THE STUDY OF 
 AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 BY VISCOliJNT BRYCE 
 
 WATSON CHAIR INAUGURAL LECTURE 1921 i j 
 
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THE STUDY OF 
 AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
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THE STUDY 
 
 OF 
 
 AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 BY 
 
 VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M. 
 
 BEING THE INAUGURAL LECTURE OF THE 
 SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR OF AMERICAN 
 HISTORY, LITERATURE AND INSTITUTIONS 
 
 WITH AN APPENDIX RELATING TO 
 THE FOUNDATION 
 
 CAMBRIDGE 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 1921 
 
■ 6 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 By the Secretary 
 OF THE Anglo-American Society 
 
 tORD BRYCE'S INAUGURAL LECTURE 
 ^ under the Sir George Watson Foundation, 
 which is here presented to the public, was delivered 
 at the Mansion House, London, on Monday, June 
 27th, 1 92 1, before a large and representative assem- 
 bly, including many American visitors. The Rt Hon. 
 Arthur J. Balfour, M.P., presided. 
 
 Mr H. S. Ferris, the secretary of the Anglo- 
 American Society, read a letter from the Prince of 
 Wales's private secretary regretting that owing to 
 the pressure of public engagements the Prince was 
 unable to be present, "especially as this is a function 
 which it would have given him special pleasure to 
 attend, not only in view of the objects for which the 
 Anglo-American Society exists, but as a further 
 mark of his appreciation of Sir George Watson's 
 generosity." 
 
 Mr Balfour, who had to leave the Mansion House 
 before Lord Bryce had concluded his address in 
 order to attend the meeting of the Imperial Confer- 
 ence, said there could not be a more fitting opening 
 of what he hoped was going to be a fruitful course of 
 lectures delivered in this country by authorities upon 
 
vi PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 Anglo-American history than a lecture by Lord 
 Bryce himself. He had every qualification for the 
 task which he had so kindly undertaken. He had 
 made his name as an historian of European repute 
 much more than a generation ago, and that early 
 reputation of his had been sustained and increased 
 by all his subsequent work. He was not only a 
 trained historian and a universal traveller, but he 
 was also a special authority upon American subjects. 
 He approached questions dealing with America with 
 the special advantage that he knew the subject not 
 merely from books, not merely from the sources which 
 historians ordinarily drew upon in order to complete 
 their picture of the past; he had in addition to that 
 qualification, which he possessed in the fullest 
 measure, the practical experience which residence in 
 the United States had given him; a residence most 
 important from the immediate diplomatic point of 
 view, for he had to deal over and over again with 
 questions profoundly interesting to both the great 
 English-speaking peoples. In addition to that, he 
 made himself acquainted with, and, I think I may 
 say in the presence of American friends, beloved, by 
 every section of public opinion in America, irrespec- 
 tive of party, profession, tastes and all the other 
 varieties of interest which divide mankind. That is 
 a unique qualification. There is no man living who 
 possessed it in anything like the same measure as 
 
PREFATORY NOTE vii 
 
 Lord Bryce. Happy indeed were we to have secured 
 his services on the present occasion. 
 
 Mr Balfour continued: I need not say anything 
 more except that to promote the mutual comprehen- 
 sion of these two great Peoples seems to me the 
 worthiest object which any man can propose to him- 
 self at the present time. I do not believe that there is 
 any cause which involves greater consequences for the 
 future of civilization. I do not believe that there is 
 any end for which it is more worth while striving and 
 struggling, and I rejoice to-day that this view is not 
 only held by students and statesmen like Lord 
 Bryce, but has appealed to men who, like my friend 
 Sir George Watson, have the imaginative insight to 
 see how wealth can best be used, and who now, not 
 for the first time in his beneficent career, has ex- 
 pended great sums of money in a cause which I am 
 quite confident will repay all the expectations which 
 he has formed of it. 
 
 At the conclusion of Lord Bryce's lecture a vote 
 of thanks to the Lord Mayor, to Mr Balfour, and to 
 the Lecturer, was moved by Alderman Sir Charles 
 Wakefield, Bart., Hon. Treasurer of the Anglo- 
 American Society and of the Sulgrave Institution. 
 
 This was seconded by Dr Nicholas Murray 
 Butler, President of Columbia University, New 
 York, who said: "It is a privilege to be permitted 
 on behalf of my countrymen, so many of whom are 
 
viii PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 here present this afternoon, to second the vote of 
 thanks to the Lord Mayor, to Mr Balfour, and to 
 Lord Bryce, and I hope I may be permitted to add, 
 to Sir George Watson, whose foresight and generos- 
 ity have started a movement which one may con- 
 fidently say is bound to have the largest and the 
 happiest results. It would be unbecoming in me at 
 this hour to detain you with any comments of my 
 own, but perhaps I may say that the spirit in which 
 Lord Bryce has approached his great subject this 
 afternoon offers an introduction to the study of 
 American history that is exceptionally inviting and 
 exceptionally profitable. He has not chosen to dwell 
 upon names or dates or purely political happenings 
 and circumstances, but has rather sought for men- 
 tion and emphasis those great underlying principles 
 of social construction and of social and political inter- 
 pretation which it has been, after all, the glory of the 
 English-speaking peoples for a thousand years in so 
 many ways to illustrate and to carry forward. I sin- 
 cerely hope that this vote of thanks, which I am sure 
 will be unanimously passed, will be the first of many 
 witnesses of appreciation of successive lectures upon 
 this foundation and of the generosity of him who 
 has made it possible." 
 
 After some words in support of the Resolution by 
 the Marquess of Aberdeen, the Resolution was put 
 to the meeting and carried with acclamation. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE . . . . v 
 
 BY THE SECRETARY OF THE ANGLO-AMERICAN 
 SOCIETY 
 
 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY . i 
 
 BY THE RT HON. VISCOUNT BRYCE, O.M. 
 
 APPENDIX 45 
 
 RELATING TO THE FOUNDATION AND PURPOSES 
 OF THE SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR OF AMERI- 
 CAN HISTORY, LITERATURE, AND INSTITUTIONS, 
 TOGETHER WITH A REPRINT OF THE ORIGINAL 
 CORRESPONDENCE RELATING THERETO 
 
 INDEX 59 
 
 TLJTE 
 PORTRAIT OF SIR GEORGE WATSON . . to face 45 
 
1. 
 
 THE STUDY OF 
 AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 By the Rt Hon. Viscount Bryce, O.M. 
 
 Y first duty is, if I may venture to make myself 
 the spokesman of British students of history, 
 to express their thanks to the munificent founder of 
 this professorial chair, whose enlightened vision has 
 discerned what was lacking in the provision made for 
 the study of American history in England, and who 
 has by this foundation gone far to remedy that defect. 
 I do not say that we in England have studied ancient 
 history, or mediaeval history, or modern European 
 history too much, but we have studied American 
 history too little. How great is the gain to be ex- 
 pected from its study I shall presently try to indicate. 
 For the moment let me be content to convey to the 
 founder our sense of the great service his far-sighted 
 generosity has rendered, and to express the confident 
 hope that it will begin to bear abundant fruit. 
 
 What does American history mean? To ask this 
 question is to ask : When does American history begin ? 
 To that question different answers may be given. 
 Some will say it begins with the tribes who inhabited 
 the North American continent from the era of im- 
 
2 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 memorial darkness, before they came into contact 
 with any white men, even with the Icelanders who 
 sailed from Greenland in the ship of Leif the son of 
 Eric. The only data we possess for the study of those 
 prehistoric days are to be found in a study of the 
 relations between the languages of the different 
 aboriginal tribes, and in the scanty relics which have 
 been preserved in their burial places, and especially 
 in the great mounds they erected in the wide spread- 
 ing plains of the Upper Mississippi. 
 
 Others will fix the beginning of American history 
 in the earliest age of European colonization, that is 
 to say, at the date of the enterprise attempted under 
 Raleigh's auspices at Roanoke in 1585, or at the 
 making of effective settlements at James Town in 
 Virginia in 1607, and on the coast of Massachusetts 
 by the Pilgrims in 1620. Many, however, — and I 
 suspect they would include more than might be ex- 
 pected of the less educated citizens of the United 
 States — would, if the question were suddenly put to 
 them, reply that their history began with the Declara- 
 tion of Independence in 1776, when the peoples of 
 the Colonies disclaimed the authority of the British 
 Crown, and started on their career as a group of as- 
 sociated Sovereign States. 
 
 All these answers err by thinking of the Country 
 rather than of the People who inhabit the country. 
 The history of the Land belongs to geology. The 
 
THE BEGINNING OF AMERICAN HISTORY 3 
 
 history of the aborigines, such as it is, belongs to the 
 sciences of ethnology, philology, and folklore, and 
 it is a history which has already come to its end. It 
 was my good fortune to see the last two leading 
 figures among the Indian tribes, one of them Sitting 
 Bull, chief of the Sioux, ini88 jj__at the city j)f Bis- 
 marck, in Dakota; the other, Geronimo, chief of the 
 Apaches of Arizona, at Fort Sell in Oklahoma in 1907. 
 There are now probably not more than a few thousands 
 of aboriginal Indians of pure stock still surviving, and 
 their descendants will soon be lost, absorbed into the 
 growing white population of the West. The English- 
 men who landed in Virginia in 1607, and on the 
 bleaker shores of Massachusetts thirteen years later, 
 did not begin a new history, but continued a history 
 which had begun many centuries before. When did 
 that old history begin ? We all remember the phrase 
 with which Montesquieu surprised his contemporaries 
 when he was describing to them the original lines of 
 the English Constitution. "Ce beau systeme a ete 
 trouve dans les bois." The history of those who 
 settled North America began in the forests and on 
 the shores of Holstein and East Frisia far back in 
 days of which we have no native record save in myth- 
 ology and poetry, in the worship of Woden and 
 Thunor (Thunder) and Freya, and in the ancient lay 
 of Beowulf. A branch of this Teutonic stock con- 
 quered Eastern, Southern and Central Britain, and 
 
 I — 2 
 
4 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 ultimately, intermingled with the Celtic population 
 which they found there, grew to be the English 
 nation, which, by the beginning of the seventeenth 
 century, was already, for those days, a large nation, 
 possibly of four millions, as large as the Scottish 
 people or the Swiss people are to-day, and smaller 
 than the Bulgarians or the Portuguese. It was from 
 a tiny body of settlers belonging to that English 
 nation, reinforced by later English immigrants, and 
 with the addition of some Hollanders, Swedes and 
 Germans, that the American nation sprang. 
 
