The fact remains, however, that we have still to live down our wars
with the United States, in which there was much that was galling to the
just pride of the American people, and much, too, that was perhaps
over-stimulating to their self-esteem. There is no doubt, on the one
hand, that we were inclined to adopt a supercilious and contemptuous
attitude towards the "rebel colonists" of 1775, the new-made nation of
1815; no doubt, on the other hand, that they made a splendid fight
against us, and taught our superciliousness a salutary lesson. They feel
to this day the humiliation of having been despised, and the exultation
of having put their despisers to shame. These wars, which were, until
1861, almost the whole military history of the United States, were but
episodes in our history, and one of them a trifling episode. Therefore,
while the average Englishman has not studied them sufficiently to
realise how much he ought to deplore them, the average American has been
taught to dwell upon them as the glorious struggles in which his nation
won its spurs. To the juvenile imagination, battles are always the oases
in the desert of history, and the schoolboy never fails to take sides
fiercely and uncompromisingly, exaggerating, with the histrionic
instinct of youth, his enthusiasm and his hatreds. Thus the insolent
Britisher became the Turk's-head or Guy Fawkes, so to speak, of the
American boy, the butt of his bellicose humours; and a habit of mind
contracted in boyhood is not always to be eradicated by the sober
reflection of manhood, even in minds capable of sober reflection. The
Civil War, be it noted, did not depose the insolent Britisher from his
bad eminence in the schoolboy imagination. The Confederates were, after
all, Americans, though misguided Americans; and the fostering, the
brooding upon, intestine rancours was felt by teachers and pupils alike
to be impossible. But there is in the juvenile mind at any given moment
a certain amount of abstract combativeness, let us call it, which must
find an outlet somewhere. Hatred is a natural function of the human