Class. Book COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE BY A. G. GARDINER ^ New York THOMAS SELTZER 1921 Copyright, 1921, by THOMAS SELTZER, Inc. All rights resented PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA JUN -8 i92l 'CI.A617242 CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE CHAPTER I. THE NEW WORLD . II. A CENTURY OF PEACE III. THE TWO PEOPLES IV. THE AMERICAN MIND V. THE ENGLISH MANNER VI. POLITICAL DISCORDS . VII. SEA POWER VIII. THE FUTURE . 9 i6 29 45 S6 71 87 99 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Among the books that should be read in connection with Anglo-American relations in the past is Professor Dunning's Xfhe British Empire and the United States, George Louis ^'^eer's The English-Speaking Peoples, Mr. H. S. Perris's A Short History of Anglo-American Relations, and Broug- ham Villiers and W. H. Chesson's Anglo-American Rela- tions 1861-1865. C. F. Adams's biography- of his father, who was American Minister in London during the Civil War, is essential to a just appreciation of the Anglo-Ameri- can situation in that critical time. Mr. Owen Wister's A Straight Deal, or The Ancient Grudge, is a breezy and generous attack by an American on the current anti-British feeling. [^Professor William E. Dodd's IVoodroiv Wilson: His Life and PFork contains much valuable matter bearing on the post-war aspects of the subject. On the question of a naval pact Mr. H. Sidebotham's ("A Student of War") article in the Neiv Republic and the accompanying leader in that journal deserve wide notice. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE CHAPTER I THE NEW WORLD / If the key to the puzzle of this distracted world can be said to rest in any single fact, it is to be found in the relations of the British Commonwealth and the American Commonwealth. The war has scrapped the European system, and with it the whole political mechanism of pre-war society. In that society Europe was alike the brain and the power-house. From the general current of the world's affairs, the American continent stood aloof by tradition and interest. It was self-contained and sufficient to itself. It would have no integral asso- ciation with European politics, nor would it permit Europe to acquire new sovereign rights in its own soil. The doctrine of isolation laid down by the Fathers of the United States Republic was in prin- ciple extended to the whole continent by President Monroe. It is pertinent to remind ourselves that in this extension English statesmanship played a lo THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE significant part which will be worth attention in a later connection. During the Civil War the Monroe doctrine was challenged by the ill-fated enterprise of Napoleon III in Mexico, and twice within recent memory it was brought into play in connection with the affairs of Venezuela. It was never accepted by the Con- tinental Imperialists, least of all by the last German Emperor, to whose dreams of German expansion in South America it offered an insuperable obstacle. As a policy it had obvious and inherent weaknesses, the chief of which was that its validity rested in the last resort less upon the power of the United States than upon the goodwill of the British Fleet. But for nearly a century it served as a bulwark of the policy of isolation, and under that policy America kept its hands off European affairs and the hands of Europe off its own affairs. It was the more disposed to confirm itself in the doctrine of isolation because its own abundant in- heritance preserved it from any need of external exploitation. It wanted nothing from the outside world except labor and credit to develop its enor- mous potentialities, and it was quite content to leave the competitive Imperialisms of Europe to appro- priate the wildernesses of Africa, extend their do- minions over Asia and occupy the islands of the THE NEW WORLD ii jsea. In these circumstances the European system (grew in unchallenged prestige and power. Apart / from the incipient Imperialism of Japan it had no (competitor outside itself; and as the vacant terri- tories of the earth became developed, Europe reaped the harvest in increasing prosperity, which was re- flected in the accumulation of wealth, vast industrial expansion, and the growth of competitive arma- ments. In this general prosperity most of the nations had their share, but the chief beneficiaries were the six great military states which held the European structure together on the insecure basis of organized hostilities called the Balance of Power. With the war the structure collapsed, and today continental Europe is a political and economic ruin. Of the six great Imperialist Powers three have ceased to exist in any recognizable form. All have been swept by revolution and are plunged in poverty and misery. The ramshackle Empire of Austria- Hungary has fallen to fragments; and though Germany and Russia have in them indestructible qualities which assure their ultimate revival, their power is in abeyance. In so far as it exists, it exists only to complete the destruction of the old European system, and can play no effective part in the imme- diate task of world reconstruction. And while the war has wrecked the defeated Powers, it has not 12 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE strengthened the victorious Powers. The extent of the impoverishment is has wrought in France and Italy is only temporarily concealed by the continu- ance of the Alliance and by the artificial conditions of credit and commerce that prevail. For practical purposes the continental system has ceased to exist. Its recovery will be a matter of years, perhaps of generations, and in the interval other Powers will have the main responsibility for making the chan- nels into which the new world will flow. Those Powers are Great Britain and the United States. Both have been engaged in the war, but, thanks to their inherent conditions rather than to any intrinsic virtues of their own, they have escaped relatively unharmed, and indeed — especially in the case of the United States — with enhanced power. They have escaped because they were not a part of the continental system. The source of Great Brit- ain's strength was as a world Power, and the source of the strength of the United States was as the dominant nation of a continent wholly untouched by the material and political devastations of war. Powerful among equals before that event, they are today and must be^ for a long time to come the supreme arbiters in the world's affairs. They have the world at their feet. It will be what they choose to make it. Between them they rule, directly or THE NEW WORLD 13 \mdirectly, not much less than half the earth. They Icommand practically the whole of the credit left in /the world. Their supremacy in mere terms of force is unassailable. Their command of the sea is not merely complete : it is without the shadow of a chal- lenge. They have the unequalled potentiality of great armies. They possess the major part of the raw materials of the general life — wool, cotton, coal, iron, food. They represent, both mentally and physically, the highest standard of human efficiency i extant. They possess the two greatest power-houses in the world. There is no other nation that approxi- mates to their industrial capacity, and (as the war has shown) it is industrial capacity more even than numbers in the field that is the determining factor in modern warfare. Above all, the power of these two great Commonwealths is realized power. It is not power (as in the case of Russia) which is latent and may be developed in a generation or generations. It is in being, actual, instant. It dominates the globe. / And it is not an extravagance to say that the /capital problem of mankind is whether this domina- j tion is to be exercised in rivalry or in agreement, V in friendship or in hostility, for the well-being of the world or for the selfish aggrandizement of the re- , spective nations. Neither country can escape this challenge to its good sense and good-will even if it 14 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE desired to do so. For good or evil, with or without its own volition, the United States is now irrevoca- bly involved in the web of the world's affairs. It cannot help itself. The doctrine of isolation became for ever obsolete on the day that the United States entered the war, and the attempt to breathe new life into it is as futile as it would be for us to attempt to restore the Heptarchy. It has gone, not because it was not a sound doctrine in the past, nor because it would not be a desirable policy now, but because the war has shown that it is not compatible with the conditions of the modern world. There can never be any water-tight compartments again, not even though the compartment is a continent encompassed by oceans as wide as the Pacific and the Atlantic. The world is henceforth a unit. It may be a unit of order or a unit of anarchy, but its solidarity is fixed and unalterable and the United States is an integral part of the system. And it is equally im- possible for us to evade the new conditions. Ger- many has passed out of our sky as a menace. We no longer look across the North Sea with disquiet at the activities of Kiel and Hamburg, Bremen and Stettin. Indeed, in all the Continent there is no cause of national anxiety left, however much cause there may be for alarm in the general dissolution that is In progress. For an equal with whom our THE NEW WORLD 15 power and resources can alone be measured we look henceforth across the Atlantic to the great nation that speaks our language and that has now swum into the orbit of our affairs. The mutual relations of these two great bodies are a matter of momentous concern not only to them, but to the whole world system on which their attractions and repulsions are destined to exercise a predominant influence. It is for this reason that the spirit of Anglo-American relations may be said to be the chief secular issue of the future. CHAPTER II A CENTURY OF PEACE An incidental result of the outbreak of the Great War of 19 14 was that the preparations on both sides of the Atlantic for the celebration of the Centenary of the Treaty of Ghent had to be aban- doned. It had been intended to make the occasion an imposing demonstration of Anglo-American friendship and to knit that friendship into still more enduring shape as a memorial of the com- mon gratitude for the blessings of a hundred years of peace. The idea had made a powerful appeal to all people of goodwill in both countries, and the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the ancestral home of Washington, as a memorial of a century of reconciliation had given the movement the right inspiration by associating the two countries in the common heritage of Washington's illustrious mem- ory. It was hope^ that the celebration would do much to give a more positive character to the friendship by removing what Lord Grey of Fallo- don has described as the chief obstacles to Anglo- 16 A CENTURY OF PEACE 17 American relations. "There is no solid ground for disagreement between this country and Amer- ica," he said in a speech at Bedford College last July, "and I asked when in America what were the chief obstacles to a thorough understanding be- tween the two countries. One of the most interesting replies given to me was from an American uni- versity woman. 'I think,' she said, 'that the two chief obstacles are — in England ignorance of the United States, and in the United States miscon- ception of England.' " The cure for ignorance is knowledge, and the cure for misconception is truth. The commemoration of the Centenary of the Treaty of Ghent seemed to furnish an unrivaled opportunity for applying the cures, and among the consequences of the war few are more regrettable than that the opportunity was lost. It was not, it is true, a century of dove-like "billing and cooing" that would have been com- memorated. If it had been that it would hardly have called for celebration, since perfect amity is its own sufficient comment. It is because the century of peace was won in the face of constant menace and friction that it is so rich in the lessons of statesmanship and in encouragement for the future. The general spirit of the relations of the two countries between 18 15-19 15 has been admirably 1 8 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE stated by Brougham Villiers in his study of the critical period of 1 86 1-5. Generally, he says, it appears largely a record of unwise, even mischiev- ous speaking and thinking, but on the whole of rational and honorable doing; of two peoples vehemently conscious of each other's shortcomings, and never very guarded in the expression of their disapproval or resentment, yet fundamentally so very much at one in their outlook and ideas that though only perhaps towards the close of the period they attained to cordiality, yet they never actually came to strife. Between the United States and ourselves have been waged some of the most reckless and offensive verbal battles in history; while the same nations, as soon as they have come to grips with any question, have repeatedly come to a fair-minded and sensible agreement on the subject, and have afterwards kept it with an in- variable loyalty worthy of all praise. Of the differences between the English-speaking peoples it may fairly be said that as long as they are half understood they produce the maximum of friction; as soon as they are fully understood they produce no friction at all. In this record of violent speech and wise action, neither country can claim all the merit of the one nor disclaim all the discredit of the other. Honors A CENTURY OF PEACE 19 and dishonors are alike pretty equally divided. In his book, A Straight Deal, Mr. Owen Wister tends to give the balance of credit to this country and the balance of discredit to his own, and it is true ( that there has been more positive and declamatory hostility to this country in the United States than there has been towards the United States in our own. This is due primarily to the