Similarly the visiting European goes into polite society and is amazed at the peculiar qualities of some of the persons whom he meets there. He tells stories about those peculiar people, but the background of the society, against which these people stood out so clearly, a background which is so much like his own at home, almost escapes his notice or is too uninteresting and familiar to talk about. There is no one to explain fully to the English people that while in England educated society keeps pretty well to itself, there are in America no hurdles—or none that a lively animal may not easily leap—to keep the black sheep away from the white, or the white from straying off anywhere among the black, so that a large part of the English people has imbibed the notion that there are really no refined or cultured circles in the United States.
Whenever a financial fraud of a large size is discovered in America, the world is told of it, just as certainly as it is told when an English peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the English people have come to think of American business ethics as being too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware that only in most exceptional cases can great or permanent individual commercial success be won by fraud, and that nothing but fundamental honesty will serve as the basis for a great national trade such as the United States has built up.
Visiting Englishmen are bewildered by the strange types of peoples whom they see upon the streets and by the talk which they hear of "German elements" and "French elements" and "Scandinavian elements" in the population. But they do not as a rule see that these various "elements," when in the first generation of citizenship, are but a fringe upon the fabric of society, and when in the second or third generation they have a tendency to become entirely swallowed up and to merge all their national characteristics by absorption in the Anglo-Saxon stock; and that apart from and unheeding all these irrelevant appendages, the great American people goes on its way, homogeneous, unruffled, and English at bottom.
Finally Englishmen read American newspapers and, not understanding the different relation in which those newspapers stand to the people, they compare with them the normal English papers and draw inferences which are quite unjust. Similar inferences no less unjust may be drawn from hearing the speech of a certain number of well-to-do Americans, belonging, as Englishmen opine, to the class of "gentlemen."
These misunderstandings do less harm to the Englishman than to the American, inasmuch as the Englishman has that predisposition to national cordiality which the American has not. But, though the Englishman's mistakes do not influence his good-will to the United States, though he himself attaches no serious importance to them, his utterance of them is taken seriously by the Americans themselves and does not tend to the promotion of international good feeling. Therefore it is that it is no less desirable that English misconceptions of the United States should be corrected than it is that the American people should be brought to a juster appreciation of the British character and Empire.
It is in America, doubtless, that missionary work is most needed, inasmuch as all England would at any minute welcome an American alliance with enthusiasm; while in the United States any public suggestion of such an alliance never fails to provoke immediate and vehement protest. It is true that that protest issues primarily from the Irish and German elements; and it may seem absurd that the American people as a whole should suffer itself to be swayed in a matter of so national a character by a minority which is not only comparatively unimportant in numbers, but which the true American majority regards with some irritability as distinctly alien.
There are a large number of constituencies in the United States, however, where the Irish and German votes, individually or in combination, hold the balance of power in the electorate, and not only must many individual members of Congress hesitate to antagonise so influential a section of their constituents, but it is even questionable whether the united and harmonious action of those two elements might not, under certain conditions, be able to unseat a sufficient number of such individual members as to change the political complexion of one or both of the Houses of Congress, and even, in a close election, of the Administration itself. Nor is it necessary to repeat again that when the anti-British outcry is raised, though primarily by a minority and an alien minority, it finds a response in the breasts of a vast number of good Americans in whom the traditional dislike of England, though latent, still persists solely by reason of misapprehension and misunderstandings. Therefore it is that so many of the best Americans, who in their hearts know well how desirable an alliance with England would be, are content to deprecate its discussion and to say that things are well enough as they are; though again I say that things are never well enough so long as they might be better. However desirable such an alliance may be, however much to the benefit of the nation, it would, they say, be bad politics to bring it forward as a party question. And to bring it forward without its becoming from the outset a party question would be plainly impossible.
But would it be bad politics? Can it ever, in the long run, be bad politics to champion any cause which is great and good? It might be that it would be difficult for an individual member of Congress to come forward as the active advocate of a British alliance and not lose his seat; but in the end, the man who did it, or the party which did it, would surely win. When two peoples have a dislike of each other based on intimate knowledge by each of the other's character, to rise as the champion of their alliance might be hopeless; but when two peoples are held apart only by misunderstanding and by lack of perception of the boons that alliance between them would bring, it can need but courage and earnestness to carry conviction to the people and to bring success.