impressively by those who do not put it into words at all, as by
Professor Muensterberg[36:1] who is apparently not familiar with England,
but shows no lack of willingness to dislike her. There is therefore no
intentional comparison between the two peoples, but the writer's point
of view has absorbing interest to an Englishman who knows both
countries. More than once he remarks with admiration or astonishment on
traits of the American character or institutions in the United States
which the Englishman would necessarily take for granted, because they
are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home.
Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American
life which delight an English reader by their naive and elementary
superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor Muensterberg has
written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British
and American peoples as contrasted with his own.
Two brothers will commonly be aware only of the differences between
them--the unlikeness of their features, the dissimilarities in their
tastes or capabilities,--yet the world at large may have difficulty in
distinguishing them apart. While they are conscious only of their
individual differences, to the neighbours all else disappears in the
family resemblance. So it is that Max O'Rell sees how like the American
is to the Englishman more clearly than Mark Twain: Professor Muensterberg
has involuntarily traced the features of the one in the lineaments of
the other with a surer hand than Matthew Arnold or Mr. Bryce.
When, in his remarkable book, M. Demolins uses the term Anglo-Saxon, he
speaks indifferently at one time of Englishmen and at another of
Americans. The peoples are to him one and indistinguishable. Their
greatness is a common greatness based on qualities which are the
inheritance of their Anglo-Saxon origin. Chief among these qualities,
the foundation-stone of their greatness, is the devotion to what we will
follow him in calling the "Particularistic" form of society,--a society,
that is, in which the individual predominates over the community, and
not the community over the individual; a society which aims at
"establishing each child in its full independence." This is, a Frenchman
sees, eminently characteristic of the English and the Americans, in
contrast with other peoples, with those which hold a republican form of
government no less than those which live under an auto
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