note of them.

These premises seemed to warrant the inference that Amenia has a small but serious reading public; one that owns its books and reads them, and that in general may be thought to regard a book as an instrument of culture rather than as a stopgap for idle time. This inference is borne out by a French authority, who says that Amenia has une petite élite extrêmement brillante et cultivée. My mind then went back to the immense masses of garbage shot daily from the press of more literate lands, and I wondered just what the net gain — understand me clearly, the net gain — of a general and indiscriminate literacy really is. Our republicanism assumes that there is a net gain, and so indeed there may be, but just what is it? With all our devotion to ‘research,’ I do not think that our institutions of learning have ever entertained this question; yet I submit that it is worth attention.

In the eighteenth century, before Western society had been penetrated by the minor commonplaces of republicanism, Bishop Butler — almost a contemporary of Mr. Jefferson — remarked that the great majority of people are far more handy at passing things through their minds than they are at thinking about them; and therefore, considering the kind of thing they usually read, very little of their time is more idly spent than the time spent in reading. This fact is more noticeable now by far than it was in Bishop Butler’s day; and when set off against Amenia’s condition, it is bound to make one wonder what, precisely, this particular absolute of our republicanism amounts to. What, precisely, would the civilization of Amenia gain by a more general spread of literacy? What, precisely, would ours lose by a shrinkage of literacy to Amenia’s level? Does the indiscriminate spread of literacy encounter an unsuspected moral equivalent of Gresham’s law, that ‘bad money drives out good’? Does it encounter a moral equivalent of the law of diminishing returns?

The whole question is rather a pretty one, and as far as I know, our doctrinaire republicanism has hitherto had no better answer for it than the ‘one plain argument’ which Lord Peter applies to the doubts of his brothers, in the Tale of a Tub; and this, while in a sense perhaps effective, is hardly satisfactory.

III

One cannot go to and fro among the Amenians for any length of time without perceiving that their theory of business is wrong. Their idea is that supply should follow demand, and that the purchaser should seek the vendor; whereas the Right Idea, as we all know, is that supply should precede demand, and that the vendor should hound and bedevil the purchaser with all kinds of importunities, in order to keep demand going at its maximum speed. Thus the ideal development of a nation’s business is a joyous game of what in our youthful days we used to call ‘outrunning the constable’; and hence, to an American eye, nothing is more unnatural and shocking than the stringency with which Amenia’s business is kept down to the level of solid requirement. Hardly anything is done deliberately to increase consumption. The Amenians have only the vaguest and most uncertain notion of ‘creating a market,’or of splitting up purchasing power among a dozen or more competing varieties of what is actually the same thing. Yet, as I said, somehow or other business manages to do very well under these conditions, and it is perhaps equally remarkable that the visiting stranger who comes here quite unaccustomed to these peculiar ideas of business soon finds that he too is doing very well, even though he sees the line pretty sharply drawn between amenities, comforts, and conveniences, on the one hand, and mere gadgets on the other. Perhaps his contentment tends to show that human beings are highly adaptable and very easily corrupted. I argue nothing from it, but offer the fact merely as an object of interesting speculation.

The Amenians have not even learned the art of sophisticating their products. Their excellent staples, such as flour, olive oil, wine, come to you pretty much, one might say, as the Lord made them. Nor have these interesting people learned to sophisticate their workmanship. Amenia reckons its money in écus or escudos (pronounced scoots), worth at the moment about four cents apiece. You can buy an excellent suit of clothes, custom-made of domestic wool, for five or six hundred scoots, and the workmanship will be as good as the fabric; that suit will stand hard wear, and thrive on it. Shoes, too, that one buys handmade for something like two hundred scoots, show no sign of the familiar devices to ‘make people shoe-conscious,’ and thereby increase consumption; and the same may be said for the workmanship put into everything one uses, as far as my observation goes.

These practices seem to spring from the root idea that things should be made to use rather than to sell; a distinction first drawn in literature by Canning, I believe, in the rhymed fable of Hodge’s razor. Moreover, the Amenians do not appear to believe that the ‘pursuit of happiness’ contemplated by Mr. Jefferson’s great document means only the accumulation and use of purchasable things. Yet, in spite of this handicap, not only does business manage to drag on, but also most of the Amenians whom I saw seemed a great deal happier than under the circumstances they should be.

