"Well," began Mr. Punch, "I think a good deal of it—I mean, I think a good deal about it. And it nearly always makes me smile. Of course you won't understand why it nearly always makes me smile, because we don't see fun in the same things. You don't appreciate our humour, and therefore you say that we haven't any. And if we don't appreciate your humour that proves again that we haven't any. So you'll never understand why it makes me smile, sometimes gently and sometimes rather bitterly, to think about your nation; but I'll tell you just the same.
"In the first place, what you call 'America' is only a small fraction of the American continent, not even as large as British North America. And in the second place what you call your 'nation'—well, some rude person once said of it that it isn't really a nation at all, but just a picnic. I won't go so far as that, but I hardly suppose you will be much better pleased if I call it a League of Nations. That is a phrase that you hate, because your President Wilson loves it.
"By the way, I must be very careful how I speak of your President, because you're so sensitive on that subject. You allow yourselves to abuse him as the head of a political party, but if other nations so much as question his omniscience he suddenly becomes the Head of a Sovereign State. An English Cabinet Minister once told me how an American gave vent in conversation to the most violent language in regard to the policy of the President of the day, and when at the end the Englishman very quietly said, 'I am inclined to agree with you,' the American turned on him in a fury, saying: 'Sir, I didn't come here to have my country insulted!'
"However, to return to your League of Nations. In England (where I come from) they are just now reviving a play by Mr. Israel Zangwill, in which, if I recall it rightly, he makes out your country to be the Melting Pot into which every sort of fancy alien type is thrown, and turned out a pattern American citizen, a member of a United Family. I wish I could believe it. It seems to us that your German, even after passing through the Melting Pot, remains a German; that your Irishman, however much he Americanises himself for purposes of political power and graft, remains an Irishman. You never seem to get together as a nation, except when you go to war, and even then you don't keep it up, for you're not together now, although you're still at war with Germany. The rest of the time you seem to spend in having Elections and 'placating' (I think that's what you call it) the German interest, or the negro interest, or the Sinn Fein interest.
"And this brings me to the point that makes me smile most of all—when it doesn't make me weep. Isn't it a pathetic thing that a really great and strong people like you should be so weak and little as to let your Press sympathise blatantly with the campaign of murder in Ireland; to suffer that campaign to be actively assisted by American gunmen; to look on while it is being financed by American money, here employed in conjunction with the resources of that very Bolshevism which you take care to treat as criminal in your own country?
"Isn't it pitiful that you should regard reprisals (hateful though they may be) as worse than the hideous murders which provoked them; forgetting your own addiction to lynch law; forgetting too (as some of our own people forget) that the sanctity of the law depends as much upon the goodwill and assistance of the populace as it does upon the police, and cannot else be maintained?
"Indeed your memory is not very good. Your Monroe Doctrine, which insists that nobody from outside shall interfere with your affairs, escapes you whenever you want to interfere with other people's. You even forget, at convenient times, your own Civil War. Just as there was not a protest made by you against the methods of our blockade of Germany for which an answer could not be found in some precedent set by you in that War of North and South, so now the best answer to your sympathy with the preposterous claims of an Irish Republic is to be found in those four years in which you fought so bloodily to preserve the integrity of your own Union.
"Yet you let men like De Valera go at large proclaiming the brutal tyranny of the alien Saxon and advertising his country as a Sovereign State—all because you have to 'placate' the Irish interest. I should very much like to hear what you would think of us if at our Elections we ran an Anti-You campaign and even made Intervention a plank in our platform (as one of your Parties did) for the sake of 'placating' the niggers or the Cubans or the Filipinos or any other sort of Dago in our midst.
"Of course we are told—and of course I believe it—that the 'best' American sentiment is all right. But, if so, it must be cherished by a very select few, or they would never tolerate a condition of things so rotten that, unless your coming President finds some cure for it, you are like to become the laughing-stock of Europe. I am almost tempted to go into the Melting Pot myself and show you, as none but an American citizen would ever be allowed to show you, how it is to be done. Unfortunately I am too busy elsewhere, putting my own country right.
"But to conclude—for I see that we are drawing close to the landing-stage—I do hope that in my desire to be genial I have not been too flattering. No true friend ever flatters. And in my heart, which has some of our common blood in it (notoriously thicker than water), I cannot help loving your country, and would love it better still if only it gave me a better chance. Indeed, I belong at home to a Society for the Promotion of Anglo-American Friendship. More than that"—and here the Sage was seen to probe into a voluminous and bulging breast-pocket—"I have brought with me a token of affection designed to stimulate a mutual cordiality."