MR CHAMBERLAIN'S REPLY TO SOME AMERICAN CRITICS.

Waikato Times, Volume XXX, Issue 2474, 19 May 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

MR CHAMBERLAIN'S REPLY TO SOME AMERICAN CRITICS.

I have been in America four months, and during that time have received from everyone with whom I have been in contact personal kinduess and hospitality, which have made a deep impression on me, leaving upon my mind an overwhelming burden of gratitude. At the same time I have been pained at some expressions which have been publicly used by individuals, and especially by language which I have seen in the press concerning my country. We are treated as though we were a foreign and rival nation. I decline to be considered a foreigner in the United States. I feel much as a distinguished American diplomatist, who once told the Prince of Wales that the world was divided into three classes, Americans, Englishmen, and foreigners. I confess 1 am astonished at men who boast of an unbroken line of British decent, and who are proud of the purity of their speech, when I hear them fouling the nest whence they sprang, and imputing to Englishmen a policy, a malignity, a duplicity, and an arbitrary character ouly existing in their diseased imaginations. I should like to appeal to critics, and should wish to ask them whether they have considered all the inferences which may be drawn from sentiments as these. Have they forgotten their early traditions, that we are of the same blood as themselves, men of the same character, imbued with the same love of justice which is tho distinguishing feature of our race? Which of us in this world is infallible? We may be open to their friendly remonstrance, but we are depicted as monsters of iniquity. I wonder they did not reflect that they are deriding the stock from which they sprang and are throwing discredit upon institutions which they embody, and which we in the old country have perfected through a long course of centuries until now they are even more democratic than those of the United States. When I see different views sometimes presented to the American public by those professing to be its guideß, philosophers and friends, I incline to think that the time has come when some American Columbus should undertake the discovery of Euglaud—not the England so frequently depicted to you as the dreary, tyrannical, cruel government which is on the downward road to speedy, well-deserved extinction, but the England of today, the true England, the mother of nations greater than herself, existing under a popular government in which all are represented, and the England which in her glorious maturity wields the sceptre of dominion over hundreds of millions of contented subjects.