tude of Englishmen towards the United States; but both these
influences together, powerful though each may be, are almost unimportant
compared to the factor which most of all colours, and must colour, the
American's view of Great Britain,--and that is the influence of the
history of his own country.

The history of the United States as an independent nation goes back no
more than one hundred and thirty years, a space to be spanned by two
human lives; so that events of even her very earliest years are still
recent history and the sentiments evoked by those events have not yet
had time to die. In the days of the childhood of fathers of men still
living (the thing is possible, so recent is it) the nation was born out
of the throes of a desperate struggle with Great Britain--a struggle
which left the name "British" a word of loathing and contempt to
American ears. American history proper begins with hatred of England:
nor has there been anything in the course of that history, until the
present decade, calculated to tend to modify that hatred in any material
degree.

During the nineteenth century, the United States, except for the war
with Spain at its close, had little contact with foreign Powers. She
lived isolated, concentrating all her energies on the developing of her
own resources and the work of civilising a continent. Foreign
complications scarcely came within the range of her vision. The Mexican
War was hardly a foreign war. The only war with another nation in the
whole course of the century was that with Great Britain in 1812.
Reference has already been made to the English ignorance of the War of
1812; but to the American it was the chief event in the foreign politics
of his country during the first century and a quarter of its existence,
and the Englishman's ignorance thereof moves him either to irritation or
to amusement according to his temperament. In the American Civil War,
British sympathy with the South was unhappily exaggerated in American
eyes by the _Alabama_ incident. The North speedily forgave the South;
but it has not yet entirely forgiven Great Britain.

The other chief events of American history have nearly all, directly or
indirectly, tended to keep Great Britain before the minds of the people
as the one foreign Power with whom armed conflict was an ever-present
possibility. The cession of her North American territory on the part of
France only served to accentuate England's position as the sole r