We live in times when patriotism is exalted above all other virtues, because there have happened to lie before the patriotic tremendous chances for the display of courage and self-sacrifice. Patriotism ever has that advantage as the world is now constituted; but patriotism and provincialism of course are pretty close relations, and they who can only see beauty in the plumage of their own kind, who prefer the bad points of their countrymen to the good points of foreigners, merely write themselves down blind of an eye, and panderers to herd feeling. America is advantaged in this matter. She lives so far away from other nations that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only country in the world; but in the many strains of blood which go to make up America, there is as yet a natural corrective to the narrower kind of patriotism. America has vast spaces and many varieties of type and climate, and life to her is still a great adventure. I pretend to no proper knowledge of the American people. It takes more than two visits of two months each to know the American people; there is just one thing, however, I can tell you: You seem easy, but are difficult to know. Americans have their own form of self-absorption; but they appear to be free as yet from the special competitive self-centrement which has been forced on Britons through long centuries by countless continental rivalries and wars. Insularity was driven into the very bones of our people by the generation-long wars of Napoleon. A Frenchman, André Chevrillon, whose book: “England and the War” I commend to anyone who wishes to understand British peculiarities, justly, subtly studied by a Frenchman, used these words in a recent letter to me: “You English are so strange to us French; you are so utterly different from any other people in the world.” It is true; we are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, I think, we feel that only the American people could ever really understand us. And being extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and proud, we do our best to hide from Americans that we have any such feeling. It would distress the average Briton to confess that he wanted to be understood, had anything so natural as a craving for fellowship or for being liked. We are a weird people, though we look so commonplace. In looking at photographs of British types among photographs of other European nationalities, one is struck at once by something which is in no other of those races――exactly as if we had an extra skin; as if the British animal had been tamed longer than the rest. And so he has. His political, social, legal life was fixed long before that of any other Western country. He was old before the _Mayflower_ touched American shores and brought there avatars, grave and civilised as ever founded nation. There is something touching and terrifying about our character, about the depth at which it keeps its real yearnings, about