fact that we : have filled a much larger space in the canvas of I events to America than America has to us. Our \ preoccupations have been with the Continent and the continental system, whereas the external affairs of America have brought it into contact with this •country more than with any other Power. During the past century France, Russia, and Germany have j in turn been the clouds upon our horizon, and the issues with America have never been of more than secondary and even remote concern. But apart from the newly developed distrust of Japan there has been hardly any matter of first-rate interna- tional concern to America which has not had rela- tion to British policy and interests. In practical politics the British Empire has covered pretty well the whole field of foreign affairs for the United States, and this fact, taken in conjunction with the historic, temperamental, and other considerations that will be discussed later, explains the exceptional 20 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE acerbity of tone which, as Mr, Wister shows, has often marked the controversial temper of America towards England. But, putting aside the question of tone and tem- per, the achievements of the two English-speakinr Commonwealths in the pacific solution of their difficulties during the past hundred years present an example quite without parallel in the relations of any two countries of similar magnitude, high spirit, and national consciousness. Since the Treaty of Ghent there have been eight or ten occasions on which the two nations have been brought into sharp conflict or subjected to severe tests to their wisdom and mutual good-feeling, and on every occasion the result has been a triumph for reason- able counsels and judicial processes. After the preliminary explosion of much fiery feeling the air has cooled and the statesmen of the two countries have set about finding a sensible and friendly solution of their problems. It was so in the first case that arose, that of the Maine boundary question in 1843, which in- volved some 12,000 square miles of territory and which, after much heated controversy, was amica- bly settled by arbitration at the suggestion of Great Britain. In the following year the Californian boundary question aroused intense bitterness in A CENTURY OF PEACE 21 the United States, which gave place to a temper of compromise that removed all grounds of dis- agreement. In the case of Nicaragua, Great Britain very wisely and justly yielded its rights under the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in deference to the strong and reasonable national sentiment of (the American people. Under the Treaty both I countries had contracted to build and own the Isthmian Canal, but when the United States sought to annul the Treaty Great Britain agreed, subse- quently surrendering even the stipulation that the canal should be unfortified and subject to the principle of the open door. ' Much the most serious and sustained menace to the pacific relations of the two countries came with the Civil War. In this case the weight of the indictment, apart from the singular incident at the beginning in which Mr. Seward, the American Foreign Secretary, played so indefensible a role, rests on this country. There are few chapters in our history on which we are entitled to look back with less satisfaction than the record of our deal- ings with America in the first years of the War. And this in spite of the fact that popular senti- ment in England, and especially in Lancashire, never played a more generous part. But it was a long time before that popular sympathy became 22 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE dominant In policy. So far as the spirit of the country was reflected In action and utterance and In the Press, It was the hostility of society and the governing classes which was apparent to the North. It would not be just to assume from this that the Intellectual and wealthy classes In England were In favor of slavery. They were not. But though the slavery issue was the sole cause of the strug- gle the fact was not so clearly visible to the con- temporary judgment in Britain as It is today. It was masked by the secession issue. The rival interests of the North and the South caused both to disguise or at least to blur the real issue. The South did so because they knew that their "peculiar Institution" of slav^ery did not furnish a ground on which they could hope to win the active sympathy of nations to whom slavery was an unthinkable and unholy practice. The North did so because they did not enter the war with the Idea of abolishing slavery, but in order to prevent its extension to territories outside those In which It already ex- isted. It Is true that before his election Lincoln had made his famous declaration that no nation could continue "half slave and half free," but his own general attitude was more exactly represented in his statement that he looked for abolition to be a long process, perhaps occupying a hundred years. A CENTURY OF PEACE 23 He would not permit extension, but apart from that he was concerned to avoid disruption rather than to secure abolition, and it was not until his proclamation of emancipation in the midst of the war that the true issue was presented nakedly p unequivocally to the outside world. In these circumstances British opinion in the early stages was governed by consideration that I had little to do with slavery. The sympathies of ' aristocratic and governing England were with the South because the South represented their own -stock and their own traditions. The colonization of the South had been carried out in the spirit of the old landed aristocracy, and like appealed to like across the Atlantic. All the hostility which a privileged and monarchical society entertained towards the Republic was directed against the in- dustrial democratic North whose foundations were laid by the Puritan migration of 1620. Conserva- tive England had never reconciled itself to the Republic, and the breach between the two elements in the United States seemed to offer what the con- temporary Times called the opportunity of prick- ing "the bubble of the Republic." In short, it was hostility to the Union and not support of slavery that made all the powerful influences in English Society take the side of the South and inspired 24 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE what Cobden called "the diabolical tone of the Times and the Post.'' It is not difficult today to see how fatal would have been the results had the wishes of the clubmen and politicians of Eng- land been gratified. The United States would have been converted into two rival nations and two armed camps; Canada would have had to arm too or become absorbed in the Northern Union, and there would have been no united America to come to the help of Great Britain and France at the most critical stage of the Great War. The gravest incident of this anxious time was the launching of the Alabama from Laird's Shipyard at Liverpool. There was never any real doubt as to the purpose and destination of this famous ves- sel, and Charles Francis Adams, the United States Minister in London, gave the Foreign Office the completest depositions and evidence on the subject. At the eleventh hour Lord Russell decided to de- tain her, but a singular accident defeated the in- tention. New evidence, on which Lord Russell proposed to act, was submitted to Sir John Har- ding, the Queen's advocate. What followed is told in the life of Charts Francis Adams: "He (Sir John Harding) just then broke down from nervous tension and thereafter became hope- A CENTURY OF PEACE 25 lessly insane. His wife, anxious to conceal from the world knowledge of her husband's condition, allowed the package to lie undisturbed on his desk for three days — days which entailed the destruc- tion of the American merchant marine; and it was on the first of these days, Saturday, July 26, 1862, that Captain Bullock (the Confederate Agent who had ordered the ship) at Liverpool 'received in- formation from a private but most reliable source that it would not be safe to leave the ship at Liv- erpool another forty-eight hours.' On the following Monday accordingly the Alabama, alias the '290,' alias the Enrica, was taken out of dock and under pretense of making an additional trial trip steamed, dressed in flags, down the Mersey, with a small party of guests on board. It is needless to say that she did not return. The party of guests was brought back on a tug, and the Enrica, now fully manned, was on the 31st off the north coast of Ireland, headed seawards in heavy weather." / This was the severest blow struck at the cause of the North from any external source. The American mercantile marine was destroyed by a ship built in a British yard, and manned by British i seamen whose achievements were openly applauded • in the British press and by British passengers who 26 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE hailed it with cheers as they passed it at sea. Even the patience and wisdom of Lincoln could not have prevented so flagrant and disastrous a breach of neutrality issuing in a declaration of war if the circumstances of the moment had not been too heavy to admit of action. Happily the popular current in England, as the war developed and its true character appeared, served to modify the effect of the crime; and when, later, the South sought to repeat the Alabama success by secretly commissioning two ironclad rams at the Liverpool yard, Lord Russell intervened. An order detain- ing the suspect ships was issued and shortly after- wards they were seized by the Government. But the affair of the Alabama remained a menacing cloud on the horizon after the war was over. It was dispersed by the proposal of the Gladstone Administration to arbitrate, and the Geneva Con- vention awarded £3,000,000 damages to the United States. The next incident, that of the Behring Sea, in 1887, saw the United States as flagrantly in error as we had been in 1862. The seizure of Canadian ships, sixty miles from land, was a clear breach of the law of the sea, and the attitude of the United States in the earlier negotiations was highly provo- cative. But once more reason and good sense pre- A CENTURY OF PEACE 27 vailed. Arbitration was proposed by this country, the United States agreed, and the judgment went in our favor both in the matter of damages and the issue out of which the incident arose. Again, in the first Venezuelan affair, in 1895, it will not be denied that the attitude of the United States w^as unreasonable. Venezuela, a notoriously cor- rupt State, took British prisoners on what we claimed to be British Guiana soil, and, when we took action, appealed to the United States Gov- ernment for protection. President Cleveland's Secretary of State, Mr. Olney, demanded "in accordance with the Monroe doctrine" that the question of the disputed territory should be sub- mitted to arbitration. The right to dictate how one country should settle a disagreement with an- )other was a questionable extension of the Monroe (doctrine, but in the end the Salisbury Government (wisely agreed to arbitrate and once more the clouds (were dispersed. In the second Venezuelan inci- dent, that of 1902, the honors were wholly with America, The joint demonstration of the British and German Governments against Venezuela was superficially little more than a debt-collecting af- fair, but behind it there lurked in the mind of the Kaiser the idea of challenging the Monroe doc- trine. The United States met the challenge both 28 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE wisely and firmly, and, the British Government responding with equal reasonableness, the trouble passed over. It will be seen from this brief record that the century of peace has been sufficiently charged with alarms and possibilities of conflict as to make its achievement remarkable, and to justify the claim that history furnishes no parallel for so long and consistently successful an unraveling and settlement of difficulties between two great nations. They may claim to have set up in the world a new doctrine of international adjudication, the doctrine of the civil settlement of every form of disagree- ment. They have used high words in the heat of the moment, but they have never come within the danger zone of war and have invariably settled down in a business-like way to find a just and pacific path out of their difficulties. And though the admirable efforts of President Taft and Sir Edward Grey in 19 12 to reduce this century of practice to law and to frame an ironclad scheme of perpetual peace between the two countries failed at the time, it bore fruit when the war broke out in a Treaty which,^ if not ironclad, goes far to accomplish the end they had in view. CHAPTER III THE TWO PEOPLES If we looked only at the positive events of the century of peace it might be assumed that Anglo- American relations were established on so firm a footing that the future could be taken for granted. This is, unfortunately, not the case. It is, per- versely enough, less the case today than it was before the war which, for the first time in history, made the two English-speaking Commonwealths comrades in arms against a common enemy. There has throughout been a startling disagreement be- tween action and temper. Wisdom has prevailed, but the positive spirit of friendliness has been lacking. We have been like two men who have acted righteously towards each other, but grudg- , mgly and snarlingly. We have done well without, ! apparently, wishing well. Our works have been ' better than our will. In the end the better mind in the two countries has always prevailed, but it is the worse mind which has hetn most clamant and most audible, and if the future relations of 29 30 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE the two countries are to be happy, the better mind on both sides must be so organized and strength- ened as to resist all the blows of circumstance and all the gusts of passion. We both have our incen- diaries who act and react on each other, and the task