Icelandic snakes. But with a fair review of the proportions of the case
he will dismiss this conjecture, and come to the conclusion that a
number of educated Americans are very warmly and sincerely sympathetic
with England.

What I began to feel, with a certain creeping chill, was that they were
only too sympathetic with England. The word sympathetic has sometimes
rather a double sense. The impression I received was that all these
chivalrous Southerners and men mellow with Bostonian memories were
_rallying_ to England. They were on the defensive; and it was poor old
England that they were defending. Their attitude implied that somebody
or something was leaving her undefended, or finding her indefensible.
The burden of that hearty chorus was that England was not so black as
she was painted; it seemed clear that somewhere or other she was being
painted pretty black. But there was something else that made me
uncomfortable; it was not only the sense of being somewhat boisterously
forgiven; it was also something involving questions of power as well as
morality. Then it seemed to me that a new sensation turned me hot and
cold; and I felt something I have never before felt in a foreign land.
Never had my father or my grandfather known that sensation; never during
the great and complex and perhaps perilous expansion of our power and
commerce in the last hundred years had an Englishman heard exactly that
note in a human voice. England was being _pitied_. I, as an Englishman,
was not only being pardoned but pitied. My country was beginning to be
an object of compassion, like Poland or Spain. My first emotion, full of
the mood and movement of a hundred years, was one of furious anger. But
the anger has given place to anxiety; and the anxiety is not yet at an
end.

It is not my business here to expound my view of English politics, still
less of European politics or the politics of the world; but to put down
a few impressions of American travel. On many points of European
politics the impression will be purely negative; I am sure that most
Americans have no notion of the position of France or the position of
Poland. But if English readers want the truth, I am sure this is the
truth about their notion of the position of England. They are wondering,
or those who are watching are wondering, whether the term of her success
is come and she is going down the dark road after Prussia. Many are
sorry if this is so; some are glad if it is so