English Pharisees, French Crocodiles, and Other Anglo-French Typical Characters

ENGLISH PHARISEES AND FRENCH CROCODILES.
You have been kind enough to receive favorably two volumes of unpretentious impressions of your great and most hospitable country, published in 1889 and 1891.
You are a dear friend and a delightful fellow. You are on the road that will safely lead you to the discovery of everything that can insure the prosperity of the land of which you are so justly proud.
Yet the Old World can teach you something; not how to work, but how to live.
I have drawn a few sketches for you. Perhaps they will show you that people can be happy without rolling in wealth, or living in a furnace.
Take up this little book and, lighting a cigar, lie down quietly on the grass and read it under the shade of a tree.
People very often speak ill of their neighbors, not out of wickedness, but merely out of laziness; it is so much easier to do so than to study their qualities and all the circumstances that might oblige you to change your opinion.
For instance, some fifty years ago, a great English wit, Sydney Smith, said that it required a surgical operation to make a Scotchman understand a joke.
Well, an English joke, he probably meant.
However, the satire was neatly expressed. When the English get hold of a good joke, and see it, it lasts them a long time.
The Scotch are a hundred times more witty and humorous than the English; but John Bull still goes on affirming that it requires a surgical operation to make a Scotchman understand a joke.
If such misunderstanding can exist between the English and the Scotch, just imagine what feelings the natives of a land can inspire in foreigners.