it in their every discussion of him, particularly when they discuss him
in camera. It is the secret but general view of the French, we are
informed by confidential agents, that he is a fellow of loose life and
not to be trusted with either a wine-pot, a virgin or a domestic
fowl--an absurdly inaccurate generalization from the aberrations of
soldiers in a far land, cut off from the moral repressions that lie upon
them and colour all their acts at home. It is the view of the English,
so we hear upon equally reliable authority, that he is an earnest but
extremely inefficient oaf, incapable of either the finer technic of war
or of its machine-like discipline--another thumping error, for the
American is actually extraordinarily adept and ingenious in the very
arts that modern war chiefly makes use of, and there is, since the
revolt of the Prussian, no other such rigidly regimented man in the
world. He has, indeed, reached such a pass in the latter department that
it has become almost impossible for him to think of himself save as an
obedient member of some vast, powerful and unintelligibly despotic
organization--a church, a trades-union, a political party, a tin-pot
fraternal order, or what not--, and often he is a member of more than
one, and impartially faithful to all. Moreover, as we have seen, he
lives under laws which dictate almost every detail of his public and
private conduct, and punish every sign of bad discipline with the most
appalling rigour; and these laws are enforced by police who supply the
chance gaps in them extempore, and exercise that authority in the best
manner of prison guards, animal trainers and drill sergeants.

The English and the French, beside these special errors, have a full
share in an error that is also embraced by practically every other
foreign people. This is the error of assuming, almost as an axiom beyond
question, that the Americans are a sordid, money-grubbing people, with
no thought above the dollar. You will find it prevailing everywhere on
the Continent of Europe. To the German the United States is Dollarica,
and the salient American personality, next to the policeman who takes
bribes and the snuffling moralist in office, is the Dollarprinzessin. To
the Italian the country is a sort of savage wilderness in which
everything else, from religion to beauty and from decent repose to
human life, is sacrificed to profit. Italians cross the ocean in much
the same spirit that our runaway