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1923

A STRAIGHT DEAL
OR
THE ANCIENT GEUDGE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NBW YORK • BOSTON - CHICAGO • DALLAS
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON ¦ BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd,
TORONTO

A STRAIGHT DEAL

OR

THE ANCIENT GRUDGE

BY
OWEN WISTER

TStia grrefe
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
AU rights reserved

COPTEISHT, 1920,
Bt THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1920.

Wortnooa $ress
J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

TO
EDWARD AND ANNA MARTIN
WHO GIVE HELP IN TIME OF
TBOUBLE

CONTEXTS
CHAJTEB PAQ>
I. CONCEBNING One's LeTTEB Box ... 1
II. What the Postman Brought ... 5
TI. In Front of a Bulletin Board ... 29
IV. "My Army of Spies"  39
V. The Ancient Grudge  53
VI. Who Is Without Sin?  59
VII. Tarred with the Same Stick ... 71
VTII. History Astigmatic  83
LX. Concerning a Complex .... 97
X. Jackstraws  105
XI. Some Family Scraps  121
XH. On the Ragged Edge  139
XHI. Benefits Forgot  173
XTV. England the Slacker! .... 183
XV. Rude Britannia, Crude Columbia . . 203
XVI. An International Imposture . . . 253
XVH. Paint  267
XVHI. The Will to Friendship — or the Will to
Hate?  275
XIX. Lion and Cub  283
vii

CHAPTER I
CONCERNING ONE'S LETTER BOX

A STRAIGHT DEAL
OR,
THE ANCIENT GRUDGE
CHAPTER I
CONCERNING ONE'S LETTER BOX
Publish any sort of conviction related to
these morose days through which we are living,
and letters will shower upon you like leaves in
October. No matter what your conviction be,
it will shake both yeas and nays loose from
various minds where they were hanging ready
to fall. Never was a time when so many brains
rustled with hates and panaceas that would
sail wide into the air at the lightest jar. Try
it and see. Say that you believe in God, or do
not; say that Democracy is the key to the
millennium, or the survival of the unfittest ; that
Labor is worse than the Kaiser, or better ; that
drink is a demon, or that wine ministers to the
3

4 A STRAIGHT DEAL
health and the cheer of man — say what you
please, and the yeas and nays will pelt you.
So insecurely do the plainest, oldest truths dangle
in a mob of disheveled brains, that it is likely,
did you assert twice two continues to equal four
and we had best stick to the multiplication table,
anonymous letters would come to you full of
passionate abuse. Thinking comes hard to all
of us. To some it never comes at all, because
their heads lack the machinery. How many of
such are there among us, and how can we find
them out before they do us harm? Science has
a test for this. It has been applied to the army
recruit, but to the civilian voter not yet. The
voting moron still runs amuck in our Democracy.
Our native American air is infected with alien
breath. It is so thick with opinions that the
light is obscured. Will the sane ones eventually
prevail and heal the sick atmosphere? We
must at least assume so. Else, how could we
go on?

CHAPTER n
WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT

CHAPTER II
WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT
During the winter of 1915 I came to think
that Germany had gone dangerously but method
ically mad, and that the European War vitally
concerned ourselves. This conviction I put in
a book. Yeas and nays pelted me. Time seems
to show the yeas had it.
During May, 1918, I thought we made a mis
take to hate England. I said so at the earliest
opportunity. Again came the yeas and nays.
You shall see some of these. They are of help.
Time has not settled this question. It is as
alive as ever — more alive than ever. What
if the Armistice was premature? What if Ger
many absorb Russia and join Japan? What if
the League of Nations break like a toy?
Yeas and nays are put here without the con
sent of their writers, whose names, of course, do
not appear, and who, should they ever see this,
are begged to take no offense. None is intended.
7

8 A STRAIGHT DEAL
There is no intention except to persuade, if
possible, a few readers, at least, that hatred of
England is not wise, is not justified to-day, and
has never been more than partly justified. It
is based upon three foundations fairly distinct
yet meeting and merging on occasions : first
and worst, our school histories of the Revolution ;
second, certain policies and actions of England
since then, generally distorted or falsified by
our politicians ; and lastly certain national traits
in each country that the other does not share
and which have hitherto produced perennial
personal friction between thousands of English
and American individuals of every station in
life. These shall in due time be illustrated by
two sets of anecdotes : one, disclosing the Eng
lish traits, the other the American. I say Eng
lish, and not British, advisedly, because both
the Scotch and the Irish seem to be without
those traits which especially grate upon us and
upon which we especially grate. And now for
the letters.
The first is from a soldier, an enlisted man,
writing from France.

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 9
"Allow me to thank you for your article en
titled 'The Ancient Grudge.' . . . Like many
other young Americans there was instilled in
me from early childhood a feeling of resentment
against our democratic cousins across the At
lantic and I was only too ready to accept as
true those stories I heard of England shirking
her duty and hiding behind her colonies, etc. It
was not until I came over here and saw what she
was really doing that my opinion began to change.
"When first my division arrived in France it
was brigaded with and received its initial ex
perience with the British, who proved to us
how httle we really knew of the war as it was
and that we had yet much to learn. Soon my
opinion began to change and I was regarding
England as the backbone of the Allies. Yet
there remained a certain something I could not
forgive them. What it was you know, and
have proved to me that it is not our place to
judge and that we have much for which to be
thankful to our great Ally.
"Assuring you that your . . . article has suc
ceeded in converting one who needed conversion
badly I beg to remain. . , ."

10 A STRAIGHT DEAL
How many American soldiers in Europe, I
wonder, have looked about them, have used
their sensible independent American brains (our
very best characteristic), have left school his
tories and hearsay behind them and judged the
English for themselves? A good many, it is
to be hoped. What that judgment finally be
comes must depend not alone upon the personal
experience of each man. It must also come
from that liberality of outlook which is attained
only by getting outside your own place and see
ing a lot of customs and people that differ from
your own. A mind thus seasoned and balanced
no longer .leaps to an opinion about a whole
nation from the sporadic conduct of individual
members of it. It is to be feared that some of
our soldiers may never forget or make allowance
for a certain insult they received in the streets
of London. But of this later. The following
sentence is from a letter written by an American
sailor :
"I have read . . . 'The Ancient Grudge' and
I wish it could be read by every man on our big
ship as I know it would change a lot of their
attitude toward England. _; I have argued with

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 11
lots of them and have shown some of them where
they are wrong but the Catholics and descendants
of Ireland v have a different argument and as my
education isn't very great, I know very httle
about what England did to the Catholics in
Ireland." Ireland I shall discuss later. Ireland is no
more our business to-day than the South was
England's business in 1861. That the Irish
question should defeat an understanding be
tween ourselves and England would be, to
quote what a gentleman who is at once a loyal
Catholic and a loyal member of the British
Government said to me, "wrecking the ship
for a ha'pennyworth of tar."
The following is selected from the nays, and
was written by a business man. I must not
omit to say that the writers of all these letters
are strangers to me.
"As one American citizen to another . . .
permit me to give my personal view on your
subject of 'The Ancient Grudge' . . .
"To begin with, I think that you start with
a false idea of our kinship — with the idea that
America, because she speaks the language of

12 A STRAIGHT DEAL
England, because our laws and customs are to
a great extent of the same origin, because much
that is good among us came from there also,
is essentially of English character, bound up
in some way with the success or failure of Eng
land. "Nothing, in my opinion, could be further
from the truth. We are a distinctive race — no
more Enghsh, nationally, than the present King
George is German — as closely related and as
alike as a celluloid comb and a stick of dyna
mite. "We are bound up in the success of America
only. The Enghsh are bound up in the success
of England only. We are as friendly as rival
corporations. We can unite in a common cause,
as we have, but, once that is over, we will go
our own way — which way, owing to the , in
crease of our shipping and foreign trade, is
likely to become more and more antagonistic
to England's.
"England has been a commercially unscrupu
lous nation for generations and it is idle to throw
the blame for this or that act of a nation on an
individual. Such arguments might be kept up

WHAT THE POST^LAN* BROUGHT 13
indefinitely as regards an act of any country.
A responsible nation must bear the praise or
odium that attaches to any national action. If
England has experienced a change of heart it
has occurred since the days of the Boer Repubhc
— as wanton a steal as Belgium, with even less
excuse, and attended with sufficient brutality
for all practical purposes. . . .
" She has done us many an ill turn gratuitously
and not a single good turn that was not dictated
by selfish policy or jealousy of others. She has
shown herself, up till yesterday at least, grasping
and unscrupulous. She is no worse than the
others probably — possibly even better — but
it would be doing our country an ill turn to per
suade its citizens that England was anything
less than an active, dangerous, competitor, es
pecially in the infancy of our foreign trade.
When a business rival gives you the glad hand
and asks fondly after the children, beware lest
the ensuing emotions cost you money.
"No : our distrust for England has not its life
and being in pernicious textbooks. To really
believe that would be an insult to our intelli
gence — even grudges cannot live without real

14 A STRAIGHT DEAL
food. Should England become helpless to
morrow, our animosity and distrust would die
to-morrow, because we would know that she had
it no longer in her power to injure us. Therein hes
the feeling — the textbooks merely echo it. . . .
"In my opinion, a navy somewhat larger
than England's would practically eliminate from
America that 'Ancient Grudge' you deplore.
It is England's navy - — her boasted and actual
control of the seas — which threatens and irri
tates every nation on the face of the globe that
has maritime aspirations. She may use it with
discretion, as she has for years. It may even
be at times a source of protection to others,, as
it has — but so long as it exists as a supreme
power it is a constant source of danger and food
for grudges.
"We will never be a free nation until our
navy surpasses England's. The world will never
be a free world until the seas and trade routes are
free to all, at all times, and without any menace,
however benevolent.
"In conclusion . . . allow me to again state
that I write as one American citizen to another
with not the slightest desire to say anything that

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 15
may be personally obnoxious. My own an
cestors were from England. My personal re
lations with the Englishmen I have met have
been very pleasant. I can readily believe that
there are no better people living, but I feel so
strongly on the subject, nationally — so bitterly
opposed to a continuance of England's sea con
trol — so fearful that our people may be lulled
into a feeling of false security, that I cannot
help trying to combat, with every small means
in my power, anything that seems to propagate
a dangerous friendship."
I received no dissenting letter superior to this.
To the writer of it I rephed that I agreed with
much that he said, but that even so it did not
in my opinion outweigh the reasons I had given
(and shall now give more abundantly) in favor
of dropping our hostile feeling toward England.
My correspondent says that we differ as a race
from the Enghsh as much as a celluloid comb
from a stick of dynamite. Did our soldiers find
the difference as great as that? I doubt if our
difference from anybody is quite as great as
that. Again, my correspondent says that we
are bound up in our own success only, and Eng-

16 A STRAIGHT DEAL
land is bound up in hers only. I agree. But
suppose the two successes succeed better through
friendship than through enmity? We are as
friendly, my correspondent says, as two rival
corporations. Again I agree. Has it not been
proved this long while that competing corpora
tions prosper through friendship? Did not the
Northern Pacific and the Great Northern form
a combination called the Northern Securities,
for the sake of mutual benefit? Under the
Sherman Act the Northern Securities was dis
solved; but no Sherman act forbids a Liberty
Securities. Liberty, defined and assured by Law,
is England's gift to the modern world. Liberty,
defined and assured by Law, is the central pur
pose of our Constitution. Just as identicaUy as
the Northern Pacific and Great Northern run
from St. Paul to Seattle do England and the
United States aim at Liberty, defined and assured
by Law. As friends, the two nations can swing
the world towards world stabihty. My cor
respondent would hardly have instanced the
Boers in his reference to England's misdeeds,
had he reflected upon the part the Boers have
played in England's struggle with Germany.

