THR WORT.D OF TO-DAY
THE ANGLO-
AMERICAN FUTURE

BY
A. G. GARDINER

ci

HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN
NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN
BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI PEKING

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE

THE WORLD OF TO-DAY
Under the general editorship of
MR. VICTOR GOLLANCZ
Books of kindred interest to the present
Avhich are ready or will be published shortly
in this series include :
THE BACKWARD PEOPLES AND
OUR RELATIONS WITH THEM.
By Sir Harry Johnston.
AMERICAN PARTIES AND POLITICS.
By S. K. Ratcliffe.
THE TREATY SETTLEMENT OF
EUROPE : SOME GEOGRAPHIC
AND ETHNOGRAPHIC ASPECTS.
By Prof. Fleure.
A NEW ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. By
Dr. George D. Herron.

THE WORLD OF TO-DAY
THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE

BY
A. G. GARDINER

HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE
CAPE TOWN BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
SHANGHAI PEKING COPENHAGEN
1920

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Among the books that should be read in connexion with
Anglo-American relations in the past is Professor Dunning's
The British Empire and the United States, George Louis Beer's
The English-Speaking Peoples, Mr. H. S. Perris's A Short
History of Anglo-American Relations, and Brougham ViUiers
and W. H. Chesson's Anglo-American Relations i86i-i86j.
C. F. Adams's biography of his father, who was American
Minister in London during the Civil War, is essential to a just
appreciation of the Anglo-American situation in that critical
time. Mr. Owen Wister's A Straight Deal, or The Ancient
Grudge is a breezy and generous attack by an American on the
current anti-British feeling. Professor WiUiam E. Dodd's
Woodrow Wilson : His Life and Work contains much valuable
matter bearing on the post-war aspects of the subject. On the
question of a naval pact Mr. H. Sidebotham's (' A Student
of War ') article in the New Republic and the accompanying
leader in that journal deserve wide notice.

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHAPTER I. THE NEW WORLD
II. A CENTURY OF PEACE
III. THE TWO PEOPLES
IV. THE AMERICAN MIND
V. THE ENGLISH MANNER
VI. POLITICAL DISCORDS
VII. SEA POWER
VIII. THE FUTURE.

7
II i8
27
33 41 50
57

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE

CHAPTER I
THE NEW WORLD
If the key to the puzzle of this distracted world can
be said to rest in any single fact, it is to be found in the
relations of the British Commonwealth and the American
Commonwealth. The war has scrapped the European
system, and with it the whole political mechanism of
pre-war society. In that society Europe was alike the
brain and the power-house. From the general current
of the world's affairs, the American continent stood aloof
by tradition and interest. It was self-contained and
sufficient to itself. It would have no integral association
with European politics, nor would it permit Europe to
acquire new sovereign rights in its own soil. The doctrine
of isolation laid down by the Fathers of the United States
Republic was in principle extended to the whole continent
by President Monroe. It is pertinent to remind ourselves
that in this extension English statesmanship played a
significant part which will be worth attention in a later
connexion. During the Civil War the Monroe doctrine was chal
lenged by the ill-fated enterprise of Napoleon III in
Mexico, and twice within recent memory it was brought
into play in connexion with the affairs of Venezuela. It
was never accepted by the Continental Imperialists, least
of all by the last German Emperor, to whose dreams of
German expansion in South America it offered an in
superable obstacle. As a policy it had obvious and
inherent weaknesses, the chief of which was that its
validity rested in the last resort less upon the power of
 7

8 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
the United States than upon the goodwill of the British
Fleet. But for nearly a century it served as a bulwark
of the policy of isolation, and under that policy America
kept its hands off European affairs and the hands of
Europe off its own affairs.
It was the more disposed to confirm itself in the doctrine
of isolation because its own abundant inheritance pre
served it from any need of external exploitation. It
wanted nothing from the outside world except labour and
credit to develop its enormous potentialities, and it was
quite content to leave the competitive ImperiaUsms of
Europe to appropriate the wildernesses of Africa, extend
their dominions over Asia and occupy the islands of the
sea. In these circumstances the European system grew
in unchallenged prestige and power. Apart from the
incipient Imperialism of Japan it had no competitor
outside itself ; and as the vacant territories of the earth
became developed, Europe reaped the harvest in increas
ing prosperity, which was reflected in the accumulation
of wealth, vast industrial expansion, and the growth of
competitive armaments. In this general prosperity
most of the nations had their share, but the chief bene
ficiaries were the six great military states which held the
European structure together on the insecure basis of
organized hostilities called the Balance of Power. With
the war the structure collapsed, and to-day continental
Europe is a political and economic ruin. Of the six great
Imperialist Powers three have ceased to exist in any
recognizable form. All have been swept by revolution
and are plunged in poverty and misery. The ramshackle
Empire of Austria- Hungary has fallen to fragments;
and though Germany and Russia have in them indestruc
tible qualities which assure their ultimate revival, their
power is in abeyance. In so far as it exists, it exists only
to complete the destruction of the old European system,
and can play no effective part in the immediate task of
world reconstruction. And while the war has wrecked
the defeated Powers, it has not strengthened the victorious
Powers. The extent of the impoverishment it has
wrought in France and Italy is only temporarily concealed
by the continuance of the Alhance and by the artificial

THE NEW WORLD 9
conditions of credit and commerce that prevail. For
practical purposes the continental system has ceased
to exist.^ Its recovery will be a matter of years, perhaps
of generations, and in the interval other Powers will have
the main responsibility for making the channels into
which the new world will flow.
Those Powers are Great Britain and the United States.
Both have been engaged in the war, but, thanks to their
inherent conditions rather than to any intrinsic virtues
of their own, they have escaped relatively unharmed,
and indeed — especially in the case of the United States —
with enhanced power. They have escaped because they
were not a part of the continental system. The source
of Great Britain's strength was as a world Power, and
the source of the strength of the United States was as the
dominant nation of a continent wholly untouched by the
material and political devastations of war. Powerful
among equals before that event, they are to-day and must
be for a long time to come the supreme arbiters in the
world's affairs. They have the world at their feet. It
will be what they choose to make it. Between them they
rule, directly or indirectly, not much less than half the
earth. They command practically the whole of the credit
left in the world. Their supremacy in mere terms of
force is unassailable. Their command of the sea is not
merely complete : it is without the shadow of a challenge.
They have the unequalled potentiality of great armies.
They possess the major part of the raw materials of the
general life — wool, cotton, coal, iron, food. They repre
sent, both mentally and physically, the highest standard
of human efficiency extant. They possess the two great
est power-houses in the world. There is no other nation
that approximates to their industrial capacity, and (as
the war has shown) it is industrial capacity more even
than numbers in the field that is the determining factor
in modern warfare. Above all, the power of these two
great Commonwealths is realized power. It is not power
(as in the case of Russia) which is latent and may be
developed in a generation or generations. It is in being,
actual, instant. It dominates the globe.
And it is not an extravagance to say that the capital

10 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
problem of mankind is whether this domination is to be
exercised in rivalry or in agreement, in friendship or in
hostility, for the well-being of the world or for the selfish
aggrandizement of the respective nations. Neither coun
try can escape this challenge to its good sense and good
will even if it desired to do so. For good or evil, with or
without its own volition, the United States is now irre
vocably involved in the web of the world's affairs. It
cannot help itself. The doctrine of isolation became for
ever obsolete on the day that the United States entered
the war, and the attempt to breathe new life into it is as
futile as it would be for us to attempt to restore the
Heptarchy. It has gone, not because it was not a sound
doctrine in the past, nor because it would not be a desir
able policy now, but because the war has shown that it is
not compatible with the conditions of the modem world.
There can never be any water-tight compartments again,
not even though the compartment is a continent encom
passed by oceans as wide as the Pacific and the Atlantic.
The world is henceforth a unit. It may be a unit of
order or a unit of anarchy, but its solidarity is fixed and
unalterable and the United States is an integral part of
the system. And it is equally impossible for us to evade
the new conditions. Germany has passed out of our sky
as a menace. We no longer look across the North Sea
with disquiet at the activities of Kiel and Hamburg,
Bremen and Stettin. Indeed, in all the Continent there
is no cause of national anxiety left, however much cause
there may be for alarm in the general dissolution that is
in progress. For an equal with whom our power and
resources can alone be measured we look henceforth across
the Atlantic to the great nation that speaks our language
and that has now swum into the orbit of our affairs. The
mutual relations of these two great bodies are a matter
of momentous concern not only to them, but to the whole
world system on which their attractions and repulsions
are destined to exercise a predominant influence. It is for
this reason that the spirit of Anglo-American relations
may be said to be the chief secular issue of the future.

A CENTURY OF PEACE ii
CHAPTER II
A CENTURY OF PEACE
An incidental result of the outbreak of the Great War
of 1914 was that the preparations on both sides of the
Atlantic for the celebration of the Centenary of the Treaty
of Ghent had to be abandoned. It had been intended to
make the occasion an imposing demonstration of Anglo-
American friendship and to knit that friendship into still
more enduring shape as a memorial of the common
gratitude for the blessings of a hundred years of peace.
The idea had made a powerful appeal to all people of
goodwill in both countries, and the purchase of Sulgrave
Manor, the ancestral home of Washington, as a memorial
of a century of reconciliation had given the movement the
right inspiration by associating the two countries in the
common heritage of Washington's illustrious memory.
It was hoped that the celebration would do much to give
a more positive character to the friendship by removing
what Lord Grey of Fallodon has described as the chief
obstacles to Anglo-American relations. ' There is no
solid ground for disagreement between this country and
America,' he said in a speech at Bedford College last July,
' and I asked when in America what were the chief
obstacles to a thorough understanding between the two
countries. One of the most interesting replies given to
me was from an American university woman. " I think,"
she said, " that the two chief obstacles are — in England
ignorance of the United States, and in the United States
misconception of England." The cure for ignorance is
knowledge, and the cure for misconception is truth.
The commemoration of the Centenary of the Treaty of
Ghent seemed to furnish an unrivalled opportunity for
applying the cures, and among the consequences of the
war few are more regrettable than that the opportunity
was lost.
It was not, it is true, a century of dove-like ' billing
and cooing ' that would have been commemorated. If
it had been that it would hardly have called for cele
bration, for perfect amity is its own sufficient comment.

12 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
It is because the century of peace was won in the face of
constant menace and friction that it is so rich in the
lessons of statesmanship and in encouragement for the
future. The general spirit of the relations of the two
countries between 1815-1915 has been admirably stated
by Brougham Villiers in his study of the critical
period of 1861-5. Generally, he says, it appears largely
a record of unwise, even mischievous speakmg and think
ing, but on the whole of rational and honourable doing ;
of two peoples vehemently conscious of each other's
shortcomings, and never very guarded in the expression
of their disapproval or resentment, yet fundamentally
so very much at one in their outlook and ideas that
though only perhaps towards the close of the period they
attained to cordiality, yet they never actually came to
strife. Between the United States and ourselves have
been waged some of the most reckless and offensive verbal
battles in history ; while the same nations, as soon as
they have come to grips with any question, have repeatedly
come to a fair-minded and sensible agreement on the
subject, and have afterwards kept it with an invariable
loyalty worthy of all praise. Of the differences between
the English-speaking peoples it may fairly be said that as
long as they are half understood they produce the maxi
mum of friction ; as soon as they are fuUy understood
they produce no friction at all.
In this record of violent speech and wise action, neither
country can claim all the merit of the one nor disclaim
all the discredit of the other. Honours and dishonours
are alike pretty equally divided. In his book, A
Straight Deal, Mr. Owen Wister tends to give the balance
of credit to this country and the balance of discredit to
his own, and it is true that there has been more positive
and declamatory hostility to this country in the United
States than there has been towards the United States in
our own. This is due primarily to the fact that we have
filled a much larger space in the canvas of events to
America than America has to us. Our preoccupations
have been with the Continent and the continental system,
whereas the external affairs of America have brought it
into contact with this country more than with any other

A CENTURY OF PEACE i3
Power. During the past century France, Russia, and
Germany have in turn been the clouds upon our horizon,
and the issues with America have never been of more
than secondary and even remote concern. But apart
from the newly-developed distrust of Japan there has
been hardly any matter of first-rate international concern
to America which has not had relation to British policy
and interests. In practical politics the British Empire
has covered pretty well the whole field of foreign affairs
for the United States, and this fact, taken in conjunction
with the historic, temperamental, and other considerations
that will be discussed later, explains the exceptional
acerbity of tone which, as Mr. Wister shows, has often
marked the controversial temper of America towards this
country. But, putting aside the question of tone and temper,
the achievements of the two English-speaking Common
wealths in the pacific solution of their difficulties during
the past hundred years present an example quite without
parallel in the relations of any two countries of similar
magnitude, high spirit, and national consciousness. Since
the Treaty of Ghent there have been eight or ten occasions
on which the two nations have been brought into sharp
conflict or subjected to severe tests to their wisdom and
mutual good-feeling, and on every occasion the result
has been a triumph for reasonable counsels and judicial
processes. After the preliminary explosion of much
fiery feeling the air has cooled and the statesmen of the
two countries have set about finding a sensible and
friendly solution of their problems.
It was so in the first case that arose, that of the Maine
boundary question in 1843, which involved some 12,000
square miles of territory and which, after much heated
controversy, was amicably settled by arbitration at the
suggestion of this country. In the following year the
Californian boundary question aroused intense bitterness
in the United States, which gave place to a temper of
compromise that removed all grounds of disagreement.
In the case of Nicaragua, Great Britain very wisely and
justly yielded its rights under the Clayton- Bulwer Treaty
in deference to the strong and reasonable national senti-

