tion between the two nations. The new English ideal of a preferential tariff may have also had something to do with it. We could not see the adhesion of a mighty free-trade empire to our doctrine of protection, without emotion, without the belief that it was caused by a common motive and a common aim. These things are very subjective; they are very occult in their origin; but they are not the less veritable for all that, and they are the more interesting in the dearth of other explanations, except the growth of both countries in civilization, which really will not explain them.
However, the fact remains, whether accounted for or not, and the great matter is how to promote the good feeling, which we cannot deny. If millionaire marriages, if preferential tariffs, fail to touch the popular heart to finer issues with us, what will hopefully, worthily, effectually appeal to it? We have our own belief as to the true means, and no reader will be surprised to learn that we believe the means is literary. Indeed, literature has been so much the bane between the two nations that it ought to be at least a little the antidote; and our suffering from the long succession of English travellers who have censured our manners and accused our morals, ought now to be somewhat assuaged by the increasing kindness of their difficult sort. A generation ago such a book as Sir Philip Burne-Jones's "Democracy and Dollars" would not have spared us on that large majority of points which he touches with tolerance, with gentleness, with almost a caress. Once so lively an observer would have been a pitiless critic, but now he is no longer so. Sir Philip does not pretend to have plucked the heart out of our mystery, but only to have pierced its epidermis here and there. He gives his conclusions with frankness, but quite without the air of finality, and we think it must be a very impassioned, not to say besotted, American who would generally disagree with him. Of course there always comes a moment for the lively observer when his own shadow is projected so largely upon the object before him that it inevitably engages rather more of his attention; and this has not failed to happen with our latest English censor. But it is fair to say that it does not happen inordinately. One would not say that at any moment the book was written with entire impersonality; the author is always there with his feelings as well as his opinions; but he is never unhandsomely or churlishly there; he is vastly good-natured; he never loses his temper under the trials which beset the alien everywhere, except when it is a question of reporters and interviewers. Even these he does not take too seriously, though in the cases in which he was abominably used by them he cannot see them quite as the joke which we would always like to make them out. His book will have had condemnation enough to constitute the more than sufficient punishment of its errors of head and heart; and we rather please ourselves in dwelling on its amiable virtues, though it is not the kind of book which we had first or chiefly in mind when we owned our belief that the means of drawing England and America lastingly together would be literary. To this end the literature could not be too noble or serious, or too much like a book by a large-minded and large-spirited Englishman which we have been lately rather belatedly reading.
Sir George Otto Trevelyan's "History of the American Revolution," as a moral force, could hardly be overestimated in the direction of our better understanding of the better English sentiment towards us. Its effect to this end is of course the greater because it is indirect. The book is the story of our Revolution—perhaps the most important event in the life of the Anglo-Saxon race—on both sides of the ocean, and it is all the more appealing to the American reader because its first office with him will be to widen and deepen his outlook in the region of English sympathy with his resistance of measures which were essentially un-English. He will always have had some notion of this; from his earliest schoolboy days he will have known by heart the burning passages of Chatham's eloquence in our justification; and from his later reading he will have learned how Fox, and Burke, and Walpole, and other of the noblest and wisest spirits of the day were with us in our struggle for English liberties; but without the light
