cally with a foreign people.
Foreigners, however, see the likeness when they look at the two
together. And those foreigners who know only one of the peoples will
sketch the character of that people so that it might be taken for a
portrait of the other. In all essentials the characters are the same; in
minor attributes only, such as exist between the individual members of
any family, do they differ.

Not only does neither people understand with any clearness how like it
is to the other, but each is under many misapprehensions--some trivial,
some vital--in regard to the other's temperament and ways of life. These
misapprehensions are the result chiefly of the geographical remoteness
of the lands, so that intimate contact between anything like an
appreciable portion of the two peoples has been impossible; and, when
thus separated by so wide a sea, Great Britain has been too consumedly
engrossed in the affairs of the world to be able to give much time or
thought to the United States, while America has been too isolated from
that world, too absorbed in her own affairs, to be able to look at
England in anything like true perspective.

Arising thus from different causes, the errors of the two peoples in
regard to each other have taken different forms. Great Britain, always
at passes with a more or less hostile Europe, has never lost her
original feeling of kinship with, or good-will towards, the United
States. There has been no time when she would not gladly have improved
her knowledge of, and friendship with, the other, had she at any time
been free from the anxieties of the peril of war with one Power or
another, from the burden of concern for her Empire in India, from the
weight of her responsibilities in regard to Australia, South Africa,
Egypt, and the various other parts of Britain over seas. Engrossed as
she has been with things of immediate moment to her existence, she has
been perforce compelled to take the good-will of the remote United
States for granted, and to assume that there was no need to voice her
own. Until at last she was awakened with a rudeness of awakening that
shocked and staggered her.

For the United States had had no such constant burden of anxiety, no
perpetual friction with other peoples, to keep her occupied. Rather,
sitting aloof in her isolation she had looked upon all the Powers of
Europe as actors in a great drama with which she had no other than a
spectacular concern. Only of all the Power