14 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
ment of the American people. Under the Treaty both
countries had contracted to build and own the Isthmian
Canal, but when the United States sought to annul the
Treaty Great Britain agreed, subsequently surrendering
even the stipulation that the canal should be unfortified
and subject to the principle of the open door.
Much the most serious and sustained menace to the
pacific relations of the two countries came with the
Civil War. In this case the weight of the indictment,
apart from the singular incident at the beginning in which
Mr. Seward, the American Foreign Secretary, played so
indefensible a role, rests on this country. There are few
chapters in our history on which we are entitled to look
back with less satisfaction than the record of our dealings
with America in the first years of the War. And this
in spite of the fact that popular sentiment in this country,
and especially in Lancashire, never played a more generous
part. But it was a long time before that popular sym
pathy became dominant in policy. So far as the spirit
of the country was reflected in action and utterance and
in the Press, it was the hostility of society and the govern
ing classes which was apparent to the North. It would
not be just to assume from this that the intellectual and
wealthy classes in England were in favour of slavery.
They were not. But though the slavery issue was the
sole cause of the struggle the fact was not so clearly
visible to the contemporary judgement in this country as
it is to-day. It was masked by the secession issue. The
rival interests of the North and the South caused both to
disguise or at least to blur the real issue. The South did
so because they knew that their ' peculiar institution ' of
slavery did not furnish a ground on which they could
hope to win the active sympathy of nations to whom
slavery was an unthinkable and unholy practice. The
North did so because they did not enter the war with the
idea of abolishing slavery, but in order to prevent its
extension to territories outside those in which it already
existed. It is true that before his election Lincoln had
made his famous declaration that no nation could continue
' half slave and half free,' but his own general attitude
was more exactly represented in his statement that he

A CENTURY OF PEACE 15
looked for abolition to be a long process, perhaps occupy
ing a hundred years. He would not permit extension,
but apart from that he was concerned to avoid disruption
rather than to secure abolition, and it was not until his
proclamation of emancipation in the midst of the war that
the true issue was presented nakedly and unequivocally
to the outside world.
In these circumstances opinion in this country in the
early stages was governed by considerations that had
little to do with slavery. The sjnnpathies of aristocratic
and governing England were with the South because the
South represented their own stock and their own tradi
tions. The colonisation of the South had been carried
out in the spirit of the old landed aristocracy, and like
appealed to like across the Atlantic. All the hostility
which a privileged and monarchical society entertained
towards the Republic was directed against the industrial
democratic North whose foundations were laid by the
Puritan migration of 1620. Conservative England had
never reconciled itself to the Republic, and the breach
between the two elements in the United States seemed
to offer what the contemporary Times called the oppor
tunity of pricking ' the bubble of the Republic' In
short, it was hostility to the Union and not support of
slavery that made all the powerful influences in English
Society take the side of the South and inspired what
Cobden called ' the diabolical tone of the Times and the
Post.' It is not difficult to-day to see how fatal would
have been the results had the wishes of the clubmen and
politicians of England been gratified. The United States
would have been converted into two rival nations and two
armed camps; Canada would have had to arm too or
become absorbed in the Northern Union, and there would
have been no united America to come to the help of Great
Britain and France at the most critical stage of the Great
War. The gravest incident of this anxious time was the
launching of the Alabama from Laird's Shipyard at Liver
pool. There was never any real doubt as to the purpose
and destination of this famous vessel, and Charles Francis
Adams, the United States Minister in London, gave the

i6 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
Foreign Office the completest depositions and evidence
on the subject. At the eleventh hour Lord Russell
decided to detain her, but a singular accident defeated
the intention. New evidence, on which Lord Russell
proposed to act, was submitted to Sir John Harding, the
Queen's advocate. What followed is told in the life of
Charles Francis Adams :
' He (Sir John Harding) just then broke down from
nervous tension and thereafter became hopelessly insane.
His wife, anxious to conceal from the world knowledge of
her husband's condition, allowed the package to lie un
disturbed on his desk for three days — days which entailed
the destruction of the American merchant marine ; and
it was on the first of these days, Saturday, July 26, 1862,
that Captain Bullock (the Confederate Agent who had
ordered the ship) at Liverpool " received information
from a private but most reliable source that it would not
be safe to leave the ship at Liverpool another forty-eight
hours." On the following Monday accordingly the
Alabama, alias the " 290," alias the Enrica, was taken
out of dock and under pretence of making an additional
trial trip steamed, dressed in flags, down the Mersey, with
a small party of guests on board. It is needless to say
that she did not return. The party of guests was brought
back on a tug, and the Enrica, now fully manned, was on
the 31st off the north coast of Ireland, headed seawards
in heavy weather.'
This was the heaviest blow struck at the cause of the
North from any external source. The American mer
cantile marine was destroyed by a ship built in a British
yard, and manned by British seamen whose achievements
were openly applauded in the British press and by British
passengers who hailed it with cheers as they passed it at
sea. Even the patience and wisdom of Lincoln could not
have prevented so flagrant and disastrous a breach of
neutrality issuing in a declaration of war if the circum
stances of the moment had not been too heavy to admit
of action. Happily the popular current in England, as
the war developed and its true character appeared, served
to modify the effect of the crime ; and when, later, the

A CENTURY OF PEACE 17
South sought to repeat the Alabama success by secretly
commissioning two ironclad rams at the Liverpool yard,
Lord Russell intervened. An order detaining the suspect
ships was issued and shortly afterwards they were seized
by the Government. But the affair of the Alabama re
mained a menacing cloud on the horizon after the war
was over. It was dispersed by the proposal of the Glad
stone Administration to arbitrate, and the Geneva Con
vention awarded £3,000,000 damages to the United States.
The next incident, that of the Behring Sea, in 1887,
saw the United States as flagrantly in error as we had
been in 1862. The seizure of Canadian ships, sixty miles
from land, was a clear breach of the law of the sea, and
the attitude of the United States in the earlier negotiations
was highly provocative. But once more reason and good
sense prevailed. Arbitration was proposed by this
country, the United States agreed, and the judgement
went in our favour both in the matter of damages and
the issue out of which the incident arose. Again, in the
first Venezuelan affair, in 1895, it will not be denied that
the attitude of the United States was unreasonable.
Venezuela, a notoriously corrupt State, took British
prisoners on what we claimed to be British Guiana soil,
and, when we took action, appealed to the United States
Government for protection. President Cleveland's Secre
tary of State, Mr. Olney, demanded ' in accordance with
the Monroe doctrine ' that the question of the disputed
territory should be submitted to arbitration. The right
to dictate how one country should settle a disagreement
with another was a questionable extension of the Monroe
doctrine, but in the end the Salisbury Government wisely
agreed to arbitrate and once more the clouds were dis
persed. In the second Venezuelan incident, that of 1902,
the honours were wholly with America. The joint
demonstration of the British and German Governments
against Venezuela was superficially little more than a
debt-collecting affair, but behind it there lurked in the
mind of the Kaiser the idea of challenging the Monroe
doctrine. The United States met the challenge both
wisely and firmly, and, the British Government respond
ing with equal reasonableness, the trouble passed over.

i8 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
It will be seen from this brief record that the century
of peace has been sufficiently charged with alarms and
possibilities of confiict as to make its achievement re
markable, and to justify the claim that history furnishes
no parallel for so long and consistently successful an un
ravelling and settlement of difficulties between two great
nations. They may claim to have set up in the world a
new doctrine of tntemational adjudication, the doctrine
of the civil settlement of every form of disagreement.
They have used high words in the heat of the moment, but
they have never come within the danger zone of war and
have invariably settled down in a business-like way to
find a just and pacific path out of their difficulties. And
though the admirable efforts of President Taft and Sir
Edward Grey in 1912 to reduce this century of practice
to law and to frame an ironclad scheme of perpetual peace
between the two countries failed at the time, it bore fruit
when the war broke out in a Treaty which, if not ironclad,
goes far to accomplish the end they had in view.

CHAPTER III
THE TWO PEOPLES
If we looked only at the positive events of the century
of peace it might be assumed that Anglo-American rela
tions were established on so firm a footing that the future
could be taken for granted. This is, unfortimately, not
the case. It is, perversely enough, less the case to-day
than it was before the war which, for the first time in
history, made the two English-speaking Commonwealths
comrades in arms against a common enemy. There has
throughout been a startling disagreement between action
and temper. Wisdom has prevailed, but the positive
spirit of friendliness has been lacking. We have been
like two men who have acted righteously towards each
other, but grudgingly and snarlingly. We have done well
without, apparently, wishing well. Our works have been
better than our wiU. In the end the better mind in the
two countries has always prevailed, but it is the worse
mind which has been most clamant and most audible,

THE TWO PEOPLES 19
and if the future relations of the two countries are to be
happy, the better mind on both sides must be so organized
and strengthened as to resist all the blows of circumstance
and all the gusts of passion. We both have our incen
diaries who act and react on each other, and the task for
reasonable minds in both countries is to make our fire-
engines so efl&cient that we can keep the activities of the
incendiaries under and reduce the combustible material
upon which they work. Some of the causes of discord
are ineradicable, but most of them are removable by wise
action and many of them are the product of misunder
standing which will yield to frank discussion or are the
result of old memories which ought to be decently buried.
Let us look at these old memories first. They endure
on both sides of the Atlantic, and if they are more noisy
on the American side it is for the reason already given,
that our external preoccupations have been with the
Continent, while those of the United States have been
primarily with ourselves. That will not be the case in
future. With the disappearance of the one really for
midable Continental power and the emergence of the
United States as our only possible rival in world leader
ship, a new situation is created. It is a situation that
may be turned to good or evil. We can go forward to
gether and in harmony, or we can go forward separately
and in discord. The issue is in our hands, and upon our
worthiness to deal with it the well-being of human society
depends more than on any other factor in the world's affairs.
In nursing the memories of the past it may be said that
our offence has been passive while that of America has
been active. It has assumed in our case the spirit of a
resentful parent, who has seen a younger member of the
family break away from his paternalism, throw off his
authority and traditions and establish himself in the world
on another pattern of ideas. The fact that he has suc
ceeded has not modified the parental resentment. On
the contrary it has aggravated it. The conservative mind
of England has never quite forgiven the American Revolu
tion! It might have achieved forgiveness if the Americans
had adopted a monarchical form of Government, but the
choice of republicanism kept the resentment alive with

20 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
a permanent motive. The divinity of kingship has long
been intellectually repudiated even in the most reaction
ary circles, but attachment to the monarchic idea is still
deep-rooted and there is a latent if unexpressed conviction,
fortified by vague memories of the French Revolution,
that republicanism is allied with the powers of darkness,
the denial of religion, and the abolition of the rights of
property. That conviction continues even though the
peculiarly conventional morality of America and the
excessive reverence for property which pervades both
America and France make it absurd. It will continue,
no doubt, in face of the fact that half the nations of the
world have now become repubUcan. Moreover, there
has persisted in the same obscurantist quarters a feeling
that ultimately the United States, no matter what
happened, really in the sight of Heaven owed some measure
of obedience and loyalty to us. This has led to a certain
minatory and austere attitude, a certain accent of author
ity and superiority, which have added a subtle poison
to our intercourse. And in particular situations of
delicacy and difficulty, notably the Civil War, it has
broken out into positive hostility to the republic as such.
The dominant influences in England did not care two
pence about the rights and wrongs of secession ; but they
did care a great deal about the Union, and the prospect of
its disruption appealed to all the obscure antagonisms asso
ciated with the foundation and growth of the republic.
We are bound, out of respect for historic truth and in
order to clear the ground, to make this confession ; but
it is happily only one side, and I beheve the lesser side,
of the truth. Even in the Revolution itself the best mind
of England was wholly in sympathy with the rebel farmers
of New England. It was recognized that they were
fighting the battle of English liberty against a wholly
alien spirit of despotism in London, and the speeches of
Burke and Chatham live as immortal records of the fact.
It is certainly open to doubt whether such formidable
and unequivocal support to an enemy as Burke's speeches
constituted — and still more his great message to the rebels
themselves, the greatest state paper in history according
to Lord Acton — would have been unpunished in the

