the people of New York with the people of London, but
the people of the whole United States of all classes, urban and
provincial, industrial and peasant, East and West, with the whole
population of all classes in the British Isles; for a large percentage
of the mistakes which Englishmen make about America arises from the fact
that they insist on comparing the educated classes of London with such
people as they may chance to have met in New York or one or two Eastern
cities, under the impression that they are thereby drawing a comparison
between the two peoples. Senator Hoar's opinion of Matthew Arnold has
been already quoted; and the truth is that very few Englishmen who have
written about America have lived in the country long enough to grasp how
much of the United States lies on the other side of the North River. Not
only does not New York alone, but New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and
Washington combined do not bear anything like the same relation to
America as a whole as London bears to the British Isles. Englishmen take
no account of, for they have not seen and no one has reported to them,
the intense craving for and striving after culture and self-improvement
which exists (and has existed for a generation) not only in such larger
cities as Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans,
but in many hundreds of smaller communities scattered from the Atlantic
to the Pacific. One must have such a vision of the United States as a
whole as will enable him to imagine all this endeavour, now dissipated
over so vast a stretch of country, as all massed together into a
territory no larger than the British Isles before he can arrive at an
intelligent basis of comparison between the peoples. What is centralised
in England in America is diffused over half a continent and much less
easily measurable.

It happens that as I am correcting the proofs of the chapter the London
newspapers of the day (January 25, 1908) contain announcements of the
death in New York of Edward MacDowell. He was often spoken of as "the
American Grieg"; but it was a phrase which irritated many good musical
critics in America, for the reason that they considered their countryman
the greater man of the two. They would have had Grieg spoken of as the
Norwegian MacDowell. In that judgment they may have been right or they
may have been wrong; but it is characteristic of the attitudes of the
British and American peoples that, whereas the people of th