_animum_" in its Ciceronian sense of "opinion."[9] To
hold this view does not make any excessive demand on our optimism.
There seems absolutely no reason why in this particular case the line
of cleavage between one's likes and one's dislikes should coincide
with that of foreign and native birth. The very word "foreign" rings
false in this connection. It is often easier to recognise a brother in
a New Yorker than in a Yorkshireman, while, alas! it is only
theoretically and in a mood of long-drawn-out aspiration that we can
love our alien-tongued European neighbour as ourselves.

The man who wishes to form a sound judgment of another is bound to
attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not
merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when
brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for
fundamental differences of taste and temperament. The golden rule of
judging others by ourselves can easily become a dull and leaden
despotism if we insist that what _we_ should think and feel on a given
occasion ought also to be the thoughts and actions of the Frenchman,
the German, or the American. There are, perhaps, no more pregnant
sentences in Mr. Bryce's valuable book than those in which he warns
his British readers against the assumption that the same phenomena in
two different countries must imply the same sort of causes. Thus, an
equal amount of corruption among British politicians, or an equal
amount of vulgarity in the British press, would argue a much greater
degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same
phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic
British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary,
semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a
grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do
evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither
Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless each
recognises that the other is fashioned of a somewhat different clay.

The strong reasons, material and otherwise, why Great Britain and the
United States should be friends need not be enumerated here. In spite
of some recent and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make
for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength and
volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured
native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denu