| Show COLONIALISM IN THE I UNITED STATES In the years which followed the close of the war it aeemed as if colonialism col-onialism had been utterly extinguished extin-guished Unfortunately this was not the case The multiplication of great fortunes the growth of a class rich by inheritance and the improvement improve-ment i methods of travel and communication com-munication all tended to carry great numbers of Americans to Europe The luxurious fancies which were born of increased wealth and the intellectual in-tellectual tastes which were developed by the advance of the higher education educa-tion and to which an old civilization offers peculiar advantages and attractions attrac-tions combined to breed in many persons a love of foreign life and foreign for-eign manners These tendencies and opportunities have revived tbe dying spirit of colonialism We see it moat strongly in tbe leisure class which is gradually increasing in this country During tbe miserable as cendency of the Second Empire a band of these persons formed what was known of tbe American colony col-ony in Paris Perhaps they still exist if so their existence is now less flagrant and more decent When they were notorious they presented the melancholy spectacle of Americans Ameri-cans admiring ad aping the manners man-ners habits and vices of another nation na-tion when that nation was bent and corrupted by the cheap meretricious and rotten system of the third Napoleon Napo-leon They furnished a very offensive offen-sive example of peculiarly mean colonialism col-onialism Ibis particular phase has departed but the same sort of Americana Amer-icana are unfortunrtely still common com-mon in Europe I do not mean of course those persons who go abroad to buy social consideration nor the women who trade on their beauty or I wits to obtain a brief and dishonoring notoriety These last are merely adventurers ad-venturers and adventuresses who are common to all nations The people referred to here form that large class comprising many excellent men and women no doubt pass their livea in Europe mourning over the inferiority of their own country and who become be-come thoroughly denationalized They do not change into Frenchmen or Englishmen but are simply disfigured dis-figured and deformed Americans We find the same wretched habit of thought in certain groups among the rich and idle people of our great eastern east-ern cities especially in New York because it is the metropolis These groups are for the most part made up ot young men who despise every thing American and admire everything every-thing English They talk and dress and walk and ride in certain ways because the English do these things in those ways They hold their own country in contempt and lament the haid fate of their birth They try to think that they form an aristocracy and become at once ludicrous and despicable de-spicable The virtues which have made the upper classes in England what they are and which take them into public affairs into literature and politics are forgotten AngloAmer loans imitate tbe vices or tbe follies of their models and stop there If all this were merely a passing fash ion an attack of Anglomania or of Gallomania of which there haye been instances enough everywhere it would be of no consequence But it is a recurrence of the old and deep seated malady of colonialism It is a lienal descendant of the old colonial family The features are somewhat dim now and the vitality ia low but there is no mistaking the hereditary qualities They who thus despise their own land and ape English manners flatter themselves with being be-ing cosmopolitans when in truth they aregenuine colonists petty and provincial to the last degreeAtlan ic Monthly |
