The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics — John Shaqi
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
This innate British temper--aristocratic, conservative, or Tory,
whichever one may term it--is the first of the two foundations whereon
English dislike of Americans appears to me to rest. The second is a
natural, though assuredly not a laudable feeling,--the residual soreness
left by our defeat in the old American War of Independence. Far be it
from me to say that the English nation at large, or Englishmen
individually, brood gloomily over that defeat, or, with active and
conscious malignity, long for the desolation of their brothers in blood,
language, and a common history. To say that would be as strained and
exaggerated, and as contrary to British practicality and freedom from
vengefulness, as to deny that some degree of soreness and distance
remains would seem to me uncandid. Englishmen are quite ready to
believe, and to light upon the casual evidences, that Frenchmen remember
Waterloo, and would have no objection to wipe out the reminiscence upon
occasion; and Frenchmen and Americans may probably perceive that like
causes lead to like results in the Englishmen's own case, although the
latter are less quick-sighted regarding that. There is, I apprehend,
quite enough soreness on the subject to lead us to watch the career of
the United States with jealousy, to take offence easily where the
relative interests of both countries are concerned, to put the less
favorable of two possible constructions upon American doings, and to
feel as if, in any reverse which may happen to the States, a certain
long-standing score of our own, which we did not clear off quite
satisfactorily to ourselves, were in a round-about course of settlement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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