 Having already observed that the history of a na- 
 tion is the history of the men who compose the nation, 
 and not of their dwelling-place, and that it is, there- 
 fore, a record of what the men were and of what they 
 did, let us consider what this includes. It includes, 
 primarily, their character; that is to say, the distinc- 
 tive quality of their habits of feeling, thinking and 
 acting, and secondarily, the institutions, social and 
 political, in which those habits found expression. In- 
 stitutions, when solidified by long practice, come to 
 be, because respected and valued, a permanent factor 
 in moulding and developing character itself. In its 
 earliest form the American stock was the small branch 
 of a large race dwelling in the North Temperate 
 zone, possessing already, in its old home on the Euro- 
 pean continent, certain distinctive gifts and qualities 
 unlike those of the neighbouring racial stocks, Celtic, 
 
THE MEDIAEVAL NATION 5 
 
 Slavonic and Italic, and having also institutions, 
 though still in a rudimentary stage. Julius Caesar and 
 Tacitus tell us that there were in the Germanic tribes 
 kings honoured for their lineage, war-leaders chosen 
 for their bravery, and popular assemblies, in which 
 the more important decisions were taken. We cannot 
 talk of a Germanic Nation, but of tribes, branches of 
 a widespread race, among them Angles, Jutes and 
 Saxons, tribes often at war one with another, and as 
 yet without a collective national consciousness. When 
 some of these tribes settled in Britain, raiding north- 
 ward and westward from the spots where their war 
 bands landed, they were still no more than the raw 
 material of a nation, but they grew in the course of 
 centuries to be a national state, and by the four- 
 teenth century they had acquired a definite type of 
 character, which was finding its expression in litera- 
 ture, and they had also created an elaborate system 
 of institutions, including a legislature, partly repre- 
 sentative, courts administering justice throughout 
 the country, an executive government, co-operating 
 with, yet sometimes in conflict with, the elected 
 representatives of the people. Foreign observers in 
 the fifteenth century, such as Froissart and Aeneas 
 Sylvius Piccolomini (afterwards Pope Pius II) and 
 Philip of Comines already talk of the English as 
 a people quite unlike the peoples of the continent. 
 This may be called the second stage in the growth 
 
6 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 of the American nation. The third stage begins when 
 an extremely small branch is transplanted to a new 
 continent. The first migration was from a continent 
 to an island, the second was from an island to an im- 
 mense continent. In that continent these transplanted 
 Englishmen do not cease to be English, but they 
 presently, though very slowly, develop into a differ- 
 ent kind of English, under the new influences which 
 began from the first to work upon them. Much later, 
 when they were politically separated from the British 
 Crown, a new name was needed to distinguish them 
 from the English who had remained behind in the 
 old Mother Land, and so the term "American," 
 theretofore employed to denote the aboriginal Red 
 Men, came to be applied to the English of America 
 as being now an independent nation. The use of the 
 word made a great difference, for words have a 
 curious power of implicit suggestion, a power inevi- 
 table, but often misleading. In this case the name did 
 mislead, and has gone on misleading. It made the 
 less instructed part of the American nation forget the 
 greatness of their spiritual heritage, and think of 
 themselves as a new nation, when they were really 
 part of an old nation to which their forefathers had 
 belonged in those very days when it was reaching 
 the highest level it has ever yet attained in poetry 
 and thought. The age which sent Englishmen to 
 settle in Virginia and Massachusetts was the age 
 
THE ENGLISH IN AMERICA 7 
 
 of Shakespeare and Spenser and Milton, of Bacon 
 and Newton and Harvey, of Cromwell and Hampden 
 and Jeremy Taylor and John Bunyan, glories of the 
 English stock whom Americans have just as good a 
 right to claim as has England herself. Thus the in- 
 tellectual, moral and religious history of England 
 for thirteen centuries, from the landing of the Jutish 
 keels at Ebbsfleet in Kent in the middle of the fifth 
 century A. D., is a part of American history. Whoever 
 forgets this truth will fail to understand that history 
 as a whole, in its most essential features. 
 
 We may now pass to that third stage in which 
 American history begins to be the history of America 
 only, i.e. of that branch of the English stock which 
 came under a new set of influences peculiar to the 
 new land, and was at the same time removed from 
 some of the influences which were thereafter to afl-ect 
 the development of that then larger branch which, 
 remaining in Britain, was in close contact with the 
 European continent. But we must remember that the 
 connecting influences of literature were still operative, 
 because the language was the same, and all that was 
 thought and written on either side of the Atlantic 
 told upon men's minds on the other side. Bearing this 
 in mind, let us consider what were the influences, 
 peculiarto the new continent, which have slowlytrans- 
 formed the children of the English settlers of the seven- 
 teenth century into the Americans of the twentieth. 
 
8 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 First, a word or two upon Climate. The land in 
 which the immigrants settled lay further south than 
 England, yet even in the northern part of it the 
 winters were colder, though the summers were hotter, 
 than in the same latitude in Europe. Climate is not 
 to be measured by latitude, and in the northern part 
 of the United States other factors, such as winds and 
 ocean currents, have so moderated the summer heats 
 as to enable the old Teutonic stock to remain fully 
 as strong and physically vigorous as it was when it 
 left its European home. Some observers think that 
 the race has become more nervously excitable, and 
 so more susceptible to new ideas and sudden accesses 
 of emotion. Without venturing to controvert this 
 view, I incline to believe that climate has done less to 
 modify national character than is generally supposed, 
 so far as the cooler parts of North America are con- 
 cerned. When, however, we regard those parts which 
 lie south of latitude 2S° N. the case is different. Here, 
 except in the hill-country, outdoor labour is, not in- 
 deed impossible, but unwelcome to a northern race. 
 The settlers thought that in the regions south of the 
 Potomac and the Ohio they must procure some other 
 kind of labour than their own to cultivate the land, 
 so the example which had been set by the Spaniards 
 in the Antilles was unfortunately followed. Negroes 
 were brought from Africa to work as slaves, and thus 
 in the southern colonies there grew up a social system 
 
THE SETTLERS IN THE SOUTH 9 
 
 quite different from that of the northern regions, in 
 which the white owner had been tilling his own 
 farm. When, owing to the invention of labour- 
 saving machinery, the cultivation of cotton became so 
 huge and highly profitable an industry, that immense 
 quantities of that fibre were thenceforth sent to the 
 markets of Europe, the welfare of the inhabitants of 
 the South was deemed to be bound up with the main- 
 tenance of slavery. Estates were large, a planting oli- 
 garchy grew up and controlled politics, the humbler 
 part of the white population sank into a condition 
 far below that of the northern whites. Whether the 
 character of the Southern people has been perma- 
 nently affected may be doubted, for the old planting 
 aristocracy has now almost disappeared, while the 
 poorer element among the whites has risen. But it 
 must be confessed that the respect felt for justice, 
 law and order was more or less temporarily impaired, 
 and the habit of lynching has not yet vanished. As 
 you all know, the presence of a negro population ex- 
 ceeding ten millions remains a source of trouble and 
 disquiet. 
 
 Another new factor that told upon the character 
 of the race in its new home, was the absence in the 
 earlier days of some of the external appliances of 
 civilization, and the consequent need imposed upon 
 the settler of self-help and individual exertion. It was 
 only at intervals that attacks by the Indian aborigines 
 
10 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 were to be feared, but Nature has had always to be 
 resisted and overcome, and the effort to subdue her 
 evoked energy and became a spur to invention. To 
 this let us add that in the northern states the settlers 
 found themselves relieved from the pressure of a 
 territorial aristocracy such as had maintained social 
 inequalities in England. The American cultivator, 
 especially in the north, owned his land, and until the 
 middle of the nineteenth century no great fortunes 
 were amassed in trade or manufacturing industry. 
 Conditions so favourable to social equality had existed 
 nowhere in Europe except in rural Switzerland and 
 in Norway. When the great colonizing movement to 
 the West began across the Alleghany Mountains into 
 the valley of the Ohio River and along the shores of 
 the Great Lakes, the conditions of the first settlers 
 were repeated. Among men who find themselves in 
 a wild country, where everyone has like difficulties 
 to face and needs the help of others, there is no 
 room for assumptions of superiority, and each is 
 judged by what he can do. Characters are strength- 
 ened, resourcefulness is developed, and there is also 
 induced a sort of recklessness and a disregard of 
 conventions which does not subside for two or three 
 generations. Theodore Roosevelt often said to me 
 that the pictures Dickens drew in Martin Chuzzlewit 
 of the West as he saw it contained a good deal of 
 unpleasant truth. 
 
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION ii 
 
 The political change from a government, nomi- 
 nally monarchical and administered by governors sent 
 from England, to republics whose executive heads 
 were elected by the citizens, counted for less than 
 did those influences of the new country which I have 
 already described, because the colonists had long 
 enjoyed self-government for most purposes, and the 
 main lines of their character were already fixed. 
 Nevertheless, the Revolutionary war, and the inde- 
 pendence it won, did make a difference. To have (no 
 doubt with the aid of France) thrown off the 
 sovereignty of an old and powerful state after de- 
 feating its army, heightened the self-confidence of 
 the people. To have done this in the name of Liberty, 
 though there had in fact been very little that could 
 be called oppression, quickened their march towards 
 the goal of absolute political equality, and gave them a 
 faith in abstract principles and high-sounding phrases 
 which had theretofore been absent from the normal 
 American as from the British mind. Faith in liberty 
 would have been altogether wholesome and inspirit- 
 ing had it not made the republicans of the four 
 generations that followed the Revolution forget that 
 there are other powers beside those of kings which 
 may threaten liberty. 
 
 One cannot speak of the great separation and all 
 the consequences that followed it, not merely for 
 England and America but for the rest of the world, 
 
12 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 without asking what would have happened had the 
 poHtical link with Britain remained unbroken. 
 Though the colonies must, as time went on, have 
 become with their growing population even more 
 fully self-governing than they had been before 1776, 
 they might have continued to be united to the mother 
 country so far as foreign relations were concerned, 
 for the connection would have been for the benefit 
 of both, since France and Spain still held territories 
 to the south of them, and the navy of Britain would 
 have served the colonists then as it serves Australia 
 and New Zealand to-day. The misfortune was, not 
 so much that independence came, as^that it came in 
 the way it did. None of the current assumptions by 
 which enthusiastic optimists beguile themselves has 
 less basis than that of believing the thing which has 
 in fact happened to have happened for the best in 
 the long run. In 1776 things might have happened 
 otherwise, and happened far better. England suffered 
 from the fact that the English Government was then 
 in weak or unskilful hands. There were strong and 
 wise statesmen in England, but they were not in 
 power. The men who controlled affairs were some of 
 them short-sighted and incompetent, some of them 
 narrow-minded, some of them subservient to a per- 
 verse and obstinate king. As there are moments in 
 history when the presence of a great man turns the 
 current of events and saves the situation, so, also, are 
 
IF SEPARATION HAD NOT COME 13 
 
 there times when his absence means disaster. Indepen- 
 dence, virtual or legal, ought to have come gradually 
 and peacefully as the natural result of American 
 growth. Coming as the result of a war it left bitter 
 memories behind, which poisoned the relations of the 
 peoples for generations thereafter. Supposing that, 
 controversies having been amicably settled and diffi- 
 culties adjusted, independence had not come in 
 1776 — 1783 let us indulge ourselves in a little post- 
 prophetic speculation as to what the course of events 
 might have been. Would there have been a Revolu- 
 tion in France? A collapse of the Bourbon monarchy 
 would probably have come, but there might have 
 been no volcanic cataclysm had there not been in 
 America a successful proclamation of democratic 
 doctrines which when they spread to Europe brought 
 republicanism into the realm of actuality. 
 
