Of the books written about the United States in the last score of years by European writers of any weight, there are few which have not helped to dissipate the grotesquely one-sided view of America formerly held in the Old World.  Preeminent among such books is, of course, the “American Commonwealth” of Mr. James Bryce; but such writers as Mr. Freeman, M. Paul Bourget, Sir George Campbell, Mr. William Sanders, Miss Catherine Bates, Mme. Blanc, Miss Emily Faithful, M. Paul de Rousiers, Max O’Rell, and Mr. Stevens have all, in their several degrees and to their several audiences, worked to the same end.  It may, however, be worth while mentioning one or two literary performances of a somewhat different character, merely to remind my British readers of the sort of thing we have done to exasperate our American cousins in quite recent times, and so help them to understand the why and wherefore of certain traces of resentment still lingering beyond the Atlantic.  In 1884 Sir Lepel Griffin, a distinguished Indian official, published a record of his visit to the United States, under the title of “The Great Republic.”  Perhaps this volume might have been left to the obscurity which has befallen it, were it not that Mr. Matthew Arnold lent it a fictitious importance by taking as the text for some of his own remarks on America Sir Lepel’s assertion that he knew of no civilised country, Russia possibly excepted, where he should less like to live than the United States.  To me it seems a book most admirably adapted to infuriate even a less sensitive folk than the Americans.  I do not in the least desire to ascribe to Sir Lepel Griffin a deliberate design to be offensive; but it is just his calm, supercilious Philistinism, aggravated no doubt by his many years’ experience as a ruler of submissive Orientals, that makes it no less a pleasure than a duty for a free and intelligent republican to resent and defy his criticisms.

Can, for instance, anything more wantonly and pointlessly insulting be imagined than his assertion that an intelligent and well-informed American would probably name the pork-packing of Chicago as the thing best worth seeing in the United States?  After that it is not surprising that he considers American scenery singularly tame and unattractive, and that he finds female beauty (can his standard for this have been Orientalised?) very rare.  He predicts that it would be impossible to maintain the Yellowstone National Park as such, and asserts that it was only a characteristic spirit of swagger and braggadocio that prompted this attempt at an impossible ideal.  He also seems to think lynching an any-day possibility in the streets of New York.  The value of his forecasts may, however, be discounted by his prophecy in the same book that the London County Council would be merely a glorified vestry, utterly indifferent to the public interest, and unlikely to attract any candidates of distinction!