ny foreigner; nor, when we have the
chance, will we suffer him to eat of it himself. The same spirit
inspired Miss Bird's American missionaries, who had come thousands of
miles to change the faith of Japan, and openly professed their ignorance
of the religions they were trying to supplant.

I quote an American in this connection without scruple. Uncle Sam is
better than John Bull, but he is tarred with the English stick. For Mr.
Grant White the States are the New England States and nothing more. He
wonders at the amount of drinking in London; let him try San Francisco.
He wittily reproves English ignorance as to the status of women in
America; but has he not himself forgotten Wyoming? The name Yankee, of
which he is so tenacious, is used over the most of the great Union as a
term of reproach. The Yankee States, of which he is so staunch a
subject, are but a drop in the bucket. And we find in his book a vast
virgin ignorance of the life and prospects of America; every view
partial, parochial, not raised to the horizon; the moral feeling proper,
at the largest, to a clique of States; and the whole scope and
atmosphere not American, but merely Yankee. I will go far beyond him in
reprobating the assumption and the incivility of my countryfolk to their
cousins from beyond the sea; I grill in my blood over the silly rudeness
of our newspaper articles; and I do not know where to look when I find
myself in company with an American and see my countrymen unbending to
him as to a performing dog. But in the case of Mr. Grant White example
were better than precept. Wyoming is, after all, more readily accessible
to Mr. White than Boston to the English, and the New England
self-sufficiency no better justified than the Britannic.

It is so, perhaps, in all countries; perhaps in all, men are most
ignorant of the foreigners at home. John Bull is ignorant of the States;
he is probably ignorant of India, but, considering his opportunities, he
is far more ignorant of countries nearer his own door. There is one
country, for instance--its frontier not so far from London, its people
closely akin, its language the same in all essentials with the
English--of which I will go bail he knows nothing. His ignorance of the
sister kingdom cannot be described; it can only be illustrated by
anecdote. I once travelled with a man of plausible manners and good
intelligence--a University man, as the phrase goes--a man, besides, who
had taken his degree in l