ome extent the American, has remained alien to
England, largely because he does not truly realise that the Englishman
loves England, still less can he really imagine why the Englishman loves
England. That is why I insist on the stupidity of ignoring and insulting
the opinions of those few Virginians and other Southerners who really
have some inherited notion of why Englishmen love England; and even love
it in something of the same fashion themselves. Politicians who do not
know the English spirit when they see it at home, cannot of course be
expected to recognise it abroad. Publicists are eloquently praising
Abraham Lincoln, for all the wrong reasons; but fundamentally for that
worst and vilest of all reasons--that he succeeded. None of them seems
to have the least notion of how to look for England in England; and they
would see something fantastic in the figure of a traveller who found it
elsewhere, or anywhere but in New England. And it is well, perhaps, that
they have not yet found England where it is hidden in England; for if
they found it, they would kill it.

All I am concerned to consider here is the inevitable failure of this
sort of Anglo-American propaganda to create a friendship. To praise
Lincoln as an Englishman is about as appropriate as if we were praising
Lincoln as an English town. We are talking about something totally
different. And indeed the whole conversation is rather like some such
cross-purposes about some such word as 'Lincoln'; in which one party
should be talking about the President and the other about the cathedral.
It is like some wild bewilderment in a farce, with one man wondering how
a President could have a church-spire, and the other wondering how a
church could have a chin-beard. And the moral is the moral on which I
would insist everywhere in this book; that the remedy is to be found in
disentangling the two and not in entangling them further. You could not
produce a democrat of the logical type of Lincoln merely out of the
moral materials that now make up an English cathedral town, like that on
which Old Tom of Lincoln looks down. But on the other hand, it is quite
certain that a hundred Abraham Lincolns, working for a hundred years,
could not build Lincoln Cathedral. And the farcical allegory of an
attempt to make Old Tom and Old Abe embrace to the glory of the
illogical Anglo-Saxon language is but a symbol of something that is
always being attempted, and always attempted in vain. I