fellow-countrymen of ours had satisfied the English taste for wildness
in us. There had been Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been
other Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows. There had
then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise, of an American fineness,
which might be as well in its way as the American wildness, and the
American who had any imaginable touch of this found as warm a liking
ready for him then as the wild American found earlier, or the rich
American finds later.

In fact, interesting Americans have always been personally liked in
England, if I must really go to the extreme of saying it. What the
English now join in owning, if the question of greater kindness between
the two countries comes up, is that their ruling class made a vast
mistake in choosing, officiously though not officially, the side of the
South in our Civil War. They own it frankly, eagerly. But they owned the
same thing frankly, if not so eagerly, twenty-five years ago. Even
during the Civil War, I doubt if an acceptable American would have
suffered personally among them. He would have suffered nationally, but
he has now and then to suffer so still, for they cannot have the same
measure of his nationality as he, and they necessarily tread upon its
subtile circumferences here and there.

From the very beginning of Americanism the case has been the same. The
American in England during the Civil War was strangely unfortunate if he
did not meet many and great Englishmen who thought and felt with him;
and if there were now any American so stricken in years as to be able to
testify from his own experience of the English attitude towards us in
the War of Independence, he could tell us of the outspoken and constant
sympathy of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Walpole, and their like, with the
American cause--which they counted the English cause. He could tell of