Note 309:1 — Chapter XII

It is delightful to find, some weeks after this was written, that Mr. Wells makes precisely this common blunder and states it in almost the exact words that I have used later on. His excuse lies in the fact that, as he says, he had it "in his mind before ever he crossed the Atlantic"; but that hardly excuses his failure to disabuse himself after he was across. Most curious is it that Mr. Wells appears to think that this erroneous notion is a discovery of his own and he enlarges on it and expounds it at some length; the truth being, as I say above, that it is the common opinion of all uninformed Englishmen. Mr. Wells is in fact voicing an almost universal—even if unformulated—national prejudice, but it is a pity that he took it over to America and brought it back again.