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Jones? 311 [symbol] Wherever you may be in the United States you will not find it difficult to obtain letters of introduction to any town in the unclear. If an American traveller were to ask an English friend at Ipswich for introductions to Exeter, Galway?, Dundee, Carlisle, & Dover, his friend wd not find it easy to comply with the request. But if the position of the two were reversed, & the Englishman were travelling in America, & were to ask his American friend for introductions to half a dozen places in the States, far more distant from each other than the places I have mentioned in the United Kingdom, the American wd either be able to give them himself, or wd easily find friends who could. This implies a vast difference in our social systems. Ours is a system which isolates, theirs is a system which brings everybody in contact with everybody. One is astonished at the number of acquaintances an American has. For one acquaintance an English Gentleman has an American Gentleman will probably have fifty, or a hundred. I will repeat here what an American Gentleman at Washington said to me on the subject of Letters of Introduction. "We Americans," he remarked, "are a busy people. We have not time to attend to general "introductions. We gladly do what we can, but we cannot do what cost time. Still, "however, if the letter is brought to us by one who has ideas, & who has the "power of making us feel the magnetism of his ideas, we will give to him "our time, & every thing we have to give"