Excerpt from Y. America's Peril The Real America has been suggested to me as a title for this book, but I wrote it under the name of Y. And I shall let it remain at that - perhaps with an alias. And why you will probably ask, and I, who wish you to read and be interested in what follows, must explain. This book purports to give some account of the American as he impressed me as he unfortunately impresses many. The American is always striving for records and he prides himself, amongst many other things, on his spasmodic flashes of brilliant brevity, for on general occasions he can be as loquacious and diffuse as any other man. He calls the Elevated Railway The L.' He asked me what I thought of it as a saving of time. Resist ing a natural desire to pun without the assistance of the aspirate, I agreed with him that it was very short and convenient, and he seemed pleased. This desire for records is rather catching, and in dealing with the American it seemed to me only right to give him a record title. It may not hold the record for brevity, but it will certainly save me much writing, and it must at least be a tie. Y. Stands for Yankee, and although I know I shall be told that the genus Yankee has his habitat in New England, to the great majority of readers Yankee is synonymous with American, and I shall so use it personally or collectively, as may be necessary, throughout these pages. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.