would be none the worse American for being encouraged to set a due value
on his rightful share in the achievements of earlier ancestors than
those who fought at Trenton or sailed with Decatur. Let him realise his
birthright in the glories of Britain, and he will perhaps come to take a
more magnanimous view of her errors and disasters.




IV


Britain has been too forgetful of the past, America, perhaps, too
mindful; and in the everyday relations of life Britain has often been
tactless and unsympathetic, America suspicious and supersensitive. There
is every prospect, I think, that such errors will become, in the future,
rarer and ever rarer; and it behoves us, on our side, to be careful in
guarding against them. We have not hitherto sufficiently respected
America,--that is the whole story. We have taken no pains to know and
understand her. We have too often regarded her with a careless and
supercilious good feeling, which she has not unnaturally mistaken for
ill feeling, and repaid in kind. The events of the past year seem to
have brought the two countries almost physically closer to each other,
and to have made them more real, more clearly visible, each to each.
America has won the respectful consideration of even the most
thoughtless and insular among us. She has come home to us, so to speak,
as a vast and vital factor in the problem of the future.
Superciliousness towards her is a mere anachronism.

Many Englishmen, however, are still guilty of a thoughtless captiousness