l about everything
in the world except Japan. He knows nothing at all about Japan."

The specialist in a single subject can always find the holes in the
information on that subject of the "universal specialist." But it is
worth noticing that, like almost every other salient trait of the
American character, this American desire to become a universal
specialist--this reaching after the all-culture and all-knowledge--is an
essentially Anglo-Saxon or English characteristic. The German may be
content to spend his whole life laboriously probing into one small hole.
The Frenchman (let me say again that I thoroughly recognise that all
national generalisations are unsound) will cheerfully wave aside with a
_la-la-la_ whole realms of knowledge which do not interest him. But all
Englishmen and all Americans would be Crichtons and Sydneys if they
could. And--perhaps on the principle of setting a thief to catch a
thief--although the all-round man is the ideal of both peoples, each is
equally suspicious of an intellectual rotundity (in another person) too
nearly complete.

Americans rather like to repeat that story of Mr. Gladstone, when the
talk is of English culture.

The American as a rule is a better linguist than the Englishman,--he is
quicker, that is, to pick up a modern language and likely to speak it
with a better accent. "Never trust an Englishman who speaks French
without an English accent," said Prince Bismarck; and the remark,
however unjust it may be to an occasional individual, showed a shrewd
insight into the English character. There is always to be recognised the
fact that there are tens--perhaps hundreds--of thousands of Englishmen
who speak Hindustani, Pushtu, or the language of any one of a hundred
remote peoples with whom the Empire has traffic, while the American has
had no contact with other peoples which called for a knowledge of any
tongue but his own, except that in a small way some Spanish has been
useful. But so far as European languages go, the Englishman, in more or
less constant and intimate relation with each of the peoples of Europe,
has been so well satisfied of his own superiority to each that it has
seemed vastly more fitting that they should learn his language than that
he should trouble to learn theirs. Under any circumstances, is it not
obviously easier for each one of the European peoples to learn to talk
English than for the Englishman to learn eight European tongues with
eighty miscellaneo