“Do you know why you pulled us over the line?”
“No.”
“Because you had all the blackguards on your side of the line.”
“Do you know why we had all the blackguards on our side of the line?” inquired the American.
“No.”
“Because we pulled you over the line.”
In one of my anecdotes I used the term Sam Johnson to describe an Englishman of a certain type. Dr. Samuel Johnson was a very marked specimen of the type, and almost the only illustrious Englishman of letters during our Revolutionary troubles who was not our friend. Right down through the years ever since, there have been Sam Johnsons writing and saying unfavorable things about us. The Tory must be eternal, as much as the Whig or Liberal; and both are always needed. There will probably always be Sam Johnsons in England, just like the one who was scandalized by our Chicago packing-house disclosures. No longer ago than June 1, 1919, a Sam Johnson, who was discussing the Peace Treaty, said in my hearing, in London:
“The Yankees shouldn’t have been brought into any consultation. They aided and abetted Germany.”
In Littell’s Living Age of July 20, 1918, pages 151-160, you may read an interesting account of British writers on the United States. The bygone ones were pretty preposterous. They satirized the newness of a new country. It was like visiting the Esquimaux and complaining that they grew no pineapples and wore skins. In Littell you will find how few are the recent Sam Johnsons as compared with the recent friendly writers. You will also be reminded that our anti-English complex was discerned generations ago by Washington Irving. He said in his Sketch Book that writers in this country were “instilling anger and resentment into the bosom of a youthful nation, to grow with its growth and to strengthen with its strength.”
And he quotes from the English Quarterly Review, which in that early day already wrote of America and England: