Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/258

 wish he would leave these gentry alone, and write for us again with the old shining wit, the old laughter, the old mockery, which was like a dash of salt on the flavourless porridge of life.

Twenty-one years ago Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson published an American edition of the "Letters from a Chinese Official," a species of sermon, it is true, but preached delicately and understandingly, in suave and gleaming sentences, its burden of thought half veiled by the graceful lightness of its speech. American readers took that book to heart. We could not make over the United States into a second China. "Some god this severance rules." But we accepted in the spirit of reason a series of criticisms which were reasonably conveyed to our intelligence, and a great deal of good they did us.

Much has happened in twenty-one years, and few of us are so light