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 17
I will point out no more of the latent weak
nesses that underlie various passages in this
letter, but proceed to the remaining letters that
I have selected. I gave one from an enlisted
man and one from a sailor; this is from a
commissioned officer, in France.
"I cannot refrain from sending you a line of
appreciation and thanks for giving the people
at home a few facts that I am sure some do not
know and throwing a light upon a much dis
cussed topic, which I am sure will help to remove
from some of their minds a foohsh bigoted an
tipathy." Upon the single point of our school histories
of the Revolution, some of which I had named
as being guilty of distorting the facts, a cor
respondent writes from Nebraska :
"Some months ago . . . the question came to
me, what about our Montgomery's History
now. ... I find that everywhere it is the
King who is represented as taking these measures
against the American people. On page 134 is
the heading, American Commerce; the new King,
George III; how he interfered with trade; page
135, The King proposes to tax the Colonies; page

18 A STRAIGHT DEAL
136, 'The best men in Parliament — such men
as William Pitt and Edmund Burke — took the
side of the colonies.' On page 138, 'William
Pitt said in Parliament, "in my opinion, this
kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the col
onies ... I rejoice that America has re
sisted'"; page 150, 'The English people would
not volunteer to fight the Americans and
the King had to hire nearly 30,000 Hessians
to help do the work. . . . The Americans had
not sought separation ; the King — not the
English people — had forced it on them. . . .'
"I am writing this . . . because, as I was
glad to see, you did not mince words in naming
several of the worse offenders." (He means
certain school histories that I mentioned and
shall mention later again.)
An official from Pittsburgh wrote thus :
"In common with many other people, I have
had the same idea that England was not doing
all she could in the war, that while her colonies
were in the thick of it, she, herself, seemed to
be sparing herself, but after reading this article
... I will frankly and candidly confess to you
that it has changed my opinion, made me a

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 19
strong supporter of England, and above all
made me a better American."
From Massachusetts :
"It is well to remind your readers of the errors
— or worse — in American school text books
and to recount Britain's achievements in the
present war. But of what practical avail are
these things when a man so highly placed as the
present Secretary of the Navy asks a Boston
audience (Tremont Temple, October 30, 1918)
to believe that it was the American navy which
made possible the transportation of over
2,000,000 Americans to France without the loss
of a single transport on the way over? Did he
not know that the greater part of those troops
were not only transported, but convoyed, by
British vessels, largely withdrawn for that pur
pose from such vital service as the supply of
food to Britain's civil population?"
The omission on the part of our Secretary of
the Navy was later quietly rectified by an official
publication of the British Government, wherein
it appeared that some sixty per cent of our troops
were transported in British ships. Our Secre
tary's regrettable slight to our British allies was

20 A STRAIGHT DEAL
immediately set right by Admiral Sims, who
forthwith, both in public and in private, paid
full and appreciative tribute to what had been
done. It is, nevertheless, very likely that some
Americans will learn here for the first time that
more than half of our troops were not transported
by ourselves, and could not have been trans
ported at all but for British assistance. There
are many persons who still believe what our
politicians and newspapers tell them. No in
cident that I shall relate further on serves better
to point the chief international moral at which
I am driving throughout these pages, and at
which I have already hinted : Never to general
ize the character of a whole nation by the acts
of individual members of it. That is what
everybody does, ourselves, the English, the
French, everybody. You can form no valid
opinion of any nation's characteristics, not even
your own, until you have met hundreds of its
people, men and women, and had ample oppor
tunity to observe and know them beneath the
surface. Here on the one hand we had our
Secretary of the Navy. He gave our Navy the
whole credit for getting our soldiers overseas.

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 21
He justified the British opinion that we are a
nation of braggarts. On the other hand, in
London, we had Admiral Sims, another Amer
ican, a splendid antidote. He corrected the
Secretary's brag. What is the moral? Look
out how you generalize. Since we entered the
war that tribe of Enghsh has increased who judge
us with an open mind, discriminate between us,
draw close to a just appraisal of our qualities
and defects, and possibly even discern that
those who fill our pubhc positions are mostly
on a lower level than those who elect them.
I proceed with two more letters, both dissent
ing, and both giving very typically, as it seems
to me, the American feeling about England —
partially justified by instances mentioned by
my correspondent, but equally mentioned by
me in passages which he seems to have skipped.
"Lately I read and did not admire your article
. . . 'The Ancient Grudge.' Many of your
statements are absolutely true, and I recognize
the fact that England's help in this war has been
invaluable. Let it go at that and hush!
"I ido not defend our own Indian policy. . . .
Wounded and disabled in our Indian wars . . .

22 A STRAIGHT DEAL
I know all about them and how indefensible they
are 
"England has been always our only legitimate
enemy. 1776? Yes, call it ancient history and
forget it if possible. 1812? That may go in
the same category. But the causes of that mis
understanding were identically repeated in 1914
and '15. '
"1861? Is that also ancient? Perhaps — but
very bitter in the memory of many of us now
living. The Alabama. The Confederate Com
missioners (I know you will say we were wrong
there — and so we may have been technically
— but John Bull bullied us into ¦ compliance
when our hands were tied). Lincoln told his
Cabinet 'one war at a time, Gentlemen' and
submitted. . . .
"In 1898 we were a strong and powerful nation
and a dangerous enemy to provoke. England
recognized the fact and acted accordingly. Eng
land entered the present war to protect small
nations! Heaven save the mark! You surely
read your history. Pray tell me something of
England's policy in South Africa, India, the
Soudan, Persia, Abyssinia, Ireland, Egypt. The

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 23
lost provinces of Denmark. The United States
when she was young and helpless. And thus,
almost to infinitum.
"Do you not know that the foundations of
.ninety per cent of the great British fortunes
came from the loot of India? upheld and fostered
by the great and unscrupulous East India Com
pany? 
"Come down to later times: to-day for in
stance. Here in California ... I meet and
associate with hundreds of Britishers. Are they
American citizens? I had almost said, 'No,
not one.' Sneering and contemptuous of
America and American institutions. Continually
finding fault with our government and our people.
Comparing these things with England, always to
our disadvantage 
"Now do you wonder we do not like England?
Am I pro-German? I should laugh and so
would you if you knew me."
To this correspondent I did not reply that I
wished I knew him — which I do — that, even
as he, so I had frequently been galled by the
rudeness and the patronizing of various speci
mens, high and low, of the Enghsh race. But

24 A STRAIGHT DEAL
something I did reply, to the effect that I
asked nobody to consider England flawless, or,
any nation a charitable institution, but merely
to be fair, and to consider a cordial understand
ing between us greatly to our future advantage.
To this he answered, in part, as .follows :
"I wish to thank you for your kindly
reply. . . . Your argument is that as a matter
of policy we should conciliate Great Britain.
Have we fallen so low, this great and powerful
nation? . . . Truckling to some other power
because its backing, moral or physical, may
some day be of use to us, even tho' we know
that in so doing we are surrendering our dearest
rights, principles, and dignity! . . . Oh! my
dear Sir, you surely do not advocate this? I
inclose an editorial chpping. ... Is it no
shock to you when Winston Churchill shouts
to High Heaven that under no circumstances
will Great Britain surrender its supreme control
of the seas? This in reply to President Wilson's
plea for freedom of the seas and curtailment of
armaments. . . . But as you see, our President
and our Mr. Daniels have already said, 'Very
well, we will outbuild you.' Never again shall

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 25
Great Britain stop our mail ships and search our
private mails. Already has England declared an
embargo against our exports in many essential
lines and already are we expressing our dissatis
faction and taking means to retaliate  "
Of the editorial chpping inclosed with the
above, the following is a part :
"John Bull is our associate in the contest with
the Kaiser. There is no doubt as to his position
on that proposition. He went after the Dutch
in great shape. Next to France he led the way
and said, 'Come on, Yanks; we need your help.
We will put you in the first line of trenches where
there will be good gunning. Yes, we will do all
of that and at the same time we will borrow your
money, raised by Liberty Loans, and use it for
the purchase of American wheat, pork, and
beef.' "Mr. Bull kept his word. He never flinched
or attempted to dodge the issue. He kept strictly
in the middle of the road. His determination to
down the Kaiser with American men, American
money, and American food never abated for a
single day during the conflict."
This editorial has many twins throughout the

26 A STRAIGHT DEAL
country. I quote it for its value as a specimen
of that sort of journalistic and pohtical utterance
amongst us, which is as seriously embarrassed by
facts as a skunk by its tail. Had its author
said: "The Declaration of Independence was
signed by Christopher Columbus on Washing
ton's birthday during the siege of Vicksburg in
the presence of Queen Elizabeth and Judas
Iscariot," his statement would have been equally
veracious, and more striking.
As to Winston Churchill's declaration that
Great Britain will not surrender her control
of the seas, I am as httle shocked by that
as I should be were our Secretary of the
Navy to declare that in no circumstances would
we give up control of the Panama Canal. The
Panama Canal is our carotid artery, Great
Britain's navy is her jugular vein. It is her
jugular vein in the mind of her people, regardless
of that new apparition, the submarine. I was
not shocked that Great Britain should decline
Mr. Wilson's invitation that she cut her jugular
vein; it was the invitation which kindled my
emotions; but these were of a less serious
kind.

WHAT THE POSTMAN BROUGHT 27
The last letter that I shall give is from an
American citizen of English birth.
"As a boy at school in England, I was taught
the history of the American Revolution as J. R.
Green presents it in his Short History of the English
People. The gist of this record, as you doubtless
recollect, is that George III being engaged in the
attempt to destroy what there then was of po
htical freedom and representative government in
England, used the American situation as a means
to that end; that the Enghsh people, in so far
as their voice could make itself heard, were solidly
against both his Enghsh and American policy,
and that the triumph of America contributed in
no small measure to the salvation of those in
stitutions by which the evolution of England
towards complete democracy was made possible.
Washington was held up to us in England not
merely as a great and good man, but as an heroic
leader, to whose courage and wisdom the Enghsh
as well as the American people were eternally
indebted 
"Pray forgive so long a letter from a stranger.
It is prompted ... by a sense of the illimitable
importance, not only for America and Britain,

28 A STRAIGHT DEAL
but for the entire world, of these two great demo
cratic peoples knowing each other as they really
are and cooperating as only they can cooperate
to estabhsh and maintain peace on just and
permanent foundations."

CHAPTER III
IN FRONT OF A BULLETIN BOARD

CHAPTER III
IN FRONT OF A BULLETIN BOARD
There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which
came to me in consequence of what I wrote in
May, 1918, which was published in the American
Magazine for the following November. Ten will
do. To read the other forty would change no
impression conveyed aheady by the ten, but
would merely repeat it. With varying phrase
ology their writers either think we have hitherto
misjudged England and that my facts are to the
point, or they express the stereotyped American
antipathy to England and treat my facts as we
mortals mostly do when facts are embarrassing
— side-step them. What best pleased me was
to find that soldiers and sailors agreed with me,
and not "high-brows" only.
May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very
dark hour. We had come into the war, had been
in for a year; but events had not yet taken us
31

32 A STRAIGHT DEAL
out of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our
character by those blighting words, "there is
such a thing as being too proud to fight." The
British had been told by their General that they
were fighting with their backs to the wall. Since
March 23d the tread of the Hun had been com
ing steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood
and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the
true ring from our metal and put into the hands
of Foch the one further weapon that he needed.
French moral was burning very low and blue.
Yet even in such an hour, people apparently
American and apparently grown up, were talk
ing against England, our ally. Then and there
after, even as to-day, they talked against her
as they had been talking since August, 1914, as
I had heard them again and again, indoors and
out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd
during the earlier years of the war, the miserable
years before we waked from our trance of neu
trality, while our chosen leaders were still mis
leading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years?
The explosions, the plots, the spies, the Lusi-
tania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff,

IN FRONT OF A BULLETIN BOARD 33
half our country — oh, more than half ! — in
different or incredulous, nothing prepared, nothing
done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and
Leonard Wood's almost the only voices warning
us what was bound to happen, and to get ready
for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards?
Did you grow, as I did, so restless that you would
step out of your office to see if anything new had
happened during the last sixty minutes — would
stop as you went to lunch and stop as you came
back? We knew from the faces of our friends
what our own faces were like. In company we
pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone
with our apprehensions — do you remember ?
For our future's sake may everybody remember,
may nobody forget !
What the news was upon a certain forenoon
memorable to me, I do not recall, and this is of
no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by-
passers clotted thickly to read it as the man
chalked it Une upon line across the bulletin
board. Citizens who were in haste stepped
off the curb to pass round since they could not
pass through this crowd of gazers. Thus on the
sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at names

34 A STRAIGHT DEAL
we had never known until a little while ago,
B6thincourt, Malancourt, perhaps, or Mont-
faucon, or Roisel ; French names of small places,
among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have
walked since, where hved peacefully a few hun
dred or a few thousand that are now a thousand
butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran
once again the wonder that had often chilled
me since the abdication of the Czar which made
certain the crumbling of Russia : after France,
was our turn coming? Should our fields, too,
be sown with bones, should our httle towns
among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes
amongst which broken hearts would wander in
search of some surviving stick of property? I
had learned to know that a long while before the
war the eyes of the Hun, the bird of prey, had
been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had
written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914,
these Pan-German schemes had been leaking
out for all who chose to understand them. A
great many did not so choose. The Hun had
wanted us and planned to get us, and now more
than ever before, because he intended that we
should pay his war bills. Let him once get by

IN FRONT OF A BULLETIN BOARD 35
England, and his sword would cut through our
fat, defenseless carcass like a knife through
cheese. A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by
in the crowd. It said, "Well, I hke the French.
But I'll not cry much if England gets hers.
What's England done in this war, anyway?"
"Her fleet's keeping the Kaiser out of your
front yard, for one thing," retorted another voice.
With assurance shghtly wobbhng and a touch
of the nasal whine, the first speaker protested,
"Well, look what George III done to us. Bad
as any Kaiser."
"Aw, get your facts straight!" It was said
with scornful force. "Don't you know George III
was a German ? Don't you know it was Hessians
— they're Germans — he hired to come over here
and kill Americans and do his dirty work for him?
And his Germans did the same dirty work the
Kaiser's are doing now. We've got a letter
written after the battle of Long Island by a mem
ber of our family they took prisoner there. And
they stripped him and they stole his things and
they beat him down with the butts of their guns
— after he had surrendered, mind — when he

