I have never held a whole-hearted brief for the British character. There is a lot of good in it, but much which is repellent. It has a kind of deliberate unattractiveness, setting out on its journey with the words: “Take me or leave me.” One may respect a person of this sort, but it’s difficult either to know or to like him. An American officer said recently to a British Staff Officer in a friendly voice: “So we’re going to clean up Brother Boche together!” and the British Staff Officer replied: “Really!” No wonder Americans sometimes say: “I’ve got no use for those fellows!” The world is consecrate to strangeness and discovery, and the attitude of mind concreted in that: “Really!” seems unforgivable till one remembers that it is _manner rather than matter_ which divides the hearts of American and Briton. In your huge, still half-developed country, where every kind of national type and habit comes to run a new thread into the rich tapestry of American life and thought, people must find it almost impossible to conceive the life of a little old island where traditions persist generation after generation without anything to break them up; where blood remains undoctored by new strains; demeanour becomes crystallised for lack of contrasts; and manner gets set like a plaster mask. Nevertheless the English manner of to-day, of what are called the classes, is the growth of only a century or so. There was probably nothing at all like it in the days of Elizabeth or even of Charles II. The English manner was still racy not to say rude when the inhabitants of Virginia, as we are told, sent over to ask that there might be despatched to them some hierarchical assistance for the good of their souls, and were answered: “D――――n your souls, grow tobacco!” The English manner of to-day could not even have come into its own when that epitaph of a Lady, quoted somewhere by Gilbert Murray, was written: “Bland, passionate, and deeply religious, she was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of Heaven.” About that gravestone motto you will admit there was a certain lack of self-consciousness; that element which is now the foremost characteristic of the English manner.