wooded islet that parts the headlong waters of the Niagara like a
coulter and shears them into the separate falls of the American and
Canadian shores. Behind me stood an English lady who did not quite
catch what the lecturer said, and turned to her husband in surprise.
"Rhode Island? Well, I knew Rhode Island was one of the smallest
States, but I had no idea it was so small as that!" On another
occasion an Englishman, invited to smile at the idea of a
fellow-countryman that the Rocky Mountains flanked the west bank of
the Hudson, exclaimed: "How absurd! The Rocky Mountains must be at
least two hundred miles from the Hudson." Even so intelligent a
traveller and so friendly a critic as Miss Florence Marryat (Mrs.
Francis Lean), in her desire to do justice to the amplitude of the
American continent, gravely asserts that "Pennsylvania covers a tract
of land larger than England, France, Spain, and Germany all put
together," the real fact being that even the smallest of the countries
named is much larger than the State, while the combined area of the
four is more than fourteen times as great. Texas, the largest State in
the Union, is not so very much more extensive than either Germany or
France.

An analogous want of acquaintance with the mental geography of America
was shown by the English lady whom Mr. Freeman heard explaining to a
cultivated American friend who Sir Walter Scott was, and what were the
titles of his chief works.

It is to such international ignorance as this that much, if not most,
of the British want of appreciation of the United States may be
traced; just as the acute critic may see in the complacent and
persistent misspelling of English names by the leading journals of
Paris an index of that French attitude of indifference towards
foreigners that involved the possibility of a Sedan. It is not,
perhaps, easy to adduce exactly parallel instances of American
ignorance of Great Britain, though Mr. Henry James, who probably knows
his England better than nine out of ten Englishmen, describes Lord
Lambeth, the eldest son of a duke, as himself a member of the House of
Lords ("An International Episode"). It was amusing to find when _meine
Wenigkeit_ was made the object of a lesson in a Massachusetts school,
that many of the children knew the name England only in connection
with their own New England home. Nor, I fear, can it be denied that
much of the historical teaching in the primary schools of the United
St