36 A STRAIGHT DEAL
was surrendered and naked, and when he was
down they beat him some more. That's Ger
mans for you. Only they've been getting worse
while the rest of the world's been getting better.
Get your facts straight, man."
A number of us were now listening to this,
and I envied the historian his ingenious prompt
ness — I have none — and I hoped for more of
this timely debate. But debate was over. The
anti-Englishman faded to silence. Either he
was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what
is so pithily termed "come-back." The latter,
I incline to think ; for come-back needs no facts,
it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence in the
anti-Englishman looks as if he had been a German.
Germans do not come back when it goes against
them, they bleat "Kamerad!" — or disappear.
Perhaps this man was a spy — a poor one, to be
sure — yet doing his best for his Kaiser: slink
ing about, peeping, hstening, trying to wedge the
Allies apart, doing his little bit towards making
friends enemies, just as his breed has worked to
set enmity between ourselves and Japan, our
selves and Mexico, France and England, France
and Italy, England and Russia, between every-

IN FRONT OF A BULLETIN BOARD 37
body and everybody else all the world over, in
the sacred name and for the sacred sake of the
Kaiser. Thus has his breed, since we occupied
Coblenz, run to the French soldiers with hes
about us and then run to us with hes about the
French soldiers, overlooking in its providential
stupidity the fact that we and the French would
inevitably compare notes. Thus too is his breed,
at the moment I write these words, infesting
and poisoning the earth with a propaganda that
remains as coherent and as systematically directed
as ever it was before the papers began to assure
us that there was nothing left of the Hohen->
zollern government.

CHAPTER IV
"MY ARMY OF SPIES"

CHAPTER IV

" MY ARMY OF SPIES "

"You will desire to know," said the Kaiser to
his council at Potsdam in June, 1908, after the
successful testing of the first Zeppehn, "how
the hostilities will be brought about. My army
of spies scattered over Great Britain and France,
as it is -'over North and South America, will take
good care of that. Even now I rule supreme in
the United States, where three million voters do
my bidding at the Presidential elections."
Yes, they did his bidding ; there, and elsewhere
too. They did it at other elections as well. Do
you remember the mayor they tried to elect in
Chicago ? and certain members of Congress ? and
certain manufacturers and bankers? They did
his bidding in our newspapers, our pubhc schools,
and from the pulpit. Certain localities in one
of the river counties of Iowa (for instance) were
spots of German treason to the United States.
The "exchange professors" that came from Berlin
41

42 A STRAIGHT DEAL
to Harvard and other universities were so many
camouflaged spies. Certain prominent American
citizens, dined and wined and flattered by the
Kaiser for his purpose, women as well as men,
came back here mere Kaiser-puppets, hypnotized
by royalty. His bidding was done in as many
ways as would fill a book. Shopkeepers did it,
servants did it, Americans among us were deco
rated by him for doing it. Even after the Armis
tice, a school textbook "got by" the Board of
Education in a western state, wherein our boys
and girls were to be taught a German version —
a Kaiser version — of Germany. Somebody pro
tested, and the board explained that it "hadn't
noticed," and the book was held up.
We cannot, I fear, order the school histories in
Germany to be edited by the Allies. German
school children will grow up believing, in all prob
ability, that bombs were dropped near Nurnberg
in July, 1914, that German soil was invaded, that
the Fatherland fought a war of defense ; they will
certainly be nourished by hes in the future as
they were nourished by hes in the past. But
we can prevent Germans or pro-Germans writing
our own school histories; we can prevent that

"MY ARMY OF SPIES" 43
"army of spies" of which the Kaiser boasted to
his council at Potsdam in June, 1908, from con
tinuing its activities among us now and hence
forth ; and we can prevent our school textbooks
from playing into Germany's hand by teaching
hate of England to our boys and girls. Beside
the sickening silliness which still asks, "What
has England done in the war?" is a silliness still
more sickening which says, "Germany is beaten.
Let us forgive and forget." That is not Chris
tianity. There is nothing Christian about it.
It is merely sentimental slush, sloppy shirking
of anything that compels national alertness, or
effort, or self-discipline, or self-denial; a moral
cowardice that pushes away any fact which dis
turbs a shallow, torpid, irresponsible, self-indul
gent optimism.
Our golden age of isolation is over. To at
tempt to return to it would be a mere per
nicious day-dream. To hark back to Washing
ton's warning against entanghng alliances is as
sensible as to go by a map of the world made
in 1796. We are coupled to the company of
nations hke a car in the middle of a train, only
more inevitably and permanently, for we cannot

44 A STRAIGHT DEAL
uncouple ; and if we tried to do so, we might not
wreck the train, but we should assuredly wreck
ourselves. I think the war has brought us one
benefit certainly : that many young men return
from Europe knowing this, who had no idea of
it before they went, and who know also that
Germany is at heart an untamed, unchanged
wild beast, never to be trusted again. We must
not, and shall not, boycott her in trade ; but let
us not go to sleep at the switch ! Just as
busily as she is baking pottery opposite Coblenz,
labelled "made in St. Louis," "made in Kansas
City," her "army of spies" is at work here and
everywhere to undermine those nations who
have for the moment delayed her plans for world
dominion. I think the number of Americans
who know this has increased ; but no American,
wherever he hves, need travel far from home to
meet fellow Americans who sing the song of slush
about forgiving and forgetting.
Perhaps the man I heard talking in front of
the bulletin board was one of the "army of
spies," as I hke to infer from his absence of
"come-back." But perhaps he was merely an
innocent American who at school had studied,

"MY ARMY OF SPIES" 45
for instance, Eggleston's history ; thoughtless —
but by no means harmless ; for his school-taught
"slant" against England, in the days we were
hving through then, amounted to a "slant" for
Germany. He would be sorry if Germany beat
France, but not if she beat England — when
France and England were joined in keeping the
wolf not only from their door but from ours!
It matters not in the least that they were fighting
our battle, not because they wanted to, but be
cause they couldn't help it : they were fighting it
just the same. That they were compelled doesn't
matter, any more than it matters that in going
to war when Belgium was invaded, England's duty
and England's self-interest happened to coincide.
Our duty and our interest also coincided when
we entered the war and joined England and
France. Have we seemed to think that this
diminished our glory? Have they seemed to
think that it absolved them from gratitude ?
Such talk as that man's in front of the bulletin
board helped Germany then, whether he meant
to or not, just as much as if a spy had said it —
just as much as similar talk against England
to-day, whether by spies or unheeding Americans,

46 A STRAIGHT DEAL
helps the Germany of to-morrow. The Germany
of yesterday had her spies all over France and
Italy, busily suggesting to rustic uninformed peas
ants that we had gone to France for conquest
of France, and intended to keep some of her land.
What is she telhng them now? I don't know.
Something to her advantage and their disad
vantage, you may be sure, just as she is busy
suggesting to' us things to her advantage and
our disadvantage — jealousy and fear of the
British navy, or pro-German school histories for
our children, or that we can't make dyes, or
whatever you please : the only sure thing is, that
the Germany of yesterday is the Germany of
to-morrow. She is not changed. She will not
change. The steady stream of her propaganda
all over the world proves it. No matter how
often her masquerading government changes
costumes, that costume is merely her device to
conceal the same cunning, treacherous wild
beast that in 1914, after forty years of prepara
tion, sprang at the throat of the world. Of all
the nations in £he late war, she alone is pulhng
herself together. She is hard at work. She
means to spring again just as soon as she can.

"MY ARMY OF SPIES" 47
Did you read the letter written in April of
1919 by her Vice-Chancellor, Mathias Erzberger,
also her minister of finance? A very able, com
pact masterpiece of mahgnant voracity, good
enough to do credit to Satan. Through that lucky
flaw of stupidity which runs through apparently
every German brain, and to which we chiefly
owe our victory and temporary respite from the
fangs of the wolf, Mathias Erzberger posted his
letter. It went wrong in the mails. If you de
sire to read the whole of it, the International
News Bureau can either furnish it or put you on
the track of it. One sentence from it shall be
quoted here :
"We will undertake the restoration of Russia,
and in possession of such support will be ready,
within ten or fifteen years, to bring France, with
out any difficulty, into our power. The march
towards Paris will be easier than in 1914. The
last step but one towards the world dominion
will then be reached. The continent is ours.
Afterwards will follow the last stage, the closing
struggle, between the continent and the over
seas." Who is meant by "overseas"? Is there left

48 A STRAIGHT DEAL
any honest American brain so fond and so
feeble as to suppose that we are not included
in that highly suggestive and significant term?
I fear that some such brains are left.
Germans remain German. I was talking with
an American officer just returned from Coblenz.
He described the surprise of the Germans when
they saw our troops march in to occupy that
region of their country. They said to him :
"But this is extraordinary. Where do these
soldiers of yours come from? You have only
150,000 troops in Europe. All the other trans
ports were sunk by our submarines." "We have
two million troops in Europe," replied the officer,
"and lost by explosion a very few hundred. No
transport was sunk." "But that is impossible,"
returned the burgher, "we know from our Gov
ernment at Berhn that you have only 150,000
troops in Europe."
Germans remain German. At Coblenz they
were servile, cringing, fawning, ready to lick the
boots of the Americans, loading them with offers
of every food and drink and joy they had. Thus
they began. Soon, finding that the Americans
did not cut their throats, burn their houses, rape

"MY ARMY OF SPIES" 49
their daughters, or bayonet their babies, but
were quiet, civil, disciplined, and apparently harm
less, they changed. Their fawning faded away,
they scowled and muttered. One day the Burgo
master at a certain place rephed to some ordinary
requisitions with an arrogant refusal. It was
quite out of the question, he said, to comply
with any such ridiculous demands. Then the
Americans ceased to seem harmless. Certain
steps were taken by the commanding officer, some
leading citizens were collected and enhghtened
through the only channel whereby light pene
trates a German skull. Thus, by a very slight
taste of the methods by which they thought
they would cow the rest of the world, these
burghers were cowed instantly. They had
thought the Americans afraid of them. They
had taken civility for fear. Suddenly they en
countered what we call the swift kick. It edu
cated them. It always will. Nothing else will.
Mathias Erzberger will, of course, disclaim
his letter. He will say it is a forgery. He will
point to the protestations of German repentance
and reform with which he sweated during April,
1919, and throughout the weeks preceding the

50 A STRAIGHT DEAL
dehvery of the Treaty at Versailles. Perhaps
he has done this aheady. All Germans will
believe him — and some Americans.
The German method, the German madness —
what a mixture ! The method just grazed making
Germany owner of the earth, the madness saved
the earth. With perfect recognition of Bel
gium's share, of Russia's share, of. France's,
Italy's, England's, our own, in winning the war,
I beheve that the greatest and most efficient Ally
of all who contributed to Germany's defeat was
her own constant blundering madness. Americans
must never forget either the one or the other,
and too many are trying to forget both.
Germans remain German. An American lady
of my acquaintance was about to chmb from
Amalfi to Ravello in company with a German lady
of her acquaintance. The German lady had a
German Baedeker, the American a Baedeker in
Enghsh, published several years apart. The
Baedeker in German recommended a path that
went straight up the ascent, the Baedeker in
Enghsh a path that went up more gradually
around it. "Mine says this is the best way,"
said the American. "Mine says straight up

"MY ARMY OF SPIES" 51
is the best," said the German. "But mine is
a later edition," said the American. "That
is not it," explained the German. "It is that
we Germans are so much more clever and agile,
that to us is recommended the more dangerous
way while Americans are shown the safe path."
That happened in 1910. That is Kultur. This
too is Kultur : "If Silesia become Polish
Then, oh God, may children perish, like beasts, in their
mothers' womb.
Then lame their Polish feet and their hands, oh God!
Let them be crippled and blind their eyes.
Smite them with dumbness and madness, both men and
women." From a Hymn of German hate for the Poles.
Germany remains German ; but when next she
springs, she will make no blunders.

