profound and friendly observers like Mr. Bryce,
have had, and will continue to have, their say.

The reader who tries to take all this testimony at its face value, and
to reconcile its contradictions, will be a candidate for the insane
asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to be neglected and some of it
is far too important to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after long
familiarity with these foreign opinions of America, has gathered some
of the most representative of them into a delightful and stimulating
volume entitled _As Others See Us_. There one may find examples of what
the foreigner has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his sojourn in
America, and what he has said about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too
charitable to our visitors to quote the most fantastic and highly
colored of their observations; but what remains is sufficiently
bizarre.

The real service of such a volume is to train us in discounting the
remarks made about us in a particular period like the
eighteen-thirties, or from observations made in a special place, like
Newport, or under special circumstances, like a Bishop's private car.
It helps us to make allowances for the inevitable angle of nationality,
the equally inevitable personal equation. A recent ambitious book on
America, by a Washington journalist of long residence here, although of
foreign birth, declares that "the chief trait of the American people is
the love of gain and the desire of wealth acquired through commerce."
That is the opinion of an expert observer, who has had extraordinary
chances for seeing precisely what he has seen. I think it,
notwithstanding, a preposterous opinion, fully as preposterous as
Professor Muensterberg's notion that America has latterly grown more
monarchical in its tendencies,--but I must remember that, in my own
case, as in that of the journalist under consideration, there are
allowances to be made for race, and training, and natural idiosyncracy
of vision.

The native American, it may be well to remember, is something of an
observer himself. If his observations upon the characteristics of his
countrymen are less piquant than the foreigner's, it is chiefly
because the American writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he
talks. But incisive native writing about American traits is not
lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York
_Nation_ every week for the past forty years, he has had an
extraordinary "moving pictu