THE TWO PEOPLES 21
recent war with Germany. Burke would almost certainly
have been indicted as a traitor for succouring the enemy.
The fact that he could take such an attitude with safety
is evidence of the weight of public opinion that was behind
him in his assaults upon a stupid monarch and a corrupt
and unrepresentative Parliament. And in the case of the
Civil War popular opinion never shared the bat-eyed
hostility of the fashionable world, and there are few
incidents of which we as a nation are entitled to be more
proud than the heroic fortitude of the Lancashire cotton
spinners and weavers whose starvation only intensified
their devotion to the cause of the North.
Nor is it true, on the whole, that our statesmanship
has acted from the point of view of the powerful irreconcil
able forces of the country. It is not too much to claim
that the Monroe doctrine itself emanated from an English
statesman in circumstances supremely creditable to us.
The crude view that that instrument was forged to keep
European kings and especially British kings away from
the Western hemisphere will not stand on examination.
The Monroe doctrine was a reply to the infamous Holy
Alliance which consisted of the monarchs of Prussia,
Russia, Austria, and France, but of which the British
king was not a member. It had been formed in 1815 by
the Czar of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the Emperor
of Austria. In 1820 the Czar sent an invitation to the
United States to join, and the invitation was declined by
John Quincy Adams in a dispatch in which he said :
' To stand in firm and cautious independence of all en
tanglements in the European system, has been a cardinal
point of their (the United States) policy under every
administration.' The real nature of the so-called Holy
Alliance was then made apparent by a protocol signed at
Troppau and by the Treaty of Verona, by the first article
of which the contracting Powers, being convinced that
the system of representative government is ' as incom
patible with the monarchical principle as the maxim of
the sovereignty of the people with the divine right, en
gaged mutually in the most solemn manner to use all their
efforts to put an end to the system of representative
government in whatever country it may exist in Europe,

22 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
and to prevent its being introduced into those countries
where it is not yet known.'
The spearhead of this great testament of monarchism
was directed less against Europe, which was then well
under heel, than against the South American peoples then
struggling for their freedom. It was directed also against
the United States, and it was Canning, the British Prime
Minister, who drew the attention of Richard Rush, the
American Minister in London, to the meaning of the
threat. Rush communicated Canning's warning to Pre
sident Monroe, who consulted the aged Thomas Jefferson,
the ex-President, who drafted the Declaration of In
dependence. In his reply Jefferson used these remarkable
words : ' The question presented by the letter you have
sent me is the most momentous which has been offered
to my contemplation since that of Independence. . . .
One nation most of all could disturb us. She now offers
to lead, aid, and accompany us. . . . With her on our
side we need not fear the whole world. With her, then,
we should most seriously cherish a cordial friendship,
and nothing would tend more to unite our affections
than to be fighting once more side by side in the same
cause.' From this incident emerged the famous doctrine of
the function of the United States to preserve the inviola
bility of all American soil. It emerged, not out of
hostility to this country, but with its warm approval —
an approval crowned by the benediction of the last of
the Great Fathers of the repubhc. And no unbiased
American opinion to-day denies that during the century
that has elapsed since the doctrine was laid down, its
main security has been the sea-pOwer of Great Britain.
Without the open or tacit sanction of that power no
challenge to the authority of the doctrine from any ex
ternal quarter was possible, and it was this consideration
that stood in the path of the ambition of the last German
Kaiser to extend his Empire in the South American Con
tinent. In any fair discussion of the historic attitude
of Great Britain to the United States a weighty entry on
the credit side is due in respect, not merely of the origin
and endorsement by this country of the Monroe doctrine.

THE TWO PEOPLES 23
but of the practical guarantee given to it by tne existence
of British sea-power.
There are other memories which may fairly be recalled
as a set-off to the heavy account of the Revolution and
the Civil War. The far-reaching ambitions of Napoleon
included not only India, but the North American Con
tinent, and it was the British Fleet which stood between
him and the foundation of an overseas dominion in
Louisiana, just as a hundred years later it stood between
the German Kaiser and his hopes of extending his Empire
to South America. It was in this connexion that Jeffer
son wrote in 1802 that ' the day France takes possession
of New Orleans we must marry ourselves to the British
Fleet and nation.' There was no need for the marriage
then, for the existence of the British Fleet was enough,
but it is significant that Jefferson, so soon after the Re
volution, could turn with such confidence to the idea of
an understanding with this country. And the action of
England during the Spanish War was no less friendly and
beneficial to the United States. The Continental Powers
were almost unanimously hostile to America — Germany,
France, and Austria sought to organize a European league
in the interests of Spain. Great Britain was essential
to the design, and Great Britain firmly and emphatically
declined to have any part in the proposal ; not only so,
but the refusal to allow the Spanish Fleet to coal at Port
Said — a refusal dictated by the interpretation of the status
of neutrality — ^had a not unimportant bearing on the
course of the war.
If there has been little recognition of this indebtedness
in the United States in the past, the fact is due to what
Mr. Owen Wister calls the ' anti-British complex ' which
has persisted from revolutionary days, and has been
stereotyped by the biased presentation of history and
reinvigorated by circumstances which will be dealt with
in other connexions. Mr. Wister contrasts this anti-
British complex with the ' pro- French complex ' which has
paralleled and completed it. Under the influence of
these currents every wrong that England has done to
America has been studiously remembered, while every
act of friendship ha5 been studiously ignored. Pre-

24 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
cisely the opposite tendency has prevailed in the case
of France. ' Several times France has been flagrantly
hostile to us,' says Mr. Wister. ' But there was Lafayette,
there was Rochambeau, and the great service France did
us then against England. Hence from our school his
tories we have a pro-French complex. Under its workings
we automatically remember every good tum France has
done us and automatically forget the evil turns.' It is
probably true that no country in history ever earned so
handsome a dividend from a single investment as France
has done by her support of the American Revolution.
No one will begrudge her this good fortune, but it is per
tinent to remember that the action of the French king was
not motived by affection for the Americans.but by hostihty
to the English, and that he himself lamented what he had
done. ' I was dragged into that unhappy affair of America, '
he said later, ' advantage was taken of my youth.' And
the nimbus that hangs about the head of Lafayette in
America is not very visible to those who are famiUar with
his later unfortunate activities in the French Revolution.
The romantic affection for France became a tradition
which was invulnerable to circumstance. It survived
even the open antagonism of Napoleon III during the
Civil War. He seized the opportunity offered by the pre
occupations of the North to make the only serious attack
ever delivered on the Monroe doctrine. With the tacit
consent of the South, which was prepared to pay any price
for European support, he placed the unfortunate Maxi
milian on the throne of Mexico and so seemed to have
succeeded where his great namesake had failed. In return
he was unremitting in his efforts to serve the cause of the
South. ' All through the summer of 1862,' says C. F.
Adams in his biography of his father, the American Minis
ter in London, ' the Ministers of Napoleon III were
pressing the British Government towards recognition '
(of the South) ; and though the story of the Alabama
provides a sufficiently black mark against this country, it
is at least paralleled by the action of the French Govern
ment which gave a licence to a French firm to build four
armoured ships, two smaller ships, and a gunboat, imder
cover of a statement that they were ' destined by a foreign

THE TWO PEOPLES 25
shipper to ply the Chinese and Pacific seas between China,
Japan, and San Francisco.' It was only after the Laird
rams had been seized by the British Government that
Napoleon III became discreet, and we find Mason, the
Confederate agent in England, writing home sadly that
' the conviction has been forced upon us that there
remains no chance or hope of getting ships from either
England or France. . . . From England we have long
since had nothing to expect ; from France we have ihe right
to entertain a belief of other results.' It was not until the
end of 1863, when the issue of the war was no longer in
doubt, that Napoleon III definitely renounced his hopes
of securing the consent of the British Government to a
breach of neutrality in the interests of the South. With
out the co-operation of the British Fleet it was impossible
for him to act, and it is clear beyond any shadow of doubt
that but for the attitude of the British Government he
would have intervened in the war. This fact does not
rest upon surmise, but on the documentary evidence of
the principals. Slidell, the Southern agent in Paris,
records that in the interview of the pro-South Englishman,
W. S. Lindsay, with the Emperor, Napoleon III said ' he
would long since have declared the inefficiency of the
blockade and taken steps to put an end to it, but that he
could not obtain the concurrence of the English Ministry
and that he had been, and was still, unwilling to act
without it. That M. Thouvenel had twice addressed
to the British Government, through the Ambassador at
London, representations to that effect, but that no
definite response had been elicited.' And the interview
with Lindsay was granted, on the Emperor's own ad
mission, in the hope that he would be a channel through
which he could once more approach the British Govern
ment with a view to prompt and decisive action which
was to take the shape of the dispatch of a joint fleet to
the mouth of the Mississippi.
It is relevant to recaU these facts, not in order to pre
judice the French nation in the American mind, but to
show, in the light of the naked facts of the past, how
irrational is the historic anti- British bias by comparison
with the pro-French bias, It is generally assumed that

26 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
that anti- British bias is chiefly the result of a mischievous
tendency in education, and an investigation of the school
histories in popular use in the past gives strong confirma
tion of the view. They have taken a definitely prejudiced
attitude in regard to the facts of history, and have, as has
been repeatedly shown by American writers, carefully
excluded those aspects of the conflict which were calcu
lated to modify American opinion of British conduct and
feeling. This use of perverted history in order to canalize
national sentiment in a given direction, which was carried
to such scientific lengths in Germany by Treitschke and his
school, is a vice from which the English educational prac
tice has been tolerably free. The kindred vice of exalting
our own actions and slurring over our own misdeeds and
failures has been common enough, but it cannot be charged
against us that our schools have been used to create a
hostile frame of mind in regard to any particular nation.
At the same time, there are abundant lacunae in our
knowledge that account for much of the failure to appre
ciate American feeUng. When I was being shown over
the White House at Washington recently I was told how
a British Ambassador, now dead, on visiting the residence
of the Presidents, asked why the wood of the structure,
obviously beautiful, had been covered with white paint.
He was informed that about a hundred years ago there
had been an unfortunate fire there, and the charred timbers
had had to be painted — Whence the White House. In
his innocence he pressed for details, and he learned to
his discomfiture that the ' unfortunate fire ' was caused
by a raid of British marines in the war of i8 12-14. He
was ignorant of the fact and I was no less ignorant. To
the English mind the war of 1812-14 is a very negligible
affair in the large perspective of the Napoleonic era.
It was an affair in regard to which impartial American
opinion to-day admits that we were not primarily culpable
and that it was a product of the Anglophobe Francophil
tendency which was more natural and excusable within
a generation or so of the Revolution than it is in the •
twentieth century. But it is well to remember that
while we are ignorant of the reason for the White House
being the White House, the American schoolboy in the

THE TWO PEOPLES 27
past has not been allowed to be ignorant. He has been
kept excessively conscious of the cause. The fact that
we had twice waged war on American soil was at the root
of his patriotic teaching, and it takes a long time to get
a reminiscence like that out of the blood of a race.

CHAPTER IV
THE AMERICAN MIND
It is, however, not only a truer and more generous inter
pretation of history on both sides that is necessary to the
growth of goodwill. The disease is deeper than dead
memories. It is in living tendencies and temperamental
irritants. The American university woman, referred
to by Lord Grey, defined them broadly as ignorance of
the United States on our part and misconception of Eng
land on theirs. With the latter it is not my function here
to deal. There are happily plenty of enlightened Ameri
can writers who are combating that misconception in its
various aspects. We can leave them to remove the mote
(or beam) out of their own eye, whUe we attend to the
beam (or mote) in our own. The charge of ignorance
leveUed against us does not admit of denial. All we can
advance in mitigation of the fact is that we are a European
country involved in the European web and that we have
been compeUed to take America for granted. We have
felt we could take it for granted, because, in our innocence,
we have assumed that, in spite of the periodical naggings
and taU-twistings, and in spite of the Revolution and the
Republic, the United States was really England under
another name. It was colonized from this country ; it
spoke our language, shared our traditions, our customs,
and our literature, had much the same spiritual ten
dencies, and quite the same commercial morality and
more than our own practical energy. If it was not part of
the British Commonwealth in law, it was a part of it
in virtue of bonds more enduring and sacred than law.
The marriage, it seemed, was made in heaven and no
revolution could dissolve its spiritual contracts. In this
comfortable conviction, it was assumed that we as the

