In England the situation has also changed. American novelists now enjoy a vogue in England that would have seemed almost incredible two decades ago. At that time the English public did not look to America for its fiction, while Americans did look to England; and each new book by a well-known English novelist was as certain of its reception in the United States as--perhaps more certain than it was--in England. That has changed. There are not more than half a dozen writers of fiction in England to-day of such authority that whatever they write is of necessity accepted by the American public. Americans turn now first to their own writers--a dozen or a score of them--and only then do they seek the English book, always provided that, no matter whose the name may be that it bears, it has won the approval of their own critics on its merits. They no longer take it for granted that the best work of their own authors is as a matter of course inferior to the work of a well-known Englishman. It may not be many years before the American public will be so much preoccupied with its own literary output--before that output will be so amply sufficient for all its needs--that it will become as contemptuously indifferent to English literature of the day as Englishmen have, in the past, shown themselves to the product of American writers. There is, perhaps, no other field in which the increase of the confidence of the nation in itself is more marked than in the honour which Americans now pay to their own writers. It is worth noticing that the English appreciation of American literature as yet hardly extends beyond works of fiction. Specialists in various departments of historical research and the natural sciences know what admirable work is being done in the same fields by individual workers in the United States; but hardly yet has the specialist--still less has the general public--formed any adequate conception of the great mass of that work in those two fields, still less of its quality. Englishmen do not yet take seriously either American research or American scholarship. It would be absurd to count noses to prove that there were more competent historians writing--more scientific investigators searching into the mysteries--in America than in England or vice versa; but this I take to be an undoubted fact, namely, that men of science in more than one field in other countries are beginning to look rather to the United States than to Great Britain for sound and original work.