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.