Lack of confidence
Sir: Such self-confidence as may remain to us, such lingering respect in which the foreigner may hold us, is hardly fortified by an all-out display of national masochism like the American bicentennial exhibition at Greenwich, of a war in which we were defeated.
This is presumably the logical climax of a nauseating endeavour to suck up to the Americans that started in 1919 with the setting-up of a statue to Abraham Lincoln in Parliament Square and of George Washington outside the National Gallery. One can hardly imagine, for instance, the spectacle of a statue of General Burgoyne or Lord Cornwallis on the steps of the Capitol.
If this pathetic groping after a mythical special relationship was intended to persuade the American tourist either to hold our hand or put a very welcome dollar into it I can testify, having served as guide to literally thousands of American visitors over the last ten years, that their normal reaction is at best pity and at worst disgust, though they may be too polite to express either. On the other hand our Canadian guests, whose ancestors fought on our side in 1776 (also in 1812), are apt to show their indignation with rather less restraint. No memorial or monument to them, which they feel the more bitterly if they come, as many of them do, from those families of United Empire Loyalists who paid for their British patriotism with bleak exile to Nova Scotii.
More generally, sir, a people so blatantly lacking in confidence in themselves are hardly likely to win the confidence of anybody else.
4 Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, George Edinger London WC1
Previous page
