to speak at some entertainment
or function at West Point, when, besides the cadets, there were many
officers of the United States Army in the room, he told the story.
Instantly, as he finished, a simultaneous cry from several places in the
hall called for "Three cheers for the Forty-fourth!" There was no
Englishman in the company, but, as he told me the story, never had he
heard so instantaneous, so crashing a response to any call, as then when
the whole room leaped to its feet and cheered the old enemies who had
not forgotten.[41:1]

It is not my wish here to discuss even the possibility of war between
Great Britain and the United States. The thing is too horrible to be
considered as even the remotest of contingencies--the "Unpardonable
War," indeed, as Mr. James Barnes has called it. None the less, there is
always greater danger of such a war than any Englishman imagines or than
many Americans would like to confess. However true it may be that it
takes two to make a quarrel, it is none the less true that if one party
be bent upon quarrelling it is always possible for him to go to lengths
of irritation and insult which must ultimately provoke the most
peaceful and reluctant of antagonists. However pacific and reluctant to
fight Great Britain might be at the outset, she is not conspicuously
lacking in national pride or in sensitiveness to encroachments on the
national honour.

Mr. Freeman makes the shrewd remark that "the American feels a greater
distinction between himself and the Englishman of Britain than the
Englishman of Britain feels between himself and the American," which
remains entirely true to-day, in spite of the seemingly paradoxical fact
that the American knows more of English history and English politics
than the Englishman knows of the politics and history of the United
States. This by no means implies that the American knows more of the
English character than the Englishman knows of his. On the contrary, the
Americans have seen infinitely less of the world than Englishmen, and
however many of the bare facts of English history and English politics
they may know, they are strangely ignorant of the atmosphere to which
those facts belong, and have never learned how much more foreign to them
other foreign nations are. The individual American will take the
individual Englishman into his friendship--will even accept him as a
sort of a relative--but as a political entity Great Britain is almost as
much a for