l Sims.

That is part of what England did in the war.

Note.--The author expresses thanks and acknowledgment to Pearson's
Magazine for permission to use the passages quoted from the articles by
Admiral Sims.

Chapter XV: Rude Britannia, Crude Columbia

It may have been ten years ago, it may have been fifteen--and just
how long it was before the war makes no matter--that I received
an invitation to join a society for the promotion of more friendly
relations between the United States and England.

"No, indeed," I said to myself.

Even as I read the note, hostility rose in me. Refusal sprang to my lips
before my reason had acted at all. I remembered George III. I remembered
the Civil War. The ancient grudge, the anti-English complex, had been
instantly set fermenting in me. Nothing could better disclose its
lurking persistence than my virtually automatic exclamation, "No,
indeed!" I knew something about England's friendly acts, about
Venezuela, and Manila Bay, and Edmund Burke, and John Bright, and the
Queen, and the Lancashire cotton spinners. And more than this historic
knowledge, I knew living English people, men and women, among whom I
counted dear and even beloved friends. I knew also, just as well as
Admiral Mahan knew, and other Americans by the hundreds of thousands
have known and know at this moment, that all the best we have and
are--law, ethics, love of liberty--all of it came from England, grew in
England first, ripened from the seed of which we are merely one great
harvest, planted here by England. And yet I instantly exclaimed, "No,
indeed!"

Well, having been inflicted with the anti-English complex myself,
I understand it all the better in others, and am begging them to
counteract it as I have done. You will recollect that I said at the
outset of these observations that, as I saw it, our prejudice was
founded upon three causes fairly separate, although they often melted
together. With two of these causes I have now dealt--the school
histories, and certain acts and policies of England's throughout our
relations with her. The third cause, I said, was certain traits of the
English and ourselves which have produced personal friction. An American
does or says something which angers an Englishman, who thereupon goes
about thinking and saying, "Those insufferable Yankees!" An Englishman
does or says something which angers an American, who thereupon goes
about thinking and saying, "To Hell with Englan