To the civilian this military bias which leads men in all countries to such extremes in judgments and actions is incomprehensible. The attitude of the military mind towards the ordinary problems of life, towards the faults and failings of men, towards petty transgressions and disobediences, towards rank, routine, and discipline, towards the courtesies and sympathies and affections which are the leavening influences of life, cannot be understood by the lay mind. The soldier’s training and occupation are such that he does not think, feel, and act as an ordinary man; his standards, convictions, and ethics are fundamentally different; so different that he requires his own territory, his own laws, and his own tribunals. With the soldier the maxim of ordinary justice that it is better that ten guilty should go free than one innocent be condemned is reversed. * * * * * By birth, by tradition, by association, Whistler was thoroughly saturated with this spirit; and it affected his conduct and his attitude towards people throughout his life. It accounts for much of the impatience, the arrogance, the intolerance, the combativeness, the indifference to the feelings of others with which he is charged, or rather overcharged, for much of what is said is exaggeration. No man can be reared in an atmosphere of authority and blind obedience to authority without losing something of that give-and-take spirit which softens life’s asperities. Therefore, in any estimate of Whistler’s character and of his conduct towards others, the influence of these very unusual early associations and conditions must be taken into account and due allowance made. _III_ _An American--The Puritan Element--Attitude of England and France--Racial and Universal Qualities in Art--Art-Loving Nations._ Of Whistler’s innate and aggressive Americanism this is the place to speak. English in origin, the family became Irish and then American. In blood he was doubly removed from England, first by Irish progenitors, then by American, and in his entire make-up, physical and intellectual, he was so absolutely un-English that to the day of his death he was an object of curious observation and wondering comment wherever he went, in even so cosmopolitan a city as London. There was nothing he loved better than to surprise, mystify, confuse, and confound the stolid Briton. And though he lived most of his life in Chelsea and came back there to spend his last days, he was from the very beginning and remained until the end a stranger in a strange land, a solitary soul in the midst of an uncongenial, unsympathetic, unappreciative, unloving people.