misunderstanding. The Englishman, with his somewhat unsensitive
feelers, is apt, in all good faith and unconsciousness, to criticise
American ways to the American with much more freedom than he would
criticise French ways to a Frenchman. It is as if he should say, "You
and I are brothers, or at least cousins; we are a much better sort
than all those foreign Johnnies; and so there's no harm in my pointing
out to you that you're wrong here and ought to change there." But,
alas, who is quicker to resent our criticism than they of our own
household? And so the American, overlooking the sort of clumsy
compliment that is implied in the assurance of kinship involved in the
very frankness of our fault-finding criticism, resents most keenly the
criticisms that are couched in his own language, and sees nothing but
impertinent hostility in the attitude of John Bull. And who is to
convince him that it is, as in a Scottish wooing, because we love him
that we tease him, and in so doing put him (in our eyes) on a vastly
higher pedestal than the "blasted foreigner" whose case we consider
past praying for? And who is to teach us that Brother Jonathan is able
now to give us at least as many hints as we can give him, and that we
must realise that the same sauce must be served with both birds? Thus
each resiles from the encounter infinitely more pained than if the
antagonist had been a German or a Frenchman. The very fact that we
speak the same tongue often leads to false assumptions of mutual
knowledge, and so to offences of unguarded ignorance.

One of the most conspicuous differences between the American and the
Briton is that the former, take him for all in all, is distinctly the
more articulate animal of the two. The Englishman seems to have
learned, through countless generations, that he can express himself
better and more surely in deeds than in words, and has come to
distrust in others a fatal fluency of expressiveness which he feels