A feature of the average middle-class Englishman which the American cannot easily understand is his tacit recognition of the fact that somebody else (the aristocrat) is his superior.  In fact, this is sometimes a fertile source of misunderstanding, and it is apt to beget in the American an entirely false idea of what he thinks the innate servility of the Englishman.  He must remember that the aristocratic prestige is a growth of centuries, that it has come to form part of the atmosphere, that it is often accepted as unconsciously as the law of gravitation.  This is a case where the same attitude in an American mind (and, alas, we occasionally see it in American residents in London) would betoken an infinitely lower moral and mental plane than it does in the Englishman.  No true American could accept the proposition that “Lord Tom Noddy might do so-and-so, but it would be a very different thing for a man in my position;” and yet an Englishman (I regret to say) might speak thus and still be a very decent fellow, whom it would be unjust cruelty to call a snob.  No doubt the English aristocracy (as I think Mr. Henry James has said) now occupies a heroic position without heroism; but the glamour of the past still shines on their faded escutcheons, and “the love of freedom itself is hardly stronger in England than the love of aristocracy.”

Matthew Arnold has pointed out to us how the aristocracy acts like an incubus on the middle classes of Great Britain, and he has put it on record that he was struck with the buoyancy, enjoyment of life, and freedom of constraint of the corresponding classes in America.  In England, he says, a man feels that it is the upper class which represents him; in the United States he feels that it is the State, i.e., himself.  In England it is the Barbarian alone that dares be indifferent to the opinion of his fellows; in America everyone expresses his opinion and “voices” his idiosyncrasies with perfect freedom.  This position has, however, its seamy side.  There is in America a certain anarchy in questions of taste and manners which the long possession of a leisured, a cultivated class tends to save us from in England.  I never felt so kindly a feeling towards our so-called “upper class” as when travelling in the United States and noting some effects of its absence.  This class has an accepted position in the social hierarchy; its dicta are taken as authoritative on points of etiquette, just as the clergy are looked on as the official guardians of religious and ecclesiastical standards.  I do not here pretend to discuss the value of the moral example of our jeunesse doree, filtering down through the successive strata of society; but their influence in setting the fashion on such points as scrupulous personal cleanliness, the avoidance of the outre in costume, and the maintenance of an honourable and generous standard in their money dealings with each other, is distinctly on the side