CHAPTER V
THE ANCIENT GRUDGE

CHAPTER V

THE ANCIENT GRUDGE

It was in Broad Street, Philadelphia, before
we went to war, that I overheard the foohsh —
or propagandist — slur upon England in front of
the bulletin board. After we were fighting by
England's side for our existence, you might have
supposed such talk would cease. It did not.
And after the Armistice, it continued. On the
day we celebrated as "British Day," a man went
through the crowd in Wanamaker's shop, asking,
What had England done in the War, anyhow?
Was he a German, or an Irishman, or an American
in pay of Berhn? I do not know. But this I
know : perfectly good Americans still talk like
that. Cowboys in camp do it. Men and women
in Eastern cities, persons with at least the external
trappings of educated intelligence, play into the
hands of the Germany of to-morrow, do their
unconscious Uttle bit of harm to the future of
55

56 A STRAIGHT DEAL
freedom and civilization, by repeating that Eng
land "has always been our enemy." Then they
mention the Revolution, the War of 1812, and
England's attitude during our Civil War, just as
they invariably mentioned these things in 1917
and 1918, when England was our ally in a struggle
for life, and as they will be mentioning them in
1940, I presume, if they are still alive at that
time, f
Now, the Civil War ended fifty-five years
ago, the War of 1812 one hundred and five, and
the Revolution one hundred and thirty-seven.
Suppose, while the Kaiser was butchering Belgium
because she barred his way to that dinner he was
going to eat in Paris in October, 1914, that France
had said, "England is my hereditary enemy.
Henry the Fifth and the Duke of Wellington and
sundry Plantagenets fought me"; and suppose
England had said, "I don't care much for France.
Joan of Arc and Napoleon and sundry other
French fought me" — suppose they had sat
nursing their ancient grudges like that? WeU,
the Kaiser would have dined in Paris according
to his plan. And next, according to his plan,
with the Channel ports taken he would have

THE ANCIENT GRUDGE 57
dined in London. And finaUy, according to his
plan, and with the help of his "army of spies"
overseas, he would have dined in New York and
the White House. For German madness could
not have defeated Germany's plan of World
dominion, if various nations had not got together
and assisted. Other Americans there are, who
do not resort to the Revolution for their grudge,
but are in a commercial rage over this or that :
wool, for instance. Let such Americans reflect
that commercial grievances against England can
be more readily adjusted than an absorption of
aU commerce by Germany can be adjusted.
Wool and everything else wiU belong to Mathias
Erzberger and his breed, if they carry out their
intention. And the way to insure their carry
ing it out is to let them spht us and England and
aU their competitors asunder by their ceaseless
and ingenious propaganda, which plays upon
every international prejudice, historic, commer
cial, or o^her, which is available. After August,
1914, England barred the Kaiser's way to New
York, and in 1917, we found it useful to forget
about George the Third and the Alabama. In
1853 Prussia possessed one ship of war — her first.

58 A STRAIGHT DEAL s
In 1918 her submarines were prowling along our
coast. For the moment they are no longer there.
For a while they may not be. But do you think
Germany intends that scraps of paper shall be
abolished by any Treaty, even though it contain
80,000 words and a League of Nations? She
will make of that Treaty a whole basket of scraps,
if she can, and as soon as she can. She has said
so. Her workingmen are at work, industrious
and content with a quarter the pay for a longer
day than anywhere else. Let those persons who
cannot get over George the Third and the Ala
bama ponder upon this for a minute or two.

CHAPTER VI
WHO IS WITHOUT SIN?

CHAPTER VI
WHO IS WITHOUT SIN?
Much else is there that it were well they should
ponder, and I am coming to it presently; but
first, one suggestion. Most of us, if we dig back
only fifty or sixty or seventy years, can disinter
various relatives over whose doings we should pre
fer to ghde hghtly and in silence.
Do you mean to say that you have none?
Nobody stained with any shade of dishonor ? No
grandfather, great-grandfather, great-great-etc.
grandfather or grandmother who ever made a
scandal, broke a heart, or betrayed a trust?
Every man Jack and woman Jill of the lot
right back to Adam and Eve whoUy good, honor
able, and courageous? How fortunate to be
sprung exclusively from the loins of centuries of
angels — and to know all about them ! Consider
the hoard of virtue to which you have fallen heir !
But you know very well that this is not so;
that every one of us has every kind of person
61

62 A STRAIGHT DEAL
for an ancestor ; that all sorts of virtue and vice,
of heroism and disgrace, are mingled in our blood ;
that inevitably amidst the huge herd of our grand-
sires black sheep as well as white are to be found.
! As it is with men, so it is with nations. Do
you imagine that any nation has a spotless
history? Do you think that you can peer into
our past, turn over the back pages of our record,
and never come upon a single blot? Indeed
you cannot. And it is better — a great deal
better — that you should be aware of these blots.
Such knowledge may enhghten you, may make
you a better American. What we need is to
be critics of ourselves, and this is exactly what
we have been taught not to be.
We are quite good enough to look straight at
ourselves. Owing to one thing and another we
are cleaner, honester, humaner, and whiter than
any people on the continent of Europe. If any
nation on the continent of Europe has ever be
haved with the generosity and magnanimity
that we have shown to Cuba, I have yet to learn
of it. They jeered at us about Cuba, did the
Europeans of the continent. Their papers stuck
their tongues in their cheeks. Of course our fine

WHO IS WITHOUT SIN? 63
sentiments were all sham, they said. Of course
we intended to swallow Cuba, and never had
intended anything else. And when General
Leonard Wood came away from Cuba, having
made Havana healthy, having brought order out
of chaos on the island, and we left Cuba independ
ent, Europe jeered on. That dear old Europe !
Again, in 1909, it was not any European nation
that returned to China their share of the in
demnity exacted in consequence of the Boxer
troubles ; we alone returned our share to China —
sixteen milhons. It was we who prevented levy
ing a punitive indemnity on China. Read the
whole story ; there is much more. We played the
gentleman, Europe played the bully. But Europe
caUs us "dollar chasers." That dear old Europe !
Again, if any conquering General on the continent
of Europe ever behaved as Grant did to Lee at
Appomattox, his name has escaped me.
Again, and lastly — though I am not attempting
to tell you here the whole tale of our decencies :
Whose hands came away cleanest from that Peace
Conference in Paris lately? What did we ask for
ourselves? Everything we asked, save some
repairs of damage, was for other people. Oh,

64 A STRAIGHT DEAL
yes ! we are quite good enough to keep quiet about
these things. No need whatever to brag. Brag
ging, moreover, inclines the listener to suspect
you're not so remarkable as you sound.
But all this virtue doesn't in the least alter the
fact that we're hke everybody else in having some
dirty pages in our History. These pages it is a
foohsh mistake to conceal. I suppose that the
school histories of every nation are partly bad.
I imagine that most of them implant the germ of
international hatred in the boys and girls who
have to study them. Nations do not like each
other, never have liked each other; and it may
very well be that school textbooks help this
inchnation to dislike. Certainly we know what
contempt and hatred for other nations the
Germans have been sedulously taught in their
schools, and how utterly they beheved their
teaching. How much better and wiser for the
whole world if all the boys and girls in all the
schools everywhere were henceforth to be started
in hfe with a just and true notion of aU flags and
the peoples over whom they fly ! The League of
Nations might not then rest upon the quicksand
of distrust and antagonism which it rests upon

WHO IS WITHOUT SIN? 65
to-day. But it is our own school histories that
are my present concern, and I repeat my opinion —
or rather my conviction — that the way in which
they have concealed the truth from us is worse
than silly, it is harmful. I am not going to take
up the whole hst of their misrepresentations, I
will put but one or two questions to you.
When you finished school, what idea had you
about the War of 1812? I will tell you what
mine was. I thought we had gone to war because
England was stopping American ships and taking
American saflors out of them for her own service.
I could refer to Perry's victory on Lake Erie and
Jackson's smashing of the British at New Orleans ;
the name of the frigate Constitution sent thriUs
through me. And we had pounded old John
BuU and sent him to the right about a second
time! Such was my glorious idea, and there
it stopped. Did you know much more than
that about it when your schoohng was done?
Did you know that our reasons for declaring
war against Great Britain in 1812 were not so
strong as they had been three and four years
earher? That during those years England had
moderated her arrogance, was ready to moderate

66 A STRAIGHT DEAL
further, had placated us for her brutal performance
concerning the Chesapeake, wanted peace; while
we, who had been nearly unanimous for war, and
with a fuller purse in 1808, were now, by our own
congressional fuddhng and messing, without any
adequate army, and so divided in counsel that
only one northern state was wholly in favor of
war? Did you know that our General Hull be
gan by invading Canada from] Detroit and sur
rendered his whole army without firing a shot?
That the British overran Michigan and parts of
Ohio, and western New York, while we retreated
disgracefully ? That though we shone in victories
of single combat on the sea and showed the Enghsh
that we too knew how to sail and fight on the
waves as hardily as Britannia (we won eleven
out of thirteen of the frigate and sloop actions),
nevertheless she caught us or blocked us up, and
rioted unchecked along our coasts ? You probably
did know that the British burned Washington,
and you accordingly hated them for this bar
barous vandahsm — but did you know that we
had burned Toronto a year earher ?
I left school knowing none of this — it wasn't
in my school book, and I learned it in mature years

WHO IS WITHOUT SIN? 67
with amazement. I then learned also that England,
while she was fighting with us, had her hands fuU
fighting Bonaparte, that her war with us was a side
show, and that this was uncommonly lucky for
us — as lucky quite as those ships from France
under Admiral de Grasse, without whose help
Washington could never have caught Cornwalhs
and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, Octo
ber 19, 1781. Did you know that there were
more French soldiers and sailors than Americans
at Yorktown? Is it well to keep these things
from the young ? I have not done with the War
of 1812. There is a political aspect of it that I
shall later touch upon — something that my
school books never mentioned.
My next question is, what did you know about
the Mexican War of 1846-1847, when you came
out of school? The names of our victories, I
presume, and of Zachary Taylor and Winfield
Scott; and possibly the treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo, whereby Mexico ceded to us the whole
of Texas, New Mexico, and Upper California,
and we paid her fifteen milhons. No doubt
you know that Santa Anna, the Mexican General,
had a wooden leg. Well, there is more to know

68 A STRAIGHT DEAL
than that, and I found it out much later. I found
out that General Grant, who had fought with
credit as a heutenant in the Mexican War, briefly
summarized it as "iniquitous." I gradually,
through my reading as a man, learned the truth
about the Mexican War which had not been
taught me as a boy — that in that war we bulhed
a weaker power, that we made her our victim,
that the whole discreditable business had the
extension of slavery at the bottom of it, and that
more Americans were against it than had been
against the War of 1812. But how many Ameri
cans ever learn these things? Do not most of
them, upon leaving school, leave history also
behind them, and become farmers, or merchants,
or plumbers, or firemen, or carpenters, or what
ever, and read httle but the morning paper for
the rest of their hves ?
The blackest page in our history would take a
long while to read. Not a word of it did I ever
see in my school textbooks. They were written
on the plan that America could do no wrong. I
repeat that, just as we love our friends in spite
of their faults, and all the more intelligently
because we know these faults, so our love of our

WHO IS WITHOUT SIN? 69
country would be just as strong, and far more
intelUgent, were we honestly and wisely taught
in our early years those acts and pohcies of hers
wherein she fell below her lofty and humane
ideals. Her character and her record on the whole
from the beginning are fine enough to allow the
shadows to throw the sunlight into rehef . To have
produced at three stages of our growth three such
men as Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, is
quite sufficient justification for our existence.

