The Difference in Point of View
The Anglo-Saxon Family Likeness—How Frenchmen and Germans View it—Englishmen, Americans, and "Foreigners"—An Echo of the War of 1812—An Anglo-American Conflict Unthinkable—American Feeling for England—The Venezuelan Incident—The Pilgrims and Some Secret History—Why Americans still Hate England—Great Britain's Nearness to the United States Geographically—Commercially—Historically—England's Foreign Ill-wishers in America.
The one thing chiefly needed to make both Englishmen and Americans desire an alliance is that they should come to know each other better. They would then be astonished to find not only how much they liked each other, but how closely each was already in sympathy with the other's ways of life and thought and how inconsiderable were the differences between them. Some one (I thought it was Mr. Freeman, but I cannot find the passage in his writings) has said that it would be a good way of judging an Englishman's knowledge of the world to notice whether, on first visiting America, he was most struck by the differences between the two peoples or by their resemblances. When an intelligent American has travelled for any time on the Continent of Europe, in contact with peoples who are truly "foreign" to him, he feels on arriving in London almost as if he were at home again. The more an Englishman moves among other peoples, the more he is impressed, on reaching the United States, with his kinship to those among whom he finds himself. Nor is it in either case wholly, or even chiefly, a matter of a common speech.
"Jonathan," says Max O'Rell, "is but John Bull expanded—John Bull with plenty of elbow room." And the same thing is said again and again in different phraseology by various Continental writers. It is said most impressively by those who do not put it into words at all, as by Professor Münsterberg[36:1] who is apparently not familiar with England, but shows no lack of willingness to dislike her. There is therefore no intentional comparison between the two peoples, but the writer's point of view has absorbing interest to an Englishman who knows both countries. More than once he remarks with admiration or astonishment on traits of the American character or institutions in the United States which the Englishman would necessarily take for granted, because they are precisely the same as those to which he has been accustomed at home. Writing for a German public, the Professor draws morals from American life which delight an English reader by their naïve and elementary superfluousness. In all unconsciousness, Professor Münsterberg has written a most valuable essay on the essential kinship of the British and American peoples as contrasted with his own.
Two brothers will commonly be aware only of the differences between them—the unlikeness of their features, the dissimilarities in their tastes or capabilities,—yet the world at large may have difficulty in distinguishing them apart. While they are conscious only of their individual differences, to the neighbours all else disappears in the family resemblance. So it is that Max O'Rell sees how like the American is to the Englishman more clearly than Mark Twain: Professor Münsterberg has involuntarily traced the features of the one in the lineaments of the other with a surer hand than Matthew Arnold or Mr. Bryce.
When, in his remarkable book, M. Demolins uses the term Anglo-Saxon, he speaks indifferently at one time of Englishmen and at another of Americans. The peoples are to him one and indistinguishable. Their greatness is a common greatness based on qualities which are the inheritance of their Anglo-Saxon origin. Chief among these qualities, the foundation-stone of their greatness, is the devotion to what we will follow him in calling the "Particularistic" form of society,—a society, that is, in which the individual predominates over the community, and not the community over the individual; a society which aims at "establishing each child in its full independence." This is, a Frenchman sees, eminently characteristic of the English and the Americans, in contrast with other peoples, with those which hold a republican form of government no less than those which live under an autocracy. And it is peculiarly Saxon in its origin,—not derived from the Celt or Norman or Dane. These latter belonged (as do the peoples sprung from, or allied to, them to-day) to that class of people which places the community above the individual, which looks instinctively to the State or the government for initiative. The Saxons alone (a people of earnest individual workers, agriculturalists and craftsmen) relied always on the initiative and impulse of the individual—what M. Demolins calls "the law of intense personal labour"—and it was by virtue of this quality that they eventually won social supremacy over the other races in Britain. It is by virtue of the same quality that the Americans have been enabled to subdue their continent and build up the fabric of the United States. It is this quality, says the French writer almost brutally, which makes the German and Latin races to-day stand to L'Anglais in about the same relation as the Oriental and the Redskin stand to the European. And when M. Demolins speaks of L'Anglais, he means the American as much as the "Englishman of Britain." It is a convenient term and, so essentially one are they in his eyes, there is no need to distinguish between the peoples. Mr. William Archer's remark is worth quoting, that "It is amazing how unessential has been the change produced in the Anglo-Saxon type and temperament [in America] by the influences of climate or the admixtures of foreign blood."[38:1]
When individual Englishmen and Americans are thrown together in strange parts of the world, they seldom fail to foregather as members of one race. There may be four traders living isolated in some remote port; but though the Russian may speak English with less "accent" than the American and though the German may have lived for some years in New York, it is not to the society of the German or the Russian that the American or the Englishman instinctively turns for companionship. The two former have but the common terms of speech; the Englishman and the American use also common terms of thought and feeling.
The people who know this best are the officers and men of the British and American navies, who are accustomed to find themselves thrown with the sailors of all nations in all sorts of waters; and wherever they are thus thrown together, the men who sail under the Stars and Stripes and those who fly the Union Jack are friends. I have talked with a good many British sailors (not officers) and it is good to hear the tone of respect in which they speak of the American navy, as compared with certain others.
The opportunities for similar companionship among the men of the armies of the two nations are fewer, but when the allied forces entered China the comradeship which arose between the American and British troops, to the exclusion of all others, is notorious. Every night after mess, British officers sought the American lines and vice versa. The Americans have the credit of having invented that rigorous development of martial law, by which, as soon as British officers came within their lines, sentries were posted with orders not to let them pass out again unless accompanied by an American officer. Thus the guests could not escape from hospitality till such hour as their hosts pleased.
Some ten years ago military representatives of various nations were present by invitation at certain manœuvres of the Indian army, and one night, when an official entertainment was impending, the United States officers were guests at the mess of a British regiment. Dinner being over, the colonel pushed his chair back and, turning to the American on his right, said in all innocence:
