September 1, 1887.] 



♦ KNO\VLEDGE ♦ 



241 



\j 



' ^-^ ILLUSTRATED^MAGAZINE . 

 [EffiLIlTERATUM^JkRI 



LONDON: SEPTEMBER 1, 1887. 



WOLF, MASTIFF, AND SPANIEL. 



RE^IE^IBER once, in Boston, being startled 

 and somewhat pained to hear America's great 

 humorist, Wendell Holmes, enunciate the 

 opinion, with which, as expressed in piint, 

 I had long been familiar enough, that, as 

 seen from certain points of view, Englishmen 

 are children compared with their American 

 cousins. I -was not comforted bj' the remembrance that in 

 his " Professor at the Breakfast-Table," where the opinion is 

 expressed, he had said that he would not let out the fact 

 of the real American feeling about Old World folk, except 

 in converse with Englishmen sensible enough to avoid 

 mistaking the feeling for personal conceit. Unfortunately, 

 the proposition has at least some degree of truth in it, 

 though be it noted that an immense projwrtion of the 

 American population are fully as childish about the same 

 matters, though in another way. 



Holmes was talking, however, of Americans of the old 

 England type — to be found throughout the States, but 

 certainly not forming the majority of the present Americ;\n 

 people. It must be admitted even by the most anti- 

 Bostonian Americans (who. indeed, may abuse Boston, but 

 Americans are all proud of her) that the old England type 

 is the most innately independent t\-pe of manhood the world 

 has known. People more free-and-easy, more don't-care-a- 

 cussative, if one might use such a word, there are in other 

 parts of America, as, indeed, there are in many parts of the 

 old country — the mining districts for example — but there 

 are none who have more definitely, more logically, or 

 therefore more thoroughly adopted the faith that men are 

 entitled to full freedom and individual independence. 



It is true enough, as Holmes has said, that "a whole 

 museum of wigs and masks and lace coats and gold sticks 

 and grimaces and phrases is still used in the Old World 

 puppet-shows." " I don't think," he says, " that we 

 Americans ever understand the Englishman's concentrated 

 loyalty and specialised reverence. But then we do think 

 more of a man as such (barring some little difficulties about 

 race and complexion we will touch on presently) than any 

 people that ever lived did think of him. Our reverence is 

 wider, if it is less intense. We have caste among us to 

 some extent, it is true ; but there is never a collar on the 

 American wolf dog, such as you often see on the English 

 mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty individuality." 



If the collar is now very often not seen on our English 

 mastiffs, it is too true, as Holmes has said elsewhere, that 

 the mark of the collar is apt to be left. Considering the 

 English people generally, it may be .said that true freedom 

 of thought is tolerated only, not welcome in England, at 

 present. It is " struggled up to and held antagonistically, 

 not spontaneously," save in a few altogether exceptional 

 cases, where men who were in advance of their time a few 



generations back have handed down as a family ti-adition a 

 true faith in the dignity of manhood, and the right of men 

 to individual independence. 



Such exceptional cases are not understood, I think, by 

 Americans, even by such as Holmes, Emerson, and the like ; 

 nor can they readily understand that in other cases fulness 

 of mental freedom may be attained even by those who at a 

 great price have purchased it. " You may teach a quadru- 

 ped," says Holmes, '• to walk on his hind legs ; but he is 

 always wanting to walk on all fours." The comparison is 

 unfair, and a trifle rude, a fault not common with Boston's 

 genial humorist. The freedom of mind which Holmes re- 

 gards as the birthright of America has come to the American 

 through his English blood. It has fuller play in America 

 and so finds freer expression ; but it is of English origin. 

 When that freedom was won, America, regarded as a nation, 

 had no existence. Britons in America fought Britons from 

 over the water (Britons ruled by a German king) for free- 

 dom, and fought successfully — even as Englishmen at home 

 fought other Englishmen, ruled by a Scottish king, for their 

 rights a century before, and won them. 



When America first became American, liberty had 

 already been achieved for the new-bom nation. And if, 

 at this day, the whole population of England could be 

 transplanted to America (as a consequence of some such 

 event as Emei-son imagined in his " English Traits," and as 

 some less friendly Americans conceive, oddly enough, to be 

 probable) the result would be not a diminution of America's 

 independence of feeling, but a vast development of it. There 

 would be a new growth of Bostonian Americanism (by 

 which I mean the spirit of resistance to popular as well as 

 to personal tyranny), not any retardation of America's 

 development as a great free nation. 



Unless I am greatly mi.staken — and if I am many 

 Americans have made the same mistake — such dangers as 

 there are for America's future would not be increased, but 

 measurably diminished, by any considerable influx of that 

 strain of British blood to which America owes the men who 

 made her what she is, as well as those of the present era 

 who stand highest in European esteem. It would be idle 

 to say that America's future is threatened by no dangers ; 

 Englishmen in particular recognise one danger to which 

 America is exposed, against which all the resolution of her 

 most steadfast citizens will ere long be required. Her 

 friends hope, and fully believe, that she will surmount the 

 dangers which lie ahead, even as she has surmounted those 

 which surrounded her in the past. But it is an easy 

 prophecy to say that if or when she overcomes those 

 dangers it will be by the exercise of qualities akin to those 

 which the great Americans of a century ago displayed — and 

 those Americans were, without exception, British — purely 

 British by birth or by descent, and actuallv British in the 

 sense in which Canadians, Australians, and Cape Colonists 

 are regarded as British until such time as they cast loose the 

 ties which connect them with their kinsfolk in the old 

 home-nest. 



Those take but a purblind view of history as well as 

 biology who imagine that three or four generations— or ten 

 or twelve, for that matter — affect the quality of race blood ; 

 insomuch that Americans who abuse British qualities, and 

 Englishmen who abuse American qualities, show themselves 

 (individually only, thank God !) of the nature of those birds 

 whom the good old proverb denounces because they " foul 

 theii- own nest." 



It cannot, unfortunately, be denied that in the England 

 of to-day false loyalties are still rife, though they are 

 steadily diminishing in prevalence. When Gorgius IV., 

 of Brentford, visited Haggisland (as Thackeray presents the 

 "o'er true tale "), the Baron of Bradwardine — a man worth 



