understand you. You are speaking English, but the meaning is a strange
tongue.

I say again that I do not know why any one should wish to be caressed
for his nationality. I think one might more self-respectfully wish to be
liked for one's self than joined with a hundred million compatriots, and
loved in the lump. If the English, however, are now trying to love us
nationally we should be careful not to tax their affections too heavily,
or demand too much of them. We must remember that they are more apt to
be deceived by our likeness to themselves than by our unlikeness. When
an Englishman and an American meet on common ground they have arrived
from opposite poles. The Englishman, though he knows the road the
American has come, cannot really imagine it. His whole experience of
life has taught him that if you have come that road, you are not the
kind of man you seem; therefore, you have not come that road, or else
you are another kind of man. He revolves in a maze of hopeless
conjecture; he gives up trying to guess your conundrum, and reads into
you the character of some Englishman of parallel tradition. If he likes
you after that, you may be sure it is for yourself and not for your
nation. All the same he may not know it, and may think he likes you
because you are an agreeable American.

My line of reasoning, or I had better say of fancying (that, on such
dangerous ground, is safest), is forcing an inference from which I
shrink a little; it seems so very bold, so very contrary to recent
prepossessions. But the candor which I would be so glad not to practise,
obliges me to say that I think the American who is himself interesting,
would have been as welcome in England twenty-five years ago as at this
day, and he would not have been expected to be rich, or to have the
acquaintance of rich Americans. Already, at that remote period, certain