semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a
grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do
evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither
Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless each
recognises that the other is fashioned of a somewhat different clay.

The strong reasons, material and otherwise, why Great Britain and the
United States should be friends need not be enumerated here. In spite
of some recent and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make
for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength and
volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured
native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denunciation of
Great Britain; and it is usually the untravelled and preëminently
insular Briton alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his
American cousins. The American, as has often been pointed out, has
become vastly more pleasant to deal with since his country has won an
undeniable place among the foremost nations of the globe. The
epidermis of Brother Jonathan has toughened as he has grown in
stature, and now that he can look over the heads of most of his
compeers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best of them.
Perhaps not _quite_ so little as John Bull, whose indifference to
criticism and silent assurance of superiority are possibly as far
wrong in the one direction as a too irritable skin is in the other.

Of the books written about the United States in the last score of
years by European writers of any weight, there are few which have not
helped to dissipate the grotesquely one-sided view of America formerly
held in the Old World. Preëminent among such books is, of course, the
"American Commonwealth" of Mr. James Bryce; but such writers as Mr.
Freeman, M. Paul Bourget, Sir George Campbell, Mr. William Sanders,