CHAPTER VII
TARRED WITH THE SAME STICK

CHAPTER VII
TARRED WITH THE SAME STICK
The blackest page in our history is our treat
ment of the Indian. To speak of it is a thank
less task — thankless, and necessary.
This land was the Indian's house, not ours.
He was here first, nobody knows how many
centuries first. We arrived, and we shoved him,
and shoved him, and shoved him, back, and
back, and back. Treaty after treaty we made
with him, and broke. We drew circles round his
freedom, smaller and smaUer. We allowed him
such and such territory, then took it away and
gave him less and worse in exchange. Through
out a century our promises to him were a whole
basket of scraps of paper. The other day I saw
some Indians in California. It had once been
their place. All over that region they had hunted
and fished and hved according to their desires,
enjoying hfe, Uberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We came. To-day the hunting and fishing are
73

74 A STRAIGHT DEAL
restricted by our laws — not the Indian's —
because we wasted and almost exterminated in a
very short while what had amply provided the
Indian with sport and food for a very long while.
In that region we have taken, as usual, the fertile
land and the running water, and have allotted
land to the Indian where neither wood nor water
exist, no crops will grow, no human life can be
supported. I have seen the land. I have seen
the Indian begging at the back door. Oh, yes,
they were an ' ' inferior race. " Oh, yes, they didn't
and couldn't use the land to the best advantage,
couldn't build Broadway and the Union Pacific
Railroad, couldn't improve real estate. If you
choose to call the whole thing "manifest destiny,"
I am with you. I'll not dispute that what we
have made this continent is of greater service to
mankind than the wilderness of the Indian ever
could possibly have been — once conceding, as
you have to concede, the inevitableness of civiliza
tion. Neither you, nor I, nor any man, can re
mold the sorry scheme of things entire. But we
could have behaved better to the Indian. That
was in our power. And we gave him a raw deal
instead, not once, but again and again. We did

TARRED WITH THE SAME STICK 75
it because we could do it without risk, because he
was weaker and we could always beat him in the
end. And all the while we were doing it, there
was our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of In
dependence, founded on a new thing in the world,
proclaiming to mankind the fairest hope yet born,
that "All men are endowed by their Creator with
certain inahenable rights," and that these were
now to be protected by law. Ah, no, look at it
as you wiU, it is a black page, a raw deal. The
officers of our frontier army know all about it,
because they saw it happen. They saw "the
treaties broken, the thieving agents, the tres
passing settlers, the outrages that goaded the
deceived Indian to despair and violence, and when
they were ordered out to kill him, they knew that
he had struck in seh-defense and was the real
victim. It is too late to do much about it now. The
good people of the Indian Rights Association try
to do something ; but in spite of them, what httle
harm can still be done is being done through dis
honest Indian agents and the mean machinery of
politics. If you care to know more of the long,
bad story, there is a book by Helen Hunt Jackson,

76 A STRAIGHT DEAL
A Century of Dishonor; it is not new. It as
sembles and sets forth what had been perpetrated
up to the time when it was written. A second
volume could be added now.
I have dwelt upon this matter here for a very
definite reason, closely connected with my main
purpose. It's a favorite trick of our anti-British
friends to call England a "land-grabber." The
way in which England has grabbed land right
along, all over the world, is monstrous, they say.
England has stolen what belonged to whites, and
blacks, and bronzes, and yellows, wherever she
could lay her hands upon it, they say. England
is a criminal. They repeat this with great satis
faction, this land-grabbing indictment. Most of
them know httle or nothing of the facts, couldn't
tell you the history of a single case. But what
are the facts to the^man who asks, "What has
England done in this war, anyway?" The word
"land-grabber" has been passed to him by
German and Sinn Fein propaganda, and he merely
parrots it forth. He couldn't discuss it at all.
"Look at the Boers," he may know enough to
reply, if you remind him that England's land-
grabbing was done a good while ago. Well, we

TARRED WITH THE SAME STICK 77
shaU certainly look at the Boers in due time, but
just now we must look at ourselves. I suppose
that the American who denounces England for
her land-grabbing has forgotten, or else has never
known, how we grabbed Florida from Spain. The
pittance that we paid Spain in onei of the Florida
transactions never went to her. The story is a
plain tale of land-grabbing ; and there are several
other plain tales that show us to have been
land-grabbers, if you will read the facts with an
honest mind. I shall not tell them here. The
case of the Indian is enough in the way of an
instance. Our own hands are by no means clean.
It is not for us to denounce England as a land-
grabber. You cannot hate statistics more than I do. But
at times there is no dodging them, and this is one
of the times. In 1803 we paid Napoleon Bonaparte
fifteen miUions for what was then called Louisiana.
Napoleon had his title to this land from Spain.
Spain had it from France. France had it —
how? She had it because La Salle, a Frenchman,
sailed down the Mississippi River. This gave
him title to the land. There were people on the
bank aheady, long before La Salle came by.

78 A STRAIGHT DEAL
It would have surprised them to be told that the
land was no longer theirs because a man had come
by on the water. But nobody did tell them.
They were Indians. They had wives and children
and wigwams and other possessions in the land
where they had always lived ; but they were red,
and the man in the boat was white, and therefore
they were turned into trespassers because he had
sailed by in a boat. That was the title to Loui
siana which we bought from Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Louisiana Purchase was a piece of land
running up the Mississippi, up the Missouri,
over the Divide, and down the Columbia to the
Pacific. Before we acquired it, our area was over
a quarter, but not half, a million square miles.
This added nearly a million square miles more.
But what had we really bought? Nothing but
stolen goods. The Indians were there before
La Salle, from whose boat-sailing the title we
bought was derived. "But," you may object,
"when whites rob reds or blacks, we caU it Dis
covery ; land-grabbing is when whites rob whites
— and that is where I blame England." For
the sake of argument I concede this, and refer
you to our acquisition of Texas. This operation

TARRED WITH THE SAME STICK 79
followed some years after the Florida operation.
"By request" we "annexed" most of present
Texas — in 1845. That was a trick of our slave
holders. They sent people into Texas and these
people swung the deal. It was virtually a theft
from Mexico. A httle while later, in 1848, we
"paid" Mexico for California, Arizona, and
Nevada. But if you read the true story of Fre
mont in California, and of the American plots
there before the Mexican War, to undermine the
government of a friendly nation, plots connived
at in Washington with a view to getting California
for ourselves, upon my word you will find it hard
to talk of England being a land-grabber and keep
a straight face. And, were a certain book to faU
into your hands, the narrative of the Alcalde of
Monterey, wherein he sets down what of Fremont's
doings in California went on before his eyes, you
would learn a story of treachery, brutahty, and
greed. AU this acquisition of territory, together
with the Gadsden Purchase a few years later,
brought our continent to its present area — not
counting Alaska or some islands later acquired —
2,970,230 square mUes.
Please understand me very clearly: I am not

80 A STRAIGHT DEAL
saying that it has not been far better for the
world and for civilization that we should have
become the rulers of all this land, instead of its
being ruled by the Indians or by Spain, or by
Mexico. That is not at aU the point. I am
merely reminding you of the means whereby we
got the land. We got it mostly by force and
fraud, by driving out of it through firearms and
plots people who certainly were there first and
who were weaker than ourselves. Our reason
was simply that we wanted it and intended to
have it. That is precisely what England has
done. She has by various means not one whit
better or worse than ours, acquired her possessions
iri various parts of the world because they were
necessary to her safety and welfare, just as this
continent was necessary to our safety and welfare.
Moreover, the pressure upon her, her necessity for
self-preservation, was far more urgent than was
the pressure upon us. To make you see this, I
must once again resort to some statistics.
England's area — herself and adjacent islands
— is 120,832 square mUes. Her population in
1811 was eighteen and one half miUions. At
that same time our area was 408,895 square

TARRED WITH THE SAME STICK 81
mUes, not counting the recent Louisiana Purchase.
And our population was 7,239,881. With an
area less than one third of ours (excluding the
huge Louisiana) England had a population more
than twice as great. Therefore she was more
crowded than we were — how much more I leave
you to figure out for yourself. I appeal to the
fair-minded American reader who only "wants
to be shown, " and I say to him, when some German
or anti-British American talks to him about what
a land-grabber England has been in her time, to
think of these things and to remember that our
own past is tarred with the same stick. Let
every one of us bear in mind that httle sentence
of the Kaiser's, "Even now I rule supreme in
the United States;" let us remember that the
Armistice and the Peace Treaty do not seem to
have altered German nature or German plans
very noticeably, and don't let us muddle our
brains over the question of the land grabbed by
the great-grandfathers of present England.
Any American who is anti-British to-day is by
just so much pro-German, is helping the trouble
of the world, is keeping discord ahght, is doing his
bit against human peace and human happiness.

82 A STRAIGHT DEAL
There are some other little sentences of the Kaiser
and his Huns of which I shall speak before I
finish : we must now take up the controversy
of those men in front of the bulletin board; we
must investigate what lies behind that controversy.
Those two men are types. One had learned
nothing since he left school, the other had.

CHAPTER VIII
HISTORY ASTIGMATIC

CHAPTER VIII

HISTORY ASTIGMATIC

So far as I know, it was Mr. Sydney George
Fisher, an American, who was the first to go back
to the original documents, and to write from a
study of these documents the complete truth
about England and ourselves during the Revolu
tion. His admirable book tore off the cloak which
our school histories had wrapped round the facts.
He lays bare the pohtical state of Britain at that
time. What did you learn at your school of
that pohtical state ? Did you ever wonder about
General Howe and his manner of fighting us?
Did it ever strike you that, although we were more
often defeated than victorious in those engage
ments with him (and sometimes he even seemed
to avoid pitched battles with us when the odds
were all in his favor), yet somehow England didn't
seem to reap the advantage she should have
reaped from those contests, didn't foUow tliem up,
85

86 A STRAIGHT DEAL
let us get away, didn't in short make any progress
to speak of in really conquering us ? Perhaps you
attributed this to our brave troops and our great
Washington. WeU, our troops were brave and
Washington was great ; but there was more
behind — more than your school teaching ever
led you to suspect, if your schoohng was Uke
mine. I imagined England as being just one
whole unit of fury and tyranny directed against
us and determined to stamp out the spark of
liberty we had kindled. No such thing! Eng
land was violently divided in sentiment about us.
Two parties, almost as opposed as our North and
South have been — only it was not sectional in
England — held very different views about hberty
and the rights of Enghshmen. The King's party,
George the Third and his upholders, were fighting
to saddle autocracy upon England ; the other
party, that of Pitt and Burke, were resisting
this, and their sentiments and pohtical behefs
led them to sympathize with our revolt against
George III. "I rejoice," writes Horace Walpole,
Dec. 5, 1777, to the Countess of Upper Ossory,
"that the Americans are to be free, as they
had a right to be, and as I am sure they have

HISTORY ASTIGMATIC 87
shown they deserve to be. . . . I own there are
very able Enghshmen left, but they happen to be
on t'other side of the Atlantic." It was through
Whig influence that General Howe did not follow
up his victories over us, because they didn't wish
us to be conquered, they wished us to be able to
vindicate the rights to which they held aU EngUsh-
men were entitled. These men considered us the
champions of that British hberty which George
III was attempting to crush. They disputed the
rightfulness of the Stamp Act. When we refused
to submit to the Stamp Tax in 1766, it was then
that Pitt exclaimed in Parhament : "I rejoice
that America has resisted. ... If ever this
nation should have a tyrant for a King, six miUions
of freemen, so dead to all the feelings of Uberty as
voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would be fit
instruments to make slaves of the rest." But
they were not willing. When the hour struck and
the war came, so many Enghshmen were on our
side that they would not enhst against us, refused
to fight us, and George III had to go to Germany
and obtain Hessians to help him out. His war
against us was lost at home, on Enghsh soil,
through Enghsh disapproval of his course, almost

88 A STRAIGHT DEAL
as much as it was lost here through the indomi
table Washington and the help of France. That
is the actual state of the case, there is the truth.
Did you hear much about this at school? Did
you ever learn there that George III had a fake
Parhament, largely elected by fake votes, which
did not represent the Enghsh people; that this
fake Parliament was autocracy's last ditch in
England; that it choked for a time the Enghsh
democracy which, after the setback given it by
the excesses of the French Revolution, went
forward again until to-day the King of Eng
land has less power than the President of the
United States? I suppose everybody in the
world who knows the important steps of history
knows this — except the average American.
From him it has been concealed by his school
histories; and generally he never learns any
thing about it at all, because once out of school,
he seldom studies any history again. But why,
you may possibly wonder, have our school
histories done this? I think their various au
thors may consciously or unconsciously have felt
that our case against England was not in truth
very strong, that in fact she had been very

HISTORY ASTIGMATIC 89
easy with us, far easier than any other country
was being with its colonies at that time. The
King of France taxed his colonies, the King of
Spain filled his purse, unhampered, from the
pockets of- Mexico and Peru and Cuba and Porto
Rico — from whatever pocket into which he could
put his hand, and the Dutch were doing the
same without the shghtest question of their right
to do it. Our quarrel with the mother country
and our breaking away from her in spite of the
extremely light rein she was driving us with, rested
in reahty upon very slender justification. If ever
our authors read of the meeting between Frankhn,
Rutledge, and Adams with General Howe, after
the Battle of Long Island, I think they may
have felt that we had almost no grievance at all.
The plain truth of it was, we had been aUowed for
so long to be so nearly free that we determined
to be free entirely, no matter what England con
ceded. Therefore these authors of our school
textbooks felt that they needed to bolster our
cause up for the benefit of the young. Accord
ingly our boys' and girls' sense of independence
and patriotism must be nourished by making
England out a far greater oppressor than ever she

90 A STRAIGHT DEAL
really had been. These historians dwelt as
heavily as they could upon George III and his
un-English autocracy, and as hghtly as they could
upon the Enghsh Pitt and upon all the Enghsh
sympathy we had. Indeed, about this most of
them didn't say a word.
Now that pohcy may possibly have been desir
able once — if it can ever be desirable to suppress
historic truth from a whole nation. But to-day,
when we have long stood on our own powerful
legs and need no bolstering up of such a kind,
that policy is not only silly, it is pernicious. It is
pernicious because the world is heaving with
frightful menaces to all the good that man knows.
They would strip hfe of every resource gathered
through centuries of struggle. Mad mobs, whole
races of people who have never thought at all, or
who have now hurled away all pretense of thought,
aim at mere destruction of everything that is.
They don't attempt to offer any substitute.
Down with rehgion, down with education, down
with marriage, down with law, down with prop
erty : Such is their cry. Wipe the slate blank,
they say, and then we'll see what we'll write on
it. Amid this stands Germany with her un-

