papers,
preachers, or local society. I found one man who told me that if
anything went wrong in this huge congress of kings,--if there was a
split or an upheaval or a smash,--the people in detail would be subject
to the Idea of the sovereign people in mass. This is a survival from the
Civil War, when, you remember, the people in a majority did with guns
and swords slay and wound the people in detail. All the same, the notion
seems very much like the worship by the savage of the unloaded rifle as
it leans against the wall.

But the men and women set Us an example in patriotism. They believe in
their land and its future, and its honour, and its glory, and they are
not ashamed to say so. From the largest to the least runs this same
proud, passionate conviction to which I take off my hat and for which I
love them. An average English householder seems to regard his country as
an abstraction to supply him with policemen and fire-brigades. The
cockney cad cannot understand what the word means. The bloomin' toffs he
knows, and the law, and the soldiers that supply him with a spectacle in
the Parks; but he would laugh in your face at the notion of any duty
being owed by himself to his land. Pick an American of the second
generation anywhere you please--from the cab-rank, the porter's room, or
the plough-tail,--'specially the plough-tail,--and that man will make
you understand in five minutes that he understands what manner of thing
his Republic is. He might laugh at a law that didn't suit his
convenience, draw your eye-teeth in a bargain, and applaud 'cuteness on
the outer verge of swindling: but you should hear him stand up and
sing:--

"My country 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
Of thee I sing!"

I have heard a few thousand of them engaged in that employment. I
respect him. There is too much Romeo and too little balcony about our
National Anthem. With the American article it is all balcony. There must
be born a poet who shall give the English _the_ song of their own, own
country--which is to say, of about half the world. Remains then only to
compose the greatest song of all--The Saga of the Anglo-Saxon all round
the earth--a paean that shall combine the terrible slow swing of the
_Battle Hymn of the Republic_ (which, if you know not, get chanted to
you) with _Britannia needs no Bulwarks_, the skirl of the _British
Grenadiers_ with that perfect quickstep, _Marching through Georgia_, and
at the end the wail