Englishmen have been very willing, within the last year or two, to believe in the revolution which has taken place in the character of another people, less akin to them than the Americans and farther away. The promptitude with which the British masses have accepted the fact that, in certain of the virtues on which Englishmen have most peculiarly prided themselves in the past, the Japanese are their superiors, has been curiously un-British. There should be no greater difficulty in believing that another revolution, much more gradual and less picturesque, and by so much the more easily credible, has taken place in the American character. The evidence in favour of the one is, rightly viewed, no less strong than that in favour of the other. It would have been impossible for the Japanese to have carried on the recent war as they did had they not been possessed of the virtues of courage and patriotism in the highest degree. It would have been equally impossible for the Americans to have built up their immense trade in competition with the great commercial powers of the world, unless they had in an equally high degree possessed the virtue of commercial honesty. No one ought to know better than the English business man that a great national commercial fabric is not built up by fraud or trickery. On this subject Professor Muensterberg,[351:1] striving to eradicate from the minds of his German countrymen the same tendency to underestimate the honesty of American business men, says (and let me say that neither my opinion, nor the form in which it is expressed, was borrowed from him): "It is naive to suppose that the economic strength of America has been built up through underhanded competition, without respect to law or justice, and impelled by nothing but a barbarous and purely material ambition. One might better suppose that the twenty-story office buildings on lower Broadway are supported by the flag-stones in the street. . . . The colossal fabric of American industry is able to tower so high only because it has its foundations on the hard rock of honest conviction." "It has been well said," says the same author, "that the American has no talent for lying, and distrust of a man's word strikes the Yankee as specifically European." Now in England "an American lie" has stood almost as a proverb; yet the German writer is entirely in earnest, though personally I do not agree with him. He sees the symptoms, but the diagnosis is wrong. The American has an excellent talent for lying, but in business he has learned that falsehood and deception are poor commercial weapons. Business which is obtained by fraud, any American will tell you, "doesn't stick"; and as every American in his business is looking always to the future, he prefers, merely as a matter of prudence, that his foundations shall be sound.