for reasonable minds in both countries is to make our fire-engines so efficient that we can keep the activities of the incendiaries under and reduce the combustible material upon which they work. Some of the causes of discord are ineradicable, but most of them are removable by wise action and many of them are the product of misunderstanding which will yield to frank discussion or are the result of old memories which ought to be decently buried. Let us look at these old memories first. They endure on both sides of the Atlantic, and if they are more noisy on the American side it is for the reason already given, that our external preoccupa- tions have been with the Continent, while those of the United States have been primarily with our- selves. That will not be the case in future. With the disappearance of the one really formidable Continental power and the emergence of the Unite ' States as our only possible rival in world leader- ship, a new situation is created. It is a situation that may be turned to good or evil. We can go THE TWO PEOPLES 31 forward together and In harmony, or we can go forward separately and in discord. The issue is in our hands, and upon our worthiness to deal with it the well-being of human society depends more than on any other factor in the world's affairs. In nursing the memories of the past it may be said that our offense has been passive while that of America has been active. It has assumed in our case the spirit of a resentful parent, who has seen a younger member of the family break away from his paternalism, throw off his authority and trad- tions and establish himself in the world on another pattern of ideas. The fact that he has succeeded has not modified the parental resentment. On the contrary it has aggravated it. The conserva- tive mind of England has never quite forgiven the American Revolution. It might have achieved forgiveness if the Americans had adopted a mon- archical form of government, but the choice of republicanism kept the resentment alive with a permanent motive. The divinity of kingship has long been intellectually repudiated even in the most reactionary circles, but attachment to the mon- archic idea is still deep-rooted and there is a latent if unexpressed conviction, fortified by vague mem- ories of the French Revolution, that republicanism is allied with the powers of darkness, the denial 32 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE of religion, and the abolition of the rights of prop- erty. That conviction continues even though the pecuharly conventional morality of America and the excessive reverence for property which per- vades both America and France make it absurd. It will continue, no doubt, in face of the fact that half the nations of the world have now become republican. Moreover, there has persisted in the same obscurantist quarters a feeling that ultimately the United States, no matter what happened, really in the sight of Heaven owed some measure of obedience and loyalty to us. This has led to a certain minatory and austere attitude, a certain accent of authority and superiority, which have added a subtle poison to our intercourse. And in particular situations of delicacy and difficulty, nota- bly the Civil War, it has broken out into positive hostility to the republic as such. The dominant influences in England did not care twopence about the rights and wrongs of secession; but they did care a great deal about the Union, and the pros- pect of its disruption appealed to all the obscure antagonisms associated with the foundation and growth of the republic. We are bound, out of respect for historic truth and in order to clear the ground, to make this confession; but it is happily only one side, and I THE TWO PEOPLES 33 believe the lesser side, of the truth. Even In the Revolution Itself the best mind of England was wholly In sympathy with the rebel farmers of New England. It was recognized that they were fight- ing the battle of English liberty against a wholly alien spirit of despotism in London, and the speeches of Burke and Chatham live as Immortal records of the fact. It Is certainly open to doubt whether such formidable and unequivocal support to an enemy as Burke's speeches constituted — and still more his great message to the rebels them- selves, the greatest state paper In history according to Lord Acton — would have been unpunished in the recent war with Germany. Burke would almost certainly have been Indicted as a traitor for suc- coring the enemy. The fact that he could take such an attitude with safety is evidence of the weight of public opinion that was behind him in his assaults upon a stupid monarch and a corrupt and unrepresentative Parliament. And in the case of the Civil War popular opinion never shared the bat-eyed hostility of the fashionable world, and there are few Incidents of which we as a nation are entitled to be more proud than the heroic fortitude of the Lancashire cotton spinners and weavers whose starvation only Intensified their devotion to the cause of the North. 34 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE Nor is it true, on the whole, that our statesman- ship has acted from the point of view of the powerful irreconcilable forces of the country. It is not too much to claim that the Monroe doctrine itself emanated from an English statesman in cir- cumstances supremely creditable to us. The crude view that that instrument was forged to keep European kings and especially British kings away from the Western hemisphere will not stand on examination. The Monroe doctrine was a reply to the infamous Holy Alliance which consisted of the monarchs of Prussia, Russia, Austria, and France, but of which the British king was not a member. It had been formed in 1815 by the Czar of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the Emperor of Austria. In 1820 the Czar sent an invitation to the United States to join, and the invitation was declined by John Quincy Adams in a dispatch in which he said: "To stand in firm and cautious independence of all entanglements in the European system has been a cardinal point of their (the United States) policy under every administration." The real nature of the so-called Holy Alliance was then made ap- parent by a protbcol signed at Troppau and by the Treaty of Verona, by the first article of which the contracting Powers, being convinced that the system of representative government is "as incom- THE TWO PEOPLES 35 patible with the monarchical principle as the maxim of the sovereignty of the people with the divine right, engaged mutually in the most solemn manner to use all their efforts to put an end to the system of representative government in whatever country it may exist in Europe, and to prevent its being in- troduced into those countries where it is not yet known." The spearhead of this great testament of mon- archism was directed less against Europe, which was then well under heel, than against the South American peoples then struggling for their free- dom. It was directed also against the United States, and it was Canning, the British Prime Minister, who drew the attention of Richard Rush, the American Minister in London, to the meaning of the threat. Rush communicated Canning's warn- ing to President Monroe, who consulted the aged Thomas Jefferson, the ex-President, who drafted the Declaration of Independence. In his reply Jefferson used these remarkable words : "The ques- tion presented by the letter you have sent me is the most momentous which has been offered to my contemplation since that of Independence. . . . One nation most of all could disturb us. She now offers to lead, aid, and accompany us. . . . With her on our side we need not fear the whole world. 36 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE With her, then, we should most seriously cherish a cordial friendship, and nothing would tend more to unite our affections than to be fighting once more side by side in the same cause." From this incident emerged the famous doctrine of the function of the United States to preserve the inviolability of all American soil. It emerged, not out of hostility to this country, but with its ,warm approval — an approval crowned by the bene- diction of the last of the Great Fathers of the Irepublic. And no unbiased American opinion to- day denies that during the century that has elapsed since the doctrine was laid down, its main security has been the sea-power of Great Britain. Without the open or tacit sanction of that power no chal- lenge to the authority of the doctrine from any external quarter was possible, and it was this con- sideration that stood in the path of the ambition of the last German Kaiser to extend his Empire I in the South American Continent. In any fair discussion of the historic attitude of Great Britain to the United States a weighty entry on the credit I side is due in respect, not merely of the origin and endorsement l^y Britain of the Monroe doc- I trine, but of the practical guarantee given to it by the existence of British sea-power. There are other memories which may fairly be THE TWO PEOPLES 37 recalled as a set-off to the heavy account of the Revolution and the Civil War. The far-reaching ambitions of Napoleon included not only India, but the North American Continent, and it was the British Fleet which stood between him and the foundation of an overseas dominion in Louisiana, just as a hundred years later it stood between the German Kaiser and his hopes of extending his Empire to South America. It was in this con- nection that Jefferson wrote in 1802 that "the day France takes possession of New Orleans we must marry ourselves to the British Fleet and nation." There was no need for the marriage then, for the existence of the British Fleet was enough, but it is significant that Jefferson, so soon after the Rev- olution, could turn with such confidence to the idea of an understanding with England. And the ac- tion of England during the Spanish War was no less friendly and beneficial to the United States. The Continental Powers were almost unanimously hostile to America — Germany, France, and Austria sought to organize a European league in the in- terests of Spain. Great Britain was essential to the design, and Great Britain firmly and emphati- cally declined to have any part in the proposal; not only so, but the refusal to allow the Spanii/i immediate foreign ancestry. This fact, so far from making them indifferent to their nationality, makes them feverishly sensible of it. They want, quite honestly, to be accepted as good Americans, and the novelty of their situation lends a fervor to their "Americanism" which can only mellow with time. From this cause comes that spirit of correctness and convention that strikes the visitor to the coun- try as much as the abounding hospitality and kind- liness of the people. The common European view of the American as a hustling and boastful person is found to be singularly wide of the mark. He is, on the contrary, cordial, quiet in speech and man- ner, and curiously modest in bearing. He takes criticism very well, and has an obvious and un- affected respect for the judgments of the older civ- ilizations in matters touching the mind. With this is coupled a certain precision of social conduct that is much more reminiscent of the England of two generations ago than of the England of today. And that precision is paralleled in political affairs by a respect for convention that amounts almost to a religion and easily becomes a vice. The result is seen in the strange paradox that while the United States is in thought the most in- dividualistic of modern states, it is more subject 54 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE in political action to the impulse of the herd-mind than perhaps any people in history. Tolerant and mild in its personal relations, it can be extraordi- narily intolerant in its collective manifestations. "America," as Mr. P. W. Wilson said in a witty phrase, "is the land of liberty — liberty to keep in step." It may be doubtful of what "American- ism" means in certain emergencies, but when it has made up its mind it moves with the unity and momentum of a herd of bison, and woe to the dissident who crosses its path. This spirit of sub- ordination to the common impulse — the spirit of a nationalism at once intense, youthful, and unsure of itself — has had many remarkable illustrations in recent years, illustrations both admirable and ugly. It was the key to the astonishing voluntary self-denial practiced during the war. The word went out that Americanism demanded that the peo- ple should forego the use of wheaten bread, and the order was obeyed without a murmur. It was declared to be unpatriotic to use petrol for pleas- ure, and on Sunday not a motor was visible in Fifth Avenue. Money was required for the war, and in the remotest corner of the United States the committee of citizens assessed how much each man ought to contribute to the loan, and he con- tributed it or paid the penalty in broken windows THE AMERICAN MIND 55 and public opprobrium. Such a tyranny, not of law, but of public opinion, is without precedent in European experience. It does not always work for worthy ends. It can be exercised in a spirit as hostile to the authentic temper and tradition of "Americanism" as any Czarist system. That was so in the case of the frantic explosion against "Radicalism" last winter, the record of which may be read in the crushing exposure of its outrages, abuses, and follies contained in the memorandum of indignant protest signed by a group of the most distinguished jurists in the United States. CHAPTER V THE ENGLISH MANNER It Is often said, I think with much truth, that the American mind respects English opinion, but Is resentful of the English manner. The two facts are Intelligible enough. What I have called the romantic attachment of Americans to France was, until the war, sufficiently removed from practical affairs to preserve the freshness of a first and immortal love. The Americans adored France as Don Quixote adored the peerless Dulclnea, be- cause she was a creature of the mind unbesmlrched