My Impressions of America

Emma Alice Margaret Asquith, Countess of Oxford and Asquith, born Emma Alice Margaret Tennan on February 2, 1864 in Peeblesshire and died on July 28, 1945 in London, known as Margot Asquith, is an Anglo-Scottish socialite Diarist. She was known for her witticisms. Extract: MARGOT NOT A NATURAL TOURIST; LACKS CURIOSITY-HEADLINES IN LONDON COMPARED WITH HEADLINES IN NEW YORK-AMERICAN WOMEN WORLDLY-AMERICAN MEN THE GENUINE ARTICLE I MOTORED to Southampton on Saturday, the 21st of January, this year, and after saying good-bye to my husband and my son, retired to my berth on the Carmania. I am a bad traveller, and had been laid up with a sort of influenza until the day before I left London. Kindly press people tempted me to confide in them on the ship. They asked me if I would be back in time for Princess Mary's wedding; where I was going when I arrived in America, and if I looked forward to my trip. I sometimes wonder what questions I would put if I were obliged to interview a traveller. I would ask with reluctance where they were going, but never what they had seen, because I know I could not listen to their answers. Everyone knows what you are likely to see if you go for any length of time to London, Rome, Athens or the United States; and is there a person living whose impressions you would care to hear either upon the Coliseum, Niagara Falls, or any other of the great works of art or of nature? On such subjects the remarks of the cleverest and stupidest are equally inadequate and the superb vocabulary of a Ruskin will probably not be more illuminating than what the school-boy writes in the Visitors' Book at Niagara, "Uncle and all very much pleased." I am inclined to think it is a mild form of vanity that makes a certain type of rich person travel every year. I have heard these say that for all the interest we who are left behind take in what they have seen and heard, they might as well have remained at Brighton. Nevertheless, the world is full of tourists; and there are a number of people who like to pick up pieces of unimportant information without effort. She married in 1894 with Herbert Henry Asquith, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.