habitants of China would agree
with the Chinese Ambassador in a preference for dining at the Savoy
rather than the Ritz. There are millions and millions of people living
in those great central plains of the North American Continent of whom
it would be nearer the truth to say that they have never heard of
England, or of Ireland either, than to say that their first emotional
movement is a desire to come to the rescue of either of them. It is
perfectly true that the more monomaniac sort of Sinn Feiner might
sometimes irritate this innocent and isolated American spirit by being
pro-Irish. It is equally true that a traditional Bostonian or Virginian
might irritate it by being pro-English. The only difference is that
large numbers of pure Irishmen are scattered in those far places, and
large numbers of pure Englishmen are not. But it is truest of all to say
that neither England nor Ireland so much as crosses the mind of most of
them once in six months. Painting up large notices of 'Watch Us Grow,'
making money by farming with machinery, together with an occasional
hold-up with six-shooters and photographs of a beautiful murderess or
divorcee, fill up the round of their good and happy lives, and fleet the
time carelessly as in the golden age.

But putting aside all this vast and distant democracy, which is the real
'majority of Americans,' and confining ourselves to that older culture
on the eastern coast which the critics probably had in mind, we shall
find the case more comforting but not to be covered with cheap and false
comfort. Now it is perfectly true that any Englishman coming to this
eastern coast, as I did, finds himself not only most warmly welcomed as
a guest, but most cordially complimented as an Englishman. Men recall
with pride the branches of their family that belong to England or the
English counties where they were rooted; and there are enthusiasms for
English literature and history which are as spontaneous as patriotism
itself. Something of this may be put down to a certain promptitude and
flexibility in all American kindness, which is never sufficiently stodgy
to be called good nature. The Englishman does sometimes wonder whether
if he had been a Russian, his hosts would not have remembered remote
Russian aunts and uncles and disinterred a Muscovite great-grandmother;
or whether if he had come from Iceland, they would not have known as
much about Icelandic sagas and been as sympathetic about the absence of