sition as
the one traditional arch-enemy.

But though the errors of commission in American history-books have been
exaggerated, I cannot but think that a common error of omission is
worthy of remark and correction. They begin American history too
late--with the discovery of America--and they do not awaken, as they
might, the just pride of race in the "unhyphenated" American boy. Long
before Columbus set sail from Palos, American history was a-making in
the shire-moots of Saxon England, at Hastings, and Runnymead, and
Bannockburn. In all the mediaeval achievements of England, in peace and
war--in her cathedrals, her castles, her universities, in Cressy,
Poictiers, and Agincourt--Americans may without paradox claim their
ancestral part. Why should the sons of the English who emigrated leave
to the sons of those who stayed at home the undivided credit of having
sent to the right-about the Invincible Armada? Nay, it is only the very
oldest American families that can disclaim all complicity in having, as
Lord Auchinleck put it, "garred kings ken that they had a lith in their
necks." Of course I do not mean that the American schoolboy should be
taken in detail through British history down to the seventeenth century
before, so to speak, he crosses the Atlantic. But I do suggest that he
would be none the worse American for being encouraged to set a due value
on his rightful share in the achievements of earlier ancestors than
those who fought at Trenton or sailed with Decatur. Let him realise his
birthright in the glories of Britain, and he will perhaps come to take a
more magnanimous view of her errors and disasters.

IV

Britain has been too forgetful of the past, America, perhaps, too
mindful; and in the everyday relations of life Britain has often been
tactless and unsympathetic, America suspicious and supersensitive. There
is every prospect, I think, that such errors will become, in the future,
rarer and ever rarer; and it behoves us, on our side, to be careful in
guarding against them. We have not hitherto sufficiently respected
America,--that is the whole story. We have taken no pains to know and
understand her. We have too often regarded her with a careless and
supercilious good feeling, which she has not unnaturally mistaken for
ill feeling, and repaid in kind. The events of the past year seem to
have brought the two countries almost physically closer to each other,
and to have made them more real, more clear