28 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
senior were entitled to correct our offspring, chasten its
deficiencies, give it good advice, and receive in return
implicit and grateful obedience. We did not understand
that Americans do not want to be regarded as EngUshmen
under another name, but as Americans sans phrase. We
were naively convinced that the greatest compUment an
American could have was to be accepted as an EngUsh
man. Any one, of course, would Uke to be an Englishman
if he could, and the idea that there were people speaking
the EngUsh tongue who resented being taken for EngUsh
men in disguise approximated to blasphemy. This
paternal or grandpatemal view is at the root of much of
the mischief between the two countries.
The first fact for us reaUy to driU into our minds is that
the Americans are a foreign people and hate above every
thing the arrogant assumption so common in our tone and
attitude that they are reaUy ourselves in a rather cruder
stage of development. Even in the main current of the
nation, which is profoundly pro-English, this resentment
exists. By the main current, I do not mean the majority.
I mean the most influential thought, the most educated
opinion, the most indigenous culture. You wiU find
among certain elements of American Ufe a tenderness of
affection for this country as surprising as it is moving.
And this not only in a city that retains so much of the
authentic English atmosphere as Boston does, but in
remote places. Off the beaten track, as in Kentucky,
you may find yourself in a social atmosphere more
reminiscent of England than England itself. It is only
there that I have seemed to see Jane Austen's serene
England in being, not as a social cult or as an affectation,
but as a frame of mind and a deep-rooted habit of life.
And among the inteUectuals the enthusiasm for England
is, I should say, overwhelmingly predominant. I saw
much in a recent visit to America of the representative
men of the universities, both the old universities like
Harvard, and the modern universities like Chicago ; and
better and wiser friends of England I do not hope to see
— friends who know our faults as weU as our virtues,
and feel our mistakes as acutely as if they were their own!
This current is our great asset in America. It rests

THE AMERICAN MIND 29
with us not only to keep it, but to extend it, and make it
dominant over American popular sentiment. That senti
ment in the main is neither pro-English nor anti-English,
though there are large ' pockets ' of definite hostUity,
For the most part it is indifferent, shot through with
threads of friendship here and hostUity there. How
could it be otherwise ? The popular English conception
of America as a sort of member of the famUy who
emigrated and became rebelUous a century and a half or
so ago is a fatal misapprehension of realities. It was true
a century ago and partiaUy true half a century ago : it is
wUdly untrue to-day. The United States is a great
foreign country, infinitely vaster, more populous, more
rich than this, with an independent life, and a civilization
widely differentiated from ours, a confusion of tongues
and races welded into a rough whole. When a war
announcement was made in Chicago, I am told, it was
placarded in 47 languages and dialects. New York has
a larger ItaUan population than Rome, and a larger
aggregation of Jews than any city on earth. It is a great
PoUsh city, a great German city, a great Russian city.
You may walk along business thoroughfares on the east
side where you wUl never see an English name on the shop
fronts. There are more Negroes there than in any other
city, the second largest aggregation of Negroes being in
Chicago. In motoring from Boston to Cape Cod I stayed
in Plymouth and found the very Mecca of English Puri
tanism mainly occupied by Polish artisans. About Cape
Cod itself the labour is largely Portuguese from the Azores.
The textUe industries of Massachusetts and Rhode Island
are run by ItaUan, Irish, Polish, and French-Canadian
labour — all of it, be it observed, of Catholic sympathies.
And Buffalo, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, and the
other cities that have sprung up like magic by the highway
of the Great Lakes to the West are as diverse in their
populations as the Eastern cities and farther removed
from the original English influence that lies, nevertheless,
at the core of American institutions and thought. And
farther West the popular aloofness from that original
thought is almost complete. In so far as there is any
acute external preoccupation it is directed not so much

30 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
to Europe as westward to the Pacific and Japan. There
has never been such a fusion of such diverse races on so
vast a scale in history, and out of that fusion a type is
emerging which, English in speech, largely EngUsh in
blood, and mainly English in custom, is nevertheless so
various in source and inspiration as to be not merely
foreign, but in some senses the most foreign thing of aU,
for it is an amalgam of all the foreignnesses on earth. How
swiftiy it is shaped tn the mould that this tumultuous
mixture is insensibly creating is iUustrated by an incident
which Mr. Gay, formerly Dean of the Faculty of Com
merce at Harvard and now editor of the Evening Post
(the Westminster Gazette of New York), told me. ' When
I was a boy in Toledo,' he said, ' the Polish immigration
was in progress, and in our city the Poles formed a com
munity so organized, nationaUstic, and self-conscious that
it seemed a fixed and permanent feature of the city's life.
It had its own newspapers, its own churches, and pre
served its own speech. It was a pure PoUsh enclave.
When I went back years later I had occasion to caU in
a decorator. The workman sent was a nice yoimg fellow
and a typical American in speech and thought. His
name was Stephens. I talked with him and found that
he was a Pole, born in Poland, who had come in that tide
of immigration twenty years before. So far from pre
serving his Polish character, he had become entirely
absorbed in the American stream, and even his name,
Stevanowski, had been AngUcized, because, as he dis
closed to me, he had faUen in love with an Irish girl, and
she would not marry him untU he had a more native-
sounding name.'
That incident Ulustrates the ease and rapidity with
which America resolves its racial material into a common
currency. It illustrates also the stratification of the
material. The tides of immigration have foUowed each
other with extraordinary definition, and the last comers
have always taken the lowUest tasks. The loo per cent.
American — if, outside the aboriginal Red Indian there
can be said to be such a phenomenon — has largely
ceased to labour. The heavy work has been taken over
in tum by the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, the Greeks,

THE AMERICAN MIND 31
and so on, as one invasion has foUowed another. The
great shoe-blacking industry, for example — so important
a feature of American life — after having been in the hands
of the Irish, then of the Negroes, then of the Italians,
then of the Poles, is now being done by the Greeks. And
the Greeks in some places, Seattle for instance, are now,
I read, giving place to the Turks. The miracle is that
out of such an unprecedented mixture of constituents
assembled in so brief a space of time there should have
developed a vndespread community so homogeneous in
character, speech, and even physical qualities. The miracle
has an important bearing on the problem of the permanence
of racial characters, but under no other existing political
and social system than that established by the founders
of the Republic could it have been accompUshed. It is the
triumph of those ideas of human equality and free institu
tions which lay at the root of the American system.
But the sudden emergence of this vast nationaUsm
of the New World out of the overflowings from the
diverse nationaUsms of the Old World has produced a
frame of mind with which we have to take account. It is
the source of that acute national sensitiveness, that
emphasis upon ' Americanism,' which plays so large a
part in public affairs. The old county family which has
been estabUshed in the country-side for centuries can
afford to be indifferent about trifles that cut the new
comer to the quick. His social nerve-ends are a Uttle
bare ; his self-consciousness a Uttle excessive, and he
tends to see disrespect and scorn too readUy. I suppose
at least two-thirds of the population of the United States
are either foreign-born or of immediate foreign ancestry.
This fact, so far from making them indifferent to their
nationality, makes them feverishly sensible of it. They
want, quite honestly, to be accepted as good Americans,
and the novelty of their situation lends a fervour to their
' Americanism ' which can only meUow with time. From
this cause comes that spirit of correctness and convention
that strikes the visitor to the country as much as the
abounding hospitality and kindliness of the people. The
common European view of the American as a hustling
and boastful person is found to be singularly wide- of the

32 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
mark. He is, on the contrary, cordial, quiet in speech
and manner, and curiously modest in bearing. He takes
criticism very weU, and has an obvious and unaffected
respect for the judgements of the older civilizations in
matters touching the mind. With this is coupled a
certain precision of social conduct that is much more
reminiscent of the England of two generations ago than
of the England of to-day. And that precision is paral
leled in political affairs by a respect for convention that
amounts almost to a religion and easUy becomes a vice.
The result is seen in the strange paradox that whUe the
United States is in thought the most individuaUstic of
modern states, it is more subject in poUtical action to the
impulse of the herd-mind than perhaps any people in
history. Tolerant and mUd in its personal relations, it
can be extraordinarUy intolerant in its coUective mani
festations. ' America,' as Mr. P. W. WUson said in a
witty phrase, ' is the land of Uberty — Uberty to keep in
step.' It may be doubtful of what ' Americanism ' means
in certain emergencies, but when it has made up its mind
it moves with the unity and momentum of a herd of
bison, and woe to the dissident who crosses its path. This
spirit of subordination to the common impulse — the spirit
of a nationalism at once intense, youthful, and unsure of
itself — has had many remarkable iUustrations in recent
years, Ulustrations both admirable and ugly. It was the
key to the astonishing voluntary self-denial practised
during the war. The word went out that Americanism
demanded that the people should forgo the use of
wheaten bread, and the order was obeyed without a
murmur. It was declared to be unpatriotic to use petrol
for pleasure, and on Sunday not a motor was visible in
Fifth Avenue. Money was required for the war, and in
the remotest corner of the United States the committee
of citizens assessed how much each man ought to contri
bute to the loan, and he contributed it or paid the penalty
in broken windows and pubUc opprobrium. Such a
tyranny, not of law, but of pubUc opinion, is without
precedent in European experience. It does not always
work for worthy ends. It can be exercised in a spirit as
hostile to the authentic temper and tradition of ' Ameri-

THE AMERICAN MIND 33
canism ' as any Czarist system. That was so in the case
of the frantic explosion against ' Radicalism ' last winter,
the record of which may be read in the crushing exposure
of its outrages, abuses, and follies contained in the memor
andum of indignant protest signed by a group of the most
distinguished jurists in the United States.
CHAPTER V
THE ENGLISH MANNER
It is often said, I think with much truth, that
the American mind respects English opinion, but is
resentful of the English manner. The two facts are
intelligible enough. What I have called the romantic
attachment of Americans to France was, until the war,
sufficiently removed from practical affairs to preserve
the freshness of a first and immortal love. The Americans
adored France as Don Quixote adored the peerless
Dulcinea, because she was a creature of the mind un-
besmirched by the contacts of earth. The saying that
the good American when he dies goes to Paris embodies
the feeUng with humorous truth. The difference of
language, so far from interfering with the affection, served
to envelop it in an agreeable strangeness. It is generaUy
assumed that community of speech is an aid to mutual
understanding and friendship. That ought certainly
to be the case, but it may be seriously doubted whether
Anglo-American relations have not lost more than they
have gained from the common medium of intercourse
and the ease with which verbal brickbats can be exchanged
across the Atlantic between the journalistic firebrands on
both sides. But there is another and much more funda
mental reason why the French have been more successful
in winning the goodwUl of Americans than the EngUsh.
They have as much natural egoism as any people on
earth, but in their methods of intercourse they have more
subtlety and deUcacy, more tact and sensitiveness to the
feelings of others than the English have.
The point may be iUustrated by an incident of which
I was a personal witness in a great American city. I had
3

34 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
been invited to speak at a dinner of leading citizens,
some of them the heads of businesses of world-wide fame.
The other guests were to be the British Consul and the
French Consul. The British Consul did not appear, and
the chairman read from him a bald intimation of the
fact that he had another engagement. There was no
expression of regret, no vrish that the gathering would be
a pleasant one — nothing but the brusque announcement
of the fact that he had something else to do. Nothing
was said publicly, but it was as tliough a contemptuous
insult had been flung at the audience. The French
Consul, who was sitting beside me, turned and raised his
eyebrows significantly. ' It might have been done more
tactfully,' he said. ' And yet,' he went on, ' he is a good
fellow, and does not mean to hurt.' He had hurt, not
the sensibilities of the audience only, but stiU more gravely
the country he represented. And whUe he did not mean
to do harm, his offence sprang ultimately from that
intolerable air of superiority which the EngUshman of a
certain type, and, not seldom, of our pubUc-school tradi
tion, affects towards other peoples. The spirit of caste
pride which he has learned at home in the social sphere
he carries with him abroad into the racial sphere. He
himself is often unconscious of what he does. Like the
British Consul ' he is a good feUow and does not mean to
hurt.' But the spiritual pride is so ingrained that he is
unaware both of it and of its reactions upon others. In a
remarkable article on ' The Roots of Anti- British Feeling '
which appeared recentiy in an American journal, Mr.
Harold Steams, one of the liberal school of American
publicists, deals with this subject :
' The Englishman's feeling that other nations really
don't count is, of course, far less strong in its manifesta
tion towards us than towards any other foreigner. But
it is replaced by an unconscious snobbery, which is perhaps
worse ; it is, at any rate, more exasperating. No one
who has ever traveUed on a British steamship going, let
us say, to Cape Town can have faUed to observe the
subtle line of social demarcation between the EngUshman
and the Colonial. It crops up in the most unexpected

