As a matter of fact, the Pilgrim Fathers, the Revolution, and all the rest of our history, so familiar either in fact or legend to American children, are to a great extent not known at all here. It was only about four years ago that the first chair of American history in any English university was founded. The cultural contributions of America to civilization had been comparatively slight, and until we became a world power, owing to our wealth and numbers, there was little more reason for Europe’s being interested in our history than there is for us to study the local historical details of South Africa or Australia. The situation is well illustrated by a story which I heard Lord Lee of Fareham, who has an American wife, tell the other day. She thought she would make a pious pilgrimage to Plymouth to see the place from which her ancestors had sailed. Trying to find the dock,—where, by the way, there is a commemorative tablet,—she asked a man if he could tell her where the Pilgrims had sailed from. He looked puzzled and finally replied: “I really do not recall them, madam. Did they sail recently?” The Standard Life Assurance Company is at present running a series of advertisements in one of the best-known English weeklies using “historical incidents” as texts. Last week they inserted one on the sailing of the Mayflower. Explaining briefly for English readers who the Pilgrim Fathers were, the notice says that “after a short stay in Holland they sailed for America, where they founded[Pg 279] a colony at New Plymouth in 1621” [sic]. This is evidently all new and requiring explanation to English people, although any American child could point out the several errors of fact in that one sentence.