Now speaking seriously, my dear Professor, it will not do. It could be
easy to fence with you for ever and parry every point you attempt to
make, until English people began to think there was nothing wrong with
England at all. But I refuse to play for safety in this way. There is a
very great deal that is really wrong with England, and it ought not to
be forgotten even in the full blaze of your marvellous mistakes. I
cannot have my countrymen tempted to those pleasures of intellectual
pride which are the result of comparing themselves with you. The deep
collapse and yawning chasm of your ineptitude leaves me upon a perilous
spiritual elevation. Your mistakes are matters of fact; but to enumerate
them does not exhaust the truth. For instance, the learned man who
rendered the phrase in an English advertisement "cut you dead" as "hack
you to death," was in error; but to say that many such advertisements
are vulgar is not an error. Again, it is true that the English poor are
harried and insecure, with insufficient instinct for armed revolt,
though you will be wrong if you say that they are occupied literally in
shooting the moon. It is true that the average Englishman is too much
attracted by aristocratic society; though you will be in error if you
quote dining with Duke Humphrey as an example of it. In more ways than
one you forget what is meant by idiom.

I have therefore thought it advisable to provide you with a catalogue of
the real crimes of England; and I have selected them on a principle
which cannot fail to interest and please you. On many occasions we have
been very wrong indeed. We were very wrong indeed when we took part in
preventing Europe from putting a term to the impious piracies of
Frederick the Great. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the
triumph over Napoleon to be soiled with the mire and blood of Blucher's
sullen savages. We were very wrong indeed when we allowed the peaceful
King of Denmark to be robbed in broad daylight by a brigand named