prehensions are easily traced.

First, there has been the eternal pre-occupation of the English people
with the affairs of other parts of the world. When Great Britain has
been so inextricably involved with the policies of all the earth that
almost any day news might come from Calcutta, from Berlin, from St.
Petersburg, from Pekin, or Teheran, or from almost any point in Asia,
Africa, or Australia, which would shake the Empire to its foundation,
how could the people spare time to become intimately acquainted with
the United States? Of coarse Englishmen talk of the "State of Chicago,"
and--as I heard an English peasant not long ago--of "Yankee earls."

During all these years individual Americans have come to England in
large numbers and have been duly noted and observed; but what the people
of any nation notices in the casually arriving representatives of any
other is not the points wherein the visitors resemble themselves, but
the points of difference. In the case of Americans coming to England the
fundamental traits are all resemblances and therefore escape notice,
while only the differences--which by that very fact stand proclaimed as
non-essentials--attract attention. So it is that the English people,
having had acquaintance with a number of typical New Englanders, have
drawn their conclusion as to the universality of one strong nasal
American accent; they think the American people garrulously outspoken in
criticism, with a rather offensive boastfulness, without any
consciousness that precisely that same trait in themselves, in a
slightly different form, is one of the chief causes why Englishmen are
not conspicuously popular in any European country. From peculiarities of
dress and manner which are not familiar to him in the product of his own
public schools and universities, the Englishman has been inclined to
think that the American people is not, even in its "better classes," a
population of gentlemen.

Moreover, many Englishmen go to the United States--the vast majority for
a stay of a few days or weeks, or a month or two--and they tell their
friends, or the public at large in print, all about America and its
people. It is not given to every one to be able, in the course of a few
weeks or a month or two, to see below the surface indications down to
the root-traits of a people--a feat which becomes of necessity the more
difficult when those root-traits are one's own root-traits and the
fundamental traits of one's