It can be proved out of the history books that, broadly speaking, your average American is a nondescript and nefarious hybrid composed of three parts promoter, three parts missionary, three parts slave-driver, and one part Indian. On this unsavoury soil the worst passions of the soaring human animal have grown and run hoggishly to seed. Out of such blood nothing that is honest or of good report could be expected to rise. And when we in England, as has been the tendency in the past few years, condescend to the adoption of American methods and American notions, and applaud rather than rebuke American smartness and American impudence, there can be no question whatever that we are on the toboggan. The gradual Americanisation of this grand old country is not only flattering to American vanity, but gratifying to American greed. As I shall presently show, America has no more love for England than would easily cover a threepenny-bit, and her insatiable cry is for markets, markets, markets—a howl in which she is dulcetly supported by her dear friend Germany. The causes for alarm in so far as they affect the larger concrete issues are as yet comparatively slight. But it behoves every Englishman to meditate on the possibility that Macaulay’s New Zealander may in the long run turn out to be an American. [1] This is a greater percentage than has obtained in the case of the Czars of Russia, and in America there are no Nihilists or at any rate none who are actively opposed to the American Presidency. [Illustration] CHAPTER II MILLIONAIRES The population of the United States, according to the last census returns, is about a hundred millions. Names in American directories invariably begin with Aarons and end with Zaccharia, and millionaires are marked with a star—thus *. In a town, or—as the puffed up merchant in stars and stripes would call it a city—of fifty thousand inhabitants you will find that the local directory stars quite twenty-five thousand as millionaires.