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III: a word more about America.
when I was at
Chicago last year, I was asked whether Lord Coleridge would not write a book about
America.
I ventured to answer confidently for him that he would do nothing of the kind.
Not at
Chicago only, but almost wherever I went, I was asked whether I myself did not intend to write a book about
America.
For oneself one can answer yet more confidently than for one's friends, and I always replied that most assuredly I had no such intention.
To write a book about
America, on the strength of having made merely such a tour there as mine was, and with no fuller equipment of preparatory studies and of local observations than I possess, would seem to me an impertinence.
It is now a long while since I read
M. de Tocqueville's famous work on Democracy in
America.
I have the highest respect for
M. de Tocqueville; but my remembrance of his book is that it deals too much in abstractions for my