though merely for purposes of illustration, as a foreign country. One is
promptly told that Americans are not regarded as foreigners in England,
and is left to conjecture one's self a sort of compromise between
English and alien, a little less kin than Canadian and more kind than
Australian. The idea has its quaintness; but the American in England has
been singularly unfortunate if he has had reason to believe that the
kindness done him is not felt. What has always been true of the English
is true now. They do not say or do the thing which is not, out of
politeness; their hypocrisies, if they have any, are for their God, and
not for their fellow-man. When they talk of their American brethren,
they mean it; just as when they do not talk of them so they mean
something less, or nothing at all. The American who wishes to be taken
nationally, may trust any expression friendly to our nation that he
hears; but still I think he will have a better time if he prefers being
taken personally. That is really making one's self at home in a
different, I will no longer say a foreign, country; the English are
eager hosts, and wish you to make yourself at home--if they like you.
Nationally we cannot make ourselves, or be made at home, except in the
United States. To any other people, to people sometimes claiming to be
nearer than the first degree of cousinship, our nationality, taking it
in bulk, is necessarily a mystery. We are so very like them; why should
we be so very unlike them? The difference puzzles them, annoys them; why
seek points of it, and turn them to the light? The same mystery
distresses the American when the points of their difference are turned
to the light. A man's nationality is something he is justly proud of,
but not till it is put aside can the man of another nation have any joy
of him humanly, spiritually. If you insist upon talking to the English
about American things, you have them in an unknown world, a really
unknowable world, as you yourself know it; and you bewilder and weary
them, unless they are studying Americanism, and then they still do not