DEAR H.S.H.: 

. . .  You know there’s been much discussion of the decadence of the English people.  I don’t believe a word of it.  They have an awful slum, I hear, as everybody knows, and they have an idle class.  Worse, from an equal-opportunity point-of-view, they have a very large servant-class, and a large class that depends on the nobility and the rich.  All these are economic and social drawbacks.  But they have always had all these—­except that the slum has become larger in modern years.  And I don’t see or find any reason to believe in the theory of decadence.  The world never saw a finer lot of men than the best of their ruling class.  You may search the world and you may search history for finer men than Lord Morley, Sir Edward Grey, Mr. Harcourt, and other members of the present Cabinet.  And I meet such men everywhere—­gently bred, high-minded, physically fit, intellectually cultivated, patriotic.  If the devotion to old forms and the inertia which makes any change almost impossible strike an American as out-of-date, you must remember that in the grand old times of England, they had all these things and had them worse than they are now.  I can’t see that the race is breaking down or giving out.  Consider how their political morals have been pulled up since the days of the rotten boroughs; consider how their court-life is now high and decent, and think what it once was.  British trade is larger this year than it ever was, Englishmen are richer then they ever were and more of them are rich.  They write and speak and play cricket, and govern, and fight as well as they have ever done—­excepting, of course, the writing of Shakespeare.

Another conclusion that is confirmed the more you see of English life is their high art of living.  When they make their money, they stop money-making and cultivate their minds and their gardens and entertain their friends and do all the high arts of living—­to perfection.  Three days ago a retired soldier gave a garden-party in my honour, twenty-five miles out of London.  There was his historic house, a part of it 500 years old; there were his ten acres of garden, his lawn, his trees; and they walk with you over it all; they sit out-of-doors; they serve tea; they take life rationally; they talk pleasantly (not jocularly, nor story-telling); they abhor the smart in talk or in conduct; they have gentleness, cultivation, the best manners in the world; and they are genuine.  The hostess has me take a basket and go with her while she cuts it full of flowers for us to bring home; and, as we walk, she tells the story of the place.  She is a tenant-for-life; it is entailed.  Her husband was wounded in South Africa.  Her heir is her nephew.  The home, of course, will remain in the family forever.  No, they don’t go to London much in recent years:  why should they?  But they travel a month or more.  They give three big tea-parties—­one when the rhododendrons bloom and the others at stated