 Would the economic development of a still colonial 
 America have advanced so swiftly as it did under an 
 independent republic.'' Would the adventurers who 
 streamed forth into the western wilderness, and built 
 up new states there, have been as bold and pushful 
 as were the American frontiersmen from 1790 to 
 1850.'' And if development had been slower might 
 it not have moved upon better lines.? Has not the 
 American West grown too fast.^* 
 
 Let us take another point. Might not the struggle 
 over slavery from 1820 onwards have been less hot 
 
14 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 and angry, and been guided to a less terrible denoue- 
 ment than that of civil war? Might not the influence 
 of the mother country, and the example which she 
 set in 1834 of abolishing slavery in the West Indies 
 and South Africa, have brought about a peaceful 
 compromise? If the American people had not con- 
 sisted of states claiming sovereignty though united 
 in a federation, but had continued to be divided into 
 a number of practically self-governing colonies held 
 together by some looser tie, each of these would 
 probably have solved the problem for itself, on the 
 lines it thought best, with the co-operation and advice 
 of the mother country. The British government 
 would not have attempted to interfere with slavery 
 in a masterful way, but the public opinion of an un- 
 divided and impartial British people might have 
 been a potent factor, suggesting gradual emancipa- 
 tion and the best method of attaining it. 
 
 So far the balance of advantage would seem to in- 
 cline in favour of a continued connection between 
 Britain and the colonial Americans, just as we in 
 England to-day think the connection of the Self- 
 Governing Dominions with Britain and with one 
 another to be for their interest quite as much as for 
 ours. But there is an objection fit to be considered. 
 It may be said, and it was at one time natural to say, 
 that the American Revolution saved liberty for Eng- 
 land as well as for America, and at least hastened its 
 
IF CONCESSIONS HAD BEEN MADE 15 
 
 victory in Continental Europe. As Sir George 
 Trevelyan has admirably shown in his history of the 
 American Revolution, the revolutionary war came 
 near to being a sort of civil war in England as well as 
 America, and the English Whigs of that day held the 
 freedom of England to be involved in the struggle. 
 A crushing defeat of the revolting colonies would, 
 doubtless, have been a set-back to Whig prospects, 
 but if those concessions to the colonists which 
 Chatham and Burke desired had been made, no such 
 result would have followed. The forces which were 
 already at work, both in Britain and in continental 
 Europe, were, as we can now see, far too strong to 
 have been overborne by a succession of kings like 
 George III, or even by a succession of kings like 
 Frederick II of Prussia. It is to-day plain enough that 
 the extinction by economic causes of the relics of 
 feudalism, and the disappearance of the old rever- 
 ence on which hereditary monarchy had relied, 
 would, sooner or later, have overthrown absolute 
 government in France, Germany and Italy. 
 
 On the other hand one consideration rises to the 
 minds when we regard the consequences, not merely 
 to the British stock, but to the world at large, which 
 the continued political union of Britain with America 
 might have involved. 
 
 Might not a highly civilized state embracing both 
 the United Kingdom and the American people, a 
 
i6 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 state already possessing the most powerful navy in 
 the world, and spreading out, as it was evidently 
 destined to spread, over the territories Britain has 
 subsequently appropriated in the south temperate 
 zone, a state dominating the sea, possessed of re- 
 sources in money as well as in men far beyond those 
 of any other state in the world, — might not such a 
 state have become a menace to its neighbours? 
 Would not the sense of preponderating power have 
 tempted it to abuse that power, to seek a world 
 dominance, to create an antagonism to itself, such 
 as the Empire of Charles V created in the sixteenth 
 and that of Napoleon created in the early nineteenth 
 century? These, however, are speculations, seductive 
 but unsubstantial, and the higher we carry the airy 
 edifice, piling hypothesis on hypothesis, the more 
 unsteady become the upper storeys. I will not try to 
 build the edifice higher, content to have suggested a 
 topic in which imagination may revel at leisure. 
 
 Returning from this digression, let me note another 
 influence, which, beginning about 1830, has ever 
 since determined the channel in which the energies 
 of the American people have tended to flow. This is 
 the development, without precedent in the annals of 
 mankind, of wealth derived from what Nature had 
 bestowed on a new and amazingly productive coun- 
 try. During the nineteenth century immense fertile 
 tracts have been brought under cultivation, forests 
 
MATERIAL PROGRESS 17 
 
 hewn down, coal and iron, silver and copper, worked 
 on a vast scale, while the transport of these products 
 to the Atlantic coast has provided employment for 
 hundreds of thousands and, latterly, for millions of 
 workers. Nearly all the more vigorous minds in the 
 nation were drawn to a business life and politics 
 suffered, partly by the greater attraction business 
 exerted, partly by the habit, which preoccupation 
 with commercial interests fostered, of leaving politics 
 to be managed by politicians. The large-minded 
 thinkers who adorned the last years of the eighteenth 
 century left few successors. Most of the brilliant 
 literary group that gave lustre to the middle of the 
 nineteenth, were born before 1830. That develop- 
 ment of the universities which has rendered inesti- 
 mable services to America since 1880 had scarcely be- 
 gun. These causes made the material progress of 
 America run ahead of its progress in letters and arts, 
 though there was no diminution in the total volume 
 of intellectual force which the nation possessed. 
 
 Now let us turn to another phenomenon of su- 
 preme consequence in its ultimate influence on the 
 population of the United States. Immigration from 
 Europe, which had gone on steadily though slowly 
 from the middle of the seventeenth century, sud- 
 denly grew in volume when the middle of the nine- 
 teenth was reached. It has not sensibly affected the 
 States with a very large coloured population, viz. 
 
1 8 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 those that He south of the Potomac and east of the 
 Lower Mississipi, but in the North and West it has 
 reached vast dimensions. This increase was, at first, 
 chiefly due to an outflow from Ireland, where famine 
 was raging. Twenty years later it expanded still 
 further by the arrival of new immigrant swarms 
 from Germany and the Scandinavian countries. 
 Still later, between 1880 and 1890, another flood 
 began to sweep in from Central and Western Europe, 
 and even from Western Asia. While Irishmen had 
 congregated in the larger cities, the Germans, 
 Swedes and Norwegians went to settle on the land. 
 Nearly all of these last, either already knowing or 
 easily learning the English language, soon inter- 
 mingled with the native American population, and 
 were absorbed into it, acquiring American habits of 
 thought and action. German as well as the Irish 
 immigration had shrunk to small dimensions before 
 1 9 14, for the German government was trying to re- 
 tain its subjects, while the population of Ireland had 
 so much diminished, and its economic condition had 
 so much improved, as to reduce the tendency to ex- 
 patriation. Both the Celtic and the Teutonic stocks 
 were already present in the United States, for both 
 had gone to the making of the British race, so that 
 no great change in the essential racial qualities of 
 American character, as it had existed among the 
 early colonists, followed the influx of these new Celts 
 
THE RECENT IMMIGRANTS 19 
 
 and Teutons. But the later arrival of such races as 
 Slavs and Italians, Russian and Polish Jews, Greeks 
 and Roumans altered the case. They brought en- 
 tirely new strains of blood into the stock. They were 
 comparatively uneducated, coming from the lower 
 social strata in their respective countries, and were for 
 the most part untrained in self-government. Very few 
 spoke English, and as they settled in huge blocks, 
 mostly in large industrial centres, they were less 
 readily assimilated. What difference then has their 
 coming made in the character and habits of the 
 American people.'' 
 
 In economic, social, and political life, some results 
 are already visible. Those newcomers, who now form 
 the bulk of the unskilled labourers in the northern 
 half of the United States, have plenty of native intelli- 
 gence, and a few men of conspicuous talent have 
 already risen from their ranks. But being ignorant 
 and prone to fall under the influence either of foreign 
 propagandists, or of leaders of their own race, they 
 are easily drawn into industrial strife, and are more 
 disposed to violence than are the native Americans. 
 When they acquire votes and are enrolled in a 
 political party, their inexperience throws them into 
 the hands of their chiefs, and makes them an element 
 whose power it is hard to calculate either in elections 
 or when labour troubles arise. But — and this is the 
 point to be noted by foreign observers — they are 
 
20 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 still unassimilated, and have not yet had time to 
 affect what may be called the normal type of the 
 American people. It remains to be seen how soon, 
 and in what way, they will affect it. 
 
 Here we are met by a question which has never 
 arisen before either on so great a scale, or under 
 conditions which enable it to be so carefully observed, 
 a question needing examination by physiologists and 
 anthropologists as well as by historians. There have 
 been many cases of race intermixture, but in ex- 
 tremely few of these have we statistical records suffi- 
 cient to furnish data for scientific conclusions. The 
 problem may be stated as follows : When two or more 
 races mix their blood what is the comparative im- 
 portance of blood, i.e. of Heredity, on the one hand, 
 and of Environment on the other, in determining the 
 quality of the race which arises from the mixture? In 
 the United States the child of Italian or Czech parents 
 grows up ignorant but intelligent, untrained to any- 
 thing but hand labour, yet inheriting certain inborn 
 tendencies and propensities, and possibly, also, draw- 
 ing from his parents certain beliefs and habits. The 
 boy goes to an American school, where he imbibes 
 the ideas and imitates the ways of the American youth 
 around him, and as he grows up reads the same 
 newspapers, hears the same talk. Unless his parents 
 are well-educated persons, he is eager to forget their 
 race and to become immediately, and for all purposes, 
 
INFLUENCES ON THE IMMIGRANTS 21 
 an American and nothing but an American. He 
 waves the Stars and Stripes, he sings in the class : 
 
 My country, 'tis of thee 
 Sweet land of liberty . . . 
 
 with more effusion than if his ancestors had come 
 over in the 'Mayflower.' Yet the blood remains. He 
 is not, he cannot make himself, altogether an Ameri- 
 can, divesting himself of the parental tendencies, of 
 the emotional excitability of the Czech, or the im- 
 pulsiveness of the Italian. To what extent then will 
 these racial qualities pass into and modify the Ameri- 
 can mass ? How far will a crowd, twenty per cent, of 
 which is of Polish or Greek or Jewish parentage, differ 
 from a native American crowd ? When three genera- 
 tions have passed, how far will the population of any 
 city, one-half of the blood in whose veins comes from 
 East European sources, feel, think, and act differ- 
 ently from the way in which the people in that city 
 felt, thought and acted thirty years ago, say in 1880, 
 before the East European flood had swollen ? The city 
 was then four-fifths English, the rest North Euro- 
 pean or Irish. In i960 not more than a half will be 
 of English blood, but all will be English-speaking, 
 and permeated by American influences. Though no 
 one can answer the question I am putting, this much 
 at least may be said. There has never been anywhere 
 an environment of more pervasive and compulsive 
 power than that into which the immigrant is plunged 
 
22 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 when he lands in America. He seems to melt in it as a 
 lump of sugar melts in a cup of tea. Yet one cannot 
 but believe that the influence of heredity remains. 
 If we discern racial traits in the individual man, and 
 explain points in his character by saying he has a 
 strain of Greek or Polish or Jewish blood, must not 
 the inherited quality of the individuals modify the 
 quality of the mass ? 
 