by the contacts of earth. The saying that the good American when he dies goes to Paris em- bodies the feeling with humorous truth. The dif- ference of language, so far from interfering with the affection, served to envelop it in an agreeable strangeness. It is generally assumed that commu- nity of speech is an aid to mutual understanding and friendship. That ought certainly to be the case, but it may be seriously doubted whether Anglo-American relations have not lost more than 56 THE ENGLISH MANNER 57 they have gained from the common medium of intercourse and the ease with which verbal brick- bats can be exchanged across the Atlantic between the journahstic firebrands on both sides. But there is another and much more fundamental reason why the French have been more successful in winning the good-will of Americans than the English. They have as much natural egoism as any people on earth, but in their methods of intercourse they have more subtlety and delicacy, more tact and sensitive- ness to the feelings of others than the English have. The point may be illustrated by an incident of which I was a personal witness in a great Amer- ican city. I had been invited to speak at a dinner of leading citizens, some of them the heads of businesses of world-wide fame. The other guests were to be the British Consul and the French Consul. The British Consul did not appear, and the chairman read from him a bald intimation of the fact that he had another engagement. There was no expression of regret, no wish that the gath- ering would be a pleasant one — nothing but the brusque announcement of the fact that he had something else to do. Nothing was said publicly, but it was as though a contemptuous insult had been flung at the audience. The French Consul, 58 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE who was sitting beside me, turned and raised his eyebrows significantly. "It might have been done more tactfully," he said. "And yet," he went on, "he is a good fellow, and does not mean to hurt." He had hurt, not the sensibilities of the audience only, but still more gravely the country he repre- sented. And while he did not mean to do harm, his offense sprang ultimately from that intolerable air of superiority which the Englishman of a cer- tain type, and, not seldom, of our public-school tradition, affects towards other peoples. The spirit of caste pride which he has learned at home in the social sphere he carries with him abroad into the racial sphere. He himself is often unconscious of what he does. Like the British Consul "he is a good fellow and does not mean to hurt." But the spiritual pride is so ingrained that he is unaware both of it and of its reactions upon others. In a remarkable article on "The Roots of Anti-Briti^' Feeling" which appeared recently in an American journal, Mr. Harold Stearns, one of the libernl school of American publicists, deals with this sub- ject: "The Englishman's feeling that other nations really don't count is, of course, far less strong in its manifestation towards us than towards any THE ENGLISH MANNER 59 other foreigner. But it is replaced by an uncon- scious snobbery, which is perhaps worse; it is, at any rate, more exasperating. No one who has ever traveled on a British steamship going, let us say, to Cape Town can have failed to observe the subtle line of social demarcation between the Eng- lishman and the Colonial. It crops up in the most unexpected ways, but it is always there, and the Colonial is made to feel very definitely that he is an inferior. The Englishman assumes his supe- riority as naturally as he assumes the fact of the British Empire. Similarly in his attitude towards Americans the average Englishman assumes, prob- ably unconsciously, that we are still Colonials, rather capricious Colonials to be sure, and with peculiar, amusing ways of our own, but still Colo- nials. America has hardly become a definite na- tional entity in his consciousness; we do not quite literally exist as a rival nation or as an important factor in the world. We both speak the same lan- guage; we have the same traditions and laws and civilization; we are of one color and blood; we are all Anglo-Saxons — and is it not an Anglo- Saxon world? The Englishman regards an alli- ance with us, at all events common action with us, as perfectly natural, if not indeed inevitable — with \ England doing the directing. I shall not stretch 6o THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE this point, because Americans understand it only too well; it would make us angry if it did not make us laugh. After all, Englishmen are hardly to be blamed for not seeing the point. Our own snobs with money have flattered them to the top of their bent. Yet nationally we are of the mood of Mar' Twain when he wrote 'A Connecticut Yankee' ; it is still true that we regard ourselves as the salt of the earth. And while I do not seek to pass judg- ment on these respective claims to superiority, I may perhaps point out that no genuine Anglo- American entente cordiale can come into existence until England has accepted the fact of America. It is because I for one want that acceptance to come without the bloody intrusion of war, and because so many of my own friends are Englishmen, that I commend to the liberal Englishman's attention these unpalatable truths." This is severe, and it may be in some respects unjust; but it is essentially true, it comes from a friendly pen, and it very faithfully represents the feeling latent in the minds of thousands of Americans who, so far from wishing to be hostile to us, are profoundly concerned to remove the causes of hostility. It is necessary for Englishmen to realize that America is a foreign nation, as proud THE ENGLISH MANNER 6i of its history and achievements as we are proud of ours, perfectly conscious of the place which its resources give it in the world, and whose doctrine of equality makes it peculiarly resentful of the superior or condescending airs of other peoples, especially of peoples whose traditions of caste they have discarded. There are plenty of vices in the American civilization, but there are two vices from which it is conspicuously free. It is free from snobbery on the one hand and from flunkeyism on the other. These are weeds of the Old World that will never grow in that soil. If the rich American desires them he has to come for them to this country, where peerages can still be bought and flunkeyism still enjoyed. But nothing is wider of the truth than the naive view so prevalent in this country that America envies our social discrimina- tions and is conscious of inferiority because it does not enjoy them. "Those English cousins of ours will be the death of me," said a writer in a New York monthly magazine recently. "They are in- corrigible. I had an overwhelming experience with one of them the other day. He was a delightful person and we got on together famously. The talk turned to the purchase of Sulgrave Manor, the old home of the Washington family in England, as an international shrine. My friend told me that 62 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE he had lately visited the place. 'What especially impressed me,' he said, 'was the sight of the ar- morial bearings of the Washington family carved in a great oak beam in the old dining-hall. There in those stars and stripes I saw for the first time the origin of our flag, "old glorious" as you call it. And now,' he added impressively, 'whenever I see the American flag flying I realize that it represents the ideals of an English country gentleman' !" The sensible American laughs at these childlike expressions of our national mind, but he has quite other feelings when the expression assumes the grotesque ofiicial stupidity of offering the K.C.B. to distinguished Americans like J. W. Gerard and General Pershing. That so gauche an affront to American institutions and ideas should be possible is an evidence of the profound misunderstanding of those institutions and ideas that prevails in re- sponsible quarters in this country. It implies that Americans are flattered by our titles, when the keynote of their whole system is the repudiation of them as antiquated follies and the sentiment that men shall be valued as men and not as the wearers of ribbons that any climber can win by skilful touting. From this fundamental note of human equality comes that ease and accessibility which are such THE ENGLISH MANNER 63 noticeable qualities of the American. There is — to employ words I have used elsewhere — no ice to break before you get at him. There is no baf- fling atmosphere of doubt and hesitancy to get through; no fencing necessary to find out on what social footing you are to stand. You are on him at once — or rather he is on you. He comes out into the open, without reserves of manner, and talks "right ahead" with the candor and ease of a man who is at home in the world and at home with you. He is free alike from intellectual prig- gishness and social aloofness. He is just a plain man talking to a plain man on equal terms. It is the manner of the New World and of a demo- cratic society in which the Chief of the State is plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of a continent this year and may go back to his business as a private citizen next year. It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick Douglass, the Ne- gro preacher, paid to Lincoln. "He treated me as a man," said Douglass after his visit to the President. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our skins." It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose I that Lincoln had to make any effort to achieve such ^ a triumph of good manners. He treated Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man and 64 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE an equal, and because the difference in the color of their skins had no more to do with their essen- tial relationship than the difference in the color of their ties or the shape of their boots. The direct- ness and naturalness of the American manner give the sense of a man who is born free — free from the irritating restraints, embarrassments, and arti- ficialities of a society in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail as they still prevail in most European countries. Our stiffness and aloofness are due to the absence of this primal freedom of intercourse. We are uncertain about each other — not about each other as human be- ings, but about each other's social status. We have got the spirit of feudalism still in our bones, and our public-school system, our titles, and our established-church system all tend to keep it alive, all work to cut up society into social orders which are a survival from the days before democracy. And much of the anti-British feeling in America is due to the fact that we carry our feudalism abroad where it is neither understood nor appre- ciated. We succeed in giving the impression that we are the superior branch of the family visiting a poor relation, who says "cant" where we say "cahnt" and "gotten" where we say "got," and perfectly inexcusable things like that. It often hap- THE ENGLISH MANNER 65 pens, as Lowell showed long ago, that these ap- parent departures from decorum are sound English which we have dropped and the Americans have retained. It is so with "gotten," which was used by so recent and reputable an English writer as Anthony Trollope. But the point is that we ought to remember that the American practice in speech as in other matters is not necessarily inferior to our own because it differs from ours. On this subject Mr. Wister quotes an amusing dialogue : "Why do you call your luggage baggage?" asks the Englishman. "Why do you call your baggage luggage?" re- plies the American. "Why don't you say treacle?" "Because we call it molasses." "How absurd to speak of a car when you mean a carriage!" "We don't mean a carriage; we mean a car." And in another connection he records the case of an Englishman who turned up at a dinner party, to which he had been invited, in a tweed suit. Like the British Consul, again, he probably "meant no harm," but it bore the construction so common in regard to the English manner in America that anything is good enough for the inferior branch of the family. In this case it was suitably rebuked: 66 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE "Oh, I see you haven't your dress suit with you," said the host. "The man will take you upstairs. One of mine will fit you. We'll wait." There is a formality and correctness of behavior among Americans which Is acutely outraged by the ap- pearance of disrespect on the part of foreigners. It is felt not so much as a personal slight as a slight to their civilization, and must be referred to those considerations on which stress has already been laid. The point was expressed to me very simply, but effectively, by a lady in the Middle West (who, by the way, was proud of her Cornish origin). Speaking of some local feeling in regard to the casual and thoughtless action of a distin- guished visitor at a gathering in his honor, she said, "You see, we are a new people and we are a little sensitive in matters touching our self-resp' — especially where visitors from older countries are concerned." It is unfortunate that, under the conditions of our diplomatic service, which limit the supply of men to a narrow and extremely conservative circle of wealthy and officially minded persons, we have rarely sent to Washington to represent us men who understand and ""sympathize with the American Idea or appreciate American institutions. During the war many of the official visitors to the country THE ENGLISH MANNER 67 did us no good service, and the tour of one no- torious gentleman has become a legend which no English visitor to America today will fail to hear about. In the past America has sent to London to represent it a succession of its most notable citizens, men of intellect, character, and distin- guished public service, like Charles F. Adams, Russell Lowell, John Hay, J. H. Choate, W. H. Page, and the recent able and eloquent