For example, I spent three weeks at one of Amenia’s principal health resorts, which is in a most beautiful mountainous region, with no settlement of any size near by. I never saw a place where one was thrown more heavily on one’s own resources. One could not buy anything more interesting than postage stamps. One could take delightful walks, and enjoy the air, birds, trees, and flowers, but there was no golf, tennis, squash, ping-pong, cinema, radio, or gramophone; the hotel had only an utterly impracticable billiard table and a decrepit upright piano of French make, much out of tune. There was not even the usual job lot of abandoned books lying about the lobby; not a book on the premises save what one brought for oneself.

The guests were a good cross-section of Amenian society. The four learned professions were there, some royal blood and hereditary high life, some arriviste or Brummagem high life, some industry and trade. The average age of the company ran unusually young, and on that account I was all the more curious to see what they would do with themselves. I soon remarked that no one was at all afraid of being left alone with his own thoughts; and this, if not absolutely Bad, is seriously irregular, for if a person is alone and thinking, he is not doing anything to increase consumption. There was no great ‘get-together’ movement organized to insure one against the chance of a moment’s solitude. No one seemed in such desperate need of company; on the contrary, the guests kept contentedly each one to himself pretty much all day, except for casual meetings. There was a very pleasant cordiality all round; if someone came along, well and good, but if not, well and good. No one was bored; with nothing whatever to ‘do,’ and no apparatus to help fight off boredom, everybody seemed quite unreasonably and perversely happy. Again, in the evenings I remarked how the whole company showed itself capable of immense enthusiasm over the simplest parlor games, peasant dances, peasant songs. Royalty, high life, and all grades of bourgeois rollicked through boisterous and exhausting dances with bursts of uproarious laughter, and seemed to be having the best time in the world, up to half-past ten or so, when all hands went quietly to bed.

St. John’s Eve came on while I was there, and the thing to do on St. John’s Eve, apparently, is to make brush bonfires of eucalyptus, rosemary, and other aromatic twigs, and leap across them through the flames. It seems a very moderate sort of diversion; I do not know what the significance of it is, nor could anyone tell me. However, everybody went in for it with immense eneigy and gusto, and got no end of fun out of it, though some of the ladies singed their legs a bit, and only missed setting their skirts afire by the closest kind of shave.

Three weeks of this sort of thing is bound to set one’s mind going over the assumption which, though tacit, amounts to an absolute — that happiness is built up of purchasable things. These people were not poor, yet they were not only capable of being happy as lords without a dollar’s worth of apparatus to help them, but also they did not appear to care whether they had any apparatus or not. The sum of their activities for three whole weeks did not increase consumption, or assist the development of mass-demand, to the amount of a punched nickel; yet they were quite happy. I could not help recalling the contrasting observation of de Stendhal, on a visit to the United States, where there is such an immense amount of the apparatus of happiness available everywhere, that ‘the springs of happiness seem to be dried up in this people,’ and the amazing statement of Edison, eighty years old, when a reporter asked him what human happiness consisted in, ‘I am not acquainted with anyone who is happy.’ Perhaps the visitor to Amenia might be a little put to it to say offhand precisely what human happiness does consist in, but the question is forced on him by such incidents as the ones I have just cited.

Indirectly, too, it is forced on him by observation of the instinct for the ne quid nimis, the instinct for the level of real requirement, that he sees coming out everywhere. In the matter of transportation, for instance, Amenia’s railways are cheap, safe, clean, and good, but that is all one can say, and all one is supposed to say; they do not pretend to lure you into taking them merely for the fun of the thing. The same is true of the motor roads; they are excellent, plenty good enough for anybody who has to use them, but they are not a standing temptation to the canine love of joy-riding. I remember once, when my charming friend Cassandre was standing up stoutly for France, she said there was great hope that the French would remain a civilized people, for they had not yet put down any cement roads; when a nation begins to lay cement roads, she said, it is gone, past any hope of reform or redemption. There would seem to be something in this from the Amenian point of view, which regards a road primarily as a thing of use rather than of pleasure. I took a two-hour walk between four and six o’clock of a beautiful afternoon, on a main road out of one of Amenia’s largest towns — her fourth in population, I believe — and in that time I saw only one motor vehicle, a truck.

