ABSTRACT COMBATIVENESS
uncompromisingly, exaggerating, with the histrionic instinct of youth, his enthusiasm and his hatreds. Thus the insolent Britisher became the Turk's-head or Guy Fawkes, so to speak, of the American boy, the butt of his bellicose humours; and a habit of mind contracted in boyhood is not always to be eradicated by the sober reflection of manhood, even in minds capable of sober reflection. The Civil War, be it noted, did not depose the insolent Britisher from his bad eminence in the schoolboy imagination. The Confederates were, after all, Americans, though misguided Americans; and the fostering, the brooding upon, intestine rancours was felt by teachers and pupils alike to be impossible. But there is in the juvenile mind at any given moment a certain amount of abstract combativeness, let us call it, which must find an outlet somewhere. Hatred is a natural function of the human mind, just as much as love; and the healthy boy instinctively exercises it under the guise of patriotism, without clearly distinguishing the element of sheer play and pose in his transports. England's attitude during the Civil War certainly did nothing to endear her either to the writers or the readers of school histories; and she remained after that struggle, as she had been before, the one great historical adversary on whom the abstract combativeness of young America could expend itself. How strong this tendency is, or has been, in the American school, may be judged from the following anecdote.
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