' This might
keep us pretty busy, your lordship."
In a rather low-class farce which I saw in a Chicago theatre, two men
wandered through the action, with the charming irrelevance
characteristic of American popular drama, attired, one as John Bull, the
other as Brother Jonathan. There came a point in the action where some
one had to be kicked out of the house. "You do it, Jonathan," said John
Bull; whereupon Jonathan retorted: "I know your game; you want me to do
your fighting for you, but _I don't do it_! See?" These are ridiculous
trifles, no doubt, but they might be indefinitely multiplied; and they
show the set of a certain current in American feeling. Let us beware of
lending added strength to this current by any appearance of
self-interested eagerness in our advances towards America.
One thing we cannot too clearly realise, and that is that the true
American clings above everything to his Americanism. The status of an
American citizen is to him the proudest on earth, and that although he
may clearly enough recognise the abuses of American political life, and
the dangers which the Republic has to encounter. The feeling (which is
not to be confounded with an ignorant chauvinism, though in some cases
it may take that form) is the fundamental feeling of the whole nation;
and no emotion which threatened to encroach upon it, or compete with it
in any way, would have the least chance of taking a permanent place in
the American mind.
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