America To-day, Observations and Reflections

American. Mr. Goldwin Smith, a high authority, has contested this theory; and I must admit that, after a good deal of inquiry, I have been unable to find the American school historians g

they commonly malign character or misrepresent events I cannot discover. They are perhaps a little too much inclined to make "insolent" the inseparable epithet of the British s

. Blood was streaming upon the snow; and though that purple stain melted away in the next day's sun, it was never forgotten nor forgiven by the people.... A battle took place between a large force of Tories and Indians and a hastily organised force of patriotic America

sent on the educational market I find nothing so lurid. What I do find in some is a failure to distinguish between the king's share and the British people's share in the policy whic

ns by which to grasp for themselves a share of the wealth that was thus rolling in.... Indeed, the English

iously and deliberately banded together for purposes of sheer brigandage. The same history is delightfully chauvinistic in its account of the Colonial Wars

, took command, and beat the French terribly.... Abercrombie's defeat was the last of the English disasters. The colonists now had arms enough, and were allowed to fight in their own way, and a series of brilliant victories followed.... By the ene

rom Mr. Barnes may not hate Englan

Teachers' Association published in the Educational Review for December 1898 a careful survey of

n the other, as the helpless victim of political environment. Under the influence of deeper study and a keener sense of justice, however, the element of bitterness, which so often entered into

tles 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 mind, just as much as love; and the healthy boy instinctively exercises it under the guise of patriotis

ough guiltless in the main of active hostility to America, cannot be acquitted of ignorance and indifference. It is not in the least to be desired that American history should be written with a pro-English bias, and, as I have said, I do not find the anti-English bias, even in inferior text-books, so excessive as it is sometimes represented to be. The anti-English sentiment of American schools is, as it seems to me, an inevitable phenomenon of juvenile psychology, under the given conditions; and it is the alterati

gland, in peace and war-in her cathedrals, her castles, her universities, in Cressy, Poictiers, and Agincourt-Americans may without paradox claim their ancestral part. Why should the sons of the English who emigrated leave to the sons of those who stayed at home the undivided credit of having sent to the right-about the Invincible Armada? Nay, it is only the very oldest American families that can disclaim all complicity in having, as Lord Auchinleck put it, "garred kings ken that they had a lith in their necks." Of course I