st as certainly as it is told when an English
peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the
nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most
American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the
drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the
English people have come to think of American business ethics as being
too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware
that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual
commercial success be won by fraud, and that nothing but fundamental
honesty will serve as the basis for a great national trade such as the
United States has built up.

Visiting Englishmen are bewildered by the strange types of peoples whom
they see upon the streets and by the talk which they hear of "German
elements" and "French elements" and "Scandinavian elements" in the
population. But they do not as a rule see that these various "elements,"
when in the first generation of citizenship, are but a fringe upon the
fabric of society, and when in the second or third generation they have
a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their
national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and
that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great
American people goes on its way, homogeneous, unruffled, and English at
bottom.

Finally Englishmen read American newspapers and, not understanding the
different relation in which those newspapers stand to the people, they
compare with them the normal English papers and draw inferences which
are quite unjust. Similar inferences no less unjust may be drawn from
hearing the speech of a certain number of well-to-do Americans,
belonging, as Englishmen opine, to the class of "gentlemen."

These misunderstandings do less harm to the Englishman than to the
American, inasmuch as the Englishman has that predisposition to national
cordiality which the American has not. But, though the Englishman's
mistakes do not influence his good-will to the United States, though he
himself attaches no serious importance to them, his utterance of them is
taken seriously by the Americans themselves and does not tend to the
promotion of international good feeling. Therefore it is that it is no
less desirable that English misconceptions of the United States should
be corrected than it is that the American people should be brought to