repre- sentative, Mr. J. W. Davis. With the exception of Lord Bryce, whom the Americans still charac- teristically call Mr. Bryce and the memory of whose tenure of office is preserved with singular affection, we have usually sent to Washington men trained in the vicious atmosphere of European diplomacy, limited, formal persons, ignorant of the American spirit and often contemptuous of that spirit if they were not ignorant. No graver wrong than this can be done to Anglo-American relations. The measure of the wrong can be appreciated from the remarkable and salutary influence which Lord Bryce's term of service had on American feeling. It can be confidently said that nothing in recent years has done anything like so much to improve the relations of the two countries, and it is regrettable that that admirable departure was not pursued. The American people have a deep 68 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE and sincere reverence for intellect and character, and respond more readily perhaps than any other nation to the compliment implied in sending to them the best we have to represent us. We need in Washington, not Foreign Office officials, but great Englishmen who understand America, love it, and sympathize with its culture and ideas. In estimating the influences that hav^e to be reckoned with in this connection, account must be taken of the American woman. In spite of the enormous infusion of foreign elements, the pre- vailing moral sentiment of America is distinctly Puritan. In the spiritual sense it is not more Puri- tan than England — perhaps not so much. The religious motive is singularly attenuated. Few of the churches in New York, for example, are open for service more than once on Sundays, and a dis- tinguished pastor said to me that he had come to the conclusion that music was the only contact with spiritual things that the American retained. But while materialism has overwhelmed the religious motive, it is materialism strongly permeated with moral ideas. The gospel of personal fitnesss, of becoming social cowduct, of cleanliness and so- briety, is enforced with the passion of a religion. In this respect Mrs. Eddy, with her Science of Health, is one of the most representative products THE ENGLISH MANNER 69 of the country, and the extraordinary success of her movement reflects accurately the national spirit and ideals. From this moral motive has come, very largely, the phenomenon of Prohibition. Other factors have contributed to its success — the Negro question in the South, for example, industrial con- siderations in the North, and so on. But the main factor has been moral, coupled with the difficulty of restraining "the trade" by any legislative enact- ments. It is, I believe, true that a large proportion of the States "went dry" through "wet" votes — that is, through the votes of moderate drinkers who had, after repeated experiments, come to the conclusion that no terms could be made with the drink trade and that it was necessary to sacrifice their own habit for the general well-being. It is a characteristic illustration of that collective mind, working voluntarily and even tyrannically, which is so constant a feature of the American spirit. When it is fully seized with an idea it stampedes with irresistible force and tolerates no obstruction. In this moral revolt against alcohol the Ameri- can woman has been the dominant influence. And her suspicion of England is largely based on the drinking customs of the country. Two causes have especially operated in our disfavor. In the past, the "remittance man" — the ne'er-do-weel, shipped 70 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE abroad with an allowance — was often the only type of Englishman of which she had any knowl- edge, and she judged our standards by his. And the experience of our drinking customs brought back by the American soldiery has confirmed her in her disapproval. She has been shocked partic- ularly at the revelation of the widespread habit of public drinking among women. It represents the last term in degeneracy to the mind of a coun- try where, even before Prohibition, the spectacle of a woman drinking or a barmaid serving in a public saloon was practically unknown. If in this brief glance at the temperamental and other sources of friction between the two peoples emphasis has been laid upon the American case against us rather than upon our case against the Americans, it is not because we have no complaints to make, but because, in working for a better com- mon understanding and sympathy, it is important that we should be sensible of our own infirmities rather than theirs. At present the reverse is the case. And fortunately there are many able Amer- ican pens engaged in telling Americans where they fail in their dealings with us. CHAPTER VI POLITICAL DISCORDS In the previous chapters I have dealt with the disturbing temperamental aspects of Anglo-Amer- ican relations. In giving them first attention I have not done so because there are no serious practical difficulties, but because I believe such difficulties as there are will disappear if we can establish the spirit of good-will and good intention on both sides. In the speech to which I have previously referred Lord Grey said "there is no solid ground for disagreement between this country and America." That is substantially true, but there are abundant grounds for disagreement and worse if there is ill-will and bad temper. To understand what those grounds are it may be useful to call in representative American witnesses themselves. The first I shall summon is Mr. William Randolph Hearst. In political Intelligence Mr. Hearst re- veals a violent, emotional energy unsustained by any philosophy of life or government. He is held 71 72 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE in low repute intellectually, but he wields a jour- nalistic power as great in the North American continent as Lord Northcliffe's is in England. He owns a series of important morning and evening newspapers in many of the great cities from New York and Boston in the East to San Francisco in the West. On internal affairs his influence is often disinterested and public-spirited; on external affairs it is that of the common thoughtless jingo journal- ist, appealing to any violent emotion that will swav the mob. He has one constant motive. It is hos- tility to this country. The cause of that hostility is obscure, but the explanation generally offered to me in America was that it was the result of some personal slight, a consideration that governs most of his public activities and animosities, as for ex- ample in the case of his vendetta against President Wilson. In his newspapers on January 24th last, Mr. Hearst wrote an article over his own signa- ture replying to one I had published in which I hp' ventured the opinion that the one serious practical obstacle to good relations with the United States was the Irish question. Mr. Hearst combated this view. "An Englishman," he said, "never sees any- thing but what he wants to see, and Mr. Gardiner has been wholly unable to see the real cause of the attitude of Americans towards England." He then POLITICAL DISCORDS 73 proceeded to tell his readers what are the causes of that attitude. I shall endeavor to summarize them fairly. The endeavor will not occupy much space, for Mr. Hearst's indictment consisted mainly of a whirl of violent words from which it is diffi- cult to extract any meaning except that he dislikes us. He denies that it is the Irish question that is "the basis of America's antipathy to England." "It is the American question. "It is the self-respect so persistently offended by England which they entertain for themselves as a people [this sentence is misty; but the meaning is tolerably clear]. "It is the knowledge of the fact that they saved England from total defeat and that this service has not even been acknowledged, let alone appreciated. "It is resentment of England's affectation of lordship over the rest of the world and England's arrogant disposition to employ the United States as a useful tool for the furtherance of her own selfish purposes without regard for the interests of the United States "It is the feeling that there is no such thing as fair friendship with England, no such thing as equable association, no such thing as beneficial co- operation. It is the increasing understanding of 74 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE England's purposes and policies and of that domi- nant fact in history — that England has endeavored to destroy, and always succeeded in destroying, every great power that rivalled her in trade, com- merce, and industry, and national growth or inter- national influence, first Spain, then Holland, then France, then Germany. "It is ... " And so on to the extent of nearly a column of general invective. Not until we reach the close do we find a specific charge which has any rela- vance to practical affairs — "It is the conviction that Japan will be the next active antagonist of the United States, and that the secret treaty which existed between England and Japan before the war will be proved to be still in existence if ever war shall occur between the United States and Japan. "Americans do not dislike Englishmen, and they do not waut to dislike England. "But Americans devotedly lov^e their own coun- try and they must necessarily feel a certain antago- nism to a nation an'd a government which seem continually to endeavor to take advantage of the American people and to attempt to undermine the POLITICAL DISCORDS 75 position and the power and the progress of this American nation." Apart from the reference to Japan, It will be seen that Mr. Hearst's indictment is one of gen- eral suspicions of our motives which it would be profitless to answer. It is intrinsically as unfair and mischievous as the similar attacks on the United States which Mr. Bottomley periodically indulges in. It would be repudiated by intelligent and fair- minded opinion in America as emphatically as those diatribes are resented by intelligent and fair-minded opinion here. But, again like them, it is significant of the widespread ignorance and vague hate that exist for the exploitation of reckless journalists. And at the back of the indictment there lies a real antagonism of ideals. That antagonism is stated with precision by a writer of a wholly different calibre and outlook. In the article to which I have already referred, Mr. Harold Stearns traces the roots of anti-British feeling in America to Impe- rialism. Historically and spiritually the United States is opposed to the exploitation of subject peoples, and its own circumstances have not tempted it to depart from its traditions. The ad- venture into Imperialism in the case of the Philip- pines, so far from inaugurating a new era, has 76 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE very effectually checked any spirit of external an- nexation that may have existed under the essen- tially imperialistic influence of Theodore Roosevelt. The idea of self-government is the keynote of the American system, and a people indoctrinated with this idea is inevitably critical of a system founded on the opposite principle of Imperialism. Edu- cated American opinion readily admits that the record of the United States is not spotless. The story of the Mexican war of 1846-7 is sufficiently discreditable to check any undue self-esteem, and the treatment of the Indian, that native race which has succumbed so completely to the invader, is not a subject on which they can feel any pride. It ought, on the contrary, to chasten their censorious- ness in regard to our own record. But the broad fact remains that the two systems are fundamentally opposed, and it is difficult for Englishmen to understand how British Imperialism looks to the American mind, or the disastrous ef- fects of incidents like Amritsar upon American sympathies. Nothing has so aggravated the anti- British feeling as the practical results of the Peace Treaty, and "the spectacle of England getting away with everything that's not tied down." The belief that England has done well out of the war is at the back of much of the prevailing hostility. POLITICAL DISCORDS 77 There is enough apparent truth in it to serve the purposes of the anti-British propagandists. And selfish interests no less than abstract idealism are offended. "How," it is asked, "can these great captains of the American oil industry have felt when they read in the same newspaper of England's acquiring all the Persian concessions and that the United States had been graciously offered the lemon of the mandate over Armenia?" And there are China and Japan. The future of these two countries is one of the capital concerns of the world. And in that concern events are un- happily tending to put Great Britain and America on opposite sides. Nowhere have British policy and American policy come into such clear compari- son as in the case of China. Our record in regard to that country is not good. The story of the opium war remains a black page in our annals, our commercial and financial operations in China have been unaccompanied by any large motive of Chi- nese regeneration, and the alliance with Japan has made us practical aiders and abetters in that coun- try's imperialistic policy towards China. America, on the other hand, has an excellent record in regard to China. It has a genuine affection for the people, which no one who knows them will find difficult to understand. The Chinese have come to look upon 78 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE the Americans as the best friends they have. They see in them a people who have no territorial am- bitions to serve, who have stood for the integrity of the country and for the policy of the open door. It was the Americans alone who renounced their share of the Boxer indemnity; and among the influences that have since the war caused the la- mentable reaction in America against permanent association with Europe, few have been more powerful than the decision of the Paris Conference to countenance the aggression of Japan in Shan- tung. That incident