In three months, during which I covered Amenia pretty thoroughly from end to end, I did not see a single tractor, reaper, or binder. I saw grain being reaped with sickles — only twice did I see scythes in use — and threshed with flails. I saw irrigation carried on in pre-Mosaic fashion by boy power on vertical treading wheels, and by donkey power on horizontal pumps. By all accepted rules, these practices are wrong and bad, yet really — really, now — just how dogmatic may one be about erecting their wrongness into an absolute? They got results — there is no question about that — and as to their effect on the sum of human happiness, it is difficult, very difficult indeed, to assure oneself one way or the other. On the evidence available, I am by no means sure that the net sum of happiness in Amenia would be increased by further mechanization of these processes. It might be; I am simply not sure. On the evidence attested by Edison and de Stendhal, I am not sure that the net sum of happiness in the United States would be reduced by demechanization to the level of Amenia. Again, it might be, but I am not sure; I can only say that I found the question a very powerful solvent of dogmatism, and as such I recommend it.

IV

Amenia’s population is most improperly distributed, for two thirds of it is rural. Agriculture is the country’s chief industry, and it is carried on mostly by small independent holdings. In urban growth, Amenia is far behind other European countries. One notes with surprise and disapproval that the huge industrial proletarian agglomerations which are perhaps the most conspicuous characteristic of true prosperity — though William Cobbett gruffly called them Hell-holes — do not exist. Amenia does relatively little in the manufacturing way, and hardly any processing. Almost one might think that the Physiocrats had come to life there, and were spreading their detestable doctrine of the produit net. It is here, perhaps, that one sees Amenia’s most egregious departure from the Right Way. Surely by this time Amenia should have learned that the chief end of man in his collective capacity is to industrialize himself as completely as possible, remove the land from competition with industry in the labor market in order to force down wages by creating a standing labor surplus, and then go in for a strong policy of economic nationalism; that is to say, a policy of selling everything one can to everybody, and not buying anything from anybody.

Amenia is well off for natural resources, especially in minerals and water power, but there is unanimous testimony that the Amenians are extremely lackadaisical about exploiting them; and if anything can be absolutely Wrong, this is. The Right Way with natural resources is to turn them over wholesale to private enterprise, to be looted as rapidly and thoroughly as possible. All precedents point to this as of the essence of prosperity. Yet it would appear that the Amenians are merely pecking at their minerals, and realizing only about 8 per cent of their available hydroelectric power. A Scots engineer who has been twenty years in Amenia told me that a couple of foreign prospectors had struck gold there lately, but nobody seemed to be properly worked up about it. The general sentiment was that the gold would stay put; it would not run away, and there was no occasion to get into a great sweat over digging it out. There seemed to be enough gold around already to go on with, so why not let it lie awhile? This Scotsman told me that the Amenians had always taken this easy attitude towards ‘development,’and hence they still have pretty nearly everything that nature gave them to start with.

This may be put down to lack of enterprise, and properly so in a sense, no doubt; it depends on what one’s notion of enterprise is. But there is a little more to it than that, I think. It may be, in part at least, the outcome of a sense of moderation, for the Amenian struck me as being by nature the most consistently temperate person I ever saw. Once led to look for this trait, I kept an eye out for it continually, and saw it exhibited everywhere, whether in small matters or great. To take one instance, rather unimportant in itself, but bearing on a question that has lately been a good deal discussed in the United States, a wine merchant who took me over his property showed me certain casks to which his workpeople were free to resort at any time, for as much as they cared to drink; and he told me that in the whole history of the firm, which ran considerably over a hundred years, there had never been a tipsy person on the premises.

