Politics & Power Quote by Margot Asquith

Asquith opens with a little safety catch - "It is always dangerous to generalize" - then promptly pulls the trigger anyway. The maneuver is pure Edwardian salon intelligence: disclaim the stereotype to prove you know it is a stereotype, then deploy it with extra authority. What follows is praise that works like flattery and diagnosis at the same time. Americans are "infinitely generous", yes, but also "hard and strong" - a compliment that doubles as a warning about a people who can afford kindness because they assume they will win.

The punchline, of course, is mortality. "But for the few cemeteries I have seen" is a wonderfully dry aside, the kind of observational wit that lets her puncture American self-mythology without sounding cruel. She makes the national story - youth, vigor, endless expansion - feel like a superstition. The line "I am inclined to think they never die" lands as both admiration and critique: a society so committed to forward motion it treats death as an administrative error, something that happens offstage.

Context matters. As a British aristocratic writer moving through the Anglo-American world in an era when the United States was asserting itself as a modern power, Asquith is reading national character the way her class read empires: through temperament. Her quip registers unease at American confidence, but it also acknowledges its seduction. The subtext: a nation convinced of its own perpetuity becomes capable of enormous generosity - and enormous recklessness.