e
had not gone to Canada in 1881 or thereabouts, he would still be plain
"Bill" Van Horne and just as wonderful a man as he is to-day. On the
other hand if fortune had happened to place Mr. James J. Hill a little
farther north--in Winnipeg instead of in St. Paul--it is just as certain
that he would to-day be Lord Manitoba (or some such title) as that his
early associates George Stephen and Donald Smith are now Lord Mount
Stephen and Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal. But somehow--it were
useless to deny it--Englishmen would think of him as quite a different
man. Mr. C. M. Hays in Montreal is still what he was in St.
Louis--Charlie Hays. He will not change his nature when he becomes Lord
Muskoka.

And what is true of a few individuals is no less true all over the
United States. In the immediate neighbourhood of Mr. Hill, there should
be at least one peerage in the Washburn family and a couple of
baronetcies among the Pillsburys. Chicago would have of course one Duke
in the head of the McCormick family, Mr. Marshall Field would have died
Earl Dearborn, and Mr. Hughitt might be Viscount Calumet. In New York
Lord Waldorf would be the title of the eldest son of the (at present
third) Duke of Astoria. The Vanderbilt marquisate--of Hudson
probably--would be a generation more recent. So throughout the country,
from Maine to Mississippi, from Lord Penobscot to the Marquis of Biloxi,
there would be a peerage in each of the good old houses--the Adamses,
the Cabots, and the Quincys, the Livingstons, the Putnams, and
Stuyvesants, the Carters and Randolphs and Jeffersons and Lees.

Americans will say: "Thank Heaven and the wisdom of our Anglo-Saxon
forefathers that it is not so!" If it were so, however, a good deal of
British misunderstanding of the United States would be removed. Nor will
it be contended that any of the Americans whom Englishmen have known
best--Mr. Bayard, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Choate, or Mr. Whitelaw Reid, or
General Horace Porter--would be other than ornaments to any aristocracy
in the world. It would be idle to enquire whether Mr. Roosevelt or Mr.
Chamberlain, Mr. Cleveland or Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. Root or
Lord Rosebery, Mr. Olney or Sir Edward Grey were the better man, for
every Englishman will probably at once concede that the United States
does somehow manage to produce individuals of as fine a type as England
herself. But what no Englishman confesses in his heart is that there is
any class of these men