rity
and cruel force. Of late years American writers have come to tell
Americans the truth; namely, that if the power of Great Britain were to
be wiped out to-morrow and all her monuments were to perish except only
those that she has built in India, the historians of future generations,
looking only to those monuments in India, would pronounce Great Britain
to have been, of all the Powers that have held great Empire since the
beginning of time, the largest benefactor to the human race. But of this
the American people as a whole knows nothing. It only knows that sepoys
were blown from the mouths of British guns. So Englishmen, know that
negroes in the South are lynched.

And as the American people has formed no comprehension of the British
Empire as a whole and is without any understanding of its spirit, so it
has drawn for itself a caricature of the British character. As the
Empire is brutal and sanguinary, so is the individual bullying and
overbearing and coarse. The idea was originally inherited from
England's old enemies in Europe. It was a reflection of the opinion of
the French; but it has been confirmed by the frankness of criticism of
English travellers of all things in the United States. Americans do not
recognise that by their own sensitiveness and anxiety for the judgment
of others--a necessary, if morbid, result of their isolation and
self-absorption--they invited the criticism, even if they did not excuse
its occasional ill-breeding; nor has it occurred to them that the habit
of outspoken criticism of all foreign things is a common inheritance of
the two peoples and that they themselves are even more garrulously, if
less bluntly--even more vaingloriously, if less arrogantly--frank in
their habit of comment even than the English.

The same isolation and self-absorption as bred in them their
sensitiveness to the opinions of others, made the Americans also unduly
proud of such traits or accomplishments as strangers found to praise in
them. This in itself might be good for a nation; but, so far as their
understanding of Englishmen is concerned, it has unfortunately led them
to suppose that those characteristics which they possess in so eminent a
degree are proportionately lacking in the English character, which
thereby incurs their contempt. Having been over-complimented on their
own humour, they have determined that the Englishman is slow-witted,
with no sense of fun--an opinion in itself so lacking in appreci