ENGLISH AND AMERICAN WOMEN HAVE NO LOVE TO SPARE FOR ONE ANOTHER
England and America are two branches of a family who once
quarrelled--For their common interests they may make it up, but
there will never be any love lost--There are no such quarrels to
patch up as family ones.
I have heard a great deal about 'our kith and kin,' 'our cousins across
the Atlantic,' 'blood is thicker than water,' 'the Anglo-Saxon race,'
'the English-speaking people,' 'the Anglo-American alliance,' and other
more or less venerable platitudes with which music-hall managers in
England have for some time succeeded in bringing down the gallery, on
Saturday nights especially. I have heard all that, and, in company with
most Americans, I have laughed in my sleeve.
During their war with Spain, the Americans were grateful for English
sympathy and moral support.
During the Transvaal War, the English, finding themselves isolated and
blamed by the whole of Europe, hoped for American sympathy.
'I scratched your back, you scratch mine.'
This sympathy the English did not obtain, or, if they did, in a very
small measure, and only among the inhabitants of Fifth Avenue and the
'Four Hundred' of a few large Eastern cities. I was in America for
three months at the beginning of last year, and everywhere, from New
York to New Orleans, I found ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred
sympathizing with the Boers in their plucky and determined struggle for
liberty and independence. Their skill and bravery appealed to a nation
who, some hundred years ago, themselves fought successfully for their
freedom.
Yet, as I had many times the opportunity of telling American audiences,
'In the Anglo-Boer struggle, it is not the Boers, but the English who
are fighting for what your ancestors fought for so successfully during
the War of Independence--the liberty of the citizen and good and honest
government. I have sympathy for the Boers on account of their ignorant
patriotism and bravery; but, for the sake of humanity and civilization,
I hope the English will win.'
It is true that I got applause for this statement, it is true that the
presidents of many American universities thanked me for putting the
truth and the facts of the question plainly before the students; but I
am afraid I made very few converts to the pro-English cause, although I
believe I was more successful on the platform in America than in
France, where I got enthusiastically hissed and had several narrow
escapes of being mobbed for expressing my rather pro-English
sentiments.
The more charitable of my compatriots said it was only fair for a
Frenchman who had long enjoyed the hospitality of the English to speak
well of them abroad. Some went so far as to suggest that I was probably
in the pay of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.
However all this may be, my point is this: I don't care what a few
American millionaires, who prefer England to America, who crawl on all
fours before the English aristocracy, who would think it beneath their
dignity to give their daughters to honest Americans, and prefer to get
some English noblemen's coats-of-arms out of pawn with their daughters
and their dollars--I say I don't care what these people may say to the
contrary, my firm conviction, more and more absolute every time that I
travel throughout the United States, is that there is very little love
to spare in America for the English people. And this state of things
will exist as long as the Americans build their patriotism on their
successes of 1776 and 1812 against the English, and so long as
school-books published in America teach American children that the
English are the hereditary foes of their country.
Add also to this that not one-third of the population of the United
States are of English extraction. The Germans and the Scandinavians are
not 'kith and kin,' and the Irish are tooth and nail. Now, if you don't
believe me, let me wish you had been in America, as I was, during the
Venezuelan squabble, some five years ago, and you will be convinced of
the truth of my statement.
But I must leave aside all these political considerations, and also the
question whether American and English men love each other or not, for I
was very near forgetting that the subject of this chapter is 'What
American and English _Women_ think of each other.' Here again, as
in the case of the men, we must not speak of the aristocracy and the
plutocracy of the two countries. Those people are cosmopolitan;
besides, they travel and they get rid of their international
prejudices.
But what about the good, worthy masses of the people, say, at least
nine-tenths of the populations of America and England?
Well, I should like to tell what I think to be the truth frankly and
plainly. I am not a rich man--far from it--but I now see my way to
easily paying my butcher's bills for the rest of my life, and I can
afford to say what I mean. If you don't like it, and want something
else, please apply elsewhere for compliments, platitudes, and
falsehoods.
I am absolutely convinced that most American women despise English
women, and that most English women cordially hate American women. And
as it is much more flattering to be hated than to be despised, it is
the American women who seem to me the better served of the two.
In the eyes of the English women who have not travelled in America or
had the good fortune of mixing in Europe with the best American women,
and who, in good womanly fashion, stick fast to their prejudiced
notions, the daughters of Brother Jonathan are bumptious, vulgar,
overdressed, loud, assertive, indifferent mothers, selfish wives, bad
housekeepers, or else unbearable prigs and blue-stockings. And you will
hear them deliver judgment in a way that seems to admit of no appeal.
In the eyes of the American women who have not lived the home-life of
the English or mixed with the women of good English society, and who
have been fed on ideas and opinions given in some American books or
published in the newspapers of the smaller American cities, the English
women are silly, sat-upon, ignorant creatures, seedy and dowdy, badly
shaped, badly dressed, and who can only talk of their babies and their
servants.
Among that class of women in both countries, the only concessions I
have heard them make are the following: English women admit that their
American sisters are freer and smarter than they are, and the American
women envy the complexion of the daughters of John Bull.
How amiable women can be!