With its colonial resources Amenia follows the same easy policy as with its domestic resources. Though one of the smallest countries of Europe, its colonial holdings are enormous, exceeded only by those of England and France. One is rather surprised by the fact that whereas about fifty-five million of the earth’s people speak French, about seventy million speak Amenian; and the Amenian tongue is perhaps the most widely diffused language in the world, except our own. Amenia’s colonies are very rich; a really capable and energetic administration, such as the English or French or old Leopold’s Belgians or we ourselves know how to furnish, could get simply no end of profit out of them.

Yet Amenia bears the white man’s burden very lightly. It gets some return out of its colonies, but nothing like what it might get. A young and progressive Amenian told me sadly that the colonies had for years been ‘virtually abandoned.’ Amenian colonial policy does not, in our expressive phrase, crowd the mourners. It seems to be not unlike the policy of ‘salutary neglect’ which farsighted Englishmen advocated in the days of Pitt. It neither exploits the native peoples in an economic way, nor does it essay to moralize either their private convictions and habits or their social customs and practices; it does not tell them what they should eat or drink, or wherewithal they should be clothed. Hence the colonies are contented under Amenian rule, I am told, and are not all the time raising disturbances and insurrections. ‘The Amenians don’t try to civilize their colonies,’ an Englishman said to me, with a touch of irony in his tone; ‘consequently they’ve still got them. We bossed ours around and tried to make them do our way, and so we lost them.’

All this again may be put down to mere shiftlessness, but once more I suggest that the innate sense of moderation may account for something; and perhaps the extraordinary spirit of tolerance and courtesy, for which, as I have said, the Amenians are internationally noted, also accounts for something. If one gets a moderate yield out of one’s colonies, well, enough is enough, and why jeopardize peace and good feeling by squeezing them? Meanwhile, if the heathen in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, why bother him about it? Why not look the other way and let him bow? If he would rather go naked than wear Amenian textiles, it is bad for business, no doubt, but why force him all at once to accept a strictly cash-registral evaluation of life and its amenities, even though it be orthodox? Why not break the glad news to him a little gently and give it a reasonable time to sink in? If a widow sets out with pomp and ceremony to burn herself alive on her late husband’s funeral pyre, why not conclude that there is probably something in it from her point of view, and let it go at that?

V

Amenia’s government is a simonpure military despotism; it governs by general orders. Yet up to date it has been extremely disinterested, able, and efficient; the best and cheapest government, I should say, that is to be found anywhere. Doubtless it will not remain so, for that would be contrary to all human experience with any kind of government, but such is its record at the moment. It went through the motions of submitting itself to a popular mandate the other day, and was approved by a large majority. I do not know how far this election was ‘ on the level,’ or how sincere the government was minded to be about abiding by it. One’s general knowledge of government makes one skeptical; Herbert Spencer cites with approval the generalization that ‘ wherever government is, there is villainy,’ and it seems to be, on the whole, a sound one. Nevertheless, for all I actually know or have heard, this election may have been honestly undertaken and scrupulously conducted.

I suppose the sight of a military dictatorship should have set me thinking of Spartacus, Masaniello, Jack Cade, Daniel Shays, the Whiskey Boys, and all the other great liberators, until I was ready to turn my back on Amenia in disgust. What it did instead, however, was to set me thinking about some of the absolutes of eighteenth-century political theory, and wondering what basis they have in actual human experience. Representative government; the parliamentary system; universal suffrage; ‘checks and balances’; a responsible executive — Amenia has thrown all these overboard, and yet is governed well and cheaply. The question is not whether other countries would do well to throw them overboard, but whether the quality of government is as much a matter of systems and institutions as we think it is. Rival systems are now everywhere competing for the world’s attention to the color of their several shirts — well, just what is the necessary and inevitable effect of any system upon the quality of government?

America had great students of government in its early days; it is a pity that they are now so much more read about than read. One of them was William Penn. The sight of Amenia’s contribution to the great current rivalry of systems brought to my mind this paragraph from the preface which Penn wrote for Pennsylvania’s original ‘ frame of government’: —

When all is said, there is hardly any frame of government so ill designed by its first founders that in good hands would not do well enough; and story tells us the best, in ill ones, can do nothing that is great or good. . . . Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them; and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men than men upon governments.

