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