I said

"No, indeed," I said to myself.

Even as I read the note, hostility rose in me. Refusal sprang to my lips before my reason had acted at all. I remembered George III. I remembered the Civil War. The ancient grudge, the anti-English complex, had been instantly set fermenting in me. Nothing could better disclose its lurking persistence than my virtually automatic exclamation, "No, indeed!" I knew something about England's friendly acts, about Venezuela, and Manila Bay, and Edmund Burke, and John Bright, and the Queen, and the Lancashire cotton spinners. And more than this historic knowledge, I knew living English people, men and women, among whom I counted dear and even beloved friends. I knew also, just as well as Admiral Mahan knew, and other Americans by the hundreds of thousands have known and know at this moment, that all the best we have and are--law, ethics, love of liberty-- all of it came from England, grew in England first, ripened from the seed of which we are merely one great harvest, planted here by England. And yet I instantly exclaimed, "No, indeed! "

Well, having been inflicted with the anti-English complex myself, I understand it all the better in others, and am begging them to counteract it as I have done. You will recollect that I said at the outset of these observations that, as I saw it, our prejudice was founded upon three causes fairly separate, although they often melted together. With two of these causes I have now dealt--the school histories, and certain acts and policies of England's throughout our relations with her. The third cause, I said, was certain traits of the English and ourselves which have produced personal friction. An American does or says something which angers an Englishman, who thereupon goes about thinking and saying, "Those insufferable Yankees!" An Englishman does or says something which angers an American, who thereupon goes about thinking and saying, "To Hell with England!" Each makes the well-nigh universal--but none the less perfectly ridiculous--blunder of damning a whole people because one of them has rubbed him the wrong way. Nothing could show up more forcibly and vividly this human weakness for generalizing from insufficient data, than the incident in London streets which I promised to tell you in full when we should reach the time for it. The time is now.

In a hospital at no great distance from San Francisco, a wounded American soldier said to one who sat beside him, that never would he go to Europe to fight anybody again--except the English. Them he would like to fight; and to the astonished visitor he told his reason. He, it appeared, was one of our Americans who marched through London streets on that day when the eyes of London looked for the first time upon the Yankees at last arrived to bear a hand to England and her Allies. From the mob came a certain taunt: "You silly ass."