The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin by James Fullarton Muirhead
page 72 of 264 (27%)
page 72 of 264 (27%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
four is more than fourteen times as great. Texas, the largest State in
the Union, is not so very much more extensive than either Germany or France. An analogous want of acquaintance with the mental geography of America was shown by the English lady whom Mr. Freeman heard explaining to a cultivated American friend who Sir Walter Scott was, and what were the titles of his chief works. It is to such international ignorance as this that much, if not most, of the British want of appreciation of the United States may be traced; just as the acute critic may see in the complacent and persistent misspelling of English names by the leading journals of Paris an index of that French attitude of indifference towards foreigners that involved the possibility of a Sedan. It is not, perhaps, easy to adduce exactly parallel instances of American ignorance of Great Britain, though Mr. Henry James, who probably knows his England better than nine out of ten Englishmen, describes Lord Lambeth, the eldest son of a duke, as himself a member of the House of Lords ("An International Episode"). It was amusing to find when _meine Wenigkeit_ was made the object of a lesson in a Massachusetts school, that many of the children knew the name England only in connection with their own New England home. Nor, I fear, can it be denied that much of the historical teaching in the primary schools of the United States gives a somewhat one-sided view of the past relations between the mother country and her revolted daughter. The American child is not taught as much as he ought to be that the English people of to-day repudiate the attitude of the aristocratic British government of 1770 as strongly as Americans themselves. |
|