they overestimate us, the generous error is in the right direction. At
the end it must cease to be an error, for, as we Americans all know, we
need only to be better understood in order to be more highly prized.
Besides, liking is much oftener the effect of willing than has been
supposed.

But if the case were quite the contrary, if it were obvious to the
casual experience of the American traveller or sojourner in England,
that his nationality was now liked less rather than more there, I should
still be sorry to disturb what is at the worst no worse than a fond
illusion. The case is by no means the contrary, and yet in consenting to
some reason in the iridescence which the situation wears in the American
fancy I should wish to distinguish. For a beginning I should not wish to
go farther than to say that the sort of Englishmen who have always liked
Americans, because they have liked the American ideal and the kind of
character realized from it, now probably like them better than ever.
They are indeed less critical of our departure from our old ideal than
some Americans, perhaps because they have not foreseen, as such
Americans have foreseen, the necessary effect in American character.
They can still allow themselves the pleasure which comes from being
confirmed in an impression by events, and in that pleasure they may
somewhat romance us; but even such Englishmen are not blindly fond of
us. The other sort of Englishmen, the sort that never liked our ideal or
our character, probably now like us as little as ever, except as they
have noted our change of ideal, and expect a change of character. To
them we may very well have seemed a sort of civic dissenters, with the
implication of some such quality of offence as the notion of dissent
suggests to minds like theirs. We had a political religion like their
own, with a hierarchy, a ritual, an establishment all complete, and we
violently broke with it. But it is safe to conjecture that this sort of