any contemptuous criticism has to be done, I will do it myself.
My heart has gone out to them beyond all other peoples; and for the life
of me I cannot tell why. They are bleeding-raw at the edges, almost more
conceited than the English, vulgar with a massive vulgarity which is as
though the Pyramids were coated with Christmas-cake sugar-works.
Cocksure they are, lawless and as casual as they are cocksure; but I
love them, and I realised it when I met an Englishman who laughed at
them. He proved conclusively that they were all wrong, from their tariff
to their go-as-you-please Civil Service, and beneath the consideration
of a true Briton.

"I admit everything," said I. "Their Government's provisional; their
law's the notion of the moment; their railways are made of hair-pins and
match-sticks, and most of their good luck lives in their woods and mines
and rivers and not in their brains; but for all that, they be the
biggest, finest, and best people on the surface of the globe! Just you
wait a hundred years and see how they'll behave when they've had the
screw put on them and have forgotten a few of the patriarchal teachings
of the late Mister George Washington. Wait till the
Anglo-American-German-Jew--the Man of the Future--is properly equipped.
He'll have just the least little kink in his hair now and again; he'll
carry the English lungs above the Teuton feet that can walk for ever;
and he will wave long, thin, bony Yankee hands with the big blue veins
on the wrist, from one end of the earth to the other. He'll be the
finest writer, poet, and dramatist, 'specially dramatist, that the world
as it recollects itself has ever seen. By virtue of his Jew blood--just
a little, little drop--he'll be a musician and a painter too. At present
there is too much balcony and too little Romeo in the life-plays of his
fellow-citizens. Later on, when the proportion is adjusted and he sees
the possibilities of his land, he will produce things that will make the
effete East stare. He will also be a complex and highly composite
administrator. There is nothing known to man that he will not be, and
his country will sway the world with one foot as a man tilts a see-saw
plank!"

"But this is worse than the Eagle at its worst. Do you seriously believe
all that?" said the Englishman.

"If I believe anything seriously, all this I most firmly believe. You
wait and see. Sixty million people, chiefly of English instincts, who
are trained from you