rters most friendly to us, that our
excellent qualities are marred by an incorrigible hypocrisy. To France
we have always been Perfidious Albion. In Germany, at this moment, that
epithet would be scorned as far too flattering to us. Victor Hugo
explained the relative unpopularity of _Measure for Measure_ among
Shakespeare's plays on the ground that the character of the hypocrite
Angelo was a too faithful dramatization of our national character.
Pecksniff is not considered so exceptional an English gentleman in
America as he is in England.

Now we have not acquired this reputation for nothing. The world has no
greater interest in branding England with this particular vice of
hypocrisy than in branding France with it; yet the world does not cite
Tartuffe as a typical Frenchman as it cites Angelo and Pecksniff as
typical Englishmen. We may protest against it as indignantly as the
Prussian soldiers protest against their equally universal reputation for
ferocity in plunder and pillage, sack and rapine; but there is something
in it. If you judge an English statesman, by his conscious intentions,
his professions, and his personal charm, you will often find him an
amiable, upright, humane, anxiously truthful man. If you judge him, as a
foreigner must, solely on the official acts for which he is responsible,
and which he has to defend in the House of Commons for the sake of his
party, you will often be driven to conclude that this estimable
gentleman is, in point of being an unscrupulous superprig and fool,
worse than Caesar Borgia and General Von Bernhardi rolled into one, and
in foreign affairs a Bismarck in everything except commanding ability,
blunt common sense, and freedom from illusion as to the nature and
object of his own diplomacy. And the permanent officials in whose hands
he is will probably deserve all that and something to spare. Thus you
will get that amazing contrast that confronts us now between the
Machiavellian Sir Edward Grey of the Berlin newspapers and the amiable
and popular Sir Edward Grey we know in England. In England we are all
prepared to face any World Congress and say, "We know that Sir Edward
Grey is an honest English gentleman, who meant well as a true patriot
and friend of peace; we are quite sure that what he did was fair and
right; and we will not listen to any nonsense to the contrary." The
Congress will reply, "We know nothing about Sir Edward Grey except what
he did; and as there is no secre