less degree, peculiarly ignorant of other
peoples and of the ways of the world.

This has been unfortunate, so far as their judgment of England is
concerned, in two ways,--first, as has already been said, because they
have had no opportunity of measuring Great Britain against other
nations, so that one and all are equally foreign, and second and more
positively, in the general misconception in the American mind as to the
character and aims of the British Empire and the temper of British rule.
From the same authorities, the popular histories and school manuals, as
supplied the American people for so long with their ideas of the conduct
of the British troops in the Revolutionary War, they also learned of
India and the British; and the one fact which every American, twenty
years ago, knew about British India was that the English blew Sepoys
from the mouths of cannon. Every American youth saw in his school
history a picture of the thing being done. It helped to point the moral
of British brutalities in the War of Independence and it was beaten into
the plastic young minds until an impression was made which was never
effaced. Of late years not a few Americans have arisen to tell the
people something of the truth about British rule in India--of its
uprightness, its beneficence, its tolerance,--but it will be a
generation yet before the people as a whole has any approximate
conception of the facts.

It was in no way to the discredit of the American people--and enormously
to their advantage--that they were for so long ignorant of the world.
How should they have been otherwise when separated from that world by
three thousand miles of ocean? They had, moreover, in the problems
connected with the establishment of their own government, and the
expansion of that government across the continent, enough to occupy
their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived
self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts
of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in
curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a
nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a
provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the
cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its
own from the mere fact that it was continent-wide.

The Spanish-American War brought the people suddenly into contact with
the things of Europe and widened the