ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 77 



commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a 

 tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of 

 stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become respect- 

 able 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 democ- 

 racy that could fight for an abstraction, whose members 

 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 appearances 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 man- 

 hood. The world of the Saurians might be in some 

 respects more picturesque, but the march of events is 

 inexorable, and it is bygone. 



The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. 

 He had become the enfant terrible of the human house- 

 hold. It was not and will not be easy for the world 

 (especially for our British cousins) to look upon us as 

 grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also 

 be young and to. be treated accordingly, was the syl- 

 logism,- — as if libraries did not make all nations equally 

 old in all those respects, at least, where age is an ad- 

 vantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good 

 qualities, as people feel who are losing it, but boyishness 

 is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a 



