took the wider, the more genial and human, point of view; as if he had the keener appreciation of the ties of race and language.  It is as if he cherished continually a sub-dominant consciousness of the fact that the occupation of the North American continent by the Anglo-Saxons is one of the greatest events in English history—­that America is peopled by Englishmen.  When he thinks of the events of 1776 he feels, to use Mr. Hall Caine’s illustration, like Dr. Johnson, who dreamed that he had been worsted in conversation, but reflected when he awoke that the conversation of his adversary must also have been his own.  As opposed to this there may be a grain of self-assertion in the American use of the term as applied to the British; it is as if they would emphasise the fact that they are no mere offshoot of England, that the Colonial days have long since gone by, and that the United States is an independent nation with a right to have its own “foreigners.”  An American friend suggests that the different usage of the two lands may be partly owing to the fact that the cordial, frank demeanour of the American, coupled with his use of the same tongue, makes an Englishman absolutely forget that he is not a fellow-countryman, while the subtler American is keenly conscious of differences which escape the obtuser Englishman.  Another partial explanation is that the first step across our frontier brings us to a land where an unknown tongue is spoken, and that we have consequently welded into one the two ideas of foreignhood and unintelligibility; while the American, on the other hand, identifies himself with his continent and regards all as foreigners who are not natives of it.

The point would hardly be worth dwelling upon, were it not that the different attitude it denotes really leads in some instances to actual misunderstanding.  The Englishman, with his somewhat unsensitive feelers, is apt, in all good faith and unconsciousness, to criticise American ways to the American with much more freedom than he would criticise French ways to a Frenchman.  It is as if he should say, “You and I are brothers, or at least cousins; we are a much better sort than all those foreign Johnnies; and so there’s no harm in my pointing out to you that you’re wrong here and ought to change there.”  But, alas, who is quicker to resent our criticism than they of our own household?  And so the American, overlooking the sort of clumsy compliment that is implied in the assurance of kinship involved in the very frankness of our fault-finding criticism, resents most keenly the criticisms that are couched in his own language, and sees nothing but impertinent hostility in the attitude of John Bull.  And who is to convince him that it is, as in a Scottish wooing, because we love him that we tease him, and in so doing put him (in our eyes) on a vastly higher pedestal than the “blasted foreigner” whose case we consider past praying for?  And who is to teach us that Brother Jonathan is able now to give us at least as many hints as we can give him, and that we must realise that the same sauce must be served with both birds?  Thus each resiles from the encounter infinitely more pained than if the antagonist had been a German or a Frenchman.  The very fact that we speak the same tongue often leads to false assumptions of mutual knowledge, and so to offences of unguarded ignorance.