THE ENGLISH MANNER 35
ways, but it is always there, and the Colonial is made to
feel very definitely that he is an inferior. The English
man assumes his superiority as naturally as he assumes
the fact of the British Empire. Similarly in his attitude
towards Americans the average Englishman assumes,
probably unconsciously, that we are still Colonials, rather
capricious Colonials to be sure, and with peculiar, amusing
ways of our own, but still Colonials. America has hardly
become a definite national entity in his consciousness ; we
do not quite literally exist as a rival nation or as an
important factor in the world. We both speak the same
language ; we have the same traditions and laws and
civilization ; we are of one colour and blood ; we are all
Anglo-Saxons — and is it not an Anglo-Saxon world?
The Englishman regards an alliance with us, at aU events
common action with us, as perfectly natural, if not indeed
inevitable — ^with England doing the directing. I shall
not stretch this point, because Americans understand it
only too well ; it would make us angry if it did not make
us laugh. After all, Englishmen are hardly to be blamed
for not seeing the point. Our own snobs with money have
flattered them to the top of their bent. Yet nationally
we are of the mood of Mark Twain when he wrote " A
Connecticut Yankee " ; it is still true that we regard
ourselves as the salt of the earth. And while I do not
seek to pass judgement on these respective claims to
superiority, I may perhaps point out that no genuine
Anglo-American entente cordiale can come into existence
until England has accepted the fact of America. It is
because I for one want that acceptance to come without
the bloody intrusion of war, and because so many of my
own friends are Englishmen, that I commend to the
liberal EngUshman' s attention these unpalatable truths.'
This is severe, and it may be in some respects unjust ;
but it is essentially true, it comes from a friendly pen,
and it very faithfully represents the feeling latent in the
minds of thousands of Americans who, so far from wishing
to be hostile to us, are profoundly concerned to remove
the causes of hostUity. It is necessary for EngUshmen
to realize that America is a foreign nation, as proud of its

36 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
history and achievements as we are proud of ours, per
fectly conscious of the place which its resources give it in
the world, and whose doctrine of equality makes it pecu
liarly resentful of the superior or condescending airs of
other peoples, especially of peoples whose traditions of
caste they have discarded. There are plenty of vices in
the American civilization, but there are two vices from
which it is conspicuously free. It is free from snobbery
on the one hand and from flunkeyism on the other. These
are weeds of the Old World that will never grow in that
soil. If the rich American desires them he has to come
for them to this country, where peerages can stUl be
bought and flunkeyism still enjoyed. But nothing is
wider of the truth than the naive view so prevalent in this
country that America envies our social discriminations
and is conscious of inferiority because it does not enjoy
them. ' Those English cousins of ours will be the death
of me,' said a writer in a New York monthly magazine
recently. ' They are incorrigible. I had an overwhelm
ing experience with one of them the other day. He was
a delightful person and we got on together famously.
The talk turned to the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the
old home of the Washington famUy in England, as an
international shrine. My friend told me that he had
lately visited the place. " What especiaUy impressed
me," he said, " was the sight of the armorial bearings of
the Washington family carved in a great oak beam in the
old dining-hall. There in those stars and stripes I saw
for the first time the origin of your flag, ' old glorious '
as you call it. And now," he added impressively, " when
ever I see the American flag flying I realize that it repre
sents the ideals of an English country gentleman." '
The sensible American laughs at these childlike ex
pressions of our national mind, but he has quite other
feelings when the expression assumes the grotesque
official stupidity of offering the K.C.B. to distinguished
Americans like J. W. Gerard and General Pershing.
That so gauche an affront to American institutions and
ideas should be possible is an evidence of the profound
misunderstanding of those institutions and ideas that
prevails in responsible quarters in this country. It

THE ENGLISH MANNER 37
implies that Americans are flattered by our titles, when
the keynote of their whole system is the repudiation of
them as antiquated follies and the sentiment that men
shall be valued as men and not as the wearers of ribbons
that any climber can win by skilful touting.
From this fundamental note of human equality comes
that ease and accessibility which are such noticeable
quaUties of the American. There is — to employ words
I have used elsewhere — no ice to break before you get
at him. There is no baffling atmosphere of doubt and
hesitancy to get through ; no fencing necessary to find
out on what social footing you are to stand. You are
on him at once — or rather he is on you. He comes out
into the open, without reserves of manner, and talks
' right ahead ' with the candour and ease of a man who is
at home in the world and at home with you. He is free
alike from intellectual priggishness and social aloofness.
He is just a plain man talking to a plain man on equal
terms. It is the manner of the New World and of a
democratic society in which the Chief of the State is plain
Mr. President, who may be the ruler of a continent this
year and may go back to his business as a private citizen
next year. It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick
Douglass, the Negro preacher, paid to Lincoln. ' He
treated me as a man,' said Douglass after his visit to the
President. ' He did not let me feel for a moment that
there was any difference in the colour of our skins.' It
is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had
to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good
manners. He treated Douglass as a man and an equal
because he was a man and an equal, and because the
difference in the colour of their skins had no more to do
with their essential relationship than the difference in the
colour of their ties or the shape of their boots. The
directness and naturalness of the American manner give
the sense of a man who is bom free — free from the irritat
ing restraints, embarrassments, and artificialities of a
society in which social caste and feudal considerations
prevail as they still prevail in most European countries.
Our stiffness and aloofness are due to the absence of this
primal freedom of intercourse. We are uncertain about

38 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
each other — not about each other as human beings, but
about each other's social status. We have got the spirit
of feudalism still in our bones, and our public-school sys
tem, our titles, and our established-church system aU tend
to keep it alive, aU work to cut up society into social orders
which are a survival from the days before democracy.
And much of the anti- British feeUng in America is due
to the fact that we carry our feudalism abroad where
it is neither understood nor appreciated. We succeed in
giving the impression that we are the superior branch of
the family visiting a poor relation, who says ' cant ' where
we say ' cahnt ' and ' gotten ' where we say ' got,' and
perfectly inexcusable things like that. It often happens,
as Lowell showed long ago, that these apparent departures
from decorum are sound English which we have dropped
and the Americans have retained. It is so with ' gotten,'
which was used by so recent and reputable an English
writer as Anthony TroUope. But the point is that we
ought to remember that the American practice in speech
as in other matters is not necessarily inferior to our own
because it differs from ours. On this subject Mr. Wister
quotes an amusing dialogue :
' Why do you call your luggage baggage ? ' asks the
Englishman. ' Why do you call your baggage luggage ? ' replies the
American. " Why don't you say treacle ? '
' Because we call it molasses.'
' How absurd to speak of a car when you mean a
carriage ! '
' We don't mean a carriage ; we mean a car.'
And in another connexion he records the case of an
Englishman who turned up at a dinner party, to which he
had been invited, in a tweed suit. Like the British
Consul, again, he probably ' meant no harm,' but it bore
the construction so common in regard to the English
manner in America that anything is good enough for
the inferior branch of the family. In this case it was
suitably rebuked : ' Oh, I see you haven't your dress
suit with you,' said the host. ' The man wiU take you
upstairs. One of mine will fit you. We'll wait.' There

THE ENGLISH MANNER 39
is a formality and correctness of behaviour among Ameri
cans which is acutely outraged by the appearance of
disrespect on the part of foreigners. It is felt not so much
as a personal slight as a slight to their civilization, and
must be referred to those considerations on which stress
has already been laid. The point was expressed to me
very simply, but effectively, by a lady in the Middle West
(who, by the way, was proud of her Cornish origin).
Speaking of some local feeling in regard to the casual and
thoughtless action of a distinguished visitor at a gathering
in his honour, she said, ' You see, we are a new people
and we are a little sensitive in matters touching our self-
respect — especiaUy where visitors from older countries
are concerned.'
It is unfortunate that, under the conditions of our
diplomatic service, which limit the supply of men to a
narrow and extremely conservative circle of wealthy and
officiaUy-minded persons, we have rarely sent to Washing
ton to represent us men who understand and S5nnpathize
with the American idea or appreciate American institu
tions. During the war many of the official visitors to
the country did us no good service, and the tour of one
notorious gentleman has become a legend which no English
visitor to America to-day wiU fail to hear about. In the
past America has sent to London to represent it a suc
cession of its most notable citizens, men of inteUect,
character, and distinguished public service, like Charles
F. Adams, RusseU Lowell, John Hay, J. H. Choate, W. H.
Page, and the present able and eloquent representative,
Mr. J. W. Davis. With the exception of Lord Bryce,
whom the Americans still characteristically call Mr.
Bryce and the memory of whose tenure of ofi&ce is pre
served with singular affection, we have usually sent
to Washington men trained in the vicious atmosphere of
European diplomacy, Umited, formal persons, ignorant
of the American spirit and often contemptuous of that
spirit if they were not ignorant. No graver wrong than
this can be done to Anglo-American relations. The
measure of the wrong can be appreciated from the re
markable and salutary influence which Lord Bryce' s term
of service had on American feeling. It can be confidently

40 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
said that nothing in recent years has done anything like
so much to improve the relations of the two countries,
and it is regrettable that that admirable departure was
not pursued. The American people have a deep and
sincere reverence for intellect and character, and respond
more readily perhaps than any other nation to the com
pliment implied in sending to them the best we have to
represent us. We need in Washington, not Foreign Office
officials, but great Englishmen who understand America,
love it, and sympathize with its culture and ideas.
In estimating the influences that have to be reckoned
with in this connexion, account must be taken of the
American woman. In spite of the enormous infusion
of foreign elements, the prevaUing moral sentiment of
America is distinctly Puritan. In the spiritual sense it
is not more Puritan than England — perhaps not so much.
The religious motive is singularly attenuated. Few of
the churches in New York, for example, are open for
service more than once on Sundays, and a distinguished
pastor said to me that he had come to the conclusion that
music was the only contact with spiritual things that the
American retained. But while materialism has over
whelmed the religious motive, it is materiaUsm strongly
permeated with moral ideas. The gospel of personal
fitness, of becoming social conduct, of cleanliness and
sobriety, is enforced with the passion of a reUgion. In
this respect Mrs. Eddy, with her Science of Health, is one
of the most representative products of the country, and
the extraordinary success of her movement reflects
accurately the national spirit and ideals. From this
moral motive has come, very largely, the phenomenon of
Prohibition. Other factors have contributed to its
success — the Negro question in the South, for example,
industrial considerations in the North, and so on. But
the main factor has been moral, coupled with the difiiciUty
of restraining ' the trade ' by any legislative enactments.
It is, I believe, true that a large proportion of the States
' went dry ' through ' wet ' votes — that is, through the
votes of moderate drinkers who had, after repeated
experiments, come to the conclusion that no terms could
be made with the drink trade and that it was necessary to

THE ENGLISH MANNER 41
sacrifice their own habit for the general well-being. It is
a characteristic illustration of that coUective mind, work
ing voluntarUy and even tyrannicaUy, which is so constant
a feature of the American spirit. When it is fully seized
with an idea it stampedes with irresistible force and
tolerates no obstruction.
In this moral revolt against alcohol the American
woman has been the dominant influence. And her
suspicion of England is largely based on the drinking
customs of the country. Two causes have especially
operated in our disfavour. In the past, the ' remittance
man ' — the ne'er-do-weel, shipped abroad with an allow
ance — was often the only type of Englishman of which
she had any knowledge, and she judged our standards by
his. And the experience of our drinking customs brought
back by the American soldiery has confirmed her in her
disapproval. She has been shocked particularly at the
revelation of the widespread habit of public drinking
among women. It represents the last term in degeneracy
to the mind of a country where, even before Prohibition,
the spectacle of a woman drinking or a barmaid serving
in a public saloon was practically unknown.
If in this brief glance at the temperamental and other
sources of friction between the two peoples emphasis has
been laid upon the American case against us rather than
upon our case against the Americans, it is not because we
have no complaints to make, but because, in working
for a better common understanding and sympathy, it is
important that we should be sensible of our own infirmities
rather than theirs. At present the reverse is the case. And
fortunately there are many able American pens engaged
in telling Americans where they faU in their dealings
with us. CHAPTER VI
POLITICAL DISCORDS
In the previous chapters I have dealt with the disturb
ing temperamental aspects of Anglo-American relations.
In giving them first attention I have not done so because
there are no serious practical difficulties, but because I
beUeve such difficulties as there are wUl disappear if we

42 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
can establish the spirit of goodwUl and good intention on
both sides. In the speech to which I have previously
referred Lord Grey said ' there is no solid ground for
disagreement between this country and America.' That
is substantiaUy true, but there are abundant grounds for
disagreement and worse if there is iU-wUl and bad temper.
To understand what those grounds are it may be useful
to call in representative American witnesses themselves.
The first I shaU summon is Mr. WiUiam Randolph Hearst.
In political intelligence Mr. Hearst reveals a violent,
emotional energy unsustained by any phUosophy of Ufe
or government. He is held in low repute inteUectuaUy,
but he wields a journalistic power as great in the North
American continent as Lord NorthcUffe's is in England.
He owns a series of important morning and evening news
papers in most of the great cities from New York and
Boston in the East to San Francisco in the West. On
internal affairs his influence is often disinterested and
pubUc-spirited ; on external affairs it is that of the com
mon thoughtless jingo journalist, appealing to any violent
emotion that wUl sway the mob. He has one constant
motive. It is hostUity to this country. The cause of
that hostility is obscure, but the explanation generaUy
offered to me in America was that it was the result of
some personal slight, a consideration that governs most
of his public activities and animosities, as for example in
the case of his vendetta against President WUson. In
his newspapers on January 24 last, Mr. Hearst wrote an
article over his own signature repl57ing to one I had
published in which I had ventured the opinion that the
one serious practical obstacle to good relations with the
United States was the Irish question. Mr. Hearst com
bated this view. ' An Englishman,' he said, ' never sees
anything but what he wants to see, and Mr. Gardiner
has been wholly unable to see the real cause of the attitude
of Americans towards England.' He then proceeded to
tell his readers what are the causes of that attitude. I
shaU endeavour to summarize them fairly. The en
deavour wUl not occupy much space, for Mr. Hearst's
indictment consisted mainly of a whirl of violent words
from which it is difficult to extract any meaning except

