the sun, but that is a mere detail. He regards himself as the owner
of the sun; the sun begins his little day in the British Empire, ends
his little day in the British Empire: for all practical purposes the
sun is part of the British Empire. Foolish people in other countries
sit underneath it and feel warm, but that is only their ignorance.
They do not know it is a British possession; if they did they would
feel cold.

My views on this subject are, I know, heretical. I cannot get it
into my unpatriotic head that size is the only thing worth worrying
about. In England, when I venture to express my out-of-date
opinions, I am called a Little Englander. It fretted me at first; I
was becoming a mere shadow. But by now I have got used to it. It
would be the same, I feel, wherever I went. In New York I should be
a Little American; in Constantinople a Little Turk. But I wanted to
talk about Holland. A holiday in Holland serves as a corrective to
exaggerated Imperialistic notions.

There are no poor in Holland. They may be an unhappy people, knowing
what a little country it is they live in; but, if so, they hide the
fact. To all seeming, the Dutch peasant, smoking his great pipe, is
as much a man as the Whitechapel hawker or the moocher of the Paris
boulevard. I saw a beggar once in Holland--in the townlet of
Enkhuisen. Crowds were hurrying up from the side streets to have a
look at him; the idea at first seemed to be that he was doing it for
a bet. He turned out to be a Portuguese. They offered him work in
the docks--until he could get something better to do--at wages equal
in English money to about ten shillings a day. I inquired about him
on my way back, and was told he had borrowed a couple of forms from
the foreman and had left by the evening train. It is not the country