before my reason had acted at all. I remembered George III. I remembered
the Civil War. The ancient grudge, the anti-English complex, had been
instantly set fermenting in me. Nothing could better disclose its lurking
persistence than my virtually automatic exclamation, "No, indeed!" I knew
something about England's friendly acts, about Venezuela, and Manila Bay,
and Edmund Burke, and John Bright, and the Queen, and the Lancashire
cotton spinners. And more than this historic knowledge, I knew living
English people, men and women, among whom I counted dear and even beloved
friends. I knew also, just as well as Admiral Mahan knew, and other
Americans by the hundreds of thousands have known and know at this
moment, that all the best we have and are--law, ethics, love of liberty--
all of it came from England, grew in England first, ripened from the seed
of which we are merely one great harvest, planted here by England. And
yet I instantly exclaimed, "No, indeed! "

Well, having been inflicted with the anti-English complex myself, I
understand it all the better in others, and am begging them to counteract
it as I have done. You will recollect that I said at the outset of these
observations that, as I saw it, our prejudice was founded upon three
causes fairly separate, although they often melted together. With two of
these causes I have now dealt--the school histories, and certain acts and
policies of England's throughout our relations with her. The third cause,
I said, was certain traits of the English and ourselves which have
produced personal friction. An American does or says something which
angers an Englishman, who thereupon goes about thinking and saying,
"Those insufferable Yankees!" An Englishman does or says something which
angers an American, who thereupon goes about thinking and saying, "To
Hell with England!" Each makes the well-nigh universal--but none the
less perfectly ridiculous--blunder of damning a whole people because one
of them has rubbed him the wrong way. Nothing could show up more forcibly