is
building up a trade free, in part at least, from British domination;
that she is making earnest efforts to develop her mercantile marine, so
that her own commerce may in some fair measure be carried under her own
flag; that New York is fast becoming a financial centre powerful enough
to be able to disregard the dictation--and promising ere long to be a
rival--of London; that during the last decade, America has been
relieving England of vast quantities of her bonds and shares, heretofore
held in London, and that the wealth of her people has increased so
rapidly that she can find within herself the capital for her industries
and (except in times like the recent panic) need no longer go abroad to
beg. It is also true that of recent years England has become not a
little uneasy at the growing volume of American trade, even within the
borders of the British Isles themselves; but this newly developed
uneasiness in British minds, however well grounded, can bear no
comparison to the feeling of antagonism towards England--an antagonism
compounded of mingled respect and resentment--which Americans of the
older generation have had borne in upon them from youth up. To
Englishmen, the growing commercial power of the United States is a new
phenomenon, not yet altogether recognised and only half-understood; for
they have been for so long accustomed to consider themselves the rulers
of the sea-borne trade of the world that it is with difficulty that they
comprehend that their supremacy can be seriously threatened. To the
American, on the other hand, British commercial supremacy has, at least
since 1862, been an incontrovertible and disheartening fact. The huge
bulk of British commerce and British wealth has loomed so large as to
shut out his view of all the world; it has hemmed him in on all sides,
obstructed him, towered over him. And all the while, as he grew richer,
he has seen that Great Britain only profited the more, by interest on
his bonds, by her freight charges, by her profit on exchange. How is it
possible that under such conditions the American can think about or feel
towards England as the Englishman has thought about and felt towards
him?

Yet even now not one half has been told. We have seen that the
geographical proximity of Great Britain and the overshadowing bulk of
British commerce could not fail--neither separately could fail--to
create in American minds an attitude towards England different from the
natural atti