y a
very reasonable and appropriate statement. For bears and buffaloes are
wild and rough and in that sense free; while plumed knights do not throw
their lances about like the assegais of Zulus. And the defaulting
post-master was at least as good a person to praise in such a fashion as
James G. Blaine of the Little Rock Railway. But anybody who had treated
Ingersoll or Blaine merely as a fool and a figure of fun would have very
rapidly found out his mistake. But Dickens did not know Brick or Chollop
long enough to find out his mistake. It need not be denied that, even
after a full understanding, he might still have found things to smile at
or to criticise. I do not insist on his admitting that Hannibal Chollop
was as great a hero as Hannibal, or that Elijah Pogram was as true a
prophet as Elijah. But I do say very seriously that they had something
about their atmosphere and situation that made possible a sort of
heroism and even a sort of prophecy that were really less natural at
that period in that Merry England whose comedy and common sense we sum
up under the name of Dickens. When we joke about the name of Hannibal
Chollop, we might remember of what nation was the general who dismissed
his defeated soldiers at Appomatox with words which the historian has
justly declared to be worthy of Hannibal: 'We have fought through this
war together. I have done my best for you.' It is not fair to forget
Jefferson, or even Jefferson Davis, entirely in favour of Jefferson
Brick.

For all these three things, good, bad, and indifferent, go together to
form something that Dickens missed, merely because the England of his
time most disastrously missed it. In this case, as in every case, the
only way to measure justly the excess of a foreign country is to measure
the defect of our own country. For in this matter the human mind is the
victim of a curious little unconscious trick, the cause of nearly all
international dislikes. A man treats his own faults as original sin and
supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes
that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple
foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realise
that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his
vices as well as his virtues. His own faults are things with which he is
so much at home that he at once forgets and assumes them abroad. He is
so faintly conscious of them in himself that he