It is the Anglo-Saxon, or English, spirit which has played the dominant part in moulding the government of the United States, which has made the nation what it is, which to-day controls its social usages. The Irish invasion of the political field may fairly be said to be in its essence an alien invasion; and, while it may be to the discredit of the American people that they have allowed themselves in the past to be so engrossed in other matters that they have permitted that invasion to attain the success which it has attained, I do not fear that in the long run the masterful Anglo-Saxon spirit will suffer itself to be permanently over-ridden (any more than it has allowed itself to be kept in permanent subjection in England), even in the large cities where the Anglo-Saxon voter is in a small minority. Ultimately it will throw off the incubus. In the meanwhile it is unjust that Englishmen or other Europeans should accept as evidence of native American frailty instances of municipal abuses and of corrupt methods in a city like New York, where it has not been by native Americans that those abuses and those methods were originated or that their perpetuation is made possible. On the contrary the American minority fights strenuously against them, and I am not sure that, being such a minority as it is, it has not made as good a fight as is practicable under most difficult conditions. The American people as a whole should not be judged by the conditions to which a portion of it submits unwillingly in certain narrow areas. * * * * * It may be well to explain here (for it is a subject on which the Englishman who has lived in America is often consulted) that the Republican party may roughly be said to be the equivalent of the Conservative party in England, while the Democrats are the Liberals. It happens that a precisely reverse notion has (or had until very recent years) some vogue in England, the misconception being an inheritance from the times of the American Civil War.