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Mrs. Stevenson, we fear, exaggerates greatly the number of Anglomaniacs. A few dozen are as many as are to be found in any country, and any government or polity which their presence puts in peril ought to be overthrown, for assuredly it is rotten to the core. There is nothing, in fact, better calculated to make Americans hang their heads for shame than the list of small things which one hears from “good Americans,” put our institutions in danger. We remember a good old publisher, in the days before international copyright, who thought we could not much longer stand the circulation of British novels. Their ideas, he said, were dangerous to a republic. An Anglomaniac can hardly turn up his trousers on Fifth Avenue without eliciting shrieks of alarm from the American patriot. And yet a more harmless creature really does not exist.

These matters are worth notice because we are the only great nation in the world whom people try to preach into patriotism. The natives of other countries love their country simply, naturally, and for the most part silently, as they love their mothers and their wives. But to get an American to do so he has, one would think, to be followed about by a preacher with a big stick exhorting him to be a “good American,” or he will catch it. But nobody was ever preached into love of country. He may be preached into sacrifices in its behalf, but the springs of love cannot be got at by any system of persuasion. No man will love his country unless he feels it to be lovable; and it is to making it lovable that the exertions of those who have American patriotism in charge should be devoted.

Every Good American may take comfort in the fact that very few people indeed of any social or political value who have once lived in America ever want again to live in Europe, unless they go for purposes of study or education. For there is no question that there is no country in the world in which the atmosphere is so friendly, and in which one is so sure of sympathy in misfortune, of acceptance on his own merits independently of birth or money, and has so many opportunities of escape from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as America. These are the things which, after all, in the vast majority of cases, win and hold the human heart; and a country which has them can well afford to let its citizens travel, and even let some of them “be early English if they can.”