It is not surprising that discontent with our own ultimately English tradition has expressed itself by a kind of Freudian transformation in anti-English sentiment. Every vigorous nation strains and struggles with its tradition, like a growing boy with his clothes, and this is particularly true of new nations with old traditions behind them. Our pains are growing pains--a malady we have suffered from since the early eighteenth century at the latest. Tradition, our own tradition, pinches us; but you cannot punch tradition for pinching you, or call it names to its face, especially if it proves to be your father's tradition, or your next-door neighbor's. Therefore, since that now dim day when the Colonies acquired a self-consciousness of their own, many good Americans have chosen England and the English to symbolize whatever irked them in their own tradition. It is from England and the English that we have felt ourselves growing away, from which we had to grow away in order to be ourselves and not a shadow-- imitators, second-bests, Colonials. England and the English have had our vituperation whenever the need to be American has been greatest. And when an English government like Palmerston's, or Salisbury's, or Lloyd George's, offends some group or race among us, a lurking need to assert our individuality, or prove that we are not Colonials, leads thousands more to join in giving the lion's tail an extra twist. This may be unfortunate, but it argues curiously enough respect and affection rather than the reverse, and it is very human. It is a fact, like growing, and is likely to continue until we are fully grown. It will reassert itself vehemently until upon our English tradition we shall have built an American civilization as definitely crystallized, a literature as rich and self-sufficing, as that of France and England to-day. Three-quarters of our national genius went into the creating of our political system. Three-quarters of our national genius since has gone into the erecting of our economic system. Here we are independent--and thick skinned. But a national civilization and a national literature take more time to complete.