has aroused little indignation in this country, but in America it is accepted as typical of the Peace Treaty, and more than any- thing stamps that Treaty, for the American mind, with the hall-mark of the old unrighteous diplo- macy of Imperialism. This feeling is, of course, intensified by the dis- trust and dislike of Japan that are so prevalent. Even in the East this distrust and dislike are imme- diately apparent. Two questions are put to the English visitor with unfailing regularity. The first Is, "Why don't you settle with Ireland?" The second Is, "Are you going to continue the Japanese Alliance?" As one travels West this preoccupation with Japan Increases, and in the Far West It easily dominates all other international political considera- POLITICAL DISCORDS 79 tions. The reason is not far to seek. The Chinese in America represent no nationalistic or ulterior aim, but the Japanese come with the outlook of a highly developed and intense nationalism, and America justly or unjustly sees in them a menace to its civilization. It may seem odd that a country which has been the melting-pot of all the nations of Europe should be alarmed at the idea of Japa- nese immigration. But the white man, no matter where he comes from, is easily assimilated, while the yellow man remains a race apart with char- acters that seem fixed, with a civilization fundamen- tally alien from that of the white man, and the Americans are sufficiently afflicted with the Negro question without wishing to add yellow to their color problem. And apart from the domestic aspect of the mat- ter, which chiefly touches the western seaboard, there is the larger shadow over the future of the Pacific involved in the imperialistic policy of Japan and its undisguised and so far astonishingly suc- cessful purpose of securing the control of China as .the means of establishing an Asiatic hegemony. /^The naval development of Japan clouds the hither- ! to serene sky of the Pacific, and it is not to be i wondered at that Americans, turning eastward and seeing the naval supremacy of Great Britain, and So THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE turning westward and seeing the sea power of Japan, look with concern upon the alliance of the two powers, so dissimilar in race, in religion, in sympathy, and alike only in pursuit of the Imperial idea. The alliance with Japan — an alliance that has never commanded the popular approval of the English people — may have been defensible when Imperialist Russia seemed a menace to our Asiatic interests. It is utterly indefensible now that that menace has disappeared. Its influence has been thoroughly vicious, and it has made us at least a consenting party to the ambitions of Japan in China and criminally silent about such infamies as those practised by Japan in Korea. But the weightiest objection to it is the fact that it offers a fatal barrier to the establishment of a sound under- standing with America. If the League of Nations is to become a reality, alliances such as that with Japan have no meaning except a sinister one, and one of the first steps that a British Government, desiring to cleanse the Anglo-American atmosphere, must take is the denunciation of an alliance that ties our hands in China and is a menace not only to the friendship of the English-speaking peoples, but to the pacific development of the world. If this course is not practicable, there is an alterna- tive that is both practical and obvious. The Treaty POLITICAL DISCORDS 8i is primarily concerned with China. In that Treaty China herself is clearly entitled to be included. She is at least as much concerned in her own future as Japan or Great Britain are. And with China, the United States also should be a signatory. The legitimate interests of America in the Pacific and the development of China are at least as impor- tant as our own or those of Japan, and they have in them no element of privilege such as that which vitiates Anglo-Japanese policy. But in spite of Mr. Hearst's assertion, it remains true that the gravest source of anti-British feeling in America is the Irish question. Indeed, Mr. Hearst's own papers prove it. In his crusade against England there is no subject he employs so insistently as English rule in Ireland. When I was in Boston last autumn a whole issue of his paper there was devoted to a broadside against England on this theme. The reason is simple. Alike to our friends and foes in America the Irish question is the governing fact of Anglo-American relations. In a recent speech in the House of Commons Sir Edward Carson, referring to the Irish question, said: "Let America mind her own business and we will mind ours." Until we realize that the Irish question is an American question as much as the Negro question is an American question. 82 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE we shall miss its capital meaning. The idea that in this matter the United States is an impertinent outsider Interfering in a domestic British quarrel is a complete misreading of the situation. The United States is concerned about it because it is the most vital of its domestic issues. A moment's reflection will make this apparent. Of the hundred ^ ^millions of people composing the nation, the large yjj% ^ majority are either foreign born or the children of foreign parents. The "loo-per-cent. American" of whom we hear so much is a rare bird in the land. Of the various broad categories of the popu- lation, a tenth is Negro, an eighth is German in origin and sympathies, not less than a tenth is Irish, and there are in addition large elements of Poles, Russians, Italians, Portuguese, Scandina- vians, Greeks, and Jews of different nationalities. Among these different families that are absorbed or being absorbed in the general currency of the race, the Irish forms the most solid, coherent, de- ', tached mass. It alone preserves an imperium in \ imperio, alone brings into the American system the I antagonisms of the Old World, alone keeps aflame _' the passion of "old, unhappy, far-off things." In the midst of the" confusion of races, foreigners among foreigners, accommodating themselves to a icommon life, the Irish alone bring a violent extra- POLITICAL DISCORDS 83 territorial loyalty and a fanatical idea. The loy- alty is to Ireland and the idea is revenge upon its ancient enemy. And in all their political activities these two con- siderations govern them. Much more than the Germans, who take little part in public affairs and are universally regarded as quiet, industrious citi- zens, they are the true hyphenated American — the Irish-American whose spiritual home is elsewhere and to whom the United States is only the stage for the secular battle. One man with a conviction, said Stuart Mill, is more powerful than ninety-nine who have only interests. But the Irish are not one in a hundred. They are at least one in ten. They move as a vehement stream through the con- fused and tumultuous life of the nation. They are not the under-dog. They permeate the whole structure of society. Their great immigration took place two generations ago, and in the interval they have established themselves in the seats of the mighty. They are powerful in finance, in law, in literature, in the services. It was an Irish-AmerI-{i can Admiral who was discovered to be the antago- nist of Admiral Sims's pro-English enthusiasm. It is a judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Judge Cohalan, who is the most indus- trious, and I must add venomous, assailant of this 84 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE country in the Press and on the platform. When I went to Princeton to see the football match be- tween Harvard and Princeton it was a young Irish three-quarter back who was the hero of the game. The police force is mainly Irish, and, above all, the political machine is Irish. The political genius of the race has no rival in any other element of the community, and there is hardly a great city whose caucus is not dominated by the Irish in- fluence. If the mayor is not Irish, the party "boss" is Irish. No ambitious politician, whether Demo- crat or Republican, can afford to ignore so deci- sive a factor of success, whether the goal in view is the Mayoralty of the city, the Governorship of the State, or the Presidency of the Republic. When Mr. Hiram Johnson, of San Francisco, appeared on the horizon as a possible Presidential candidate his first step to forward his prospect was to go to Boston and make a violent anti-British speech. It was not, probably, because he wanted to make it, but because he had to make it as an evidence that on the main Irish-American issue "he was right." He had to twist the lion's tail to put himself in the running. And most of the tail-twisting, political and journalistic alike, has its origin in the same motive. It would be foolish to suppose that the average POLITICAL DISCORDS 85 decent American likes this state of things. He hates it. He wants the political atmosphere of his country to be cleansed of this poison gas. He wants American domestic affairs to be settled on wholesome American considerations, and not by considerations that have their roots in a couple of islands three thousand miles away. And it is for this reason that he asks you in tones of almost anguished entreaty, "Why don't you settle the Irish question?" He is not impertinent; he is merely selfish. He is not poking his nose into our business, as Sir Edward Carson seems to think: he is acutely sensitive about his own business. And it is not the pro-Irish who ask the question most anxiously: it is the pro-English — those who are most eager to get the grit out of the Anglo-Ameri- can machine and to set it working smoothly and sweetly for the advantage of both countries and of the world in general. While the Irish grievance continues our friends in America are helpless. On the one hand they hate and deplore the virus that Irishism introduces into their affairs, great and small; on the other hand they can exercise no con- trol over the spring from which the virus issues. They know that while the Irish disease continues it will break out in ugly blotches upon the face of America. When the source of the disease is dried 86 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE up — assuming that it is dried up by the wisdom of this country and not in defiance of its obstinate hostility — they will know how to deal with its sequelae at home. They will then say to the Irish quite firmly that they have to decide whether they are Irish or Americans, and that collective spirit that works so decisively in American affairs will do the rest. It is well to remember that the United States has inherited its two great troubles from England. It was the English slaver that brought the Negro to America for his own profit. It was English policy that depopulated Ireland and sent a nation with bitterness in its heart to poison the life of America. We cannot cancel the one mis- chief; but we alone can cancel the other. And until we do it we can never achieve that English-speaking solidarity which is the hope of those who wish the world well. CHAPTER VII SEA POWER In the background of the minds of all, whether English or Americans, who are concerned about the future of Anglo-American relations there lurks a shadow at once menacing and hopeful — menac- ing as a danger If It Is left unchecked, hopeful as a means of such a dramatic act of faith and mutual confidence as would strike the Imagination of both countries and bring a new spirit Into their Inter- course. It Is the shadow of sea power. The im- portance. In the past and present unstable structure of the world, of sea power to this country needs no argument. The British Commonwealth exists In virtue of that power. Take It away and it is dissolved into Its elements. There are powerful Influences in the United States which say that that dissolution is desirable and ultimately Inevitable. The view Is not limited to the crude anti-British propaganda of Mr. Hearst. It Is shared by much of the intellectual liberal opinion which, imbued with the tradition of the United States, is hostile 87 88 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE to Imperialism as the enemy of the self-governing development of human society. It is not the British Commonwealth that they dislike: it is the British Empire. They understand and approve the rela- tionship of the mother country and the self-govern- ing dominions — Canada, Australia, South Africa. They neither understand nor approve Crown Col- ony and imperialistic government, and they are able to point to the United States' example in Cuba and the Philippines as evidence that their country does practise what it preaches. "We want to jus- tify our civilization," says one of these critics, "but we have little desire to extend it by force. We want other peoples to agree with us; we don't particularly want them to become part of us. Eng- lishmen," he proceeds, "ought to undergo a trans- valuation of values. What the world needs is not the British Empire, but English civilization. Far from having nothing to learn from England, America, with the rest of the world, has every- thing to learn from her — justice, a vivid sense of personal and civil rights, the infallible expediency of free speech, political good sense, the whole art of compromise, sportsmanship, and good taste. America can take cafe well enough of the material- istic task of seeing that the Anglo-Saxon world continues to exist; to England is reserved the more SEA POWER 89 important job of proving that Anglo-Saxon civiliza- tion is worth existing." There is profound truth in this, and no English liberal will regard Imperialism as anything more than a means to that end of national self-expres- sion and independence which is at the root of his political philosophy. But on the other hand no English liberal would admit that the British Em- pire can be liquidated in a spasm of emotion. It might not mean disaster to ourselves; but it would, in the present circumstances of the world, certainly mean disaster to the subject peoples concerned. India, for