If an Englishman were asked what had been the chief events in the external affairs of England during the nineteenth century he would say: the Napoleonic wars, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China, Ashanti, Afghan, Zulu, Soudan, Burmese, and Boer wars, the occupation of Egypt, the general expansion of the Empire in Africa--and what not else besides. He would not mention the United States. To the American the history of his country has chiefly to do with Great Britain. Just as geographically British territory surrounds and abuts on the United States on almost every side; just as commercially Great Britain has always hemmed in, dominated, and overshadowed the United States, so, historically, Great Britain has been the one and constant enemy, actual or potential, and her power a continual menace. How is it possible that the American should think of England as the Englishman thinks of the United States? There have, moreover, been constantly at work in America forces the chief object of which has been to keep alive hostility to Great Britain. Of native Americans who trace their family back to colonial days, there are still some among the older generation in whom the old hatred of the Revolutionary War yet burns so strongly that they would not, when at work on the old family farm in, let us say, Vermont, be very seriously surprised on some fine morning to see a party of red-coated Hessians come round the angle of the hill. There are those living whose chief pastime as boys was to fight imaginary battles with the loathed British in and out among the old farm-buildings--buildings which yet bear upon them, perhaps, the marks of real British bullets fired in the real war.[57:1] And those boys, moving West as they came to manhood, carried the same spirit, the same inherited dislike of the name "British," into the cities of the Mississippi Valley, across the prairies and over the mountains to the Pacific slope. But it is not the real American--except one here and there on the old New England homestead--who talks much of his anti-British feeling. It is the imported American who has refused to allow the old hostility to die but has kept pouring contumely on the British name and insisted on the incorporation of an "anti-British" plank in his party platform to catch the votes of the citizens of his own nationality at each succeeding election.