ourselves certain forms of exaggeration, accepting, perhaps unconsciously, Hazlitt’s verdict:  “Lying is a species of wit, and shows spirit and invention.”  It is true also that no adequate provision is made in this country for the defective but valuable class without humour, which in England is exceedingly well cared for.  American letters, American journalism, and American speech are so coloured by pleasantries, so accentuated by ridicule, that the silent and stodgy men, who are apt to represent a nation’s real strength, hardly know where to turn for a little saving dulness.  A deep vein of irony runs through every grade of society, making it possible for us to laugh at our own bitter discomfiture, and to scoff with startling distinctness at the evils which we passively permit.  Just as the French monarchy under Louis the Fourteenth was wittily defined as despotism tempered by epigram, so the United States have been described as a free republic fettered by jokes, and the taunt conveys a half-truth which it is worth our while to consider.

Now there are many who affirm that the humourist’s point of view is, on the whole, the fairest from which the world can be judged.  It is equally remote from the misleading side-lights of the pessimist and from the wilful blindness of the optimist.  It sees things with uncompromising clearness, but it judges of them with tolerance and good temper.  Moreover, a sense of the ridiculous is a sound preservative of social virtues.  It places a proper emphasis on the judgments of our associates, it saves us from pitfalls of vanity and self-assurance, it lays the basis of that propriety and decorum of conduct upon which is founded the charm of intercourse among equals.  And what it does for us individually, it does for us collectively.  Our national apprehension of a jest fosters whatever grace of modesty we have to show.  We dare not inflate ourselves as superbly as we should like to do, because our genial countrymen stand ever ready to prick us into sudden collapse.  “It is the laugh we enjoy at our own expense which betrays us to the rest of the world.”

Perhaps we laugh too readily.  Perhaps we are sometimes amused when we ought to be angry.  Perhaps we jest when it is our plain duty to reform.  Here lies the danger of our national light-mindedness,—­for it is seldom light-heartedness; we are no whit more light-hearted than our neighbours.  A carping English critic has declared that American humour consists in speaking of hideous things with levity; and while so harsh a charge is necessarily unjust, it makes clear one abiding difference between the nations.  An Englishman never laughs—­except officially in “Punch”—­over any form of political degradation.  He is not in the least amused by jobbery, by bad service, by broken pledges.  The seamy side of civilized life is not to him a subject for sympathetic mirth.  He can pity the stupidity which does not perceive that it is cheated and betrayed; but penetration allied to indifference awakens his wondering contempt.  “If you think it amusing to be imposed on,” an Englishwoman once said to me, “you need never be at a loss for a joke.”