ars
his coat-sleeves longer than our tailor cuts ours, or who eats his
soup with a noise, or who has damp hands, or talks through his nose,
who irritates us and makes us wish occasionally for the unlimited
club-using freedom of the stone age. It is your first cousin with
incurable catarrh, and a slender income who is too much with you, and
who spoils your temper, not the anarchist orator who threatens your
property and almost your life.

"What do these Germans want?" asked a distinguished cabinet minister
of me. "They want consideration," I replied, "which is the most
difficult thing in the world for the Englishman to offer anybody."
"But, you don't mean to say," he continued, "that they really want to
cut our throats on account of our bad manners?" I cannot phrase it
better, nor can I give a more illuminating illustration of the
misunderstanding. That is exactly the reason, and the paramount
reason, why nations and why individuals attempt to cut one another's
throats. Whatever the fundamental differences may have been that have
led to war between nations, the tiny spark that started the explosion
has always been some phase of rudeness or bad manners.

Counting my school-days, I can remember about a dozen personal
conflicts in which I have engaged, with pardonable pleasure. Not one
of them was a question of territory, or religious difference, or of
racial hatred; indeed, the last one was due to being shouldered in the
street when my equanimity was already disturbed by a lingering
recovery from a feverish cold.

It is, after all, the little differences that count. If politically
and socially Germany were a little more sure of herself, if she were
not ever omnia tuta timens Dido; and if England were not as ever quite
so sure of herself, I believe intercourse between them would be less
strained.

"The little gnat-like buzzings shrill,
The hurdy-gurdies of the street.
The common curses of the will--
These wrap the cerements round our feet."

The smothered voice, the tepid manner, the affected and hesitating
under-statement, of a certain middlish class of English men and women,
and, alas, their American imitators, who are striving toward their
comical interpretation of the Vere de Vere manner, are the promoters
of guffaws in private, and uneasiness in public, between nations, to a
far greater extent than the bold individualist, whose voice and
manners, good or bad, are all his own. It is these small attrition