POLITICAL DISCORDS 43
that he dislikes us. He denies that it is the Irish question
that is ' the basis of America's antipathy to England.'
' It is the American question.
' It is the self-respect so persistently offended by
England which they entertain for themselves as a people
[this sentence is misty ; but the meaning is tolerably clear].
' It is the knowledge of the fact that they saved Eng
land from total defeat and that this service has not even
been acknowledged, let alone appreciated.
' It is resentment of England's affectation of lordship
over the rest of the world and England's arrogant dis
position to employ the United States as a useful tool for
the furtherance of her own selfish purposes without
regard for the interests of the United States. . . .
' It is the feeling that there is no such thing as fair
friendship vrith England, no such thing as equable associa
tion, no such thing as beneficial co-operation. It is the
increasing understanding of England's purposes and poli
cies and of that dominant fact in history — that England
has endeavoured to destroy, and always succeeded in de
stroying, every great power that rivaUed her in trade,
commerce, and industry, and national growth or inter
national influence, first Spain, then HoUand, then France,
then Germany.
' It is . . .'
And so on to the extent of nearly a column of general
invective. Not untU we reach the close do we find a
specific charge which has any relevance to practical
affairs —
' It is the conviction that Japan wUl be the next active
antagonist of the United States, and that the secret treaty
which existed between England and Japan before the war
wiU be proved to be stUl in existence if ever war shaU occur
between the United States and Japan.
' Americans do not dislike Englishmen, and they do not
want to disUke England.
' But Americans devotedly love their own country and
they must necessarily feel a certain antagonism to a nation
and a government which seem continuaUy to endeavour
to take advantage of the American people and to attempt

44 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
to undermine the position and the power and the progress
of this American nation.'
Apart from the reference to Japan, it vrill be seen that
Mr. Hearst's indictment is one of general suspicions of
our motives which it would be profitless to answer. It is
intrinsically as unfair and mischievous as the simUar
attacks on the United States which Mr. Bottomley
periodically indulges in. It would be repudiated by
intelUgent and fair-minded opinion in America as em
phatically as those diatribes are resented by intelli
gent and fair-minded opinion here. But, again like
them, it is significant of the widespread ignorance and
vague hate that exist for the exploitation of reckless
journalists. And at the back of the indictment there
lies a real antagonism of ideals. That antagonism is
stated with precision by a writer of a whoUy different
calibre and outlook. In the article to which I have
already referred, Mr. Harold Stearns traces the roots of
anti-British feeling in America to ImperiaUsm. His
torically and spiritually the United States is opposed to
the exploitation of subject peoples, and its own circum
stances have not tempted it to depart from its traditions.
The adventure into Imperialism in the case of the
Philippines, so far from inaugurating a new era, has
very effectually checked any spirit of external annexation
that may have existed under the essentially Imperialistic
influence of Theodore Roosevelt. The idea of self-
government is the keynote of the American system, and
a people indoctrinated with this idea is inevitably critical
of a system founded on the opposite principle of Imperial
ism. Educated American opinion readUy admits that
the record of the United States is not spotiess. The story
of the Mexican war of 1846-7 is sufficiently discreditable
to check any undue self-esteem, and the . treatment of
the Indian, that native race which has succumbed so
completely to the invader, is not a subject on which they
can feel any pride. It ought, on the contrary, to chasten
their censoriousness in regard to our own record.
But the broad fact remains that the two systems are
fundamentally opposed, and it is difficult for Englishmen

POLITICAL DISCORDS 45
to understand how British Imperialism looks to the Ameri
can mind, or the disastrous effects of incidents like
Amritsar upon American sympathies. Nothing has so
aggravated the anti-British feeling as the practical results
of the Peace Treaty, and ' the spectacle of England getting
away vrith everything that's not tied down.' The belief
that England has done well out of the war is at the back
of much of the prevailing hostUity. There is enough
apparent truth in it to serve the purposes of the anti-
British propagandists. And selfish interests no less than
abstract idealism are offended. ' How,' it is asked, ' can
these great captains of the American oU industry have
felt when they read in the same newspaper of England's
acquiring all the Persian concessions and that the United
States had been graciously offered the lemon of the man
date over Armenia ? '
And there are China and Japan. The future of these
two countries is one of the capital concerns of the world.
And in that concern events are unhappUy tending to put
Great Britain and America on opposite sides. Nowhere
have British policy and American policy come into such
clear comparison as in the case of China. Our record
in regard to that country is not good. The story of the
opium war remains a black page in our annals, our com
mercial and financial operations in China have been un
accompanied by any large motive of Chinese regeneration,
and the alliance with Japan has made us practical aiders
and abetters in that country's Imperialistic policy towards
China. America, on the other hand, has an excellent
record in regard to China. It has a genuine affection for
the people, which no one who knows them wUl find diffi
cult to understand. The Chinese have come to look
upon the Americans as the best friends they have. They
see in them a people who have no territorial ambitions
to serve, who have stood for the integrity of the country
and for the policy of the open door. It was the Ameri
cans alone who renounced their share of the Boxer in
demnity ; and among the influences that have since the
war caused the lamentable reaction in America against
permanent association with Europe, few have been more
powerful than the decision of the Paris Conference to

46 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
countenance the aggression of Japan in Shantung. That
incident has aroused little indignation in this country,
but in America it is accepted as typical of the Peace
Treaty, and more than anything stamps that Treaty, for
the American mind, vrith the haU-mark of the old un
righteous diplomacy of Imperialism.
This feeling is, of course, intensified by the distrust and
dislike of Japan that are so prevalent. Even in the
East this distrust and dislike are immediately apparent.
Two questions are put to the English visitor with un
faUing regularity. The first is, ' Why don't you settie
with Ireland ? ' The second is, ' Are you going to con
tinue the Japanese AUiance ? ' As one travels West
this preoccupation with Japan increases, and in the Far
West it easUy dominates aU other international poUtical
considerations. The reason is not far to seek. The
Chinese in America represent no nationalistic or ulterior
aim, but the Japanese come vrith the outiook of a highly
developed and intense nationaUsm, and America justiy
or unjustly sees in them a menace to its civilization. It
may seem odd that a country which has been the melting-
pot of aU the nations of Europe should be alarmed at the
idea of Japanese immigration. But the white man, no
matter where he comes from, is easUy assimUated, whUe
the yeUow man remains a race apart vrith characters that
seem fixed, vrith a civUization fundamentally alien from
that of the white man, and the Americans are sufficientiy
afflicted with the Negro question without vrishing to add
yeUow to their colour problem.
And apart from the domestic aspect of the matter, which
chiefly touches the western seaboard, there is the larger
shadow over the future of the Pacific involved in the
Imperialistic policy of Japan and its imdisguised and so
far astonishingly successful purpose of securing the control
of China as the means of establishing an Asiatic hegemony.
The naval development of Japan clouds the hitherto
serene sky of the Pacific, and it is not to be wondered at
that Americans, turning eastward and seeing the naval
supremacy of Great Britain, and turning westward and
seeing the sea power of Japan, look witii concern upon
the dUance of the two powers, so dissimUar in race, in

POLITICAL DISCORDS 47
reUgion, in sjonpathy, and aUke only in pursuit of the
Imperial idea. The aUiance with Japan — an alliance
that has never commanded the popular approval of the
English people — may have been defensible when Im
perialist Russia seemed a menace to our Asiatic interests.
It is utterly indefensible now that that menace has dis
appeared. Its influence has been thoroughly vicious,
and it has made us at least a consenting party to the
ambitions of Japan in China and criminally silent about
such infamies as those practised by Japan in Korea.
But the weightiest objection to it is the fact that it offers
a fatal barrier to the establishment of a sound under
standing with America. If the League of Nations is to
become a reality, alliances such as that with Japan have
no meaning except a sinister one, and one of the first
steps that a British Government, desiring to cleanse the
Anglo-American atmosphere, must take is the denuncia
tion of an alliance that ties our hands in China and is a
menace not only to the friendship of the English-speaking
peoples, but to the pacific development of the world.
If this course is not practicable, there is an alternative
that is both practical and obvious. The Treaty is pri
marily concerned with China. In that Treaty China
herself is clearly entitled to be included. She is at least
as much concerned in her own future as Japan or Great
Britain are. And with China, the United States also
should be a signatory. The legitimate interests of
America in the Pacific and the development of China are
at least as important as our own or those of Japan, and
they have in them no element of privUege such as that
which vitiates Anglo- Japanese policy.
But in spite of Mr. Hearst's assertion, it remains true
that the gravest source of anti- British feeling in America
is the Irish question. Indeed, Mr. Hearst's own papers
prove it. In his crusade against England there is no
subject he employs so insistently as English rule in Ireland.
When I was in Boston last autumn a whole issue of his
paper there was devoted to a broadside against England
on this theme. The reason is simple. AUke to our
friends and foes in America the Irish question is the
governing fact pf Anglo-American relations. In a recent

48 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
speech in the House of Commons Sir Edward Carson,
referring to the Irish question, said : •' Let America mind
her own business and we will mind ours.' Until we realize
that the Irish question is an American question as much
as the Negro question is an American question, we shall
miss its capital meaning. The idea that in this matter
the United States is an impertinent outsider interfering
in a domestic British quarrel is a complete misreading
of the situation. The United States is concerned about it
because it is the most vital of its domestic issues. A
moment's reflection will make this apparent. Of the
hundred milljons of people composing the nation, the
large majority are either foreign bom or the chUdren of
foreign parents. The ' loo-per-cent. American ' of whom
we hear so much is a rare bird in the land. Of the various
broad categories of the population, a tenth is Negro, an
eighth is German in origin and sympathies, not less than
a tenth is Irish, and there are in addition large elements
of Poles, Russians, Italians, Portuguese, Scandinavians,
Greeks, and Jews of different nationalities.
Among these different famUies that are absorbed or
being absorbed in the general cunency of the race, the
Irish forms the most solid, coherent, detached mass. It
alone preserves an imperium in imperio, alone brings into
the American system the antagonisms of the Old World,
alone keeps aflame the passion of ' old, unhappy, far-off
things.' In the midst of the confusion of races, foreigners
among foreigners, accommodating themselves to a com
mon life, the Irish alone bring a violent extra-territorial
loyalty and a fanatical idea. The loyalty is to Ireland
and the idea is revenge upon its ancient enemy.
And in all their political activities these two considera
tions govern them. Much more than the Germans, who
take little part in public affairs and are universaUy
regarded as quiet, industrious citizens, they are the
true hyphenated American — the Irish-American whose
spiritual home is elsewhere and to whom the United
States is only the stage for the secular battle. One man
with a conviction, said Stuart Mill, is more powerful than
ninety-nine who have only interests. But the Irish are
not one in a hundred. They are at least one in ten.