 The question can never be fully answered, because 
 causes other than heredity are always modifying 
 national character from one age to another. When, 
 sixty years hence, observers compare the character 
 of the American of 1980 with that of the American 
 of 1880, it will be impossible to determine how 
 much of the change is due to this particular cause. 
 The character of a nation, like that of an indi- 
 vidual, is always undergoing changes, too subtle to 
 be discernible at any given moment, but evident 
 after the lapse of years. They are retarded or ac- 
 celerated in the political sphere by the presence or 
 absence of the institutions and traditions which are 
 continually educating and forming men's habits of 
 thought and action, making the habits flow in certain 
 channels and deepening those channels. But it must 
 be remembered that institutions themselves are al- 
 ways changing, if not in their form yet in the manner 
 of their working. Nothing can arrest either decay or 
 growth except death, and health consists in the 
 
THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION 2^ 
 
 power of always eliminating the dying tissues and 
 replacing them by those in which life is vigorous. 
 
 Thoughtful men in America are disquieted when 
 they see under their eyes a change passing upon the 
 elements in the population far greater than has ever 
 passed before upon the English stock since it first 
 came to Britain in the fifth century of our era. Some 
 fear a permanent injury to the moral, perhaps also to 
 the intellectual quality of the stock. Others believe 
 that the power of literature and education and the 
 old traditions of the nation will preserve what is best 
 in the essentials of character. Uncertain as the future 
 is, one who has watched the process during many 
 years finds reason for sharing the more hopeful belief. 
 
 Having considered the character of the American 
 nation as modified by American conditions we may 
 proceed to its concrete manifestations. Salient 
 features will stand out when we note what the people 
 have produced and how they have faced the crises 
 that have arisen in their career. 
 
 The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 
 1787 and set to work in 1789, may be deemed the 
 greatest single contribution ever made to Govern- 
 ment as an applied science. It was less original than 
 some of its foreign admirers have supposed, for the 
 best of its arrangements were not fire-new, but drawn 
 partly from the constitutional laws and usages of 
 England, partly from the Constitutions of the several 
 
24 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 States, which were themselves modifications of the 
 laws and usages under which the States had been 
 living when they were colonies. But the structural pro- 
 visions embodied in the Federal Constitution were so 
 well selected from the materials which lay before the 
 framers, and were so skilfully fitted together to form a 
 compact whole, firm yet elastic, capable of bearing the 
 strain which changing circumstances might impose, 
 that the authors of the Constitution deserve all the 
 praise they have received. The parts of that famous 
 document which experience has most emphatically 
 approved are the sections which create the federal 
 system, and which guard its working by assigning to 
 an impartial and technically competent tribunal the 
 function of expounding what the mind and will of 
 people probably were, and must, anyhow, be taken to 
 have been, when they enacted the fundamental instru- 
 ment. A federation which was created for thirteen 
 States, covering an area of 335,000 square miles, 
 with a population of about 3,000,000, has been made 
 applicable with far less friction than could have been 
 expected to forty-eight States, covering an area ten 
 times, and a population thirty-six times as large. 
 This system has been taken as a model by every 
 country that has since its date adopted a federal 
 scheme of government, including not only the 
 Republics of Spanish-America, but also Switzer- 
 land, Canada and Australia, and also, in a less 
 
COMPARISON WITH ENGLAND 25 
 
 degree, South Africa and the present Republic of 
 Germany. 
 
 Less successful, yet, when we consider the diffi- 
 culties to be overcome, hardly less skilfully con- 
 structed, has been that part of the Constitution 
 which determines the relations of the two chief de- 
 partments of the National Government — the Legis- 
 lature and the Executive. No frame of government 
 made to be worked in a large country has ever suc- 
 ceeded, except for short periods, in adjusting these 
 relations so as to combine efficiency, promptitude 
 and safety. The most successful was, probably, the 
 scheme of British Government as it worked for the 
 half century which followed the Reform Act of 
 1832. Comparing that scheme with the American 
 scheme we may say that the British excelled in a 
 concentration of power which permitted swift and 
 decided action, while the merit of the American con- 
 sisted in the safeguards it provided against ill-con- 
 sidered action or the usurpation by either department 
 of the proper functions of the other. The one system 
 was built for speed, the other for safety. One provided 
 a method by which decisions can be reached with 
 the minimum of delay, the other a method which 
 averts the risk of decisions not representing the true 
 and deliberately considered will of the majority of 
 the people. The British method is forced to take the 
 risk that decisions may be wrong, the American 
 
26 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 method the risk that decisions may be dangerously 
 delayed. The capital instance of the latter fault may 
 be found in the controversy which so long harassed 
 America regarding the extension of slavery. The 
 National Government tried for forty years to settle 
 this question, but no settlement could be reached, 
 and the result was civil war. English critics used to 
 think this a fatal blot, and praised the efficiency of 
 their own system, but they have latterly come to per- 
 ceive that their own frame of governmentmaysucceed 
 no better. The British Parliamentary System has for 
 more than eighty years failed to settle a question less 
 formidable, indeed, but always threatening strife 
 and deranging the proper working of its own machi- 
 nery, that of securing peace and good government in 
 Ireland. Each country has to admit some failures, 
 and neither country is likely to part with its own 
 scheme to adopt that of the other country. Each 
 would prefer to steer its course among the rocks and 
 shoals which it has learnt to know, rather than to 
 venture into what is for it the uncharted sea of the 
 other. Whatever may be the merits of the British 
 system for a nation which inhabits a comparatively 
 small area, few will think that this system would suit 
 a people more than twice as numerous, and occupy- 
 ing a territory more than fifty times as large. 
 
 The framers of the American Constitution have 
 been blamed for leaving open the question whether 
 
CONDUCT OF FOREIGN RELATIONS 27 
 
 any state had a right to secede from the Union, since 
 this unsettled point ultimately provided an occasion 
 for a civil war in which both sides had what lawyers 
 call an "arguable case." But it must be remembered 
 that if the framers had tried to determine that ques- 
 tion in advance, there would have been no Constitu- 
 tion at all. State feeling was so strong in 1787—8 
 that a denial of state sovereignty would have led to 
 the rejection of the Constitution when it was pre- 
 sented for adoption to the peoples of the States, 
 while on the other hand, to have recognized state 
 sovereignty so far as to permit secession, would have 
 been to open a door to the very evil it was desired 
 to avoid. As prudent statesmen, they thought it better 
 to take the chance that a right neither admitted nor 
 denied would ever be exercised, than to invite the 
 immediate failure of their efforts. Their hope, though 
 falsified by the event, was at the time a reasonable 
 hope, and we cannot blame their choice. 
 
 Another criticism made on the structure of the 
 American National Government deserves a passing 
 word because one of its features has from time to 
 time had unfortunate results on diplomatic relations 
 with other countries. The provision made for the 
 conduct of foreign affairs has been charged with in- 
 efficiency because, while the function of negotiating 
 with foreign countries is left to the Executive, the 
 confirmation of executive action and the approval of 
 
28 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 treaties rest with one branch of the legislature, the 
 Federal Senate. The result of this division of powers 
 is, that, though the President can in practice so 
 handle foreign relations as to manoeuvre or precipi- 
 tate the nation into hostilities, he cannot conclude 
 a binding agreement with any other country. He can 
 bring about war, but he cannot make peace. The 
 benefits of a well-conducted negotiation may be lost 
 because the Senate may refuse to approve, and a 
 deadlock may result, involving the loss of a treaty 
 on which infinite pains have been spent. Foreign 
 nations find this situation embarrassing. They may 
 bargain and compromise, and make one concession 
 after another, and yet discover at last that all their 
 efforts have been wasted. But they are not entitled 
 to complain, because they must be taken to know the 
 provisions of the Federal Constitution, and these 
 provisions may be justified on the ground that an 
 Executive which holds office for a fixed term cannot 
 be entrusted with powers as wide as those which 
 England allows to an Executive holding office from 
 day to day at the pleasure of Parliament. A President 
 may err, by precipitancy, or because he mistakes the 
 mind of the People, so it was thought needful to 
 limit his authority. In England it may happen that an 
 Administration which negotiates with foreign states 
 can, if it keeps its negotiations secret, bring the 
 nation to a point where it must accept arrangements 
 
THE CONSTITUTION TESTED 29 
 
 which It would, if left free, be disposed to condemn. 
 Neither America nor England has yet come near to 
 solving the problem how foreign affairs should be 
 conducted and treaties concluded in conformity with 
 the will of the people. The difficulty lies in the nature 
 of the case, and particularly in the fact that in no 
 country is public opinion sufficiently informed to 
 exert the power which of right belongs to it. The 
 case for popular control of diplomacy is irrefragable 
 in theory, but theory presupposes a fuller knowledge 
 of the facts by the people than any people has yet 
 been able to acquire. ^^-^^ 
 
 Before I pass from the Federal Constitution let 
 me note three occasions on which its strength and 
 flexibility were tested. One was seen in 1834, when 
 a new set of men, less educated and more reckless 
 than their predecessors, came into the control of 
 affairs with the accession to the Presidency of Andrew 
 Jackson. Had not the respect for the Constitution 
 and the methods of working it been by that time 
 fairly well settled, there would have been a serious 
 dislocation of the machinery. Serious evils did, in 
 fact, follow, but the ship rode out the storm and 
 calmer weather returned after a while. On the other 
 two occasions, under the pressure of civil war in 
 I 8 6 1 -5, and of a foreign war in 1 9 1 7— 1 9, some pro- 
 visions of the Constitution were practically suspended 
 though, perhaps, not legally violated. But on both 
 
30 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 occasions when the stress had passed and normal 
 conditions returned, the Constitution was seen to 
 have sprung no leaks. 
 
