elsewhere that the popular
American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the
opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of
Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts--of the greater
part--of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into
consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share
with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial
morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone,
when other standards governed.

Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to
believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of
another people, less akin to them than the Americans and farther away.
The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact
that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly
prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has
been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in
believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less
picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in
the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly
viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have
been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as
they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and
patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible
for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition
with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an
equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one
ought to know better than the English business man that a great national
commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery.

On this subject Professor Muensterberg,[351:1] striving to eradicate
from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to
underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say
that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was
borrowed from him): "It is naive to suppose that the economic strength
of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without
respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and
purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story
office buildings on lower Broadway are supported b