Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
belong to a different type. The crudeness which so shocked Europeans in
their predecessors they have, with characteristic adaptability, readily
and gracefully outgrown. But whether they have improved in other
respects, and whether, on other grounds, we have cause to be
particularly proud of our countrymen abroad at the present day, is
another question.
That Americans are constantly apologizing to foreigners for America, for
its institutions, for its social life, and for themselves as belonging
to it, is a fact which no one ever thinks of disputing. In this faculty
for disparaging our own country we may flatter ourselves that we have no
equals. The Chinese may come near us in their obsequious assurances as
to the utter unworthiness of everything pertaining to them, but with the
difference that they, probably, are inwardly profoundly convinced of the
perfection of all that their idea of courtesy obliges them to abuse, and
mean nothing of what they say; whereas we _do_ mean everything we say.
The prejudice of the English, and their attempts to transport a
miniature England about with them wherever they go, furnish a frequent
subject of jest to Americans on the Continent. If the total immunity
from any such feeling which characterizes the Americans themselves were
the result of breadth of ideas--if they spoke as they do because they
measured the faults and follies, the merits and advantages, of their
own institutions with as impartial an eye as they would measure those of
other nations, and judged them without either malice or extenuation--we
might then have the privilege of condemning narrow-mindedness
and prejudice. But we have no such breadth of ideas. On the
contrary, we have ourselves--none more so--the strongest sort of
prejudices--prejudices which prevent us as a nation from taking wide,
cosmopolitan views of things. The only difference is that with us the
prejudice, instead of being in favor of everything belonging to our own
country, is, in far too many cases, against it, consequently the most
objectionable, the least excusable, of prejudices.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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