Second, when telling such lies as may seem necessary to your international standing, do not tell the lies to the people who know the truth.  Do not tell the Eskimos that snow is bright green; nor tell the negroes in Africa that the sun never shines in that Dark Continent.  Rather tell the Eskimos that the sun never shines in Africa; and then, turning to the tropical Africans, see if they will believe that snow is green.  Similarly, the course indicated for you is to slander the Russians to the English and the English to the Russians; and there are hundreds of good old reliable slanders which can still be used against both of them.  There are probably still Russians who believe that every English gentleman puts a rope round his wife’s neck and sells her in Smithfield.  There are certainly still Englishmen who believe that every Russian gentleman takes a rope to his wife’s back and whips her every day.  But these stories, picturesque and useful as they are, have a limit to their use like everything else; and the limit consists in the fact that they are not true, and that there necessarily exists a group of persons who know they are not true.  It is so with matters of fact about which you asseverate so positively to us, as if they were matters of opinion.  Scarborough might be a fortress; but it is not.  I happen to know it is not.  Mr. Morel may deserve to be universally admired in England; but he is not universally admired in England.  Tell the Russians that he is by all means; but do not tell us.  We have seen him; we have also seen Scarborough.  You should think of this before you speak.

Third, don’t perpetually boast that you are cultured in language which proves that you are not.  You claim to thrust yourself upon everybody on the ground that you are stuffed with wit and wisdom, and have enough for the whole world.  But people who have wit enough for the whole world, have wit enough for a whole newspaper paragraph.  And you can seldom get through even a whole paragraph without being monotonous, or irrelevant, or unintelligible, or self-contradictory, or broken-minded generally.  If you have something to teach us, teach it to us now.  If you propose to convert us after you have conquered us, why not convert us before you have conquered us?  As it is, we cannot believe what you say about your superior education because of the way in which you say it.  If an Englishman says, “I don’t make no mistakes in English, not me,” we can understand his remark; but we cannot endorse it.  To say, “Je parler le Frenche language, non demi,” is comprehensible, but not convincing.  And when you say, as you did in a recent appeal to the Americans, that the Germanic Powers have sacrificed a great deal of “red fluid” in defence of their culture, we point out to you that cultured people do not employ such a literary style.  Or when you say that the Belgians were so ignorant as to think they were being butchered when they weren’t, we only wonder