HISTORY ASTIGMATIC 91
changed purpose to own the earth ; and Japan
is doing some thinking. Amid this also is the
Anglo-Saxon race, the race that has brought our
law, our order, our safety, our freedom into the
modern world. That any school histories should
hinder the members of this race from under
standing each other truly and being friends,
should not be tolerated.
Many years later than Mr. Sydney George
Fisher's analysis of England under George III,
Mr. Charles Altschul has made an examination
and given an analysis of a great number of
those school textbooks wherein our boys and
girls have been and are still being taught a his
tory of our Revolution in the distorted form that
I have briefly summarized. His book was pub-
Ushed in 1917, by the George H. Doran Com
pany, New York, and is entitled The American
Revolution in our School Textbooks. Here follow
ing are some of his discoveries :
Of forty school histories used twenty years ago
in sixty-eight cities, and in many more unreported,
four tell the truth about King George's pocket Par
hament, and thirty-two suppress it. To-day our
books are not quite so bad, but it is not very much

92 A STRAIGHT DEAL
better ; and to-day, be it added, any reforming of
these textbooks by Boards of Education is hkely to
be prevented, wherever obstruction is possible,
by every influence visible and invisible that pro-
German and pro-Irish propaganda can exert.
Thousands of our American school children aU
over our country are stiU being given a version
of our Revolution and the pohtical state of
England then, which is as faulty as was George
Ill's government, with its fake parhament, its
"rotten boroughs," its Little Sarum. Meanwhile
that "army of spies" through which the Kaiser
boasted that he ruled "supreme" here, and which,
though he is gone, is by no means a demobilized
army, but a very busy and weU-drilled and well-
conducted army, is very glad that our boys and
girls should be taught false history, and wiU do
its best to see that they are not taught true
history. Mr. Charles Altschul, in his admirable enter
prise, addressed himself to those who preside
over our school world aU over the country ; he re
ceived answers from every state in the Union, and
he examined ninety-three history textbooks in
those passages and pages which they devoted to

HISTORY ASTIGMATIC 93
our Revolution. These books he grouped accord
ing to the amount of information they gave about
Pitt and Burke and Enghsh sympathy with us
in our quarrel with George III. These groups are
five in number, and dwindle down from group
one, "Textbooks which deal fully with the
grievances of the colonists, give an account of
general political conditions in England prior to
the American Revolution, and give credit to prom
inent Enghshmen for the services they rendered
the Americans," to group five, "Textbooks
which deal fully with the grievances of the
colonists, make no reference to general pohtical
conditions in England prior to the American Rev
olution, nor to any prominent Enghshmen who
devoted themselves to the cause of the Americans."
Of course, what dwindles is the amount said about
our Enghsh sympathizers. In groups three and
four this is so scanty as to distort the truth and
send any boy or girl who studied books of these
groups out of school into life with a very imperfect
idea indeed of the size and importance of English
opposition to the pohcy of George III ; in group
five nothing is said about this at aU. The boys
and girls who studied books in group five would

94 A STRAIGHT DEAL
grow up believing that England was undividedly
autocratic, tyrannical, and hostile to our hberty.
In his careful and conscientious classification, Mr.
Altschul gives us the books in use twenty years
ago (and hence responsible for the opinion of
Americans now between thirty and forty years
old) and books in use to-day, and hence responsible
for the opinion of those American men and women
who wiU presently be grown up and will prolong
for another generation the school-taught ignorance
and prejudice of their fathers and mothers. I
select from Mr. Altschul's catalogue only those
books in use in 1917, when he pubhshed his
volume, and of these only group five, where the
facts about English sympathy with us are totaUy
suppressed. Barnes' School History of the United
States, by Steele. Chandler and Chitword's Makers
of American History. Chambers' (Hansell's) A
School History of the United States. Eggleston's
A First Book in American History. Eggleston's
History of the United States and Its People. Eg
gleston's New Century History of the United States.
Evans' First Lessons in Georgia History. Evans'
The Essential Facts of American History. Estill's
Beginner's History of Our Country. Forman's

HISTORY ASTIGMATIC 95
History of the United States. Montgomery's An
Elementary American History. Montgomery's The
Beginner's American History. White's Beginner's
History of the United States.
If the reader has f oUowed me from the beginning,
he wiU recollect a letter, parts of which I quoted,
from a correspondent who spoke of Mont
gomery's history, giving passages in which a fair
and adequate recognition of Pitt and our Enghsh
sympathizers and their opposition to George III
is made. This would seem to indicate a revision
of the work since Mr. Altschul pubhshed his Usts,
and to substantiate the hope I expressed in my
original article, and which I here repeat. Surely
the publishers of these books will revise them!
Surely any patriotic American pubhsher and any
patriotic board of education, school principal, or
educator, wiU watch and resist aU propaganda and
other sinister influence tending to perpetuate this
error of these schookhistories ! Whatever excuse
they once had, be it the explanation I have offered
above, or some other, there is no excuse to-day.
These books have laid the foundation from which
has sprung the popular prejudice against Eng
land. It has descended from father to son. It

96 A STRAIGHT DEAL
has been further soUdified by many tales for
boys and girls, written by men and women
who acquired their inaccurate knowledge at our
schools. And it plays straight into the hands of
our enemies.

CHAPTER LX
CONCERNING A COMPLEX

CHAPTER IX

CONCERNING A COMPLEX

All of these books, history and fiction, drop into
the American mind during its early springtime
the seed of antagonism, estabhsh in fact an anti-
English "complex." It is as pretty a case of
complex on the wholesale as could well be found
by either historian or psychologist. It is not so
violent as the complex which has been planted
in the German people by forty years of very
adroitly and carefully planned training : they
were taught to distrust and hate everybody and
to consider themselves so superior to anybody that
their sacred duty as they saw it in 1914 was to
enslave the world, in order to force upon the world
the priceless benefits of their Kultur. Under the
shock of war that complex dilated into a form of
real hysteria or insanity. Our anti-English com
plex is fortunately milder than that ; but none
the less does it savor slightly, as any nerve
speciahst or psychological doctor would tell you
99

100 A STRAIGHT DEAL
— it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of
thousands of American men and women of every
grade of education and ignorance should auto
matically exclaim whenever the right button is
pressed, "England is a land-grabber," and "What
has England done in the War?"
The word complex has been in our dictionary for
a long while. This famihar adjective has been
made by certain scientific people into a noun,
and for brevity and convenience employed to
denote something that almost all of us harbor
in some form or other. These complexes, these
lumps of ideas or impressions that match each
other, that are of the same pattern, and that are
also invariably tinctured with either a pleasur
able or painful emotion, he buried in our minds,
unthought of but ahve, and lurk always ready to
set up a ferment, whenever some new thing from
outside that matches them enters the mind and
hence starts them off. The "suppressed com
plex" I need not describe, as our Enghsh complex
is by no means suppressed. Known to us all,
probably, is the pohtical complex. Year after
year we have been excited about elections and
candidates and pohcies, preferring one party to

CONCERNING A COMPLEX 101
the other. If this preference has been very
marked, or even violent, you know how disinchned
we are to give credit to the other party for any
act or pohcy, no matter how excellent in itself,
which, had our own party been its sponsor, we
should have been heart and soul for. You know
how easily we forget the good deeds of the opposite
party and how easily we remember its bad deeds.
That's a good simple ordinary example of a
complex. Its workings can be discerned in the
experience of us all. In our present discussion
it is very much to the point.
Estabhshed in the soft young minds of our
school boys and girls by a series of reiterated
statements about the tyranny and hostility of
England towards us in the Revolution, state
ments which they have to remember and master
by study from day to day, tinctured by the
anxiety about the examination ahead, when the
students must know them or fail, these incidents
of school work being also tinctured by another
emotion, that of patriotism, enthusiasm for
Washington, for the Declaration of Independence,
for Valley Forge — thus estabhshed in the regular
way of all complexes, this anti-English complex

102 A STRAIGHT DEAL
is fed and watered by what we learn of the War of
1812, by what we learn of the Civil War of 1861,
and by many lesser events in our history thus
far. And just as a Republican will admit nothing
good of a Democrat and a Democrat nothing good
of a Repubhcan because of the pohtical com
plex, so does the great — the vast — majority of
Americans automatically and easily remember
everything against England and forget every
thing in her favor. Just try it any day you
hke. Ask any average American you are sitting
next to in a train what he knows about England ;
and if he does remember anything and can tell
it to you, it will be unfavorable nine times in ten.
The mere word "England" starts his complex
off, and out comes every fact it has seized that
matches his school-implanted prejudice, just as
it has rejected every fact that does not match it.
There is absolutely no other way to explain the
American habit of speaking ill of England and
well of France. Several times in the past, France
has been flagrantly hostile to us. But there was
Lafayette, there was Rochambeau, and the great
service France did us then against England.
Hence from our school histories we have a pro-

CONCERNING A COMPLEX 103
French complex. Under its workings we auto
matically remember every good turn France has
done us and automatically forget the evil turns.
Again try the experiment yourseU. How many
Americans do you think that you will find who can
recall, or who even know when you recall to them
the insolent and meddlesome Citizen Genet,
envoy of the French ^Republic, and how Wash
ington requested his recall? Or the French
privateers that a httle later, about 1797-98,
preyed upon our commerce? And the hatred of
France which many Americans felt and expressed
at that time? How many remember that the
King of France, directly our Revolution was over,
was more hostile to us than England?

CHAPTER X
JACKSTRAWS

CHAPTER X

JACKSTRAWS

Jackstraws is a game which most of us have
played in our youth. You empty on a table a
box of miniature toy rakes, shovels, picks, axes,
all sorts of tools and implements. These he
under each other and above each other in intri
cate confusion, not unlike cross timber in a
western forest, only instead of being logs, they
are about two inches long and very hght. The
players sit round the table and with httle hooks
try in turn to lift one jackstraw out of the heap,
without moving any of the others. You go on
until you do move one of the others, and this
loses you your turn. European diplomacy at
any moment of any year reminds- you, if you in
spect it closely, of a game of jackstraws. Every
sort and shape of intrigue is in the general heap
and tangle, and the jealous nations sit round,
each trying to hft out its own jackstraw. Luckily
for us, we have not often been involved in these
107

108 A STRAIGHT DEAL
games of jackstraw hitherto; unluckily for us,
we must be henceforth involved. If we kept
out, our luck would be still worse.
Immediately after our Revolution, there was
one of these heaps of intrigue, in which we were
concerned. This was at the time of the negotia
tions leading to the Treaty of Paris, to which
I made reference at the close of the last section.
This was in 1783. Twenty years later, in 1803,
occurred the heap of jackstraws that led to the
Louisiana Purchase. Twenty years later, in
1823, occurred the heap of jackstraws from which
emerged the Monroe Doctrine. Each of these
dates, dotted along through our early decades,
marks a very important crisis in our history.
It is well that they should be grouped together,
because together they disclose, so to speak, a
coherent pattern. This coherent pattern is Eng
land's attitude towards ourselves. It is to be
perceived, faintly yet distinctly, in 1783, and it
grows clearer and ever more clear until in 1898,
in the game of jackstraws played when we de
clared war upon Spain, the pattern is so clear
that it could not be mistaken by any one who
was not willfully bhnded by an anti-EngUsh com-

JACKSTRAWS 109
plex. This pattern represents a preference on
England's part for ourselves to other nations.
I do not ask you to think England's reason for
this preference is that she has loved us so much ;
that she has loved others so much less — there
is her reason. She has loved herseh better than
anybody. So must every nation. So does every
nation. Let me briefly speak of the first game of jack-
straws, played at Paris in 1783. Our Revolu
tion was over. The terms of peace had to be
drawn. Franklin, Jay, Adams, and Laurens
were our negotiators. The various important
points were acknowledgment of our independence,
settlement of boundaries, freedom of fishing in
the neighborhood of the Canadian coast. We
had agreed to reach no settlement with England
separately from France and Spain. They were
our recent friends. England, our recent enemy,
sent Richard Oswald as her peace commissioner.
This private gentleman had placed his fortune
at our disposal during the war, and was Franklin's
friend. Lord Shelburne wrote Franklin that if
this was not satisfactory, to say so, and name
any one he preferred. But Oswald was satis-

110 A STRAIGHT DEAL
factory; and David Hartley, another friend of
Franklin's and also a sympathizer with our
Revolution, was added; and in these circum
stances and by these men the Treaty was made.
To France we broke our promise to reach no sep
arate agreement with England. We negotiated
directly with the British, and the Articles were
signed without consultation with the French
Government. When Vergennes, the French Min
ister, saw the terms, he remarked in disgust that
England would seem to have bought a peace
rather than made one. By the treaty we got
the Northwest Territory and the basin of the Ohio
River to the Mississippi. Our recent friend, the
French King, was much opposed to our having
so much territory. It was our recent enemy,
England, who agreed that we should have it.
This was the result of that game of jackstraws.
Let us remember several things : in our
Revolution, France had befriended us, not be
cause she loved us so much, but because she
loved England so httle. In the Treaty of Paris,
England stood with us, not because she loved us
so much, but because she loved France so little.
We must cherish no illusions. Every nation