 I have mentioned the War of Secession, and as it 
 is one of the great events of American history, two 
 lessons may be noted which a study of its course 
 suggests. One of these is the danger of ignoring or 
 trying to override the permanent tendencies of hu- 
 man nature. As we see the matter to-day, it was not 
 only a crime, but a blunder to bring the negro from 
 Africa and to force him to work as a slave in the 
 midst of a community of freemen. This blunder, 
 committed before there was any independent Amer- 
 ica, is chargeable rather on England than on the 
 early colonists, though it was the children of the 
 latter that had to suffer for it^. Without it there would 
 have been no Civil War, and the Southern States 
 would to-day be free from a problem whose solution 
 is not yet within sight and whose difficulties have 
 been aggravated by the attempt made to deal with 
 the question when the Civil War ended. This was 
 the second blunder. The Federal Constitution was 
 in 1868 and 1870 so amended as to confer the elec- 
 toral franchise upon the recently liberated negroes. 
 Wholly unfitted to exercise the franchise with ad- 
 
 ^ The efforts of the Colonial Assemblies of Virginia to stop the 
 Slave Trade were frequently baffled by selfish interests powerful 
 with the British Government. 
 
RECONSTRUCTION TROUBLES 31 
 
 vantage to themselves, the coloured people fell under 
 the control of white adventurers, many of them dis- 
 reputable, who, since the white population of the 
 states that had seceded were excluded from the suff- 
 rage, enjoyed a free field for robbery and jobbery, and 
 played havoc with administration and finance, hold- 
 ing their power by negro votes. After a few years the 
 southern whites, readmitted to the suffrage, recovered 
 control, and thereafter, partly by force, partly by 
 electoral frauds, and ultimately by a series of adroit 
 legal contrivances, they regained a mastery which 
 they have continued to maintain. The attempt to 
 bestow political power on Africans, ninety-five per 
 cent, of whom were unfitted by capacity and training 
 to use it, had the result which ought to have been 
 foreseen. It exasperated the whites, it injured the 
 negroes, it has perpetuated trouble, and has, indeed, 
 increased the friction between the races. Abstract 
 theory and emotional sympathy for those who had 
 suffered in time past had led the Northern statesmen 
 to disregard the teachings of Nature. But Nature 
 prevailed against theory. It may be true that optim- 
 ism, taken all round, is better than pessimism, and 
 it is obviously true that sentiment cannot be neglected 
 as a factor in human affairs. Yet optimism and 
 sentiment will always have their dangers. We see 
 many experiments advocated to-day, and some 
 actually tried, not less hazardous than that which 
 
32 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 the sanguine spirit of Congress attempted in the 
 days of reconstruction after the calm wisdom of 
 Abraham Lincoln had been withdrawn. How easily 
 do men persuade themselves of what they wish to 
 believe! 
 
 If the end of the War of Secession was marked by 
 one great error, it was marked also by one act of 
 supreme wisdom. Never was a civil war followed by 
 so little severity towards the vanquished. Though the 
 victorious North had talked of the seceding South- 
 erners as rebels, all sensible men felt how far from 
 ordinary treason their action had been. No one was 
 put to death for any political offence. Trials, to be 
 followed by imprisonment, were talked of, but were 
 put off with the tacit consent of the nation till they 
 silently vanished away. So soon as fighting had 
 ceased, bitter memories began to die out in the 
 North, and presently they died out in the South also. 
 I remember how, when General Sherman, in the 
 course of whose march through Georgia the city of 
 Atlanta had been destroyed by fire, came thither on 
 an official visit less than twenty years afterwards, a 
 leading citizen of Atlanta observed that the people 
 of the city were glad to see the General though he 
 was known to be rather heedless in the use of lucifer 
 matches! It used to be said that the only Southerners 
 who bore memories of the war were the two classes 
 who had not borne arms — the clergy and the 
 
WHAT AMERICAN HISTORY CAN TEACH 33 
 
 women. The reconciliation has now been complete, 
 and the whole American nation is so reunited that 
 from 1912 to 1914 the children of those who fought 
 in the Northern armies and of those who had fought 
 in the Southern armies, with the few veterans who 
 had survived from the war itself, met to celebrate 
 their own or their fathers' deeds of valour fifty years 
 before on battlefields now marked by monuments 
 which all alike honour. This, also, is a lesson to be 
 pondered by statesmen whose vision is keen enough 
 to look beyond the dust and smoke of recent con- 
 flicts to days to come, though perhaps still distant, 
 when each people in Europe will be peaceful and 
 prosperous in proportion to the confidence which it 
 can inspire in its neighbours, and the goodwill it 
 can feel towards them. 
 
 Time fails me to speak of other aspects of 
 American history which deserve the special attention 
 of the student. Nowhere in the modern world have 
 economic issues exercised so potent an influence on 
 politics. Nowhere has the problem of setting bounds 
 to the power of commercial combinations and of the 
 monopolies which combinations create, given so much 
 trouble to legislators. Nowhere has party organisation 
 been developed to such dangerous perfection. But 
 each of these subjects would furnish materials for 
 a treatise. It is enough to call the attention of 
 Europeans to the wealth of material which American 
 
34 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 experience furnishes upon these and other questions 
 which perplex, and some of which threaten, the welfare 
 of civilized states. On one topic, however, I must 
 dwell for a moment, because though it was once so 
 familiar as to have become hackneyed, the present 
 generation has begun to forget it. For nearly a century 
 after American independence had been recognized 
 in 1783, at a time when nearly the whole European 
 continent was controlled by arbitrary governments, 
 America stood forth to the world as the sanctuary 
 of freedom. To the oppressed peoples she rose as the 
 bright vision of a land where no man need tremble 
 before king or priest, an Elysium of the West like 
 that described in the Odyssey, where, far beyond the 
 sundering ocean, fresh breezes of liberty were always 
 blowing to refresh the hearts of men. That pre- 
 eminent distinction it has ceased to hold. Freedom 
 has now spread all over Europe. The Marxian Com- 
 munists have indeed now begun to paint America in 
 the blackest colours, as a land where the power of 
 wealth grinds the poor, and for whose evils there re- 
 mains no remedy except revolution. If the lines with 
 which fancy decked it out were too bright a century 
 ago, still further from the truth are the denunciations 
 which it now receives. The sober judgment of history 
 will always honour the founders of the Republic, and 
 the people who have brought their Republic safe 
 through many trials, for one supreme example which 
 they gave to the world when it was sadly needed. 
 
AMERICA'S ACHIEVEMENT 35 
 
 America has shown that it is possible to have a 
 government of the people for the people on a scale of 
 unprecedented magnitude, a scale undreamt of by- 
 earlier generations. In all the nations of the Old 
 World the habit of obedience to constituted authority 
 came down from the ages when monarchs reigned by 
 force, and by the awe which force inspired. Subjects 
 obeyed because their forefathers had obeyed, and 
 because armies were maintained to compel obedience. 
 When, as in France in 1792, and in Russia in our 
 own day, physical force failed, and authority was no 
 longer defended by the spell of reverence, there 
 succeeded first a short spell of anarchy, and there- 
 after a force still more brutal and ruthless than that 
 by which the old dynasties had reigned. So too the 
 countries of Spanish America, though they called 
 themselves Republics, showed for many a year after 
 they had won independence, what happens when 
 an obedience based only on fear and tradition has 
 suddenly disappeared. But among the English of 
 America the habit of respecting law and valuing 
 order, though at some moments and in some places 
 shaken, was never broken. When the time-hallowed 
 authority of a monarch died out of the sky like wan- 
 ing moonlight, the authority of the people rose, as 
 the sun rises to rule the day. As the nation swelled 
 in volume, the difficulty of maintaining order in 
 huge populations scattered over vast spaces seemed 
 
 3—2 
 
36 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 to grow greater. But the sense that law as the founda- 
 tion of order is the guardian of common welfare, 
 grew with the nation's growth. A national govern- 
 ment whose physical power was represented by an 
 army of less than one in a thousand of the population 
 exercised an authority greater because less contested 
 than authority had ever held in the despotisms of the 
 Old World. The steady march of the national gov- 
 ernment became so familiar that men wondered at it 
 no more than the rustic wonders at the unchanging 
 procession across the nightly heavens of the constel- 
 lations which he has seen since childhood. But those 
 who have studied human nature, and have seen what 
 havoc ignorance and passion can work, and how in- 
 finitely hard it has been to bring men to comprehend 
 what is really their common good and work together 
 for it, will marvel at America's achievement and 
 deem it one of the longest steps in the march of social 
 progress that mankind has yet taken. If ever those 
 moral forces which have led more than a hundred 
 millions of men, filling a vast continent, to obey that 
 common will which they have provided peaceful 
 means for ascertaining, if ever these forces that have 
 created and preserved the sense of common duty and 
 common interest, should show signs of decay, what 
 hope would remain for the world ? Freedom in Amer- 
 ica, as elsewhere, has been at some moments abused, 
 at others undermined or filched away: but the pride 
 in freedom and the trust in the saving and healing 
 
HISTORICAL EXPERIMENTS 37 
 
 power of freedom have never failed her people, and 
 
 have enabled them many a time to recover what they 
 
 seemed to be losing. It is by the moral forces that 
 
 ' nations live. Moribus antiquis statres Romana virisque. 
 
 Let me in conclusion touch briefly upon some of 
 the causes which make a full and just conception of 
 the problems with which the American people have 
 grappled, and of such solutions as they have found, 
 specially valuable to Englishmen. 
 
