"I should imagine it would look very queer," said the Englishman whom he was addressing, with obvious coolness; and the American was entirely aware that every person in that carriage regarded him as a typical American liar. Time passed and the carriage relapsed into silence, each of the occupants becoming immersed in such reading-matter as he had with him. Suddenly one of them aroused the others with the ejaculation:
"By Jove! If here isn't a picture of that very building you were talking of!"
It was a Graphic or Illustrated London News, or some other such undoubtedly trustworthy London paper which he was reading, and he passed it round for the inspection of the rest of the company. The American looked at it. It was not his particular building but it did as well, and there was the photograph before them, with the walls complete, to window casing and every detail of ornament, on the eighth and ninth floors, while not a brick had been laid from the second storey to the seventh. A god from the machine had intervened to save the American's reputation. Often have I seen incredulity steal over the faces of a well-bred company in England at some statement from an American of a fact in itself commonplace enough, when no such providential corroboration was forthcoming.
Curiously enough, the true Yankee in America, especially of the rural districts, has the same distrust of the veracity of the Western American as the Englishman generally has of the Yankee himself (in which he includes all Americans). I had been living for some years in Minnesota when, standing one day on the platform of the railway station at, I think, Schenectady, in New York State, I was addressed by one who was evidently a farmer in the neighbourhood. Learning that I had just come from Minnesota he referred to the two towns of St. Paul and Minneapolis. "Right lively towns," he had heard them to be. "And how many people might there be in the two together?" he asked. "About a quarter of a million," I replied—the number being some few thousand less than the figure given by the last census. The farmer, perhaps, had not heard anything of the two towns for ten or a dozen years, when their population had been not much more than a third of what it had grown to at that time; and he looked at me. He did not say anything; he merely looked at me, long and fixedly. Then he deliberately turned his back and walked to the other end of the platform as far as possible from my contaminating influence. I was never so explicitly and categorically called a liar in my life; and he doubtless went home and told his family of the magnificent Western exaggerator whom he had met "down to the depot." I fear the American reputation often suffers no less unjustly in England.
FOOTNOTES:
[349:1] Even up to a quarter of a century ago, there was at least one corner of the United States, near to the Canadian border, where among Indians not yet rounded up or blanketed the old feeling still existed, so that an Englishman, proclaiming himself a "King George Man," could go and hunt and fish safely, sure of the friendship and protection of the red man, while an American would not have been safe for a night. The subject of the relations between the British and the Indian tribes in Revolutionary times has, of course, been provocative of much bitterness in the hearts of Americans; but happily their own historians of a later day have shown that this bitterness has only been partially justified. There was not much to choose between Patriots and Loyalists. Those who know the Indian know also that the universal liking for the Englishman cannot have rested only on motives of political expediency or from temporary alliances made in Revolutionary times. They must have had abundant proof of the loyalty and trustworthiness of Englishmen before so deep-rooted a sentiment could have been created. The contrast, of course, was not with the American colonist, but with the French. The colonists, too, were King George Men once.
[351:1] Yes; I am aware that elsewhere I quote Professor Münsterberg without enthusiasm, but on another class of subject. Except for the limitations which his national characteristics and upbringing impose upon him (and for the fact that he seems to be unacquainted with the West) the Professor has written a just and clear-sighted estimate of the American character. We do not look to a German for a proper understanding of the sporting instinct, as British and Americans understand it, nor perhaps for views that will coincide with ours on the subject of morality in the youth of either sex. But the laws of common honesty are the same in all countries. A German is as well able to estimate the commercial morality of a people as an Englishman, however little he may be qualified to talk about their games or about the nuances in the masculine attitude towards women.
[358:1] That meeting has an incidental historical interest from the fact that it was then that Mr. Morgan first stepped into the public view as a financial power. Up to that time, his name was not particularly well known outside of New York or the financial circles immediately connected with New York. Most Western papers found it necessary to explain to their readers (if they could) who the Mr. Morgan was at whose house the meeting was being held.