POLITICAL DISCORDS 49
They move as a vehement stream through the confused
and tumultuous life of the nation. They are not the
under-dog. They permeate the whole structure of
society. Their great immigration took place two genera
tions ago, and in the interval they have established them
selves in the seats of the mighty. They are powerful in
finance, in law, in literature, in the services. It was an
Irish-American Admiral who was discovered to be the
antagonist of Admiral Sims' s pro- English enthusiasm.
It is a judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New
York, Judge Cohalan, who is the most industrious, and
I must add venomous, assailant of this country in the
Press and on the platform. When I went to Princeton
to see the football match between Harvard and Princeton,
it was a young Irish three-quarter back who was the hero
of the game. The police force is mainly Irish, and, above
all, the political machine is Irish. The political genius
of the race has no rival in any other element of the com
munity, and there is hardly a great city whose caucus
is not dominated by the Irish influence. If the mayor
is not Irish, the party ' boss ' is Irish. No ambitious poli
tician, whether Democrat or Republican, can afford to
ignore so decisive a factor of success, whether the goal in
view is the Mayoralty of the city, the Governorship of
the State, or the Presidency of the Republic. When Mr.
Hiram Johnson, of San Francisco, appeared on the horizon
as a possible Presidential candidate his first step to for
ward his prospects was to go to Boston and make a violent
anti-British speech. It was not, probably, because he
wanted to make it, but because he had to make it as an
evidence that on the main Irish- American issue ' he was
right.' He had to twist the lion's tail to put himself in
the running. And most of the tail-twisting, political
and journalistic alike, has its origin in the same motive.
It would be foolish to suppose that the average decent
American likes this state of things. He hates it. He
wants the political atmosphere of his country to be
cleansed of this poison gas. He wants American domestic
affairs to be settled on wholesome American considerations,
and not by considerations that have their roots in a
couple of islands three thousand miles away. And it is

50 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
for this reason that he asks you in tones of almost an
guished entreaty, ' Why don't you settle the Irish ques
tion ? ' He is not impertinent ; he is merely selfish. He
is not poking his nose into our business, as Sir Edward
Carson seems to think : he is acutely sensitive about his
own business. And it is not the pro-Irish who ask the
question most anxiously : it is the pro-EngUsh — those
who are most eager to get the grit out of the Anglo-
American machine and to set it working smoothly and
sweetly for the advantage of both countries and of the
world in general. While the Irish grievance continues
our friends in America are helpless. On the one hand
they hate and deplore the virus that Irishism introduces
into their affairs, great and smaU ; on the other hand they
can exercise no control over the spring from which the
virus issues. They know that while the Irish disease
continues it will break out in ugly blotches upon the face
of America. When the source of the disease is dried up
— assuming that it is dried up by the wisdom of this
country and not in defiance of its obstinate hostUity — ¦
they wUl know how to deal with its sequelae at home.
They will then say to the Irish quite firmly that they have
to decide whether they are Irish or Americans, and that
collective spirit that works so decisively in American
affairs will do the rest. It is weU to remember that the
United States has inherited its two great troubles from
England. It was the English slaver that brought the Negro
to America for his own profit. It was English policy that
depopulated Ireland and sent a nation vrith bitterness in
its heart to poison the life of America. We cannot cancel
the one mischief ; but we alone can cancel the other.
And until we do it we can never achieve that English-
speaking solidarity which is the hope of those who wish
the world weU. CHAPTER VII
SEA POWER
In the background of the minds of all, whether English
or Americans, who are concerned about the future of
Anglo-American relations there lurks a shadow at once

SEA POWER 51
menacing and hopeful — menacing as a danger if it is left
unchecked, hopeful as a means of such a dramatic act of
faith and mutual confidence as would strike the imagina
tion of both countries and bring a new spirit into their
intercourse. It is the shadow of sea power. The im
portance, in the past and present unstable structure of
the world, of sea power to this country needs no argument.
The British Commonwealth exists in virtue of that power.
Take it away and it is dissolved into its elements. There
are powerful influences in the United States who say that
that dissolution is desirable and ultimately inevitable.
The view is not limited to the crude anti- British propa
ganda of Mr. Hearst. It is shared by much of the in
tellectual liberal opinion which, imbued with the tradition
of the United States, is hostile to Imperialism as the
enemy of the self-governing development of human
society. It is not the British Commonwealth that they
disUke : it is the British Empire. They understand and
approve the relationship of the mother country and the
self-governing dominions — Canada, Australia, South
Africa. They neither understand nor approve Crown
Colony and Imperialistic government, and they are able
to point to the United States' example in Cuba and the
Philippines as evidence that their country does practise
what it preaches. ' We want to justify our civilization,'
says one of these critics, ' but we have little desire to
extend it by force. We want other peoples to agree with
us ; we don't particularly want them to become part of
us. Englishmen,' he proceeds, ' ought to undergo a
transvaluation of values. What the world needs is not
the British Empire, but English civilization. Far from
having nothing to leam from England, America, with the
rest of the world, has everything to leam from her —
justice, a vivid sense of personal and civil rights, the
infallible expediency of free speech, political good sense,
the whole art of compromise, sportsmanship, and good
taste. America can take care well enough of the material
istic task of seeing that the Anglo-Saxon world continues
to exist ; to England is reserved the more important
job of proving that Anglo-Saxon civilization is worth
existing.'

52 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
There is profound truth in this, and no English liberal
will regard Imperialism as anything more than a means
to that end of national self-expression and independence
which is at the root of his poUtical philosophy. But on
the other hand no English liberal would admit that the
British Empire can be liquidated in a spasm of emotion.
It might not mean disaster to ourselves ; but it would,
in the present circumstances of the world, certainly mean
disaster to the subject peoples concerned. India, for
example, has many grievances against the British raj, but
it has no desire to substitute for it the kind of devastating
rule which Japan has established in Korea. And whUe
the British system, whether as Empire or Commonwealth,
endures, indeed so long as Great Britain remains an island
power, security at sea will be its main concern. This is
not a fact for which we need apologize. We cannot help
ourselves, for we live by the sea. Our antagonisms have
always had their ultimate root in some menace to that
security. Bismarck said that hostiUty between Great
Britain and Germany was against the nature of things,
for ' the elephant could not fight the whale,' and for
centuries our relations with the German people, even with
Prussia, were more secure than those vrith any other great
European nation. It was only when the elephant re
solved to become a whale as well as an elephant that the
sky darkened and the catastrophe came. And now that
the German whale is dead blubber, lying on the floor of
the North Sea, British sea power is more unchaUenged
than it has ever been in history. Thoughtiess people
have said that we were unprepared for the late war. In
reality, as the events showed, we were the only people
who were prepared for the war, for the British Navy was,
from the beginning, incomparably the most efficient
factor in the struggle. But relatively supreme as the
British Navy was in 1914, it is immeasurably more su
preme to-day when its only serious rival has disappeared.
That supremacy is not a matter for mere exaltation :
it is a matter also for grave reflection. British security
is one thing : an unchallenged British hegemony of the
seas is quite another. Nothing is more certain than that,
left to the unregulated working of events, that hegemony

SEA POWER 53
will not be permanently accepted. The world will not
consent to live by the sanction of the British Fleet any
more than it would consent to live by the sanction of the
Prussian sword. The idea of a League of Nations which
leaves the undisputed sovereignty of the sea in the hands
of one power is an idle dream, and the great task of
statesmanship is to reconcile British security with a
soverefgnty of the sea that the general sense of the
world accepts.
The achievement of this supreme task is in the hands
of the Anglo-American community, and in achieving it
each has much to gain and nothing to lose. In achieving
it also they will lay the foundation stone of a pacific
world-structure that will survive all the vicissitudes of the
future and make the League of Nations an impregnable
reality. In considering what is at stake it is necessary
to face certain plain unpalatable facts. In the past
century practically all the grave discords between the two
countries have arisen in connexion with the sea. It was
so in the case of the war of 1812-14 ; it was so during the
Civil War ; and in the early stages of the late war the chief
obstacle to full American sympathy with the cause of the
Allies was the feeling caused, especially among the trading
community, by the rigorous exercise of the right of search
at sea. Generally speaking, it is true that the United
States accepted British sea power without reserve. It
recognized that that power was an essential consequence
of the European system, that it was exercised with moder
ation and preserved a certain code of law at sea, that its
existence was a defensive shield behind which th« Monroe
doctrine could function, and that in its absence its own
naval problem would assume a more serious character.
But the war has profoundly changed the outlook. The
German challenge has gone, and all the sea power of the
Continent combined would be hardly more formidable
against the British Navy than a fleet of fishing smacks.
In all the rest of the world, leaving out the United States,
there is only one other Navy that counts, that of Japan,
and Great Britain is an ally of Japan. Moreover, the war
has shown that the invention of the submarine has
fundamentally changed the conditions of sea warfare.

54 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
It organizes anarchy in place of the semblance of law that
prevailed before, and in that anarchy the neutral trader is
more certainly doomed than the belligerent warship.
In these circumstances, the United States will inevitably
be compelled to revise its whole attitude on the subject
of sea power. It is, in population, natural resources, and
accumulated wealth, the most powerful nation on earth,
and it cannot ignore the grave responsibUities that rest
on it for the protection of its national interests. It is
committed by the Monroe doctrine to the defence of the
whole American continent, and it has two oceans to police,
with the British Navy dominant in the one and the
Japanese Navy in the other. Its position is complicated
by the British possessions, not only on the mainland, but
still more in the Caribbean Sea. Obviously, its depen
dence on the goodwill of Great Britain, not to speak of
Japan, creates a situation that a great and proud nation
cannot permanently accept. It will be compeUed, if
not now, then at some future and not very distant time, to
provide itself with sufficient guarantees for its own defence.
It is not difficult to conceive a jingo President, ready to
sacrifice anything for a renewal of power, inflaming the
whole continent with a naval panic, perhaps against
Japan, and inaugurating a ship-buUding programme that
will seem to challenge the British supremacy at sea.
We know what would follow — the famUiar cry of ' two
keels to one,' the frenzy of the incendiary Press in both
countries, the gathering excitement, the ' incidents ' —
Morocco, Agadir, Bosnia, and the rest under other names
— perilously passed, and the final ' inevitable ' catas
trophe. There are wicked men and insane men in both
countries who would welcome that final catastrophe to
civilization. If they are to be defeated, they must be
defeated now, when the sky is unclouded and the duty is
clear. They can be defeated only in one way, by an
ironclad agreement that rules out the possibUity of a naval
competition ever arising between the two countries.
There is happily in our joint records a noble inspiration.
Within a year of the close of the war of 1812-14 Monroe,
the United States Secretary of State, wrote as follows to
the American Minister in London :

SEA POWER 55
' The information you give of orders having been issued
by the British Government to increase its naval force
on the lakes is confirmed by intelligence from that quarter
of measures having been actually adopted for the purpose.
It is evident, if each party augments its force there with
a view to obtaining the ascendancy over the other, that
vast expense will be incurred and the danger of collision
augmented in like degree. The President is sincerely
desirous to prevent an evil which it is presumed is equally
to be deprecated by both Governments. He therefore
authorizes you to propose to the British Government such
an arrangement respecting the naval force to be kept on
the lakes by both Governments as will demonstrate their
pacffic poUcy and secure their peace. He is wiUuig to
confine it on each side to a certain moderate number of
armed vessels, and the smaller the number the more
agreeable to him ; or to abstain altogether from an armed
force beyond that used for the revenue. You wUl bring
this subject under the consideration of the British Govern
ment immediately after the receipt of this letter.'
From this proposal sprang that momentous agreement
known as the Rush-Baget agreement, by which thenaval
force to be maintained by each Government on the Great
Lakes was limited, on Lake Ontario, to one vessel not
exceeding one hundred tons burden and armed with one
i8-pound cannon ; on the upper lakes to two vessels of
the same burden and armament ; and on Lake Champlain
to one simUar vessel. All other armed vessels on the
lakes were to be forthwith dismantled and no other vessels
of war were to be then built or armed.
The records of nations wUl be searched in vain for any
act so wise, so courageous, or so rich in beneficial results.
It stands as the crovraing achievement of the English-
speaking peoples in the art of statesmanship. In pur
suance of it, the American-Canadian frontier of nearly
four thousand mUes has remained for a century without
fort, or gun, or warship, or sentry, from end to end. And
uninterrupted peace has been the fruit of that act of faith
and mutual goodwill. In the light of this dazzling wit
ness, the monumental lie of the war-mongers. Si vis pacem

56 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
para bellum, shrivels to dust. Speaking of the achieve
ment, nearly a century afterwards, in the House of
Commons at Ottawa, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then Prime
Minister of Canada, said :
' If my voice could be heard that far, I would presume
to say to our American friends : There may be a spectacle
perhaps nobler yet than that of a united continent, a
spectacle that would astound the world by its novelty and
grandeur — the spectacle of two peoples Uving in amity
side by side for a distance of 4,000 mUes along a line which
is hardly visible in many quarters, vrith no cannon, no
guns frowning across it, with no fortresses on either side,
with no armament one against another, but living in
harmony and mutual confidence, and vrith no other rivalry
than that of generous emulation in the arts of peace. To
the Canadian people I would say that if it is possible for
us to obtain such relations between these young and
growing nations, Canada wiU have rendered to Old Eng
land, the Mother of Nations, nay to the whole British
Empire, a service unequalled in its present effect and stUl
more in its far-reaching consequence.'
The opportunity has come for an enlarged and more
splendid affirmation of the sacrament of a century ago.
If at the end of a war in which we had been foes, our fore
fathers could rise to so grand an argument, it ought not
to be difficult for us to-day, after a war in which we have
been comrades, to follow and better their example.
Then the lead came from Washington. The circumstances
to-day would dictate that it should come from London,
and that it should come in the shape of a proposal to pool
the naval resources of the two nations and to dedicate
them, not to any seffish national interest merely, but to
the League of Nations and the enduring peace of the world.
It is not necessary to dwell on the material gain of such
a compact. The present cost of the Navy is sufficiently
oppressive ; but it is a trifle compared vrith what would
be involved in the unhappy event of a competition with
a nation so inexhaustibly endowed as the United States.
Nor need we do more than hint at the incalciUable strain

