What matters Alaska, or Venezuela, or
Nicaragua, "or all the stones of stumbling in the world," so long as we
have a common interest in (and some of us a common distaste for) the
split infinitive? To put the matter briefly, while the outlook of the
New Yorker is wider than ours, his standpoint is the same. We gather
from a well-known anecdote that some, at least, of the cultivated
Americans of Thackeray's time were inclined to "think of Tupper." To-day
they do not "think of Tupper" any more than we do--and by Tupper I mean,
of course, not the veritable Martin Farquhar, but the Tuppers of the
passing hour. In America as in England, no doubt, there is a huge
half-educated public, ravenous for doughnuts of romance served up with
syrup of sentiment. The enthusiasms of the American shopgirl, I take it,
are very much the same as those of her English sister. But the line of
demarkation between the educated and the half-educated is just as clear
in New York as in London. For the cultivated American of to-day, the
Boomster booms and the Sibyl sibyllates in vain. I find no
justification, in this city at any rate, for the old saying which
described America as the most common-schooled and least educated country
in the world.
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