THE ENGLISH TIIE ENGLISH MEN know themselves little, peoples know themselves less. Probably of all peoples the French is the least ignorant of itself, the English the most. The actor is only human when he fancies himself most in the part in which he had to be least himself. A mail often plumes himself precisely on being what he is not a sensitive child will often hate himself for what he is. Peoples are like the man and the child per- haps the English is the most manlike in its mistaken vanities and the most childlike in its shy shrinkings, and the French at the opposite pole the least self- questioning and the most reasonably conceited, though even the French is not infallible about itself. National consciousness is fitful and broken like the flashes of consciousness in instinctive animal life. Peoples seem seldom to use the flashes to good purpose they may feel, they rarely reason, rightly about themselves. A man or a faction having wrested n hearing becomes by right or might a peoples mouthpiece this is a flash of national consciousness. The mouthpiece speaks out a peoples destiny and character, and commonly pronounces wrong. The mistake becomes an axiom against which the peoples instinct has a hard fight. Peoples choose or accept representative men and representative ideas that do not represent them rightly. Bismarck never spoke rightly for the German people, but his voice drowned all others. Napoleon never spoke for the French, but they were dumb while he roared as only he could roar. Every thinking person acknowledges that our own much softer-spoken representative men of to-day are remarkably un-English. To-day Germany calls herself, or is called by the faction of the German people which Europe listens to, the paragon of brute strength but some part of the world wonders whether what is most curious in her, and perhaps pathetic, be not her animal weakness, and whether the rising brain-power of revolt be not more interesting in her than the sodden mentality of discipline. She waves her mailed fist, but her best contributioils to the serious thought of to-day have been curious studies and fine examples of interesting intellectual disease, and her iron organisation is her boast, but she may be applying her gifts of inethod and combination to the sure though slow ylaniing of social revolution. The United States of to-day, as everybody knows, roar out their energy does it amount in matters of fact, in things of the body, in things that pay money, to much more than the meek toiling of middle class England which nobody talks about There is in American inore subtle than energetic, not blunt but inorbidly delicate, shrinking, not go-a-head, worshipping the past and shy of the future, not conquering but receptive, a man who less than a European thinlrs of breaking new ground, and who more than an Englishman clings to the most anciently trodden soil. Some call him the best American, others the played-out American is he not the real Americail He certainly is, taken in his surroundings, a Inore original type than the strenuous American. There are few finer examples of a nation misunderstandiilg itself than glorious Walt Whitman, who thought he was, whom perhaps America certainly some Europeans took to be, America, spontaneous, free, savagely poetic, madly common. He never saw the really original America, deliberate, traditional, self-analytical, and furiously refined. Rlr. Henry Janes is not all the real Alnerica, but he is much more the real America than Walt Whitrnan was. Perhaps an observer without preconceived ideas will find that the most important characteristic of America to-day is subtlety... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.