The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-04-13
THE ENGLISH MAN IN AMER1cl

A.
 A strange and on the whole delight full people who, with the English lan- guage on their lips, carry the heart of a Frenchman on their sleeves, and have deep down in their breasts another heart of their own, heart compact of fine pride and generous feeling, and gusts of sensitive resentment and shrinking reticerce that no Spanish hi- dalgo could match. It is curious mix ture, but there it is, and the sooner you come to recognize 1t the better it will be for your welfare in the country you are visiting.
 Perhaps the first thing to be done is to accustom yourself to the idea that Americans have of the average Eng lishman. Everybody knows what you think of yourself. You are the only man in the world. the measure of per- lection, the standard of the greater vir- tues the rule by which excellence in the art of living and of behaving one self is to be tested. You have never really thought about this you have gently but firmly assumed it to be true e~AAStS AAOI oilAJ liuSJ Uul ItCOSIliZtu dS true by every other nation. You are clever, polished, brilliant well-versed in the art of dress and the great points of conduct-in a word you're model
 That's your idea. Put it away from you, get rid of it. bury it deep under ground and don't resurrect it until you're back in Liverpool. The Ameri- cans are polite people, but you can't be long in their society or read their newspapers and periodicals with ordi- nary attention before you discover that their idea of our matchless nation doesn't exactly square with your own. It may be your privilege to hear a group, who are not aware of your pres ence, telling story in, which a slow, stupid and misunderstanding man is one of the characters. You listen with a distant and amused tolerance until great heaven, you realize that the stu pid man is an Englishman! He says, Flaw, dontcherknow," with every oth- CT word he utters, never sees a joke until everybody else has forgotten it, and altogether behaves with a thick headed foolishness and hob-nailed ar rogance that makes him the laughing stock and the contempt of all the other characters in the story that Is being told. Terrible, isn't it2 Of course you're not like that. Nobody ever is. But how on earth, then, did the idea ever arise in the quick American brain? That question you can answer, no doubt, but If you want to answer it trI1t thfIl11I5, yp11'11 o fn hrin +1 aid larger amount of modest diffi- dence than is generally to be found in the hand luggage of your travelling compatriots.
 We'll, it's a good thing, no doubt, to be toppled every now and then from your tall pinnacles of self-esteem, to be forced, while you lie bruised and gasping on the ground, you see your self for a brief moment as others see you-but what then? In America you get up and shake yourself; the bruises become less sore, and your opinion of yourself revives in the society of those Americans (and they are not few) who pass their lives in running down every thing that has the slightest native fla vor of Americanism about it. No such high dry tories as these are to be found in England. They admire with an ex- traordinary fervor all the ancient abus- es the dismal tendencies to reaction and obscuration against which we struggle. In their lives. their manner and their language and dress they are more English than the most ignorant, dull Englishnan that ever had his be- ing in the mind of an exaggerated sa- t:rist, and as for honest pride in their great country and it's illustrious deeds, they never felt spark of it.
 Do not take these gentlemen as your guides. Bear yourself modestly be natural, try to shake off little of that dead weight of self-assured superiority that expresses you; think of Americans as fellow oW-creatures, sometimes vain,