I like these people (most of ’em) immensely.  They are very genuine and frank, good fighters and folk of our own sort—­after you come to know them.  At first they have no manners and don’t know what to do.  But they warm up to you later.  They have abundant wit, but much less humour than we.  And they know how to live.

Except that part of life which is ministered to in mechanical ways, they resist conveniences.  They don’t really like bathrooms yet.  They prefer great tin tubs, and they use bowls and pitchers when a bathroom is next door.  The telephone—­Lord deliver us!—­I’ve given it up.  They know nothing about it. (It is a government concern, but so is the telegraph and the post-office, and they are remarkably good and swift.) You can’t buy a newspaper on the street, except in the afternoon.  Cigar-stores are as scarce as hen’s teeth.  Barber-shops are all “hairdressers”—­dirty and wretched beyond description.  You can’t get a decent pen; their newspapers are as big as tablecloths.  In this aquarium in which we live (it rains every day) they have only three vegetables and two of them are cabbages.  They grow all kinds of fruit in hothouses, and (I can’t explain this) good land in admirable cultivation thirty miles from London sells for about half what good corn land in Iowa brings.  Lloyd George has scared the land-owners to death.

Party politics runs so high that many Tories will not invite Liberals to dinner.  They are almost at the point of civil war.  I asked the Prime Minister the other day how he was going to prevent war.  He didn’t give any clear answer.  During this recess of Parliament, though there’s no election pending, all the Cabinet are all the time going about making speeches on Ireland.  They talk to me about it.

     “What would you do?”

     “Send ’em all to the United States,” say I.

     “No, no.”

     They have had the Irish question three hundred years and they
     wouldn’t be happy without it.  One old Tory talked me deaf abusing
     the Liberal Government.

     “You do this way in the United States—­hate one another, don’t
     you?”

     “No,” said I, “we live like angels in perfect harmony except a few
     weeks before election.”

     “The devil you do!  You don’t hate one another?  What do you do for
     enemies?  I couldn’t get along without enemies to swear at.”

If you think it’s all play, you fool yourself; I mean this job.  There’s no end of the work.  It consists of these parts:  Receiving people for two hours every day, some on some sort of business, some merely “to pay respects,” attending to a large (and exceedingly miscellaneous) mail; going to the Foreign Office on all sorts of errands; looking up the oddest assortment of information that you ever heard of; making reports to Washington on all sorts of things;