Ten years later
there is a twenty-line obituary in the London papers, and the reader is
paralyzed by the splendors of a career which he is not sure that he had
ever heard of before. But meanwhile he has learned all about the
continental princelets and dukelets.
The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from
his own. When they are mentioned in his presence one or two facts and
maybe a couple of names rise like torches in his mind, lighting up an
inch or two of it and leaving the rest all dark. The mention of Egypt
suggests some Biblical facts and the Pyramids-nothing more. The mention
of South Africa suggests Kimberly and the diamonds and there an end.
Formerly the mention, to a Hindoo, of America suggested a name--George
Washington--with that his familiarity with our country was exhausted.
Latterly his familiarity with it has doubled in bulk; so that when
America is mentioned now, two torches flare up in the dark caverns of his
mind and he says, "Ah, the country of the great man Washington; and of
the Holy City--Chicago." For he knows about the Congress of Religion, and
this has enabled him to get an erroneous impression of Chicago.
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