The American people labours under delusions about its own character and qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of himself--only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact that he is in the main English in origin. That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian, Spaniard, Greek--each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts--_we_ know. The American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city, unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted;