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cuously a national trait but is not especially noticeable in the typical New Yorker) becomes so familiar that it ceases to be worth comment. I have seen among my own friends journalists become hotel managers, advertising solicitors turn to "real estate agents," merchants translated straight into responsible positions in the executive departments of railway companies, and railway men become merchants and bankers, editors change into engineers and engineers into editors, and lawyers into anything from ambassadors to hotel clerks. I am not now speaking in praise of these conditions or of the results in individual cases. The point to be noticed is that the people among whom these conditions prevail must in the long run develop into a people of extraordinary resourcefulness and versatility. And in the individual cases, the results are not nearly as deplorable as an Englishman might suppose or as they would be if the raw material consisted of home-staying Englishmen. The trait however is, as has been said, essentially an Anglo-Saxon trait--an English trait--and the colonial Englishman develops the same qualities in a not incomparable degree. The Canadian and the New Zealander acquire a like unconquerable soul, but the Englishman at home is not much impressed thereby, chiefly for the reason that he is almost as ignorant of the Canadian and the New Zealander as he is of the American, and with the same benevolent ignorance. In the individual citizen of the United States, he recognises the quality in a vague way. "Yankee ingenuity" is familiar to him and he is interested in, and amused at, the imperturbability with which the individual American--and especially the individual American woman--confronts and rises at least equal to whatever new and unheard of conditions he (or she) may find himself (or herself) placed among in England. But just as the American will not from the likability and kindliness of individual Englishmen draw any general inference as to the likability and kindliness of the nation, so the Englishman or other European rarely gives to these occasional attributes, which he sees reproduced again and again in particular Americans, their proper value as the manifestations of a national trait of the first importance, a trait which makes the people unquestionably formidable as competitors in peace and would make them correspondingly formidable as antagonists in war. The trait is, as I have said, perhaps the most pre
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