 What is history but a record of experiments .f* 
 Each country studies, and, if it is wise, endeavours 
 to profit by the experiments which other countries 
 try. Now the value of experiments varies with the 
 similarity of the conditions under which any given 
 experiment has been tried to those of the country 
 which seeks to profit by the experiment. The more 
 closely the two sets of conditions resemble one 
 another the better entitled are we to draw conclusions 
 and attempt predictions. Hence, Britain can profit 
 better by the experience of America than can any 
 other country, because the institutions and social life 
 of the two nations are based upon old foundations, 
 similar in their origin. Not only the institutions and 
 laws, but also the conceptions of those things which 
 constitute the values of life are just sufficiently dif- 
 ferent to make us feel their essential likeness. An 
 Englishman can in discussing any question with an 
 American assume as a common starting point certain 
 moral and intellectual axioms which he cannot assume 
 
38 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 in the case of any other people. The fact that neither 
 people calls the other "foreigners" speaks for itself. 
 This idea may be put in another way. History 
 has for its subject human nature. It is the record 
 of what man has thought, said and done. It is the 
 lamp by whose light we see human nature in action, 
 and we can understand the causes, the significance, 
 the results of events in proportion to our compre- 
 hension of the characters of the men or the nations 
 concerned. When the records of man's doings 
 in the ancient world or the mediaeval world per- 
 plex us, this happens because we are so unlike the 
 men of those days that we fail to appreciate their 
 motives, and those mental qualities which are now 
 (rather loosely) called their "psychology." So, like- 
 wise, when we try to follow events passing in other 
 countries we are apt to err from want of understand- 
 ing the minds and impulses of, say, Russians or 
 Arabs or Chinese. This is one of the great difficulties 
 in the conduct of foreign relations. Diplomatists, if 
 keenly observant, come to know the minds of the 
 men among whom they are cast. Statesmen at home 
 know less, and suffer for it, while the mass of the 
 people is often quite at sea, because it misconceives 
 foreign ways of thought. It has been truly said that no 
 people has ever quite understood another. Thus the 
 average man, having no means forjudging the feelings 
 and behaviour of foreigners, is the victim of any 
 misstatements or misrepresentations made by poli- 
 
AMERICANS AND ENGLISHMEN 39 
 
 ticians or the press, and, consequently, each people 
 wrongs other peoples and is indignant when It is 
 wronged by others. When, as usually happens, one 
 nation takes its impression of its neighbours from their 
 government and their politicians, its judgments are 
 pretty sure to be harsh. Moreover, each people thinks 
 of the other in terms of the majority of that other, 
 not knowing or caring to know how large or small a 
 majority may be, or how many cross-currents may be 
 running through the public opinion of the other. All 
 this is inevitable, but the resulting judgments are so 
 often erroneous and even unjust, that everything pos- 
 sible ought to be done to enable each nation to look 
 behind or through the government of another into 
 the real feeling and wishes of its neighbour nations. 
 
 Now, just as the experiments made by America 
 are more profitable to Englishmen than are those 
 made by other countries, so also it is easier for us, if 
 we take a little pains, to understand American minds 
 and feelings than to understand those of any other 
 people. Reciprocal comprehension is, of course, best 
 attained by the largest possible personal intercourse. 
 The more Americans come to England and the more 
 Englishmen go to America, the better for both. But 
 as it is impossible for more than an extremely small 
 percentage of each people to create by this means a 
 genuine mutual comprehension of each by the other, 
 the next best thing is for each to learn as much as 
 it can about the history of the other. Here, again, it 
 
40 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 is only a small percentage that has the time and 
 capacity for learning from history, but that small 
 percentage ought to include the leading minds, and 
 especially the public teachers speakers and writers 
 of each country. With them it lies to form and guide 
 public opinion in their respective countries. If the 
 Englishmen on whom this function devolves address 
 themselves more largely than heretofore to the study 
 of American history, and acquire from it an insight 
 into the character and tendencies of the American 
 people, they will be far better able to judge current 
 events, and escape from the atmosphere of misre- 
 presentation or exaggeration, or honest misconcep- 
 tion, which most of them have been obliged to 
 breathe. The use of a common language does not 
 necessarily conduce to friendship; rather is it often a 
 source of bitterness, because the unfriendly things 
 which are said in one country are carelessly or even 
 maliciously propagated and diffused in the other. 
 Knowledge, however, though it does not always make 
 for goodwill, is yet always better than ignorance, for 
 it may be extended and perfected. It is anyhow, even 
 if less than perfect, the only foundation on which a 
 sound judgment can be based. 
 
 Without stopping to dwell upon the advantages, 
 material as well as spiritual, which the friendship of 
 the two nations would secure for both, I will pass 
 to a wider aspect of the situation. In these days, no 
 Englishmen can think of Anglo-American relations 
 
THE POWER OF A COMMON SPEECH 41 
 
 merely in their effect upon his own country. Every 
 view will be deceptive as well as defective which does 
 not take in the other great peoples. We must learn 
 to think in world terms. Now the growth of the Eng- 
 lish-speaking races is the most significant pheno- 
 menon of the last hundred years. That growth con- 
 tinues, and is likely to continue. It would be folly 
 as well as presumptuous vanity for members of our 
 stock to undervalue the contributions made to 
 thought and letters, science and art, which the other 
 leading peoples, and especially those of France, Ger- 
 many and Italy, have made and are making. These 
 contributions have been in some directions as great or 
 greater than our own. But it is the English language 
 that has spread and is spreading most rapidly. It is the 
 English-speaking peoples that have grown and are 
 growing most rapidly in wealth and population, and 
 that now conduct or control most of the commerce 
 of the world. Their influence upon the world at large 
 is, therefore, more potent than that of any other racial 
 stock, and that influence would, if directed to the 
 same ends, make a difference to world progress 
 greater than any other influence could exert. I ask 
 you to think not merely of political influence, though 
 that is a form of action the power of which is most 
 apparent and most calculable, but to consider also 
 another kind of action, that which the opinion, the 
 thought and the example of English-speaking men, 
 wherever they dwell, be it in the United States or 
 
42 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 in Britain, in Canada or Australia or New Zealand, 
 may exert upon the thoughts and purposes of civi- 
 lized mankind. I treat that opinion as a single con- 
 crete entity, because the possession of a common 
 language, common habits of thought, common funda- 
 mental axioms of conduct, together with the fact that 
 whatever is written by the best minds in any part of 
 the English-speaking world affects the best minds of 
 the other parts, does give a kind of unity to the mind of 
 English-speaking men which overrides all diversities 
 among them. Differences of view will, of course, always 
 exist inside each political community, and the views 
 held by the majority in one community may sometimes 
 be opposed to the views held by the majority in an- 
 other, but just as these diversities do not prevent, but 
 rather tend to develop and improve by intermixture 
 and debate, the progress of opinion in any one country, 
 so will they act in the English-speaking world as a 
 whole, each people contributing to the progress of 
 thought in the other. It may be said that this already 
 happens as between all civilized nations, since they 
 now stand in a "touch " with one another that is closer 
 than ever before. But language counts for much. 
 The common language and the common principles — 
 what I have called the axioms of conduct — bring the 
 different English-speaking peoples nearer to one 
 another than to any other people or stock. Regard 
 them as a community in the widest sense, and suppose 
 its general opinion to be playing round such large 
 
INTERNATIONAL GOODWILL 43 
 
 questions as those of the maintenance or reduction 
 of armaments, the protection of native races, the 
 freedom or restriction of economic intercourse be- 
 tween states, the extension or narrowing of the 
 functions of government, and the many projects now 
 discussed for the organization of industry by legal or 
 extra legal methods, and further, suppose the experi- 
 ments tried by each of the several members of the vast 
 English-speaking community to be closely watched 
 and studied by the other members, may we not be- 
 lieve that the intellectual and moral influence of that 
 opinion upon the world at large would be far greater 
 than any one nation has exercised since the dissolu- 
 tion of the Roman Empire? Now the first step 
 towards the formation of such an opinion must be 
 the fuller knowledge, the more perfect comprehen- 
 sion by each English-speaking people of the mind and 
 purposes of the other, not necessarily for the purposes 
 of joint political action, however desirable that may on 
 some occasions be, but in the broadly fraternal spirit 
 which seeks the welfare of all mankind. It is in 
 the development of intellectual and moral sympathy 
 rather than in formal alliances, unions often unstable 
 and sometimes excitingjealousy or suspicion in other 
 nations, that we may find the kind of co-operation 
 which will best promote that welfare. 
 
 We see to-day an old world, a world weary of the 
 past, distracted on this side of the Atlantic by a strife 
 which perpetuates itself in creating fresh wrongs that 
 
44 THE STUDY OF AMERICAN HISTORY 
 
 breed fresh resentments and revengeful passions. 
 The time has surely come when a supreme effort 
 should be made to inspire in the most enlightened 
 and far-sighted minds in all the peoples a spirit of 
 goodwill which may replace international hatreds by 
 a sense of common interests and a vision of the bless- 
 ings concord may bring. The goal may be distant, 
 but it is a splendid goal, one towards which we are 
 bound to strive. 
 
 I have spoken of American history as a part of 
 the history of the English-speaking community of 
 peoples. It is the history of that branch which is now 
 the largest, the richest and the least assailable from 
 without, yet whose fortunes are indissolubly linked 
 with those of all the others. Through its three cen- 
 turies of life in the Western hemisphere it has re- 
 tained that boldness and resourcefulness and tenacity 
 of purpose which belonged to the ancient stock that 
 came from the Elbe to the Thames and from the 
 Thames to the Hudson and onward to the Missis- 
 sippi. It has cherished high ideals and holds fast to 
 them still. Will it not be in days to come the glory 
 of the free English-speaking peoples, to whom Provi- 
 dence has given the widest influence, and therewith 
 the greatest responsibility, that any group of peoples 
 has ever received, if they should join in using that 
 influence to guide the feet of all mankind into the 
 way of peace. 
 
the founder of the first english chair of american 
 
 history, literature and institutions 
 
 Sir W. George Watson, Bart 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 ORIGIN OF THE 
 SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR 
 
 IN 191 1, when it was preparing its Programme 
 for the Celebration of the Centenary of the Treaty 
 of Ghent (18 14-19 14) and of the completion of 
 One Hundred Years of Peace among English-speak- 
 ing Peoples, the British-American Peace Centenary 
 Committee (which had the arrangements in hand 
 for Great Britain) turned its attention to the pro- 
 vision of adequate teaching of American History in 
 British Universities. 
 
 It discovered that no British University made de- 
 finite and adequate provision for such teaching. 
 There was no University in the British Isles which 
 had either a Chair or Lectureship of American His- 
 tory. This very grave deficiency in our educational 
 apparatus the Committee determined to supply; and 
 it placed the Foundation of a Chair of American His- 
 tory amongst the foremost articles of its Programme 
 for the Celebration. 
 
 The outbreak of the Great War prevented the 
 carrying out of this Programme more than in part; 
 
46 APPENDIX 
 
 and before the War was over the British-American 
 Peace Centenary Committee had been dissolved, 
 handing over its functions to two allied and affiliated 
 organizations which grew out of it — the Sulgrave 
 Institution and the Anglo-American Society. 
 
 In 1919 the Anglo-American Society revived the 
 project of a Chair of American History as the first 
 item of its national British programme for the Cele- 
 bration of the Tercentenary of the 'Mayflower' and 
 the Pilgrim Fathers; and in the last month of that 
 year the generosity and public spirit of Sir W. 
 George Watson, Bart., provided the means to realise 
 this long-cherished plan. 
 
 In the date of its foundation the Watson Chair 
 has the honour of being the first Chair of American 
 History established in the British Isles. 
 
 The correspondence relating to its foundation, 
 between Sir George Watson, H.R.H. the Duke of 
 Connaught (President of the Anglo-American Soci- 
 ety) and H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, is reprinted 
 hereafter, for purposes of record. The warmth of the 
 public reception of Sir George Watson's benefaction, 
 and the appreciation of its international and educa- 
 tional significance, is illustrated by the extracts from 
 leading articles in prominent London journals which 
 are also reprinted. 
 