example, has many grievances against the British raj, but it has no desire to substitute for it the kind of devastating rule which Japan has established in Korea. And while the British system, whether as Empire or Commonwealth, endures, indeed so long as Great Britain remains an island power, security at sea will be its main concern. This is not a fact for which we need apologize. We cannot help ourselves, for we live by the sea. Our antagonisms have always had their ultimate root in some menace to that security. Bismarck said that hostility between Great Britain and Germany was against the nature of things, for "the elephant could not fight the whale," and for centuries our relations with the German people, 90 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE even with Prussia, were more secure than those with any other great European nation. It was only when the elephant resolved to become a whale as well as an elephant that the sky darkened and the catastrophe came. And now that the German whale is dead blubber, lying on the floor of the North Sea, British sea power is more unchallenged than it has ever been in history. Thoughtless people have said that we were unprepared for the late war. In reality, as the events showed, we were the only people who were prepared for the war, for the British Navy was, from the beginning, incomparably the most efficient factor in the strug- gle. But relatively supreme as the British Navy was in 19 14, it is immeasurably more supreme to- day when its only serious rival has disappeared. That supremacy is not a matter for mere exal- tation: it is a matter also for grave reflection. British security is one thing; an unchallenged Brit- ish hegemony of the seas is quite another. Nothing is more certain than that, left to the unregulated working of events, that hegemony will not be per- manently accepted. The world will not consent to live by the sanction of the British Fleet any more than it would ct)nsent to live by the sanction of the Prussian sword. The idea of a League of Nations which leaves the undisputed sovereignty SEA POWER 91 of the sea In the hands of one power is an Idle dream, and the great task of statesmanship is to reconcile British security with a sovereignty of the sea that the general sense of the world accepts. The achievement of this supreme task is in the hands of the Anglo-American community, and in achieving it each has much to gain and nothing to lose. In achieving It also they will lay the founda- tion stone of a pacific world-structure that will survive all the vicissitudes of the future and make the League of Nations an impregnable reality. In considering what is at stake it is necessary to face certain plain unpalatable facts. In the past century practically all the grave discords between the two countries have arisen in connection with the sea. It was so in the case of the war of 18 12- 14; It was so during the Civil War; and In the early stages of the late war the chief obstacle to full American sympathy with the cause of the Allies was the feeling provoked, especially among the trad- ing community, by the rigorous exercise of the right of search at sea. Generally speaking, it Is true that the United States accepted British sea power with- out reserve. It recognized that that power was an essential consequence of the European system, that It was exercised with moderation and pre- served a certain code of law at sea, that its exis- 92 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE tence was a defensive shield behind which the Monroe doctrine could function, and that in its absence its own naval problem would assume a more serious character. But the war has pro- foundly changed the outlook. The German chal- lenge has gone, and all the sea power of the Continent combined would be hardly more formi- dable against the British Navy than a fleet of fishing smacks. In all the rest of the world, leaving out the United States, there is only one other Navy that counts, that of Japan, and Great Britain is an ally of Japan. Moreover, the war has shown that the invention of the submarine has fundamen- tally changed the conditions of sea warfare. It organizes anarchy in place of the semblance of law that prevailed before, and in that anarchy the neutral trader is more certainly doomed than the belligerent warship. In these circumstances, the United States will inevitably be compelled to revise its whole attitude on the subject of sea power. It is, in population, natural resources, and accumulated wealth, the most powerful nation on earth, and it cannot ignore the grave responsibilities that rest on it for the protection of its national interests. It is committed by the Monroe doctrine to the defence of the whole American continent, and it has two oceans SEA POWER 93 to police, with the British Navy dominant in the one and the Japanese Navy in the other. Its posi- tion is complicated by the British possessions, not only on the mainland, but still more in the Carrib- bean Sea. Obviously, its dependence on the good- will of Great Britain, not to speak of Japan, cre- ates a situation that a great and proud nation cannot permanently accept. It will be compelled, If not now, then at some future and not very dis- tant time, to provide itself with sufficient guarantees for its own defence. It is not difficult to conceive a jingo President, ready to sacrifice anything for a renewal of power, inflaming the whole continent with a naval panic, perhaps against Japan, and inaugurating a ship-building programme that will seem to challenge the British supremacy at sea. We know what would follow — the familiar cry of *'two keels to one," the frenzy of the Incendiary Press In both countries, the gathering excitement, the "incidents" — Morocco, Agadir, Bosnia, and the rest under other names — perilously passed, and the final "Inevitable" catastrophe. There are wicked men and Insane men in both countries who would welcome that final catastrophe to civiliza- tion. If they are to be defeated, they must be defeated now, when the sky Is unclouded and the duty Is clear. They can be defeated only in one 94 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE way, by an ironclad agreement that rules out the possibility of a naval competition ever arising be- tween the two countries. There is happily in our joint records a noble inspiration. Within a year of the close of the war of i8 12-14 Monroe, the United States Secretary of State, wrote as follows to the American Min- ister in London : "The information you give of orders having been issued by the British Government to increase its naval force on the lakes is confirmed by intelli- gence from that quarter of measures having been actually adopted for the purpose. It is evident, if each party augments its force there with a view to obtaining the ascendancy over the other, that vast expense will be incurred and the danger of collision augmented in like degree. The President is sin- cerely desirous to prevent an evil which it is pre- sumed is equally to be deprecated by both Govern- ments. He therefore authorizes you to propose to the British Government such an arrangement re- specting the naval force to be kept on the lakes by both Governments as will demonstrate their pacific policy and secure their peace. He is willing to confine it on each side to a certain moderate number of armed vessels, and the smaller the num- SEA POWER 95 ber the more agreeable to him; or to abstain alto- gether from an armed force beyond that used for the revenue. You will bring this subject under the consideration of the British Government imme- diately after the receipt of this letter." From this proposal sprang that momentous agreement known as the Rush-Baget agreement, by which the naval force to be maintained by each Government on the Great Lakes was limited, on Lake Ontario, to one vessel not exceeding one hun- dred tons burden and armed with one 1 8-pound cannon; on the upper lakes to two vessels of the same burden and armament; and on Lake Cham- plain to one similar vessel. All other armed ves- sels on the lakes were to be forthwith dismantled and no other vessels of war were to be then built or armed. The records of nations will be searched in vain for any act so wise, so courageous, or so rich in beneficial results. It stands as the crowning achievement of the English-speaking peoples in the art of statesmanship. In pursuance of it, the American-Canadian frontier of nearly four thou- sand miles has remained for a century without fort, or gun, or warship, or sentry, from end to end. And uninterrupted peace has been the fruit of that 96 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE act of faith and mutual goodwill. In the light of this dazzling witness, the monumental lie of the war-mongers, Si vis pacem para helium, shrivels to dust. Speaking of the achievement, nearly a cen- tury afterwards, in the House of Commons at Ottawa, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then Prime Minister of Canada, said: "If my voice could be heard that far, I would presume to say to our American friends : There may be a spectacle perhaps nobler yet than that of a united continent, a spectacle that would astound the world by its novelty and grandeur — the spec- tacle of two peoples living in amity side by side for a distance of 4,000 miles along a line which is hardly visible in many quarters, with no cannon, no guns frowning across it, with no fortresses on either side, with no armament one against another, but living in harmony and mutual confidence, and with no other rivalry than that of generous emula- tion in the arts of peace. To the Canadian people I would say that if it is possible for us to obtain such relations between these young and growing nations, Canada wiU have rendered to Old Eng- land, the Mother of Nations, nay to the whole British Empire, a service unequalled in its present SEA POWER 97 effect and still more in its far-reaching conse- quence." The opportunity has come for an enlarged and more splendid affirmation of the sacrament of a century ago. If at the end of a war in which we had been foes, our forefathers could rise to so grand an argument, it ought not to be difficult for us today, after a war in which we have been com- rades, to follow and better their example. Then the lead came from Washington. The circum- stances today would dictate that it should come from London, and that it should come in the shape of a proposal to pool the naval resources of the two nations and to dedicate them, not to any selfish national interest merely, but to the League of Na- tions and the enduring peace of the world. It is not necessary to dwell on the material gain of such a compact. The present cost of the Navy is suf- ficiently oppressive; but it is a trifle compared with what would be involved in the unhappy event of a competition with a nation so inexhaustibly en- dowed as the United States. Nor need we do more than hint at the incalculable strain which such a competition would put upon the Overseas Do- minions, Australia, South Africa, and especially Canada. When the issue was between Great Brit- 98 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE ain and Germany their course was clear: an issue between the two English-speaking families would be infinitely complex. But the overshadowing con- sideration Is the effect which such a compact as that suggested would have upon Anglo-American relations. It would establish them upon the im- pregnable rock of a common faith and a common purpose. It would rout the war-mongers of both countries finally and irrevocably. And the an- nouncement that the Anglo-American peoples had taken a step which would make naval war hence- forth impossible would strike a deathblow at com- petitive armaments generally, stablize the world on a peace basis, and turn its face confidently to the light. CHAPTER VIII THE FUTURE Perhaps the most formidable obstacle to the achievement of that good feeling which is the desire of the enlightened opinion of both countries is the popular tendency to dramatize nations as characters in a play. This one is the bold bad baron, and that the knightly and chivalrous hero of romance. The roles change with circumstances, the bad baron of the last generation being the knightly hero of this, according as he seems to be with us or against us. Since August, 19 14, for example, Russia has passed through the whole gamut of the stage. Anglo-American relations have suffered much from this subjective idealism, and a more prosaic and reasonable view of each other is a necessary pre- liminary to appreciating the task before us. There are two popular ideas of the American. One pic- tures him comprehensively as an aggressive person who talks through his nose, always carries a six- shooter, lives on cocktails and "quick lunches," and worships at the shrine of the Almighty Dollar. 