. [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—The letters in recent issues of the Spectator on the subject of the, dislike of Americans by Englishmen, and rice versa, seem to me to present yet another unfortunate instance of the tendency to condemn a group from an experience with individuals.
My family, from Farnworth, Prescott parish, some 800 years ago, has joyously fought with and against the Mother Country in each generation. Yet the tradition of blood is as closely held with us as when our hardy forefather landed at Plymouth. But each writer seems to pick out his especial aversion as to type, at which to hurl his darts of condemnation, ignoring the great numbers to be found of exactly his own type with which, certainly, he is smugly pleased.
An Englishman of birth and education.will find, if he looks for it, his counterpart in American social life, and the two will find a common language and appreciation. A middle-class Englishman may be matched by the middle-class American; each with the virtues and vices of the class ; so the lower orders find their counterpart in each country. Why should one class expect to find sympathy and understanding in examples of another class ? But, you cry, there are no classes in America.1 Who told you so ? The blatant American or the blatant' Englishman ? Alas ! each country is so sadly misrepresented by the vulgar individuals met in travelling and in hotels, the new money from Pittsburg comparing with that from your Manchester.
Again, we are not homogeneous ; half our blood is alien, and perhaps the old Anglo-Saxon traits and ideals are bound to disappear in time in this melting pot. It is a form of evolu-. tion, and who are, we to bemoan the onward march of those great forces ? I do not find the Englishman resident, let us say, in New York, unhappy in his associations ; far from it, he is enjoying himself hugely.' And all through England I have made happy contacts with the English of all classes, choosing the best for my friends, whether in manor or in a Devonshire cottage : and I have never been disappointed.
There is too much of this vitriolic exhibition of one's own bad taste in choosing acquaintances, for is that not what it comes down to ? Far better to expose and rejoice in the many excellent traits held in common, and quietly blush for the raucous unpresentables with which each country is afflicted.—I am, Sir, &c.,
Previous page
