CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 



or the world would be at a sad pass shortly. The 

 surprising thing is that men have such a taste for this 

 somewhat musty flavour, that an Englishman, for example, 

 should feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, when he 

 comes over here and finds a people speaking what he 

 admits to be something like English, and yet so very 

 different from (or, as he would say, to) those he left at 

 home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thankfulness when 

 I meet an Englishman who is not like every other, or, I 

 may add, an American of the same odd turn. 



Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as 

 nice about his country as about his sweetheart, and who ever 

 heard even the friendliest appreciation of that unexpressive 

 she that did not seem to fall infinitely short 1 Yet it would 

 hardly be wise to hold every one an enemy who could not 

 see her with our own enchanted eyes. It seems to be 

 the common opinion of foreigners that Americans are too 

 tender upon this point. Perhaps we are ; and if so, there 

 must be a reason for it. Have we had fair play 1 Could 

 the eyes of what is called Good Society (though it is so 

 seldom true either to the adjective or noun) look upon a 

 nation of democrats with any chance of receiving an undis- 

 torted image 1 ? Were not those, moreover, who found in 

 the old order of things an earthly paradise, paying them 

 quarterly dividends for the wisdom of their ancestors, with 

 the punctuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to 

 misunderstand if not to misrepresent us ? Whether at war 

 or at peace, there we were, a standing menace to all earthly 

 paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the very credit 

 on which the dividends were based, all the more hateful and 

 terrible that our destructive agency was so insidious, work 

 ing invisible in the elements, as it seemed, active while they 

 slept, and coming upon them in the darkness like an armed 

 man. Could Laius have the proper feelings of a father 

 towards QEdipus, announced as his destined destroyer by 

 infallible oracles, and felt to be such by every conscious 

 fibre of his soul ? For more than a century the Dutch were 

 the laughing-stock of polite Europe. They were butter- 



