Miss Catherine Bates, Mme. Blanc, Miss Emily Faithful, M. Paul de
Rousiers, Max O'Rell, and Mr. Stevens have all, in their several
degrees and to their several audiences, worked to the same end. It
may, however, be worth while mentioning one or two literary
performances of a somewhat different character, merely to remind my
British readers of the sort of thing we have done to exasperate our
American cousins in quite recent times, and so help them to understand
the why and wherefore of certain traces of resentment still lingering
beyond the Atlantic. In 1884 Sir Lepel Griffin, a distinguished Indian
official, published a record of his visit to the United States, under
the title of "The Great Republic." Perhaps this volume might have been
left to the obscurity which has befallen it, were it not that Mr.
Matthew Arnold lent it a fictitious importance by taking as the text
for some of his own remarks on America Sir Lepel's assertion that he
knew of no civilised country, Russia possibly excepted, where he
should less like to live than the United States. To me it seems a book
most admirably adapted to infuriate even a less sensitive folk than
the Americans. I do not in the least desire to ascribe to Sir Lepel
Griffin a deliberate design to be offensive; but it is just his calm,
supercilious Philistinism, aggravated no doubt by his many years'
experience as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes it no less a
pleasure than a duty for a free and intelligent republican to resent
and defy his criticisms.

Can, for instance, anything more wantonly and pointlessly insulting be
imagined than his assertion that an intelligent and well-informed
American would probably name the pork-packing of Chicago as the thing
_best worth seeing_ in the United States? After that it is not
surprising that he considers American scenery singularly tame and
unattractive, and that he finds female beauty (can his standard for