Every country tends to accept its own way of life as being the normal one and to praise or criticize others, as they are similar to or different from it. And unfortunately, our picture of the people and the way of life of other countries is often a distorted  one. Here is a great argument in favor of foreign travel and learning foreign languages. It is only by traveling in a country and getting to know its inhabitants and their language that one can find out what a country and its people are really like. And how different the knowledge one gains this way frequently turns out to be from the second-hand information gathered from other sources! How often we find that the foreigners whom we thought to be such different people from ourselves are not very different at all! Differences between peoples do, of course, exist and, one hopes, will always continue to do so. The world will be a dull place indeed when all the different nationalities behave exactly alike, and some people might say that we are rapidly approaching this state of affairs. With the much greater rapidity and ease of travel, there might seem to be some truth in this at least as far as Europe is concerned. However this may be, at least the greater ease of travel today has revealed  to more people than ever before that the Englishman or Frenchman or German is not some different kind of animal from themselves. The knowledge one gains by traveling in a foreign country is often  _  .
from second-hand information gathered from other sources than (from) its inhabitants gained from the arguments about the country different from what one had before the travel