JACKSTRAWS 111
must love itself more than it loves its neighbor.
Nevertheless, in this pattern of England's policy
in 1783, where she takes her stand with us and
against other nations, there is a deep significance.
Our notions of law, our notions of hfe, our notions
of religion, our notions of liberty, our notions of
what a man should be and what a woman should
be, are so much more akin to her notions than to
those of any other nation, that they draw her
toward us rather than toward any other nation.
That is the lesson of the first game of jackstraws.
Next comes 1803. Upon the Louisiana Pur
chase, I have already touched; but not upon
its diplomatic side. In those years the European
game of diplomacy was truly portentous. Bona
parte had appeared, and Bonaparte was the
storm centre. From the heap of jackstraws I
shaU Uft out only that which directly concerns
us and our acquisition of that enormous terri
tory, then caUed Louisiana. Bonaparte had
dreamed and planned an empire over here. Cer
tain vicissitudes disenchanted him. A plan to
invade England also helped to deflect his mind
from estabhshing an outpost of his empire upon
our continent. For us he had no love. Our

112 A STRAIGHT DEAL
principles were democratic, he was a colossal
autocrat. He called us "the reign of chatter,"
and he would have liked dearly to put out our
Ught. Addington was then the British Prime
Minister. Robert R. Livingston was our minister
in Paris. In the history of Henry Adams, in
Volume II at pages 52 and 53, you may find more
concerning Bonaparte's dislike of the United
States. You may also find that TaUeyrand ex
pressed the view that sociaUy and economically
England and America were one and indivisible.
In Volume I of the same history, at page 439,
you will see the mention which Pichon made to
Talleyrand of the overtures which England was
incessantly making to us. At some time during
all this, rumor got abroad of Bonaparte's pro
jects regarding Louisiana. In the second volume
of Henry Adams, at pages 23 and 24, you wiU
find Addington remarking to our minister to
Great Britain, Rufus King, that it would not do
to let Bonaparte estabhsh himself in Louisiana.
Addington very plainly hints that Great Britain
would back us in any such event. This backing
of us by Great Britain found very cordial ac
ceptance in the mind of Thomas Jefferson. A

JACKSTRAWS 113
year before the Louisiana Purchase was con
summated, and when the threat of Bonaparte
was in the air, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Living
ston, on April 18, 1802, that "the day France
takes possession of New Orleans, we must marry
ourselves to the British fleet and nation." In
one of his many memoranda to Talleyrand,
Livingston aUudes to the British fleet. He also
points out that France may by taking a cer
tain course estrange the United States for ever
and bind it closely to France's great enemy.
This particular address to Talleyrand is dated
February 1, 1803, and may be found in the
Annals of Congress, 1802-1803, at pages 1078
to 1083. I quote a sentence: "The critical
moment has arrived which rivets the connexion
of the United States to France, or binds a young
and growing people for ages hereafter to her
mortal and inveterate enemy." After this, hints
foUow concerning the relative maritime power of
France and Great Britain. Livingston suggests
that if Great Britain invade Louisiana, who can
oppose her? Once more he refers to Great
Britain's superior fleet. This interesting address
concludes with the following exordium to France :

114 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"She wiU cheaply purchase the esteem of men
and the favor of Heaven by the surrender of a
distant wilderness, which can neither add to her
wealth nor to her strength." This, as you will
perceive, is quite a pointed remark. Throughout
the Louisiana diplomacy, and negotiations to
which this diplomacy led, Livingston's would
seem to be the master American mind and pro
phetic vision. But I must keep to my jackstraws.
On April 17, 1803, Bonaparte's brother, Lucien,
reports a conversation held with him by Bona
parte. What purposes, what oscillations, may
have been going on deep in Bonaparte's secret
mind, no one can tell. We may guess that he
did not relinquish his plan about Louisiana defi
nitely for some time after the thought had dawned
upon him that it would be better if he did
relinquish it. But unless he was lying to his
brother Lucien on April 17, 1803, we get no
mere glimpse, but a perfectly clear sight of what
he had come finally to think. It was certainly
worth whUe, he said to Lucien, to sell when
you could what you were certain to lose; "for
the Enghsh . . . are aching for a chance to
capture it. . . . Our navy, so inferior to our

JACKSTRAWS 115
neighbor's across the Channel, wiU always cause
our colonies to be exposed to great risks. . . .
As to the sea, my dear fellow, you must know
that there we have to lower the flag. . . . The
Enghsh navy is, and long will be, too dominant."
That was on AprU 17. On May 2, the
Treaty of Cession was signed by the exultant
Livingston. Bonaparte, instead of establishing
an outpost of autocracy at New Orleans, sold to
us not only the small piece of land which we had
originally in mind, but the huge piece of land
whose dimensions I have given above. We paid
him fifteen millions for nearly a million square
mUes. The formal transfer was made on Decem
ber 17 of that same year, 1803. There is my
second jackstraw.
Thus, twenty years after the first time in
1783, Great Britain stood between us and the
designs of another nation. To that other nation
her fleet was the deciding obstacle. England did
not love us so much, but she loved France so much
less. For the same reasons which I have suggested
before, self-interest, behind which lay her demo
cratic kinship with our ideals, ranged her with us.
To place ' my third jackstraw, which foUows

116 A STRAIGHT DEAL
twenty years after the second, uninterruptedly
in this group, I pass over for the moment our
War of 1812. To that I will return after I have
dealt with the third jackstraw, namely, the Mon
roe Doctrine. It was England that suggested the
Monroe Doctrine to us. From the origin of this
in the mind of Canning to its pubhc announcement
upon our side of the water, the pattern to which
I have alluded is for the third time very clearly
to be seen.
How much did your school histories tell you
about the Monroe Doctrine? I confess that
my notion of it came to this: President Monroe
informed the kings of Europe that they must keep
away from this hemisphere. ( Whereupon the
kings obeyed him and have remained obedient
ever since. Of George Canning I knew nothing.
Another large game of jackstraws was being
played in Europe in 1823. Certain people there
had formed the Holy Alhance. Among these,
Prince Metternich the Austrian was undoubtedly
the master mind. He saw that by England's
victory at Waterloo a threat to aU monarchical and
dynastic systems of government had been created.
He also saw that our steady growth was a part of

JACKSTRAWS 117
the same threat. With this in mind, in 1822, he
brought about the Holy Alliance. The first Article
of the Holy Alliance reads : "The high contracting
Powers, being convinced that the system of
representative government is as equally incom
patible with the , monarchical principle as the
maxim of sovereignty of the people with the
Divine right, engage mutually, in the most solemn
manner, to use all their efforts to put an end to
the system of representative governments, in
whatever country it may exist in Europe, and to
prevent its being introduced in those countries
where it is not yet known."
Behind these words lay a design, hardly veUed,
not only against South America, but against our
selves. In a volume entitled With the Fathers,
by John Bach McMaster, and also in the fifth
volume of Mr. McMaster's history, chapter 41, you
will find more amply what I abbreviate here. Can
ning understood the threat to us contained in the
Holy AlUance. He made a suggestion to Richard
Rush, our minister to England. The suggestion
was of such moment, and the ultimate danger to
us from the Holy Alliance was of such moment,
that Rush made haste to put the matter into the

118 A STRAIGHT DEAL
hands of President Monroe. President Monroe
likewise found the matter very grave, and he
therefore consulted Thomas Jefferson. At that
time Jefferson had retired from pubhc hfe and was
living quietly at his place in Virginia. That
President Monroe's communication deeply stirred
him is to be seen in his reply, written October
24, 1823. Jefferson says in part: "The ques
tion presented by the letters you have sent me
is the most momentous which has ever been
offered to my contemplation since that of inde
pendence. . . . One nation most of all could
disturb us. . . . She now offers to lead, aid and
accompany us. . . . With her on our side we
need not fear the whole world. With her, then,
we should most seriously cherish a cordial friend
ship, and nothing would tend more to unite our
affections than to be fighting once more, side by
side, in the same cause."
Thus for the second time, Thomas Jefferson
advises a friendship with Great Britain. He
reahzes as fully as did Bonaparte the power of
her navy, and its value to us. It is striking and
strange to find Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the
Declaration of Independence in 1776, writing

JACKSTRAWS 119
in 1823 about uniting our affections and about
fighting once more side by side with England.
It was the revolt of the Spanish Colonies from
Spain in South America, and Canning's fear
that France might obtain dominion in America,
which led him to make his suggestion to Rush.
The gist of the suggestion was, that we should
join with Great Britain in saying that both coun
tries were opposed to any intervention by Europe
in the western hemisphere. Over our announce
ment there was much dehght in England. In the
London Courier occurs a sentence, "The South
American Repubhcs — protected by the two
nations that possess the institutions and speak
the language of freedom." In this fragment
from the London Courier, the kinship at which
I have hinted as being felt by England in 1783,
and in 1803, is definitely expressed. From the
Holy Alliance, from the general European diplo
matic game, and from England's preference for
us who spoke her language and thought her
thoughts about hberty, law, what a man should
be, what a woman should be, issued the Monroe
Doctrine. And you will find that no matter what
dynastic or ministerial interruptions have oc-

120 A STRAIGHT DEAL
curred to obscure this recognition of kinship
with us and preference for us upon the part of
the Enghsh people, such interruptions are always
temporary and he always upon the surface of Eng
hsh sentiment. Beneath the surface the recog
nition of kinship persists unchanged and invariably
reasserts itself.
That is my third jackstraw. Canning spoke
to Rush, Rush consulted Monroe, Monroe con
sulted Jefferson, and Jefferson wrote what we
have seen. That, stripped of every encumbering
circumstance, is the story of the Monroe Doctrine.
Ever since that day the Monroe Doctrine has
rested upon the broad back of the British Navy.
This has been no secret to our leading historians,
our authoritative writers on diplomacy, and our
educated and thinking pubhc men. But they
have not generally been eager to mention it;
and as to our school textbooks, none that I
studied mentioned it at all.

CHAPTER XI
SOME FAMILY SCRAPS

CHAPTER XI

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS

Do not suppose because I am reminding you
of these things and shall remind you of some more,
that I am trying to make you hate France. I
am only trying to persuade you to stop hating
England. I wish to show you how much reason
you have not to hate her, which your school
histories pass hghtly over, or pass wholly by.
I want to make it plain that your anti-English
complex and your pro-French complex entice
your memory into retaining only evil about
England and only good about France. That is
why I pull out from the recorded, certified, and
perfectly ascertainable past, these few large facts.
They amply justify, as it seems to me, and as I
think it must seem to any reader with an open
mind, what I said about the pattern.
We must now touch upon the War of 1812.
There is a pohtical aspect of this war which casts
upon it a hght not generally shed by our school
123

124 A STRAIGHT DEAL
histories. Bonaparte is again the point. Nine
years after our Louisiana Purchase from him, we
declared war upon England. At that moment
England was heavily absorbed in her struggle
with Bonaparte. It is true that we had a genuine
grievance against her. In searching for British
sailors upon our ships, she impressed our own.
This was our justification.
We made a pretty lame showing, in spite of
the victories of our frigates and sloops. Our
one signal triumph on land came after the Treaty
of Peace had been signed at Ghent. During
the years of war, it was lucky for us that
England had Bonaparte upon her hands. She
could not give us much attention. She was
battling with the great Autocrat. We, by de
claring war upon her at such a time, played
into Bonaparte's hands, and virtually, by em
barrassing England, struck a blow on the side of
autocracy and against our own pohtical faith.
It was a feeble blow, it did but shght harm.
And regardless of it England struck Bonaparte
down. His hope that we might damage and
lessen the power of her fleet that he so much re
spected and feared, was not reahzed. We made

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 125
the Treaty of Ghent. The impressing of sailors
from our vessels was tacitly abandoned. The
next time that people were removed from vessels,
it was not England who removed them, it was we
ourselves, who had declared war on England for
doing so, we ourselves who removed them from
Canadian vessels in the Behring Sea, and from
the British ship Trent. These incidents we shall
reach in their proper place. As a result of
the War of 1812, some Enghsh felt justified in
taking from us a large shce of land, but Wellington
said, "I think you have no right, from the state
of the war, to demand any concession of territory
from America." This is aU that need be said
about our War of 1812.
Because I am trying to give only the large
incidents, I have intentionally made but a mere
aUusion to Florida and our acquisition of that
territory. It was a case again of England's
siding with us against a third power, Spain, in
this instance. I have also omitted any account
of our acquisition of Texas, when England was
not friendly — I am not sure why : probably
because of the friction between us over Oregon.
But certain other minor events there are, which

