The man who wishes to form a sound judgment of another is bound to attain as great a measure as possible of accurate self-knowledge, not merely to understand the reaction of the foreign character when brought into relation with his own, but also to make allowance for fundamental differences of taste and temperament.  The golden rule of judging others by ourselves can easily become a dull and leaden despotism if we insist that what we should think and feel on a given occasion ought also to be the thoughts and actions of the Frenchman, the German, or the American.  There are, perhaps, no more pregnant sentences in Mr. Bryce’s valuable book than those in which he warns his British readers against the assumption that the same phenomena in two different countries must imply the same sort of causes.  Thus, an equal amount of corruption among British politicians, or an equal amount of vulgarity in the British press, would argue a much greater degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same phenomena in the United States.  So, too, some of the characteristic British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary, semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land.  Neither Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless each recognises that the other is fashioned of a somewhat different clay.

The strong reasons, material and otherwise, why Great Britain and the United States should be friends need not be enumerated here.  In spite of some recent and highly unexpected shocks, the tendencies that make for amity seem to me to be steadily increasing in strength and volume.[10] It is the American in the making rather than the matured native product that, as a rule, is guilty of blatant denunciation of Great Britain; and it is usually the untravelled and preeminently insular Briton alone that is utterly devoid of sympathy for his American cousins.  The American, as has often been pointed out, has become vastly more pleasant to deal with since his country has won an undeniable place among the foremost nations of the globe.  The epidermis of Brother Jonathan has toughened as he has grown in stature, and now that he can look over the heads of most of his compeers he regards the sting of a gnat as little as the best of them.  Perhaps not quite so little as John Bull, whose indifference to criticism and silent assurance of superiority are possibly as far wrong in the one direction as a too irritable skin is in the other.