ents in the population which on many questions
may act as a counterpoise to the Irish are not themselves conspicuously
friendly to England. If we hear too much of the Irish in America, we
hear perhaps too little of some of the other peoples. And the point
which I would impress on the English reader is that he cannot expect the
American to feel towards England as he himself feels towards the United
States. The American people came in the first instance justly by its
hatred of the name "British," and there have not since been at work any
forces sufficiently powerful to obliterate that hatred, while there have
been some operating to keep it alive.

FOOTNOTES:

[36:1] _The Americans_, by Hugo Muensterberg, 1905.

[38:1] _America To-day_, by William Archer (1900). Mr. Archer's study of
the American people is in my opinion the most sympathetic and
comprehending which has been written by an Englishman.

[41:1] The battle of New Orleans, in the War of 1812, is not one of
those incidents in English history which Englishmen generally insist on
remembering, and it may be as well to explain to English readers that it
was on that occasion that an inferior force of American riflemen (a
"backwoods rabble" a British officer called them before the engagement)
repulsed a British attack, from behind improvised earthworks, with a
loss to the attacking force of 3300 killed and wounded, and at a cost to
themselves of 13 wounded and 8 killed--or 21 casualties in all. Of the
Forty-fourth (Essex) Regiment 816 men went into action, and after less
than thirty minutes 134 were able to line up. The Ninety-third
(Sutherland) Highlanders suffered even more severely. Of 1008 officers
and men only 132 came out unhurt. The battle was fought after peace had
been concluded, so that the lives were thrown away to no purpose. The
British had to deliver a direct frontal attack over level ground, penned
in by a lake on one side and a swamp on the other. It was the same
lesson, in even bloodier characters, as was taught on several occasions
in South Africa.

[44:1] _Presidential Problems_, by Grover Cleveland, p. 281 (New York,
1904).

[57:1] I had written this before reading Senator Hoar's Reminiscences in
which, in speaking of his own youth, he tells how "Every boy imagined
himself a soldier and his highest conception of glory was to 'lick the
British'" (_An Autobiography of Seventy Years_).

CHAPTER III

TWO SIDES OF THE AMERICAN CHARACTER