If he isn't weeping, he should be.
In the novel Martin Chuzzlewit our eponymous hero finds himself in America, and almost immediately upon landing here he is identified as an Englishman and treated to a critical discourse on the sorry state of the English nation and the monarchy, complete with very exacting examples of the difficulties.
Having just left the country, our hero knows none of this to be true. His American interlocutor, having never visited England, assures him nonetheless that all of it is true.
In 170 years, nothing much has changed.
we're getting less and less likely to admit we don't know something, aren't we. it's kind of scary, in a way
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