lar matter, it appears as if England was
coming to conform to American precedent, it is, in truth only that,
having given the impulse to America, she herself is following with less
speed than the younger runner, but with such speed as she can.

If we bear this fact in mind we shall see how it is illustrated, borne
out, supported by a score of things that it falls in our way to notice;
as it is by many hundred things that lie outside our present province.

* * * * *

We shall have occasion to notice hereafter how in the past the American
disposition to dislike England has been fed by the headlong and
superficial criticism of American affairs by English "literary"
visitors; and it is unfortunate that the latest[88:1] English visitor to
write on the United States has hurt American susceptibilities almost as
keenly as any of his predecessors. With all its brilliant qualities, few
more superficial "studies" of American affairs have been given to the
world than that of Mr. H. G. Wells.

Mr. Wells, by his own account, went about the country confronting all
comers with the questions, "What are you going to make of your future?"
. . . "What is the American Utopia, how much Will is there shaping to
attain it?" This, he says, was the conundrum to find an answer to which
he crossed the Atlantic, and he is much depressed because he failed in
his search. "When one talks to an American of his national purpose he
seems a little at a loss"; and when he comes to sum up his conclusions:
"What seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of all is
. . . best indicated by saying that the typical American has no 'sense
of the State.'"[89:1]

Has Mr. Wells ever gone about England asking Englishmen the same
question: "What are you going to make of your future?" How much less "at
a loss" does he anticipate that he would find them? Mr. Wells apparently
expected to find every American with a card in his vest pocket
containing a complete scheme of an American Utopia. He was disappointed
because the government at Washington was not inviting bids for roofing
in the country and laying the portion north of Mason and Dixon's Line
with hot-water pipes.

The quality which Mr. Wells--seeing only its individual manifestations,
quite baffled and unable to look beyond the individuals to any vision of
the people as a whole (he travelled over a ludicrously small portion of
the country)--sums up as a "lack of sense of