Dakota County Herald

ANGLO-SAXON BLUNTNESS
How the Tourist Abroad Often Makes Himself Objectionable

All of us who travel, whether we mean to or not, will furnish forth impressions of Americans for foreigners, and the opinions of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians and Britons concerning us as a nation will be markedly modified because of our going hither and thither in Europe, says Charles Battell Loomis in Smith's.

"Some of us, with perfectly good intentions, will go abroad with that old fashioned spirit of spread-eagleism—that dies so hard—in our breasts. We shall feel more and more patriotic the farther away from home we find ourselves, and with a laudable desire to let benighted foreigners—to some of us all foreigners are benighted—see what a glorious country we hail from; we shall wave American flags in their faces, and let them know at all times and in all places how very superior an American is to every other specimen of humanity.

"We shall not be the only country to send forth patriotic zealots. There will be Germans bent on proving that if it were not for Germany there would be no such thing as civilization upon the earth, and there will be Englishmen making themselves just as obnoxious to the natives as we can possibly make ourselves. The French do not travel as much, and they do not feel it necessary to blazon forth a patent fact. French courtesy, also, prevents a Frenchman from telling you that you are inferior to him, however much he may think so; but this Anglo-Saxon race glories in its bluntness and its love of truth, and that is why Germany and England and America furnish some of the most objectionable travelers known to Cook."