People's Pilot, Volume 2, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 December 1892 — DO AMERICANS HATE ENGLAND? [ARTICLE]

DO AMERICANS HATE ENGLAND?

Some Amusing Letters on the Question In gtlie London Papers. “Does America hate England?” A discussion of this pleasant question has been the natural consequence, albeit the connection is not perceived by Englishmen, of the fit of sulks which seized John Bull when the world’s fair celebration forced the latest aspects of American grandeur and greatness upon his attention. According to his own notion, as expressed in print, America does hate Britain with a robust and hearty hatred. The wish is father to the thought, for otherwise John Bull could find no justification for the feeling which animates his own breast when he turns his eyes westward. Not that-he* would confess to entertaining so vvtgar an emotion toward his American cousin. ’ He would scorn the suggestion. He seeks merely a salve for his private conscience when he ascribes to America an enmity which he scarcely resents. Having declared to his own satisfaction, therefore, that the sight of the British flag always arouses in aa American a violent species of humaa rabies, John Bull has wrapped himself in a great cloud of ineffable contempt Poor Boston will purely suffer a bad sea turn which the weather clerk won’t be able to account for the next time the wind is east John’s authority for this conclusion is a series of letters from “an Englishman who has lived in America”' and “an Englishman who has traveled in the states,” etc. These letters depict a condition of popular Englishhating insanity on the other side truly appalling. The only representative of America in the controversy is a bogus one, an editor of the St. James’ Gazette, familiar with the “Spoopendyke Papers,” who has written a burlesque letter, signed “Michigander and Wife,” to that journal, in which he says: “England is one of the peskiest, gosh darnedbst, measly old bit of territory on this almighty planet, and although there fire some good people in England, take them all round, they are about as poor a lot as the tinpot country that gave them birth. Americans are sometimes called blowhards over here, but, great snakes, we’ve got something to blow about on our side of the herring pond. Englishmen are always skiting, but they have absolutely nothing to ■kite about. You haven’t got a river in the dodgasted island that would drown an American mule, and, for your mountains, we have ants out where I hail from that would not find them commodious enough for ant hills. No, siree; we answer your query right on the spot. We do despise your water-logged, vice-laden, wind-broken old territory. It ain’t worth putty.”— Chicago Herald.