 The foundation fund of the Watson Chair has 
 been invested by the Anglo-American Society, and 
 
THE WATSON CHAIR 47 
 
 its proceeds will be used entirely in connection with 
 the purposes of the Chair. 
 
 The Chair has been given the broad title of a 
 Chair of "American History, Literature, and Insti- 
 tutions" deliberately; for the reason that it is desired 
 to include all these subjects in the scope of its Lec- 
 tures, from year to year, and also to draw upon a 
 wide variety of eminent Lecturers, who will be able 
 to interpret American life and history, in its broadest 
 aspects, to the British people. 
 
 It is not proposed that the Chair should be at- 
 tached to any one University, but that it shall be 
 used for the general purpose of stimulating interest 
 in and study of America in all British Universities. 
 
 Neither will the Chair be held permanently by one 
 scholar, of a single nationality, but for a period of 
 one or two years by American or British Scholars or 
 public men, — thus drawing upon the best intellec- 
 tual resources of the two countries, and securing a 
 variety of treatment of the subjects dealt with. 
 
 The Committee trust that this Foundation will 
 assist to create in this country a wider knowledge of 
 America to-day, and of the history, literature, and 
 institutions of the great Transatlantic Common- 
 wealth of English-speaking people. 
 
 The Chair, it is hoped, will serve as a permanent 
 memorial of America's loyal partnership with Great 
 Britain in the Great War, as well as of the historic 
 
48 APPENDIX 
 
 ties of kinship which unite the British and American 
 peoples. 
 
 Lord Bryce's Inaugural Lecture will be followed, 
 in the Spring of 1922, by a Course of Six Lectures 
 by President Hadley, of Yale University, on "Some 
 American Economic Problems of To-day." These 
 lectures will be given at different British University 
 centres, and subsequently published in uniform 
 style with the present volume. 
 
 The Committee of the Anglo-American Society 
 desire to acknowledge the great assistance they re- 
 ceived from Sir Francis Trippel in bringing the sub- 
 ject of the First Chair of American History to the 
 attention of Sir George Watson, and in securing his 
 practical interest in the proposal. 
 
 All communications relating to the Watson Chair 
 should be addressed to: 
 
 The Secretary, 
 
 Watson Chair Foundation, 
 
 c/o The Anglo-American Society and Sulgrave Institution, 
 
 I, Central Buildings, 
 
 Westminster, 
 
 London, S.W. i. 
 
THE WATSON CHAIR 49 
 
 THE SIR GEORGE WATSON CHAIR 
 
 The offer of Sir George Watson to found and 
 endow a Chair of American History, Literature and 
 Institutions, was conveyed in the following letter to 
 H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, President of the 
 Anglo-American Society under date of November 
 27th, 19 19: 
 
 SULHAMSTEAD HoUSE, 
 
 Theale, Berks. 
 Your Royal Highness, 
 
 I have learnt with the deepest interest that the pro- 
 gramme drawn up by the committee of the Anglo-American 
 Society in connection with the Pilgrim Fathers tercentenary 
 celebrations next year includes the foundation and endowment 
 of a Chair of American History, Literature, and Institutions 
 of a novel kind in Great Britain. 
 
 I agree with the committee that the foundation of such a 
 chair or lectureship would greatly assist in creating in this 
 country a wider knowledge of America, and of its history, 
 literature, and political, educational, and social institutions, 
 thereby knitting more closely together the bonds of comrade- 
 ship between the two great English-speaking democracies, 
 upon whose good-will and friendship the peace of the world 
 depends. 
 
 I also share the committee's belief that, as a permanent 
 memorial of America's loyal partnership v/ith the British 
 Empire during the war as well as of the historic ties which 
 unite our two peoples, nothing could be more fitting than the 
 establishment of such an educational foundation. It would 
 
50 APPENDIX 
 
 have considerable effect in clearing away the ignorance and 
 the resulting prejudice, which should be frankly recognised 
 on both sides of the Atlantic as the real stumbling block in the 
 way of closer union between the two nations. In spite of the 
 brotherhood of arms during the war, there is still a call for 
 much discriminating labour to banish this prejudice. The 
 diplomatic relations between the two countries would enter 
 upon a smoother path if the far-seeing efforts of the statesmen 
 on both sides were aided instead of hampered by the man-in- 
 the-street; and the commercial relations, which as a conse- 
 quent natural development must vastly improve, would do so 
 with far more rapid strides if business men were to realise the 
 fact that mutual knowledge means better trade. 
 
 Every effort should, therefore, be made to prevent a weak- 
 ening of the sympathies which have been so greatly stimulated 
 between the two countries by the historic visit of His Royal 
 Highness the Prince of Wales, and it is good politics, good 
 business, good morals, to maintain them iirmly on their 
 present high level. To all American residents in this country, 
 or visiting it for business or pleasure, and to all British who 
 have personal or commercial ties with the United States, it is 
 a matter of moment that a reciprocal knowledge and sympathy 
 should grow at a rapid rate and be rooted in a firm soil. And 
 all enlightened men and women who — apart from personal 
 or business interests — are possessed of a wide vision, must also 
 feel an impulse to take advantage of any opportunity of fur- 
 thering so desirable an aim. 
 
 British universities and schools have hitherto given little 
 attention to this important subject. It is necessary to generate 
 a new interest in and make America and its life and thought 
 better and more universally known and understood in this 
 country. 
 
 For all these reasons it would be a source of great pleasure 
 
THE WATSON CHAIR 51 
 
 and satisfaction to me if your Royal Highness would consent 
 to convey, as President of the Anglo-American Society, my 
 cheque for ;/^20,ooo as a gift to His Royal Highness the Prince 
 of Wales for founding and endowing the above-mentioned 
 chair. 
 
 The present juncture, when the echoes of the wonderful 
 reception of the Prince of Wales by the American people are 
 still reverberating throughout the world, seems to me a 
 felicitous occasion for expressing the hope that His Royal 
 Highness, on reaching the shores of his native land will 
 graciously accept this free-will gift in the spirit in which it is 
 given for the intended purpose, and allow the Chair to be 
 named "The Prince of Wales's Chair of American History, 
 Literature, and Institutions." 
 
 Yours faithfully, 
 
 W. George Watson. 
 
 THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT'S REPLY 
 
 The following is the Duke of Connaught's reply 
 to Sir George Watson, dated December ist: 
 
 Dear Sir George Watson, 
 
 Lord Weardale, Chairman of the Executive Com- 
 mittee, has transmitted to me, as President of the Anglo- 
 American Society, your letter of the 28th inst. and the accom- 
 panying cheque for ;^20,ooo. 
 
 I will communicate your letter and gift to His Royal 
 Highness the Prince of Wales immediately upon his arrival 
 and he will doubtless personally address you on the subject; 
 but I cannot refrain from at once giving expression to you on 
 behalf of the Anglo-American Society how deeply we appre- 
 
52 APPENDIX 
 
 ciate the high purpose which has inspired your magnificent 
 donation, and the happy choice of the occasion of the return 
 of the Prince of Wales from his most successful journey to 
 give effect to it. 
 
 This journey marks, we believe, a momentous epoch in 
 the relations of America and Great Britain, The remarkable 
 and generous manifestation of sentiment which his visit 
 evoked among all classes in America shows how recent events 
 and common ends pursued in fraternal union on the fields of 
 battle have effaced all disturbing memories, and brought the 
 English-speaking peoples into closer touch than at any time 
 in their previous history. 
 
 This great achievement you desire to signalise and develop 
 to greater advantage by the foundation of a Chair of American 
 History, Literature, and Institutions, which shall give to the 
 rising generation a new interpretation of the past relations of 
 the two nations, and new hopes and confidence in their 
 future. 
 
 It is difficult to imagine a more timely and well-directed 
 benefaction, and the Anglo-American Society, in conveying 
 to you their most cordial expressions of gratitude, can now, 
 as a consequence of your striking and spontaneous interven- 
 tion, contemplate with greater satisfaction the full realisation 
 of their programme for the due celebration next year in Great 
 Britain and America of the Tercentenary of the sailing of 
 the 'Mayflower' and the Pilgrim Fathers. 
 
 Believe me, yours sincerely, 
 
 Arthur, 
 President, Anglo-American Society.- 
 
THE WATSON CHAIR 53 
 
 THE PRINCE'S LETTER 
 
 The following is the text of the Prince of Wales's 
 letter to Sir George Watson, dated St James's Palace, 
 December 4th, 19 19: 
 
 Dear Sir George Watson, 
 
 Nothing could have more touched and gratified me 
 upon reaching again the shores of Great Britain than the an- 
 nouncement just made to me by the Duke of Connaught of 
 your noble gift of ;r20,ooo for the foundation of a Chair of 
 American History, Literature, and Institutions, and this is 
 very pleasing to me as I have no personal connection with the 
 Society. 
 
 My all too short visit to the American Continent has con- 
 vinced me of the common underlying sentiment which resides 
 in all sections of the English-speaking world. Such differences 
 as must naturally exist are more those of form and habit than 
 of substance, and no purpose can be higher than the one to 
 which your beneficence has been directed of endeavouring by 
 educational effort to remove those false impressions which an 
 erroneous interpretation of past history, or of the varying 
 forms of our democratic communities, have created and still 
 unfortunately prevail. 
 
 May I, however, venture to suggest that it would be more 
 fitting under these circumstances that the foundation should 
 bear the name of the generous donor, and therefore be known 
 as the Sir George Watson's Chair of American History, 
 Literature, and Institutions? 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 Edward P. 
 
 4—3 
 
54 APPENDIX 
 
 ENGLAND AND AMERICA 
 
 From The Times leading article, December 5th, 1919. 
 
 The foundation and endowment of a Chair for the study 
 of American history, literature, and institutions is an inter- 
 esting and valuable feature in the programme of the Anglo- 
 American Society for the celebration next year of the sailing 
 of the Pilgrim Fathers three hundred years ago. Sir George 
 Watson has been happily inspired to make the return of the 
 Prince of Wales from his historic visit across the Atlantic the 
 occasion for the munificent gift of ;^20,ooo to this end. By 
 the terms of the programme the donor has the right to have 
 the Chair called after his name. Sir George proposed that it 
 should be known as "The Prince of Wales's Chair," but the 
 Prince, while acknowledging with the gratitude it deserves 
 the gift and the suggestion, thinks it more fitting that the 
 foundation should bear the name of the giver. That is the old 
 tradition and the wisdom of preserving it will be generally 
 recognised. The tenure of the Chair will be in some respects 
 exceptional. It will not be established in any one of our uni- 
 versities, or filled permanently by an individual professor. The 
 scheme proposes that a British and an American scholar or 
 public man should hold the office for periods of a year or two 
 in alternate succession. There may be difficulties in working 
 out the idea in practice, but of its excellence there can be no 
 doubt. . . . 
 
