Yet, when all is said and done, John Bull remains John Bull. German philosophy, French wit, American acuteness, the “_garbo_ of the Italians”—these things are not for him, nor is he specially desirous of assimilating them. He is as God made him, and has an impression that worse types have been created. At the bottom of his heart—though he no longer speaks it out as freely as of yore—there still lurks the old contempt for “foreigners.” As I have already made so bold as to say, I do not think that the hustle and bustle of the present age have brought him any clearer comprehension of these foreigners than his forefathers possessed, or that the advent of the universal republic has been at all hastened by the rise of democracy and the triumph of steam. Certainly all men are human, and all dogs are dogs; but you will not convert a bulldog into a setter by taking him out shooting, nor a mastiff into a spaniel by keeping them in one kennel. It is doubtless well that those who own a large number of dogs should encourage familiarity among them, and restrain them from delighting to bark and bite, and it might also be a good thing to induce them, if possible, to recognise each others respective utilities. But they never do recognise these. On the contrary, they contemplate one another’s performances with the deepest disdain, and if we could see into the workings of their canine minds we should very likely discover that each is perfectly satisfied with himself, and as convinced that his breed is superior to all others as Victor Hugo is that Paris is the light of the world.
Recent inventions have dealt some heavy blows at time and space, but have not as yet done much towards abolishing national distinctions of character. One result of them, as melancholy as it is inevitable, is the slow vanishing of the picturesque. The period of general dead-level has set in; old customs have fallen into abeyance and old costumes are being laid aside. The “Ranz des Vaches” no longer echoes among the Swiss mountains; the Spanish _sombrero_ has been discarded in favor of a chimney-pot hat; the Hungarian nobles reserve their magnificent frippery for rare state occasions, and the black coat, deemed so significant a sign of the times by Alfred de Musset, is everywhere replacing the gay clothing of a less material era. But, for all that, mastiffs are mastiffs and spaniels spaniels. Democracy claims to be cosmopolitan: perhaps some of us may live long enough to see what the boast is worth. If it be permitted to ground a prophecy upon the lessons of history, we may say that co-operation is possible only so long as interests are identical, and that the mainspring of all human collective action is, and will be, nothing more or less than that selfishness which, as Lord Beaconsfield once told us, is another word for patriotism.—_Cornhill Magazine._