Your United States eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 168 pages of information about Your United States.

Your United States eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 168 pages of information about Your United States.
not even know enough to be fully aware of my own ignorance.  Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection and rashness of this book.  When I regard the map and see the trifling extent of the ground that I covered—­a scrap tucked away in the northeast corner of the vast multi-colored territory—­I marvel at the assurance I displayed in choosing my title.  Indeed, I have yet to see your United States.  Any Englishman visiting the country for the second time, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world and enter by San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver before Chicago.  His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner, and the process would in various ways be salutary.  It is a nice question how many of the opinions formed on the first visit—­and especially the most convinced and positive opinions—­would survive the ordeal of the second.

As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not prepared ultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward.  There is naught in them which is not liable to be recanted.  The one possible justification of them is that they offer to the reader the one thing that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed observer could not offer—­namely, an immediate account (as accurate as I could make it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on a mind receptive and unprejudiced.  The greatest social historian, the most conscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that first impact after further intercourse had scattered them.

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Your United States from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.