The great room at St. James’s Hall had been secured for the occasion, and Lord Drummond, the Minister of State in foreign affairs, had been induced to take the chair.  In these days our governments are very anxious to be civil to foreigners, and there is nothing that a robust Secretary of State will not do for them.  On the platform there were many members of both Houses of Parliament, and almost everybody connected with the Foreign Office.  Every ticket had been taken for weeks since.  The front benches were filled with the wives and daughters of those on the platform, and back behind, into the distant spaces in which seeing was difficult and hearing impossible, the crowd was gathered at 2s. 6d. a head, all of which was going to some great British charity.  From half-past seven to eight Piccadilly and Regent Street were crammed, and when the Senator came himself with his chairman he could hardly make his way in at the doors.  A great treat was expected, but there was among the officers of police some who thought that a portion of the audience would not bear quietly the hard things that would be said, and that there was an uncanny gathering of roughs about the street, who were not prepared to be on their best behaviour when they should be told that old England was being abused.

Lord Drummond opened the proceedings by telling the audience, in a voice clearly audible to the reporters and the first half-dozen benches, that they had come there to hear what a well-informed and distinguished foreigner thought of their country.  They would not, he was sure, expect to be flattered.  Than flattery nothing was more useless or ignoble.  This gentleman, coming from a new country, in which tradition was of no avail, and on which the customs of former centuries had had no opportunities to engraft themselves, had seen many things here which, in his eyes, could not justify themselves by reason.  Lord Drummond was a little too prolix for a chairman, and at last concluded by expressing “his conviction that his countrymen would listen to the distinguished Senator with that courtesy which was due to a foreigner and due also to the great and brotherly nation from which he had come.”

Then the Senator rose, and the clapping of hands and kicking of heels was most satisfactory.  There was at any rate no prejudice at the onset.  “English Ladies and Gentlemen,” he said, “I am in the unenviable position of having to say hard things to you for about an hour and a half together, if I do not drive you from your seats before my lecture is done.  And this is the more the pity because I could talk to you for three hours about your country and not say an unpleasant word.  His Lordship has told you that flattery is not my purpose.  Neither is praise, which would not be flattery.  Why should I collect three or four thousand people here to tell them of virtues the consciousness of which is the inheritance of each of them?  You are brave and generous,—­and you are lovely