99 loo THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE The other pictures him, equally comprehensively, as a Puritan son of the Pilgrim Fathers, sublimely indifferent to persecution, romantically disinterested, now breaking the tyranny of kings and now burst- ing the bonds of the slave. Both views are equally grotesque. There are swashbucklers in America and there are still Pilgrim Fathers in America; but the mass of the people is like the mass of other peoples, infinitely mixed in character and motive, good and bad, kindly and unkindly, concerned about very commonplace things, struggling, like others, for success in life, enjoying, like others, the pleas- ures of life, subject, like others, in times of stress to waves of collective emotion, capable, perhaps more than some, of rising with circumstance to a certain elevation of moral purpose and equally capable of lapsing from that elevation. And the popular American dramatization of our- selves is no less misleading. It sees us as the his- toric persecutor of the innocent and the helpless, a sort of coarse ogre of a fellow, who having been whipped by the New England farmers has nursed a grudge against America ever since and is filled with envy of its independence and prosperity. It is not a recognizable likeness. "Rarely, indeed, in the history of mankind," wrote Charles Francis Adams, the American Minister in London during THE FUTURE loi the Civil War, "has there been a more creditable exhibition of human sympathy, and what is known as altruism, than that now witnessed in Lancashire. The common folk of England, Lincoln's 'plain people,' workless and hungry, felt what the wealthier classes refused to believe, that the cause at issue in America was the right of a working- man to his own share in the results of his toil. That cause, they instinctively knew, was somehow their cause and they would not betray it. So no organized cry went up to break the blockade which, while it shut up cotton, was throttling slavery." We are entitled to have facts like these, as well as the stupidity of George III and Lord North, recorded in the American picture of ourselves. The first step to a better and more intelligent understanding is to tear up these comic valentines of each other. We are neither of us ogres or saints. We are both quite ordinary, normal com- munities of human beings, containing every variety of opinion and swayed by every variety of interest. In both there are wise elements and unwise, reac- tionaries and revolutionaries, liberals and conserva- tives, every shade of nationalism and every shade of internationalism. Sometimes the wise elements in each get the upper hand and sometimes the unwise get the upper hand, and the chief task be- 102 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE fore us is so to organize the better mind of the two countries that it shall be permanently and not intermittently dominant in their common affairs. As a means to this end, it Is necessary to remove the specific causes of misunderstanding and antago- nism that impede the path to the goal. While these causes remain as inflammable material in our midst, danger remains. But no less important Is the clarifying of the common atmosphere. Given a spirit of good temper and goodwill, the practical issues will solve themselves. Without that spirit their removal will only change the ground of discord. In approaching the task, it Is well frankly to recognize that there are irreconcilable factions on both sides which will continue to sow tares. They are not formidable in themselves, but they are formidable If left to work unchallenged upon the great masses of unlnstructed and Indifferent opinion which Is negligible in ordinary times, but dangerous when public passion takes the reins. Against these influences, the forces of goodwill must wage a common war. Among these forces the first place belongs to the ofl^clal representation of the respec- tive countries. Reference has already been made to this subject, and it Is enough here to repeat that the admirable practice of the United States in send- THE FUTURE 103 ing, not formal officials, but its most distinguished citizens to represent it in London should be imi- tated by ourselves. "The sure way to make a foolish ambassador is to bring him up to it," said Coleridge a century ago. "What can an English minister abroad really want but an honest and bold heart, a love for his country, and the ten com- mandments? Your art diplomatic is stuff — no truly great man would negotiate upon any such shallow principles." Nowhere is this antiquated "art diplomatic" so out of place as in our relations with the American people, with their community of speech and tradition, their deliberate adoption of the idea of candid dealing in international affairs, and their policy of "open covenants openly arrived at." Among the causes of the reaction in the United States against Europe since the war few have played a more unfortunate part than the secret treaties in which we have been involved, and before we can put Anglo-American relations on a thoroughly sound basis we must discard the arti- fices of secret diplomacy In all matters that affect directly or collaterally, our intercourse with the United States. It cannot be too clearly understood, also, that anything like official propaganda in the United States is a fatal mistake. There was a great deal I04 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE of it during the war and it did our cause grave mischief, much of which still remains. The Ameri- can resents, as we should resent, the idea of an external Government carrying on a propaganda in his midst, no matter how just the cause may be. He likes to feel that he is forming his own opinions, and if he finds that that privilege is being inter- fered with from outside he is apt to be suspicious of everything he hears and hostile to the policy that such methods are designed to promote. There are few themes on which the Hearst Press is more industriously malevolent than English propaganda in America during and after the war. The most grotesque suggestions of corrupt practices are made and the general public have no means of under- standing how unjust and malignant they are. But the lesson for us is the importance of avoiding in all circumstances the appearance of officially or- ganizing opinion in America on any political issue. What is necessary, and all that is necessary, is the freest and fullest possible intercourse and dis- cussion between two peoples. We need to devote much more attention to each other's point of view on subjects of common concern and to talk out our minds candidly ^nd openly. There are no communities who have so much to gain and so little to lose by the frank exchange of ideas carried THE FUTURE 105 on In an atmosphere of toleration, goodwill, and self-respect. Much excellent work has been done and more should be done in promoting relations between the universities and educational institutions of the two countries. There is no class in the United States who exercise a more wholesome In- fluence upon public opinion than the teaching pro- fession, and I think it will be agreed by those who have had experience on the subject that there is no class also which generally takes a more enlight- ened and sympathetic view of English affairs and English difficulties or more sincerely desires to promote good feeling between the two countries. The various Anglo-American societies are doing much to bring the friendly Influence of the two peoples into active co-operation, and the recent movement for closer intercourse between the asso- ciated chambers of commerce of England and the United States is another development of the legiti- mate and helpful exchange of ideas. There is one field in which much remains to be done. It is the important field of labor relationships. Partly ow- ing to the fact of distance, and still more, perhaps, to the peculiar character of Industrial development In the United States, there has not so far been anything like that intimacy between the labor com- munities of England and America that Is both io6 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE natural and desirable. This matter deserves the serious attention of the leaders of industrial opin- ion in both countries. It ought not to be impossible to achieve such an Anglo-i\merican Pact of Labor as would furnish an indestructible guarantee against any popular stampede of hostile opinion in either country. In regard to the Press, the main difficulty is on the other side of the Atlantic. There is an ele- ment of the reactionary Press in this country which is rarely cordial to the United States. It cannot forget the past and it cannot reconcile itself to republicanism. Its insular superiority towards a mere colony is aggravated in the case of the United States, which, in its unchanging view, is not merely a colony, but a rebellious colony and, still worse, a successful rebellious colony. It is invariably unfriendly to the true movement of the American spirit, as in the case of the Civil War, and the only distinguished American who has succeeded in arousing its enthusiasm was Theodore Roosevelt, in whom it saw reflected something of its own militarist and imperialist ideals. It could forgive America if it took to buccaneering, even though that course would irtevitably bring it into collision with ourselves; but it cannot reconcile Itself to a tradition which seems a standing rebuke to its gos- THE FUTURE 107 pel of Imperialism. Its frame of mind is summed up in that phrase of Mr. Churchill's "Pious Amer- ica," which expressed the ingrained dislike of the aristocratic mind for the democratic institution. But while the spirit of this section of the Press towards the United States is consistently "distant," it is not actively hostile, nor deliberately provoca- tive. That role in the English Press is almost exclusively confined to the vulgar diatribes of one gutter organ. So far as the attitude of the larger number of newspapers toward the United States is concerned it is both friendly and understanding. This is true in the main, also, of the American Press. The tone of great newspapers like the New York Times, the New York World, the New York Evening Post, the Philadelphia Ledger, and the Chicago Daily News, and of weekly organs of opinion like the New Republic, and the Nation, is admirably fair and just, manly, straightforward, frankly critical where criticism is called for, but always friendly and always inspired by the obvious desire to clear the common path of all obstacles to a self-respecting and honorable understanding. But outside this responsible class of journals, which represents the best, and I believe the ulti- mately governing mind of America, there is a numerous and powerful body of newspapers which io8 THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE is definitely and actively anti-British. Of these, the Hearst newspapers are by far the most for- midable, though they by no means exhaust the list. The reason for this phenomenon is plain. It is in the existence, first, of powerful elements of anti- British sentiment in the American population, and next in the existence of an enormous mass of in- differentism which is ready to be exploited by that sentiment. So long as these conditions prevail there will be both journalists and politicians who will not hesitate to twist the lion's tail in order to win votes and stimulate a flagging circulation. The reputable American hates these manifestations as much as the reputable Englishman hates the coarse fulminations of the gutter press I have referred to, but he is as helpless against them in the one case as we are in the other. And unfortunately he knows that they are much more effective in defeat- ing his purpose than the negligible vulgarities that we have to endure. They are more effective, not only because they are more authoritative and im- portant, but because they appeal, not to a mere vague dislike, but to active and fierce hostilities related to definite issues. In a very real sense the remedy for the jourrralistic Anglophobia prevalent in the United States is in our own hands. The settlement of the Irish question alone would go THE FUTURE 109 far to destroy it. The Irish are not merely power- ful in themselves. They are the focus of all the inflammatory anti-British feeling of the country. The removal of this grievance would mean the dispersal of the chief centre of disaffection, and would leave Mr. Hearst and his like largely bank- rupt of explosive material. And if to the settle- ment of the Irish question there could be added a common policy in the Far East, and, above all, a pooling agreement at sea, there would be little left that we should have to fear from the activities of the anti-British Press. Indeed, those activities, in ceasing to be profitable, would cease to be at all. The course of events since the war warns us against any extravagant confidence in regard to the future. No one can see the present tendencies in America without concern. The slogan of "America first and America only" gathers volume. It has delayed if it has not destroyed the effective estab- lishment of the League of Nations. It has pro- duced the disquieting reaction embodied in the Jones Shipping Bill, and it has added venom to the atmosphere that envelops questions like oil and rival interests in Mexico. The liberal thought of both countries, looking back to the high hopes that were awakened by the entry of the United States into the war, is shadowed by the failure of no THE ANGLO-AMERICAN FUTURE those hopes. The causes of that failure do not belong to my subject. Both countries shared in them, though history will record that it was from the President of the United States that the new evangel came, and that it was what Professor Gilbert Murray has called the "outbreak of black- guardism" in this country in December, 191 8, that chiefly dealt that evangel its death-blow. It is fair to remember this when we are tempted to attri- bute to the withdrawal of the United States from the great task to which the President had dedicated it the main responsibility for the post-war catas- trophe. It gave the reactionary forces in America the opportunity they sought. It allied the more predatory and selfish motives of "American inter- ests" with the finest and most liberal current in the national life, which was outraged at the terms of the Peace Treaty and saw in the League of Nations Covenant only an instrument for the rati- fication of an evil policy. But profound though the disappointment has been, the faith of liberal Europe in the ultimate wisdom of liberal America remains. The miracle that we looked for has not come to pass. But the tide of American idealism will flow again, and in the end the hopes that have been disappointed will be fully realized. It is as a means to that larger achievement of a world THE FUTURE iii organized for peace, and not merely for any selfish national interest, that the task of reconciling the English-speaking peoples presents itself as the supreme duty before us. For in that reconciliation, accomplished as those who labor for it desire to see it accomplished, there will be no menace to any people, but the assurance to all that in the peace of the English-speaking nations is the enduring guarantee of the peace of the world. c5^ ^f 72 ^9- \