SEA POWER 57
which such a competition would put upon the Overseas
Dominions, Australia, South Africa, and especially Canada.
When the issue was between Great Britain and Germany
their course was clear : an issue between the two English-
speaking families would be infinitely complex. But the
overshadowing consideration is the effect which such a
compact as that suggested would have upon Anglo-
American relations. It would establish them upon the
impregnable rock of a common faith and a common
purpose. It would rout the war-mongers of both countries
finally and irrevocably. And the announcement that
the Anglo-American peoples had taken a step which would
make naval war henceforth impossible would strike a
deathblow at competitive armaments generally, stabilize
the world on a peace basis, and turn its face confidently
to the light. CHAPTER VIII
the FUTURE
Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to the achieve
ment of that good feeling which is the desire of the
enlightened opinion of both countries is the popular ten
dency to dramatize nations as characters in a play. This
one is the bold, bad baron, and that the knightly and
chivalrous hero of romance. The rdles change with cir
cumstances, the bad baron of the last generation being
the knightly hero of this, according as he seems to be with
us or against us. Since August 1914, for example, Russia
has passed through the whole gamut of the stage. Anglo^
American relations have suffered much from this subjec
tive idealism, and a more prosaic and reasonable view of
each other is a necessary preliminary to appreciating the
task before us. There are two popular ideas of the
American. One pictures him comprehensively as an
aggressive person who talks through his nose, always
carries a six-shooter, lives on cocktails and ' quick
lunches,' and worships at the shrine of the Almighty
DoUar. The other pictures him, equally comprehensively,
as a Puritan son of the PUgrim Fathers, sublimely in
different to persecution, romantically disinterested, now

58 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
breaking the tryanny of kings and now bursting the
bonds of the slave. Both views are equaUy grotesque.
There are swashbucklers in America and there are stiU
Pilgrim Fathers in America ; but the mass of the people
is like the mass of other peoples, infinitely mixed in
character and motive, good and bad, kindly and unkindly,
concerned about very commonplace things, struggling,
like others, for success in life, enjoying, like others, the
pleasures of life, subject, like others, in times of stress to
waves of collective emotion, capable, perhaps more than
some, of rising with circumstance to a certain elevation of
moral purpose and equally capable of lapsing from that
elevation. And the popular American dramatization of ourselves
is no less misleading. It sees us as the historic persecutor
of the innocent and the helpless, a sort of coarse ogre of
a fellow, who having been whipped by the New England
farmers has nursed a grudge against America ever since
and is fUled with envy of its independence and prosperity.
It is not a recognizable likeness. ' Rarely, indeed, in the
history of mankind,' wrote Charles Francis Adams, the
American Minister in London during the CivU War, ' has
there been a more creditable exhibition of human S5mi-
pathy, and what is known as altruism, than that now
witnessed in Lancashire. The common folk of England,
Lincoln's " plain people," workless and hungry, felt what
the wealthier classes refused to believe, that the cause
at issue in America was the right of a working-man to his
own share in the results of his toil. That cause, they
instinctively knew, was somehow their cause and they
would not betray it. So no organized cry went up to
break the blockade which, while it shut up cotton, was
throttling slavery.' We are entitled to have facts like
these, as well as the stupidity of George III and Lord
North, recorded in the American picture of ourselves.
The first step to a better and more intelligent under
standing is to tear up these comic valentines of each
other. We are neither of us ogres or saints. We are
both quite ordinary, normal communities of human
beings, containing every variety of opinion and swayed
by every variety of interest. In both there are wise

THE FUTURE 59
elements and unwise, reactionaries and revolutionaries,
liberals and conservatives, every shade of nationalism
and every shade of internationalism. Sometimes the
wise elements in each get the upper hand and sometimes
the unwise get the upper hand, and the chief task before
us is so to organize the better mind of the two countries
that it shall be permanently and not intermittently
dominant in their common affairs. As a means to this
end, it is necessary to remove the specific causes of mis
understanding and antagonism that impede the path to
the goal. While these causes remain as inflammable
material in our midst, danger remains. But no less im
portant is the clarif5dng of the common atmosphere.
Given a spirit of good temper and goodwill, the practical
issues will solve themselves. Without that spirit their
removal wUl only change the ground of discord.
In approaching the task, it is well frankly to recognize
that there are irreconcilable factions on both sides which
wUl continue to sow tares. They are not formidable in
themselves, but they are formidable if left to work un
challenged upon the great masses of uninstructed and
indifferent opinion which is negligible in ordinary times,
but dangerous when public passion takes the reins.
Against these influences, the forces of goodwill must
wage a common war. Among these forces the first
place belongs to the official representation of the respective
countries. Reference has already been made to this
subject, and it is enough here to repeat that the admirable
practice of the United States in sending, not formal
officials, but its most distinguished citizens to represent
it in London should be imitated by ourselves. ' The
sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him
up to it,' said Coleridge a century ago. ' What can an
English minister abroad really want but an honest and
bold heart, a love for his country, and the ten command
ments? Your art diplomatic is stuff — no tmly great
man would negotiate upon any such shallow principles.'
Nowhere is this antiquated ' art diplomatic ' so out of
place as in our relations with the American people, with
their community of speech and tradition, their deliberate
adoption of the idea of candid dealing in international

6o THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
affairs, and their policy of ' open covenants openly
arrived at.' Among the causes of the reaction in the United
States against Europe since the war few have played a
more unfortunate part than the secret treaties in which
we have been involved, and before we can put Anglo-
American relations on a thoroughly sound basis we must
discard the artifices of secret diplomacy in all matters
that affect, directly or coUateraUy, our intercourse with
the United States.
It cannot be too clearly understood, also, that anything
like official propaganda in the United States is a fatal
mistake. There was a great deal of it during the war and
it did our cause grave mischief, much of which -stiU
remains. The American resents, as we should regent,
the idea of an external Government carrying on a pro
paganda in his midst, no matter how just the cause may
be. He likes to feel that he is forming his own opinions,
and if he finds that that privilege is being interfered
with from outside he is apt to be suspicious of everything
he hears and hostile to thepolicy that such methods are
designed to promote. There are few themes on which
the Hearst Press is more industriously malevolent than
English propaganda in America during and after the war.
The most grotesque suggestions of corrupt practices
are made and the general public have no means of under
standing how unjust and malignant they are. But the
lesson for us is tiie importance of avoiding in aU circum
stances the appearance of officially organizing opinion
in America on any political issue.
What is necessary, and all that is necessary, is the freest
and fullest possible intercourse and discussion between
two peoples. We need to devote much more attention
to each other's point of view on subjects of common
concern and to talk out our minds candidly and operUy.
There are no communities who have so much to gain and
so little to lose by the frank exchange of ideas carried
on in an atmosphere of toleration, goodwill, and self-
respect. Much excellent work has been done and more
should be done in promoting relations between the univer
sities and educational institutions of the two countries.
There is no class in the United States who exercise a more

THE FUTURE 6i
wholesome influence upon public opinion than the teach
ing profession, and I think it wUl be agreed by those who
have had experience on the subject that there is no class
also which generaUy takes a more enlightened and sym
pathetic view of English affairs and English difficulties
or more sincerely desires to promote good feeling between
the two countries. The various Anglo-American societies
are doing much to bring the friendly influence of the two
peoples into active co-operation, and the recent movement
for closer intercourse between the associated chambers of
commerce of England and the United States is another
development of the legitimate and helpful exchange of
ideas. There is one field in which much remains to be
done. It is the important field of labour relationships.
Partly owing to the fact of distance, and still more,
perhaps, to the peculiar character of industrial develop
ment in the United States, there has not so far been any
thing like that intimacy between the labour communities
of England and America that is both natural and desirable.
This matter deserves the serious attention of the leaders
of industrial opinion in both countries. It ought not to
be impossible to achieve such an Anglo-American Pact
of Labour as would furnish an indestructible guarantee
against any popular stampede of hostile opinion in either
country. In regard to the Press, the main difficulty is on the
other side of the Atlantic. There is an element of the
reactionary Press in this country which is rarely cordial
to the United States. It cannot forget the past and it
cannot reconcile itself to republicanism. Its insular
superiority towards a mere colony is aggravated in the
case of the United States, which, in its unchanging view,
is not merely a colony, but a rebellious colony and, still
worse, a successful rebeUious colony. It is invariably un
friendly to the true movement of the American spirit, as
in the case of the Civil War, and the only distinguished
American who has succeeded in arousing its enthusiasm
was Theodore Roosevelt, in whom it saw reflected some
thing of its own militarist and Imperialist ideals. It could
forgive America if it took to buccaneering, even though
that course would inevitably bring it into coUision with

62 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
ourselves ; but it cannot reconcile itself to a tradition which
seems a standing rebuke to its gospel of Imperialism. Its
frame of mind is summed up in that phrase of Mr.
Churchill's ' Pious America,' which expressed the ingrained
dislike of the aristocratic mind for the democratic institu
tion. But while the spirit of this section of the Press
towards the United States is consistently ' distant,' it is
not actively hostile, nor deliberately provocative. That
role in the English Press is almost exclusively confined
to the vulgar diatribes of one gutter organ. So far as
the attitude of the larger number of newspapers toward
the United States is concerned it is both friendly and
understanding. This is true in the main, also, of the American Press.
The tone of great newspapers like the New York Times,
the New York World, the New York Evening Post, the
Philadelphia Ledger, and the Chicago Daily News, and
of weekly organs of opinion like the New Republic, and
the Nation, is admirably fair and just, manly, straight
forward, frankly critical where criticism is caUed for, but
always friendly and always inspired by the obvious desire
to clear the common path of all obstacles to a self-
respecting and honourable understanding.
But outside this responsible class of journals, which
represents the best, and I believe the ultimately governing
mind of America, there is a numerous and powerful body
of newspapers which is definitely and actively anti-
British. Of these, the Hearst newspapers are by far the
most formidable, though they by no means exhaust the
list. The reason for this phenomenon is plain. It is in
the existence, first, of powerful elements of anti-British
sentiment in the American population, and next in the
existence of an enormous mass of indifferentism which is
ready to be exploited by that sentiment. So long as
these conditions prevail there will be both journalists
and politicians who will not hesitate to twist the lion's tail
in order to win votes and stimulate a flagging circulation.
The reputable American hates these manifestations as
much as the reputable Englishman hates the coarse fulmin-
ations of the gutter press I have referred to, but he is as
helpless against them in the one case as we are in the other.

THE FUTURE 63
And unfortunately he knows that they are much more
effective in defeating his purpose than the negligible
vulgarities that we have to endure. They are more effec
tive, not only because they are more authoritative and
important, but because they appeal, not to a mere vague
dislike, but to active and fierce hostilities related to definite
issues. In a very real sense the remedy for the journalistic
Anglophobia prevalent in the United States is in our own
hands. The settlement of the Irish question alone would
go far to destroy it. The Irish are not merely powerful
in themselves. They are the focus of all the inflammatory
anti-British feeling of the country. The removal of this
grievance would mean the dispersal of the chief centre of
disaffection, and would leave Mr. Hearst and his like
largely bankrupt of explosive material. And if to the
settlement of the Irish question there could be added a
common policy in the Far East, and, above all, a pooling
agreement at sea, there would be little left that we should
have to fear from the activities of the anti- British Press.
Indeed, those activities, in ceasing to be profitable, would
cease to be at all.
The course of events since the war warns us against
any extravagant confidence in regard to the future. No
one can see the present tendencies in America without
concern. The slogan of 'America first and America
only ' gathers volume. It has delayed if it has not
destroyed the effective establishment of the League of
Nations. It has produced the disquieting reaction
embodied in the Jones Shipping Bill, and it has added
venom to the atmosphere that envelops questions like
oU and rival interests in Mexico. The liberal thought
of both countries, looking back to the high hopes that
were awakened by the entry of the United States into
the war, is shadowed by the faUure of those hopes. The
causes of that faUure do not belong to my subject. Both
countries shared in them, though history will record
that it was from the President of the United States
that the new evangel came, and that it was what
Professor Gilbert Murray has called the ' outbreak of
blackguardism ' in this country in December 1918 that
chiefly dealt that evangel its death-blow. It is fan: to

64 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE
remember this when we are tempted to attribute to the
withdrawal of the United States from the great task to
which the President had dedicated it the main responsi
bility for the post-war catastrophe. It gave the reaction
ary forces in America the opportunity they sought. It
allied the more predatory and selfish motives of ' American
interests ' with the finest and most liberal cunent in the
national life, which was outraged at the terms of the
Peace Treaty and saw in the League of Nations Covenant
only an instrument for the ratification of an evU policy.
But profound though the disappointment has been, the
faith of liberal Europe in the ultimate wisdom of Uberal
America remains. The miracle that we looked for has
not come to pass. But the tide of American ideaUsm
will flow again, and in the end the hopes that have been
disappointed wUl be fully realized. It is as a means to
that larger achievement of a world organized for peace,
and not merely for any selfish national interest, that the
task of reconciling the English-speaking peoples presents
itself as the supreme duty before us. For in that recoiv-
ciliation, accomplished as those who labour for it desire
to see it accomplished, there will be no menace to any
people, but the assurance to all that in the peace of the
English-speaking nations is the enduring guarantee of
the peace of the world.

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