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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
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