This romance, which belonged to my boyhood, and has grown up with me, and will never leave me, once belonged then, more or less, to the whole of the English people.  Except with those who, like me, have been fed with the poetry and the literature of America, this romance is impossible.  I suppose that it can never come again.  Something better and more stable, however, may yet come to us, when the United States and Great Britain will be allied in amity as firm as that which now holds together those Federated States.  The thing is too vast, it is too important, to be achieved in a day, or in a generation.  But it will come—­it will come; it must come—­it must come; Asia and Europe may become Chinese or Cossack, but our people shall rule over every other land, and all the islands, and every sea.

II.-THE LAND OF REALITY

When a man has received kindnesses unexpected and recognition unlooked for from strangers and people in a foreign country on whom he had no kind of claim, it seems a mean and pitiful thing in that man to sit down in cold blood and pick out the faults and imperfections, if he can descry any, in that country.  The ’cad with a kodak’—­where did I find that happy collocation?—­is to be found everywhere; that is quite certain; every traveller, as is well known, feels himself justified after six weeks of a country to sit in judgment upon that country and its institutions, its manners, its customs and its society; he constitutes himself an authority upon that country for the rest of his life.  Do we not know the man who ‘has been there’?  Lord Palmerston knew him.  ‘Beware,’ he used to say, ‘of the man who has been there!’ As Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs he was privileged to make quite a circle of acquaintance with the men who ‘had been there’; and he estimated their experience at its true value.

The man who has been there very seldom speaks its language with so much ease as to understand all classes; he has therefore no real chance of seeing and understanding things otherwise than as they seem.  When an Englishman travels in America, however, he can speak the language.  Therefore, he thinks that he really does understand the things he sees.  Does he?  Let us consider.  To understand the true meaning of things in any strange land is not to see certain things by themselves, but to be able to see them in their relation to other things.  Thus, the question of price must be taken with the question of wage; that of supply with that of demand; that of things done with the national opinion on such things; that of the continued existence of certain recognised evils with, the conditions and exigencies of the time; and so on.  Before an observer can understand the relative value of this or that he must make a long and sometimes a profound study of the history of the country, the growth of the people, and the present condition of the nation.  It is obvious that it is given to very few visitors to conduct such an investigation.  Most of them have no time; very, very few have the intellectual grasp necessary for an undertaking of this magnitude.  It is obvious, therefore, that the criticism of a two months’ traveller must be worthless generally, and impertinent almost always.  The kodak, you see, in the bands of the cads, produces mischievous and misleading pictures.