Matthew Arnold, Civilization in the United States: First and Last Impressions of America.

“ [129] their true value.” Many years ago I took alarm at seeing the Daily News and the Morning Star, like Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah, thus making horns of iron for the middle class and bidding it “Go up and prosper!” and my first efforts as a writer on public matters were prompted by a desire to utter, like Micaiah, the son of Imlah, my protest against these misleading assurances of the false prophets. And though often and often smitten on the cheek, just as Micaiah was, still I persevered; and at the Royal Institution I said how we seemed to flounder and to beat the air, and at Liverpool I singled out as our chief want the want of lucidity. But now everybody is really saying of us the same thing: that we fumble because we cannot make up our mind, and that we cannot make up our mind because we do not know what to be after. If our foreign policy is not that of “the British Philistine, with his likes and dislikes, his effusion and confusion, his hot and cold fits, his want of dignity and of the steadfastness which comes from dignity, his want of ideas, and of the steadfastness which comes from ideas,” then all the world at the present time is, it must be owned, very much mistaken.

Let us not, therefore, speak of foreign affairs;