the methods are un-English and alien;
but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the
United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it
were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.

The idea that America is trust-ridden to the extent popularly supposed
in England has been carefully fostered by those extreme journals in
America already referred to (it is impossible not to speak of them as
the Yellow Press) for personal and political reasons--reasons which
Englishmen would comprehend if they understood better the present
political situation in the United States. The idea has been encouraged
by divers English "impressionist" authors and writers on the English
press who, with a superficial knowledge of American affairs, have caught
the jargon of the same school of American journalist-politicians. It has
been further confirmed by a misunderstanding of the attitude and policy
of President Roosevelt himself, which has already been sufficiently
dealt with.

England is, in the American sense, much more "trust-ridden" than the
United States. It is not merely that (as any reference to statistics
will show) wealth is less concentrated in America than in England--that
nothing like the same proportion of the capital of the country is lodged
in a few hands--for that, inasmuch as the majority of large fortunes in
Great Britain are not commercial in their origin, might mean little; but
in business the opportunity for the small trader and the man without
backing to win to independence is a hundred times greater in America,
while the control exercised by "rings" and "cliques" over certain large
industries in England and over the access to certain large markets is, I
think, much more complete than has been attained, except most
temporarily, by any trust or ring in the United States, except, as in
the case of oil, where artificial monopoly has been assisted by natural
conditions.

The tendency in the United States even in the last twenty years has not
been in the direction of a concentration of wealth, but towards its
diffusion in a degree unparalleled in any country in the world. The
point in which the United States is economically almost immeasurably
superior to England is not in the number of her big fortunes but in the
enormously greater well-to-do-ness of the middle classes--the vastly
larger number of persons of moderate affluence, who are in the enjoyment
of inc