And as these chapters are intended a great deal more for the English than for the Americans, I may say here and now that it is the Englishman’s plain duty to himself and to the race to refrain as far as in him lies from the easy sin of imitation. In his admiration and envy for the magical and almost uncanny successes of his American brother, let him not be carried away with the stupid notion that it is possible for him to go forth and do likewise. For one thing, he hasn’t got the climate; and for another he hasn’t got either the pea-nuts or the pork. Let the Englishman, therefore, be content to remain unreservedly and unsophisticatedly English. When he sees an American adaptation or invasion—whether commercial, social, religious, or otherwise—coming his way, let him frown it down, pass by it and flee from it. Such things may seem simple and innocuous and desirable enough in themselves, they may tickle the imagination, and they may even appear to be for the distinct betterment of mankind. But in the aggregate they must of necessity tend to the Americanisation of this Country—and that is an evil which every Britisher ought to be prepared to make any sacrifice to avoid. If any profit worth having is to come out of the present welter it will come by the Anglicisation of America, and not by the Americanisation of England. The Americans themselves recognise the weight and importance of this fact. Some of them are already wearing eye-glasses. They smile in their sleeves at our readiness to adopt the least admirable of their multifarious foolish ways. When an American meets an Englishman who is trying to run his business or his household or other of his affairs after American models, and particularly when he meets an Englishman who looks upon the Americans as his superiors and masters at the game of life, he is sheerly, if unavowedly, amazed. He knows what America is, he knows in his heart what America means, and if it lay in his power to choose the place to which he will go when he dies, that place would not be Chicago, nor would it be even Paris, but a clean, free, un-Americanised England. But with all their usually enormous and often brilliant faults—that amaze, even if they do not stagger humanity—the Americans are a nation of Cæsars. In every field of activity they have scored many triumphs. But they are not satisfied with acquisition and conquest on a colossal scale, they want to surpass all previous records in ancient or modern times. They are endowed with an inherent genius for arriving at their destination, and the destination they have set down for themselves in the national time-table is one in keeping with their vast and great country, whose mission it seems to be to make Europe and the world sit-up. Therefore, within the next decade or two, I should not be surprised to see a very much larger splash of purple on the map of the earth—and to see it called the American Empire. [Illustration]