The English people has had abundant justification in the past for arriving at the conclusion that in many of the qualities which go to make a great and manly race it stands first among the peoples of the earth. The belief of Englishmen in their own moral superiority as a people is justified by the course of history, and is proven every day afresh by the attitudes of other races,--especially by the behaviour in their choice of friends, when compelled to choose as between England and other European powers, of the peoples more or less unlike the Anglo-Saxon in their civilisations in the remoter corners of the world. It is to the eternal honour of England that in countless out-of-the-way places, peoples more or less savage have learned to accept the word of a British official or trader as a thing to be trusted, and have grown quick to distinguish between him and his rivals of other European nationalities. There has been abundant testimony to the respect which the British character has won from the world,--from the frank admiration of the Prince-Chancellor for the "Parole de Gentleman" to the unshakable confidence of the far red Indian in the faith of a "King George Man"; from the trust of an Indian native in the word of a Sahib to the dying injunction to his successor of one of the greatest of the Afghan Ameers: "Trust the English. Do not fight them. They are good friends and bad enemies."[349:1] And the most solemn oath, I believe, which an Arab can take is to swear that what he says is as "true as the word of an Englishman." But, granting all that has happened in the past, and recognising that British honour and the sacredness of the British word have stood above those of any other peoples, the American nation of to-day is a new factor in the situation. It did not exist at the time when the old comparisons were made. I have suggested elsewhere that the popular American contempt for the English climate is only an inheritance of the opinions based on a comparison of that climate with the climates of Southern Europe. If the climate of certain parts--of the greater part--of the United States had then been a factor to be taken into consideration, English skies would have had at least one fellow to share with them the opprobrium of the world. So in the matter of commercial morality; we are thinking and speaking in terms of a day that has gone, when other standards governed.