 The occupants of the new Chair from both sides of the 
 Atlantic will turn themselves, we trust, thoughtfully and 
 earnestly, to the great task of furthering Anglo-American 
 inter-comprehension. There could hardly be a task nobler or 
 greater. The understanding between Englishmen and Ameri- 
 cans certainly can be made much more thorough than it has 
 
THE WATSON CHAIR 55 
 
 been hitherto. We have learnt to know each other in war as 
 we never knew each other before. We have now to supple- 
 ment that knowledge in peace, and the close study of each 
 other's history, literature and institutions is an indispensable 
 part of the process. The neglect of American history in 
 British universities hitherto has been almost complete. From 
 a purely intellectual standpoint that is a serious loss. The 
 interest of observing how a new and isolated society, originally 
 equipped with our own moral and intellectual endowments 
 of three hundred years ago, adapted them, rejected them, and 
 added to them, as the needs of their peculiar civilisation de- 
 manded, should fascinate any true student of comparative 
 politics in the wide sense of this last term. A comparison of 
 the results with those which we ourselves have attained, under 
 the stress of European complications, from the same stock of 
 ideas, principles, and habits during the same period would 
 probably yield useful lessons in the practical art of govern- 
 ment. . . . 
 
 If the professors filling the new Chair are as sharp-sighted 
 and as judicious (as the Prince of Wales, during his American 
 visit) they cannot fail to foster a view saner and more whole- 
 some than at present exists of the actual relations between the 
 masses of the two chief English-speaking democracies, and of 
 the measure of future development which these relations ad- 
 mit. In that way they may do very much to ensure that both 
 will pursue their independent courses in accordance with those 
 "key" ideas which they hold, and have always held, in com- 
 mon. 
 
56 APPENDIX 
 
 ANGLO-AMERICAN STUDIES 
 
 From The Observer \ea.dmg article, December 7th, 1919. 
 
 The vision of the Mayflower Tercentenary Committee 
 and the generosity of Sir George Watson have made possible 
 an educational experiment which must needs have political 
 effect. The new Watson Chair is no ordinary professorship. 
 Its wide range — it covers the history, literature, and institu- 
 tions of the United States — contrasts with the general tend- 
 ency towards specialised research. The Chair is unique, too, in 
 being attached to no one British University, and the period 
 of tenure is exceptionally short. It is intended to combine the 
 permanent quality of a professorship with the variety and 
 freshness of annual lectureship, and so to found a school which 
 shall have none of the traditional narrowness of a school. 
 Altogether a most interesting educational departure. 
 
 The political interest is, however, transcendent. Though 
 there has been a solid development of Anglo-American friend- 
 ship since the war, the two peoples have still much to learn 
 of each other. In great things, indeed, Briton and American 
 think alike. But in little things they differ profoundly, and, 
 after all, life is largely made up of trifles. England is compact, 
 homogeneous, socially stable, whereas America is scattered, 
 full of racial incoherence, and socially fluid. It will be for the 
 new Chair to show how these differences of circumstances 
 produce divergencies in detail of temperament and outlook. 
 
 The historical method proper to a professorship is specially 
 appropriate in the study of Anglo-American relations. The. 
 national life of both peoples is penetrated with a sense of 
 tradition. Both are conscious of the historic past as an element 
 in the present, and an influence in the future. In French 
 history, 1789 marks a breach; new forces emerge and shatter 
 
THE WATSON CHAIR 57 
 
 the old State. But in American history, 1776 emphasises a 
 continuity; old forces gather their full strength and complete 
 the fabric of the State. That is why the old uncritical Ameri- 
 can patriotism represented Independence as the expulsion of 
 certain evil elements from the body politic. That, too, is why 
 text-books can affect Anglo-American relations so profoundly. 
 Anglo-French friendship will not be influenced by contro- 
 versies about Napoleon, but Anglo-American friendship is 
 impossible without agreement about Washington. The great 
 truth that hope for the future relations of the two peoples 
 must be based upon a sober and just appreciation of the past 
 is in need of special emphasis just now, when a spirit is abroad 
 which treats everything before the war as negligible and talks 
 of a fresh start for a new world. Britons and Americans above 
 all other peoples, have in their bones a sense of the error of 
 such reasoning. There are no fresh starts in human affairs; 
 the consequences of what has been must needs work them- 
 selves out for ever and make history by their working. To 
 understand modern America, to interpret, for example, the 
 Senate's recent policy aright, we must know what America 
 has been, and such knowledge cannot come except by that 
 study of American history, literature, and institutions which 
 the Watson Chair has been founded to promote. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aberdeen, the Marquess of, viii 
 "American," the name mis- 
 leading, 6 
 American Nation, origins of, 4 
 American History 
 President Butler on, viii 
 Viscount Bryce on 
 Too little studied in England, i 
 When did it begin? i sq. 
 First stage, 4 
 Second stage, 5 
 Third stage, 7 
 
 Value of study of, to English- 
 men, 37 jy., 39 
 Linked with that of other 
 English-speaking commu- 
 nities, 42 
 (See also Appendix) 
 Anglo-American Friendship 
 Mr Balfour on, vii 
 Viscount Bryce on, 40 sq. 
 Anglo-American Society, v, vii, 
 46, 49, 50, 51-52 
 
 Bacon, 7 
 
 Balfour, Rt Hon. A. J., v-viii 
 Bryce, Rt Hon. Viscount, v, vi, viii 
 Bunyan, John, 7 
 Burke, Edmund, 15 
 Butler, President Nicholas Mur- 
 ray, vii-viii 
 
 Chair, The Sir George Watson 
 Prince of Wales on, v, 52-3 
 Duke of Connaught on, 51-2 
 Sir George Watson on, 49-51 
 Viscount Bryce on, i 
 Mr Balfour on, v, vii 
 The Times on, 53 
 The Observer on, 55 
 Appendix on origin of, 45 sq. 
 
 Chatham, Earl of, 15 
 Climate, Influences of, in U.S., 
 
 8-9 
 Colonization, in U.S., beginnings 
 
 of, 2, 17-22 
 Combinations, commercial, in 
 
 U.S., power of, 33 
 Comines, Philip of, 5 
 Connaught, H.R.H. the Duke of. 
 
 Letter from, 51 
 Constitution, The American, 
 
 23-8 
 A model for others, 24 
 Three tests of, 29 sq. 
 Cotton, and slavery, 9 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 7 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 10 
 
 Ebbsfleet, 7 
 
 Economic issues, their influence 
 
 on American politics, 33 
 English-speaking Peoples, The, 
 
 their supreme mission, 43- 
 
 Equality, social, conditions 
 favourable to, in America, 
 II 
 
 Eric, The Red, 2 
 
 Executive, relations to Legisla- 
 ture, 25 
 
 Experiments, American, in gov- 
 ernment, their value to 
 English students, 37 
 
 "Foreigners," English and 
 American not to each other, 
 38 
 
 Foreign-affairs, U.S. machinery 
 for dealing with, 27-8 
 British ditto, 28 
 
INDEX 
 
 59 
 
 Foundation, The Watson Chair, 
 
 (see Appendix) 
 Freedom, U.S. not the only 
 
 sanctuary of, now, 34 
 American pride and trust in, 
 
 35-36 
 Froissart, 5 
 
 George III, 15 
 Germanic tribes, 5 
 Government, popular, triumph 
 of, in U.S. 34 
 
 Hadley, President, 48 
 
 Hampden, John, 7 
 
 Harvey, 7 
 
 Heritage, spiritual, etc. of the 
 
 American people, 6 
 History, U.S., 39 (see under 
 
 American) 
 Hundred Years Peace, 45 
 
 Immigration to U.S., 17-22; 
 Effect on American cha- 
 racter, 19 
 
 Independence, American, 2, 12, 
 
 Indians, The American, 3, 9 
 Influences, upon English settlers 
 
 in America, 7 sq. 
 Institutions, American, based on 
 
 like foundations to English, 
 
 37 
 English, in 14th and 15th cen- 
 turies, 5 
 
 Intercourse, between U.S. and 
 England, should be in- 
 creased, 39 
 
 Intermixture, racial, in U.S., 
 20-22 
 
 Ireland, outflow from, 18 
 Problem of, 26 
 
 Invention, spurs to, 10 
 
 Jackson, President Andrew, 29 
 Julius Caesar, 5 
 
 Language, common, does not 
 always conduce to friend- 
 ship, 40 
 English spread of, 40-42 
 
 Law, similar origins of American 
 and British, 37 
 
 Law and Order, respect for, in 
 U.S., 35-36 
 
 Legislature, relations to Execu- 
 tive, 25 
 
 Liberty, ii, 33, 35-36 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham, 31 
 
 Literature, influence of Euro- 
 pean on America, 7 
 
 Lord mayor, of London, vii 
 
 Lynching, 9 
 
 Mansion house, London, v 
 
 Milton, John, 7 
 
 Monopolies, trouble to legislators, 
 
 Moral forces, in American 
 
 politics, 36 
 Mother land, 6 
 
 Negro, problem of, in U.S., 9, 
 
 29 
 Newton, Isaac, 7 
 
 Parliamentary system, the 
 
 British, 25 
 Party organisation, dangerous 
 
 perfection of, in U.S., 33 
 Peace, of world, 43-44 
 Perris, Mr H. S., v 
 Pilgrim Fathers, 2, 46, 52 
 Prehistoric, America, 2 
 President, Limitation to powers 
 
 of, 28 
 Problems, American, and their 
 
 lessons for the world, 37 
 
 Relations, Anglo-American, vii, 
 
 40, 50, 51, 54, 56 
 Resources, of American territory, 
 
 influence of, 16-17 
 
6o 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Revolution, The American, 1 1- 
 
 12, 15 
 
 Roanoke, 2 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, lo 
 
 Secession, War of, 29-31 
 Senate, 28, 57 
 Shakespeare, 7 
 Sherman, General, 32 
 Slavery, 9, 13, 25 
 Spanish-America, 24, 34 
 Spenser, 7 
 SuLGRAVE Institution, The, vii 
 
 Tacitus, 5 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 7 
 Trevelyan, Sir G. O., 15 
 
 Universities, in U.S., 17 
 
 In Britain, and American his- 
 tory teaching, 45, 50, 54, 
 
 Wakefield, Sir Charles, vii 
 Wales, H.R.H. the Prince of, v, 
 
 52-53 
 War, The Civil, in U.S., 29-315 
 
 Clemency after, 32 
 Of Independence, 12 
 Of 1914-1918, 47, 49 
 Watson, Sir W. George, Bart., v, 
 
 vii, viii, i, 46, 49-57 
 Wealth, in U.S., 16 
 Wear dale. Lord, 51 
 West, The American, 10, 13 
 
 printed in ENGLAND BY J. B. PEACE, M.A. 
 at the CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS