ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 



made a. good fight from generation to generation with the 

 chaos around them. That is precisely the battle which the 

 English race on this continent has been carrying doughtily 

 on for two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for 

 you cannot hear in Europe * that crash, the death-song of the 

 perfect tree/ that has been going on here from sturdy father 

 to sturdy son, and making this continent habitable for the 

 weaker Old World breed that has swarmed to it during the 

 last half-century. If ever men did a good stroke of work on 

 this planet, it was the forefathers of those whom you are 

 wondering whether it would not be prudent to acknowledge 

 as far-off cousins. Alas ! man of genius, to whom we owe so 

 much, could you see nothing more than the burning of a foul 

 chimney in that clash of Michael and Satan which flamed 

 up under your very ey^es ? 



Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of 

 adventurers and shopkeepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it 

 well enough when he said that he could never think of 

 America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all along 

 the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made commerce, 

 the great civiliser, contemptible. But a tradesman \vith 

 sword on thigh and very prompt of stroke was not only re 

 doubtable, he had become respectable also. Few people, I 

 suspect, alluded twice to a needle in Sir John Hawkwood s 

 presence, after that doughty fighter had exchanged it for a 

 more dangerous tool of the same metal. Democracy had 

 been hitherto only a ludicrous effort to reverse the laws of 

 nature by thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But a 

 ^democracy that could fight for an abstraction, whose mem 

 bers held life and goods cheap compared with that larger 

 life which we call country, was not merely unheard-of, but 

 portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World taking 

 upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be substance and 

 not dream. Since the Norman crusader clanged down upon 

 the throne of the porphyro-geniti, carefully-draped appear 

 ances had never received such a shock, had never been so 

 rudely called on to produce their titles to the empire of the 

 world. Authority has had its periods not unlike those of 

 geology, and at last comes Man claiming kingship in right of 

 his mere manhood. The world of the Saurians might be in 

 some respects more picturesque, but the march of events is 

 inexorable, and it is bygone. 



