ation of
its own absurdity as to be self-confounding. Too well assured of their
own chivalrousness (a foible which they share with all peoples) they
know the Englishman to be a domestic tyrant, incapable of true reverence
of womanhood. Proud, not without reason, of their own form of
government, wherein there is no room for a titled aristocracy, they
delight in holding the peerage of Great Britain up to contempt (withal
that there is a curious unconfessed strain of jealousy mingling
therewith), and piecing together, like a child playing with bricks, the
not too infrequent appearances of individual peers in the divorce or
bankruptcy courts, they have constructed a fantastic image of the
British aristocracy as a whole, wherein every member appears as either a
_roue_ or a spendthrift. Because they are--and have been so much told
that they are--so full of push and energy themselves, they believe
Englishmen to be ponderous and without enterprise; whereas if, instead
of keeping their eyes and minds permanently intent on their own
achievements, they had looked more abroad, they would have seen that,
magnificent as has been the work which they have done in the upbuilding
of their own nation and wonderful as is the fabric of their greatness,
there has simultaneously been evoked out of chaos a British Empire,
vaster than their own estate, and which is only not so near completion
as their own structure in proportion as it is on a larger ground plan,
inspired by larger ideas and involving greater (as well as infinitely
more diffused) labour in its uprearing.

The statement of these facts involves no impugnment of American
urbanity, American wit, American chivalry, or American enterprise. Only
they are not so unique as Americans, in their isolation, conceive them
to be. There are, in fact, others. It might not even be worth saying so
much, if it were not that the belief in their uniqueness has necessarily
resulted in American minds in a depreciation of the English character,
which by so much helps to keep the two peoples estranged. Americans will
be vastly more ready to believe in their English kinship, to like the
English people, and to welcome a British alliance if they once get it
into their heads that the English, as a nation, are just as fearless,
just as chivalrous, no less fond of a joke or more depraved, nor much
less enterprising or more careless of the feelings of others than
themselves. That they think of Englishmen as the