Against its background of competing systems, moreover, Amenia’s autocracy suggests what is no doubt the most pressing public question of our time, namely: whether eighteenth-century republican doctrine has not put upon the mass-man a burden greater than he can bear. Heretofore the question has not been so much with the mass-man’s actual capacity as with the advisability, for purely collateral reasons, of letting him have anything like a free hand in shaping social and political institutions. The rapid spread of republicanism, however, has given us of the present day an uncommonly good chance to appraise the type of social ideal towards which the enfranchised massman chooses to move. Therefore, quite aside from all considerations of sincerity, integrity, and good will, the question now is whether the mass-man is able, or will ever be able, to direct the development of society in accordance with his own ultimate best interest. Has he the force of intellect to perceive clearly what that interest is, and the force of character to pursue it steadfastly? Do his present performances encourage the belief that he will ever have them? Has republican doctrine, in short, any basis either in actual experience or in reasonable hope?

We have, too, an uncommonly good chance to observe the kind of leadership which at present succeeds in imposing itself on the mass-man’s allegiance, and to remark its conformity to a historical type. At almost every turn of the world’s affairs nowadays, one is reminded of the French revolutionist’s saying, ‘I must follow the mob, because I lead them.’ An anonymous book called An Englishman in Paris was published in this country about sixty years ago; and let me say in parenthesis that the strongest possible pressure should be put on its publishers to reissue it, for it is in all respects a model of what a volume of memoirs ought to be. The author says he saw two days of the revolution that ousted the July Monarchy, and never again did he open a book purporting to deal with any of the French revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century; it was enough for him to know that they were invariably led by men in want of five or ten thousand a year. The same movements might have taken place under other leaders, no doubt, but if so, those leaders would have been men who were equally in want of five or ten thousand a year. He goes on to give it as his firm belief that if Louis Napoléon had not been as poor as he was, there would have been no Second Empire; that if the Orléans family had not been as rich as they were, there would have been no Third Republic; that if the Second Empire had lasted a year longer, white-hot republican spirits like Gambetta and Émile Ollivier would have been found contentedly holding jobs under it; and he cites the saying of a witty and experienced friend, that ‘political opinion in France is based on the fact that the louis d’or is worth seven times as much as the three-franc écu.’

Finally, aside from the light it throws on the possible unsoundness of republican doctrine and the possibly dubious character of republican massleadership, Amenia’s condition makes one wonder whether political nationalism has not gone over the margin of diminishing returns. Economic nationalism seems clearly to have done so; may not its political counterpart have done so too? Amenia is small and isolated, and it is possible for a one-man government to maintain political nationalism there at something like reasonable expense. Elsewhere, however, people are uneasy about the rapidly growing cost of Stateism, centralization, and bureaucracy, and well they may be; in the United States, for example, people are extremely uneasy about it, and with reason. Is it not possible that political nationalism, like a business which is economically overgrown, has begun to cost more than it takes in? Or, to cite the comparison attributed to Lincoln, has it become like the tugboat that had a four-foot boiler and a six-foot whistle? When the whistle blew, the boat stopped running. Is political nationalism any longer commercially practicable (if I may so put it) over an area of much more than township size? It is an interesting question and a serious one; one which, from present appearances, the larger and more highly integrated political units will soon be obliged by circumstances to entertain.

VI

Probably Amenia will not long remain as I found it, for there are the beginnings of a lively onset towards ‘development’ and ‘progress.’ I heard these words often; they seemed to mean a closer approach to the condition of other nations. Well, improvement is always possible, and the study of other people’s ways is always useful. ‘They measuring themselves by themselves,’ the Apostle says, ‘and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.’ One energetic young Amenian assured me that ‘ we shall be a civilized country in ten years.’

A visiting stranger may not presume to offer advice to his hosts, but he may perhaps be permitted to observe in a general way that when one is examining other countries one is likely to find that the most valuable testimony they bear to the nature of true civilization is often of a negative kind; and that this is particularly true of civilization’s higher and finer concerns. A stranger, too, may without impropriety, I think, venture in all gratitude to express the hope that the ‘civilized’ Amenia of ten years hence will be in all respects as charming and captivating to the cultivated spirit, as interesting and thought-provoking, as the Amenia which I have had the good fortune to visit.