America To-day, Observations and Reflections

so far as the gathering of information by way of question and answer was concerned, I might almost as well have stayed at home. A curious diffidence beset me from the first. I shrank

customed to admire in its own fighting men; and the British Government, giving ready effect to the instinct of the people, had, at a critical moment, secured a fair field for the United States, and broken up what might have been an embarrassing, though scarcely a very formidable, anti-American intrigue on the part of the Continental Powers. What was there in all this to make any merit of? Nothing whatever. It was the simplest matter in the

provisional. Rightly understood, it covers a great idea; but if one chooses to take it in a strict ethnological sense, it lends itself to caricature. The truth is, it has no strict ethnological sense-it may rather be called an ethnological countersense, no less in England than in America. It represents an historical and political, not an ethnological, concept. The Anglo-Saxon was alre

eeve, or go about inviting expressions of gratitude to

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ssured me that they were keenly conscious of it. Many of my acquaintances were opposed to the policy which brought about the Spanish War, and declared the better mutual understanding between England and America to be its one good result. Others adopted the view to which Mr. Kipling had given such far-echoing expression, and frankly rejoiced in the sympathy with which England regarded America's determinatio

reet and on the farm. The events of the past year had taught him-and he rubbed his eyes at the realisation-that England was not an "effete monarchy," evilly-disposed towards a Republic as such,[K] and dully resentful of bygone humiliations by

plenty; but they could no longer reckon on the instant popular response which, a few years ago, would almost certainly have attended any movement of hostility towards England. An American publicist, who has perhaps unequalled opportunities for keeping his finger on the pulse of national feeling, said to me, "It is o

n in a nutshell, so far as to-day is

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