[169:1] To avoid misapprehension, let me say that, as an Oxford man, I have all the Oxford prejudices as fully developed as any Englishman could wish. Rather a year of Oxford than five of Harvard or ten of Minnesota. How much of this is sentiment, and worthless, and how much reason, it would be hard to say and is immaterial. The personal prepossession need not blind one either to the greatness of the work which the other institutions do, nor to the defensibility of that point of view which sets other qualities, in an institution the professed object of which is to educate and to fit youths for life, above even those possessed by Oxford or Cambridge.
[171:1] In 1906, under a stricter definition of the term "periodical," the privilege of sending as second-class matter books issued at regular intervals was withdrawn.
[188:1] Rudyard Kipling, "The Sea Wife" (The Seven Seas).
[189:1] The Loyal Legion is the society of those who held commissions as officers on the side of the North. The Grand Army of the Republic is the society which includes all ranks.
CHAPTER VIII
A Comparison in Culture
The Advantage of Youth—Japanese Eclecticism and American—The Craving for the Best—Cyrano de Bergerac—Verestschagin—Music and the Drama—Culture by Paroxysms—Mr. Gladstone and the Japanese—Anglo-Saxon Crichtons—Americans as Linguists—England's Past and America's Future—Americanisms in Speech—Why they are Disappearing in America—And Appearing in England—The Press and the Copyright Laws—A Look into the Future.
Ruskin, speaking of the United States, said that he could never bring himself to live in a country so unfortunate as to possess no castles. But, with its obvious disadvantages, youth in a nation has also compensations. Max O'Rell says that to be American is to be both fresh and mature, and I have certainly known many Americans who were fresh. The shoulders are too young for the head to be very old. But when a man—let us say an Englishman of sixty—full of worldly wisdom, having travelled much and seen many men and cities, looks on a young man, just out of the university, perhaps, very keen on his profession, very certain of making his way in the world, with a hundred interests in what seem to the other "new-fangled" things—telephones and typewriters and bicycles and radio-activity and motor cars, things unknown to the old man's youth,—talking of philosophies and theories and principles which were not taught at college when the other was an undergraduate, the elder is likely to think that the young man's judgment is sadly crude and raw, that his education has been altogether too diffused and made up of smatterings of too many things, and to say to himself that the old sound, simple ways were better. Yet it may be—is it not almost certain?—that the youth has had the training which will give him a wider outlook than his father ever had, and will make him a broader man.
