During their war with Spain, the Americans were grateful for English sympathy and moral support.
During the Transvaal War, the English, finding themselves isolated and blamed by the whole of Europe, hoped for American sympathy.
'I scratched your back, you scratch mine.'
This sympathy the English did not obtain, or, if they did, in a very small measure, and only among the inhabitants of Fifth Avenue and the 'Four Hundred' of a few large Eastern cities. I was in America for three months at the beginning of last year, and everywhere, from New York to New Orleans, I found ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred sympathizing with the Boers in their plucky and determined struggle for liberty and independence. Their skill and bravery appealed to a nation who, some hundred years ago, themselves fought successfully for their freedom.
Yet, as I had many times the opportunity of telling American audiences, 'In the Anglo-Boer struggle, it is not the Boers, but the English who are fighting for what your ancestors fought for so successfully during the War of Independence—the liberty of the citizen and good and honest government. I have sympathy for the Boers on account of their ignorant patriotism and bravery; but, for the sake of humanity and civilization, I hope the English will win.'
It is true that I got applause for this statement, it is true that the presidents of many American universities thanked me for putting the truth and the facts of the question plainly before the students; but I am afraid I made very few converts to the pro-English cause, although I believe I was more successful on the platform in America than in France, where I got enthusiastically hissed and had several narrow escapes of being mobbed for expressing my rather pro-English sentiments.
The more charitable of my compatriots said it was only fair for a Frenchman who had long enjoyed the hospitality of the English to speak well of them abroad. Some went so far as to suggest that I was probably in the pay of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.
However all this may be, my point is this: I don't care what a few American millionaires, who prefer England to America, who crawl on all fours before the English aristocracy, who would think it beneath their dignity to give their daughters to honest Americans, and prefer to get some English noblemen's coats-of-arms out of pawn with their daughters and their dollars—I say I don't care what these people may say to the contrary, my firm conviction, more and more absolute every time that I travel throughout the United States, is that there is very little love to spare in America for the English people. And this state of things will exist as long as the Americans build their patriotism on their successes of 1776 and 1812 against the English, and so long as school-books published in America teach American children that the English are the hereditary foes of their country.
Add also to this that not one-third of the population of the United States are of English extraction. The Germans and the Scandinavians are not 'kith and kin,' and the Irish are tooth and nail. Now, if you don't believe me, let me wish you had been in America, as I was, during the Venezuelan squabble, some five years ago, and you will be convinced of the truth of my statement.
But I must leave aside all these political considerations, and also the question whether American and English men love each other or not, for I was very near forgetting that the subject of this chapter is 'What American and English Women think of each other.' Here again, as in the case of the men, we must not speak of the aristocracy and the plutocracy of the two countries. Those people are cosmopolitan; besides, they travel and they get rid of their international prejudices.