126 A STRAIGHT DEAL
do require a brief reference — the boundaries of
Maine, of Oregon, the Isthmian Canal, Cleveland
and Venezuela, Roosevelt and Alaska ; and these
disputes we shall now take up together, before
we deal with the very large matter of our trouble
with England during the CivU War. Chronolog
ically, of course, Venezuela and Alaska faU after
the Civil War ; but they belong to the same class
to which Maine and Oregon belong. Together,
all of these incidents and controversies form a
group in which the underlying permanence of
British good-will towards us is distinctly to be
discerned. Sometimes, as I have said before,
British anger with us obscures the friendly senti
ment. But this was on the surface, and it al
ways passed. As usual, it is only the anger that
has stuck in our minds. Of the outcome of these
controversies and the British temperance and
restraint which brought about such outcome the
popular mind retains no impression.
The boundary of Maine was found to be un
defined to the extent of 12,000 square miles.
Both Maine and New Brunswick claimed this, of
course. Maine took her coat off to fight, so did
New Brunswick. Now, we backed Maine, and

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 127
voted supplies and men to her. Not so England.
More soberly, she said, "Let us arbitrate." We
agreed, it was done. By the umpire Maine was
awarded more than half what she claimed. And
then we disputed the umpire's decision on the
ground he hadn't given us the whole thing !
Does not this remind you of some of our base-
baU bad manners? It was settled later, and
we got, differently located, about the original
award. Did you learn in school about "fifty-four forty,
or fight"? We were ready to take off our coat
again. Or at least, that was the platform in 1844
on which President Polk was elected. At that
time, what lay between the north hne of CaUfornia
and the south hne of Alaska, which then belonged
to Russia, was caUed Oregon. We said it was
ours. England disputed this. Each nation based
its title on discovery. It wasn't really far from
an even claim. So Polk was elected, which ap
parently meant war; his words were belhcose.
We blustered rudely. Feeling ran high in Eng
land ; but she didn't take off her coat. Her
ambassador, Pakenham, stiff at first, unbent later.
Under sundry missionary impulses, more Americans

128 A STRAIGHT DEAL
than British had recently settled along the Co
lumbia River and in the WiUamette Valley.
People from Missouri followed. You may read
of our impatient violence in Professor Dunning's
book, The British Empire and the United States.
Indeed, this volume teUs at length everything
I am telhng you briefly about these boundary
disputes. The settlers wished to be under our
Government. Virtually upon their preference
the matter was finaUy adjusted. England met
us with a compromise, advantageous to us and
reasonable for herself. Thus, again, was her
conduct moderate and pacific. If you think that
this was through fear of us, I can only leave you
to our western blow-hards of 1845, or to your
anti-British complex. What I see in it, is another
sign of that fundamental sense of kinship, that
persisting unwillingness to have a real scrap with
us, that stares plainly out of our whole first
century — the same feeling which prevented so
many English from enhsting against us in the
Revolution that George III was obhged to get
Hessians. Nicaragua comes next. There again they were
quite angry with us on top, but controlled in

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 129
the end by the persisting disposition of kinship.
They had land in Nicaragua with the idea of an
Isthmian Canal. This we did not like. They
thought we should mind our own business. But
they agreed with us in the Clayton-Bulwer
Treaty that both should build and run the canal.
Vagueness about territory near by raised further
trouble, and there we were in the right. Eng
land yielded. The years went on and we grew,
untU the time came when we decided that if
there was to be any canal, no one but ourselves
should have it. We asked to be let off the old
treaty. England let us off, stipulating the canal
should be unfortified, and an "open door" to all.
Our representative agreed to this, much to our
displeasure. Indeed, I do not think he should
have agreed to it. Did England hold us to it?
AU this happened in the Ufetime of many of us,
and we know that she did not hold us to it. She
gave us what we asked, and she did so because
she felt its justice, and that it in no way menaced
her with injury. All this began in 1850 and
ended, as we know, in the time of Roosevelt.
About 1887 our seal-fishing in the Behring
Sea brought on an acute situation. Into the

130 A STRAIGHT DEAL
many and intricate detafls of this, I need not go ;
you can find them in any good encyclopedia,
and also in Harper's Magazine for April, 1891,
and in other places. Our fishing clashed with
Canada's. We assumed jurisdiction over the
whole of the sea, which is a third as big as the
Mediterranean, on the quite fantastic ground
that it was an inland sea. Ignoring the law that
nobody has jurisdiction outside the three-mile
lim^t from their shores, we seized Canadian vessels
sixty miles from land. In fact, we did virtually
what we had gone to war with England for doing
in 1812. But England did not go to war. She
asked for arbitration. Throughout this, our
tone was raw and indiscreet, while hers was con
spicuously the opposite; we had done an un
warrantable and high-handed thing; our claim
that Behring Sea was an "inclosed" sea was
abandoned ; the arbitration went against us, and
we paid damages for the Canadian vessels.
In 1895, in the course of a century's dispute
over the boundary between Venezuela and British
Guiana, Venezuela took- prisoner some British
subjects, and asked us to protect her from the
consequences. Richard Olney, Grover Cleveland's

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 131
Secretary of State, informed Lord Salisbury,
Prime Minister of England, that "in accordance
with the Monroe Doctrine, the United States
must insist on arbitration" — that is, of the dis
puted boundary. It was an abrupt extension
of the Monroe Doctrine. It was dictating to
England the manner in which she should settle
a difference with another country. Salisbury
dechned. On December 17th Cleveland an
nounced to England that the Monroe Doctrine
apphed to every stage of our national life, and
that as Great Britain had for many years re
fused to submit the dispute to impartial arbitra
tion, nothing remained to us but to accept the
situation. Moreover, if the disputed -territory
was found to belong to Venezuela, it would be the
duty of the United States to resist, by every
means in its power, the aggressions of Great
Britain. This was, in effect, an ultimatum. The
stock market went to pieces. In general American
opinion, war was coming. The situation was
indeed grave. First, we owed the Monroe Doc
trine's very existence to English backing. Second,
the Doctrine itself had been a declaration against
autocracy in the shape of the Holy AlUance, and

132 A STRAIGHT DEAL
England was not autocracy. Lastly, as a nation,
Venezuela seldom conducted herself or her gov
ernment on the steady plan of democracy. Eng
land was exasperated. And yet England yielded.
It took a httle time, but arbitration settled it in
the end — at about the same time that we flatly
dechned to arbitrate our quarrel with Spain.
History will not acquit us of groundless meddUng
and arrogance in this matter, whUe England
comes out of it having again shown in the end
both forbearance and good manners. Before
another Venezuelan incident in 1902, I take up a
burning dispute of 1903.
As Oregon had formerly been, so Alaska had
later become, a grave source of friction between
England and ourselves. Canada claimed bound
aries in Alaska which we disputed. This had
smouldered along through a number of years
until the discovery of gold in the Klondike region
fanned it to a somewhat menacing flame. In
- this instance, history is as unlikely to approve the
conduct of the Canadians as to approve our
bad manners towards them upon many other
occasions. The matter came to a head in Roose
velt's first aciministration. You wiU find it all

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 133
in the Life of John Hay by William R. Thayer,
Volume II. A commission to settle the matter
had dawdled and failed. Roosevelt was tired
of delays. Commissioners again were appointed,
three Americans, two Canadians, and Alverstone,
Lord Chief Justice, to represent England. To
his friend Justice Ohver Wendell Holmes, about
to saU for an Enghsh hohday, Roosevelt wrote a
private letter privately to be shown to Mr.
Bahour, Mr. Chamberlain, and certain other
Enghshmen of mark. He said : "The claim of
the Canadians for access to deep water along
any part of the Alaskan coast is just exactly as
indefensible as if they should now suddenly claim
the Island of Nantucket." Canada had objected
to our Commissioners as being not "impartial
jurists of repute." As to this, Roosevelt's letter
to Holmes ran on : "I beheve that no three men
in the United States could be found who would
be more anxious than our own delegates to do
justice to the British claim on aU points where
there is even a color of right on the British side.
But the objection raised by certain British
authorities to Lodge, Root, and Turner, especiaUy
to Lodge and Root, was that they had committed

134 A STRAIGHT DEAL
themselves on the general proposition. No man
in public hfe in any position of prominence could
have possibly avoided committing himself on
the proposition, any more than Mr. Chamberlain
could avoid committing himseh on the ownership
of the Orkneys if some Scandinavian country
suddenly claimed them. If this embodied other
points to which there was legitimate doubt, I
believe Mr. Chamberlain would act fairly and
squarely in deciding the matter; but if he ap
pointed a commission to settle up all these ques
tions, I certainly should not expect him to ap
point three men, if he could find them, who be
heved that as to the Orkneys the question was
an open one. I wish to make one last effort
to bring about an agreement through the Com
mission. . . . But if there is a disagreement
... I shall take a position which will prevent
any possibility of arbitration hereafter ; . . . will
render it necessary for Congress to give me the
authority to run the hne as we claim it, by our
own people, without any further regard to the
attitude of England and Canada. If I paid
attention to mere abstract rights, that is the
position I ought to take anyhow. I have not

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 135
taken it because I wish to exhaust every effort
to have the affair settled peacefuUy and with due
regard to England's honor."
That is the way to do these things : not by a
peremptory public letter, hke Olney's to Salis
bury, which enrages a whole people and makes
temperate action doubly difficult, but thus, by a
private letter to the proper persons, very plain,
very unmistakable, but which remains private,
a sufficient word to the wise, and not a red rag
to the mob. "To have the affair settled peace
fully and with due regard to England's honor."
Thus Roosevelt. England desired no war with
us this time, any more than at the other time.
The Commission went to work, and, after in
vestigating the facts, decided in our favor.
Our hst of boundary episodes finished, I must
touch upon the affair with the Kaiser regarding
Venezuela's debts. She owed money to Germany,
Italy, and England. The Kaiser got the ear of
the Tory government under Salisbury, and be
tween the three countries a secret pact was made
to repay themselves. Venezuela is not seldom
reluctant to settle her obligations, and she was
slow upon this occasion. It was the Kaiser's

136 A STRAIGHT DEAL
chance — he had been trying it aheady at other
points — to slide into a foothold over here under
the camouflage of collecting from Venezuela her
just debt to him. So with warships he and his
alhes established what he called a pacific blockade
on Venezuelan ports.
I must skip the comedy that now went on in
Washington (you will find it on pages 287-288 of
Mr. Thayer's John Hay, Volume II) and come
at once to Mr. Roosevelt's final word to the
Kaiser, that if there was not an offer to arbitrate
within forty-eight hours, Admiral Dewey would
sail for Venezuela. In thirty-six hours arbitration
was agreed to. England withdrew from her share
in the secret pact. Had she wanted war with us,
her fleet and the Kaiser's could have outmatched
our own. She did not; and the Kaiser had stiU
very clearly and sorely in remembrance what
choice she had made between standing with him
and standing with us a few years before this, upon
an occasion that was also connected with Admiral
Dewey. This I shall fully consider after sum
marizing those international episodes of our Civil
War wherein England was concerned.
This completes my list of minor troubles with

SOME FAMILY SCRAPS 137
England that we have had since Canning sug
gested our Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Minor
troubles, I caU them, because they are all smaller
than those during our Civil War. The fuU record
of each is an open page of history for you to read
at leisure in any good library. You wUl find
that the anti-Enghsh complex has its influence
sometimes in the pages of our historians, but
Professor Dunning is free from it. You wUl
find, whatever transitory gusts of anger, jealousy,
hostihty, or petulance may have swept over the
English people in their relations with us, these
gusts end in a calm; and this calm is due to
the common-sense of the race. It revealed itseh
in the treaty at the close of our Revolution, and
it has been the ultimate controlhng factor in
Enghsh deaUngs with us ever since. And now I
reach the last of my large historic matters, the
Civil War, and our war with Spain.

CHAPTER XII
ON THE RAGGED EDGE

CHAPTER XII
ON THE RAGGED EDGE
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln, nominee of
the Republican party, which was opposed to
the extension of slavery, was elected President
of the United States. Forty-one days later,
the legislature of South Carolina, determined to
perpetuate slavery, met at Columbia, but, on
account of a local epidemic, moved to Charleston.
There, about noon, December 20th, it unani
mously declared "that the Union now subsist
ing between South Carolina and other States,
under the name of the United States of America,
is hereby dissolved." Soon other slave states
followed this lead, and among them all, during
those final months of Buchanan's presidency,
preparedness went on, unchecked by the half-
feeble, haU-treacherous Federal Government.
Lincoln, in his inaugural address, March 4,
1861, declared that he had no purpose, directly
or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of
141

142 A STRAIGHT DEAL
slavery in the states where it existed. To the
seceded slave. states he said: "In your hands,
my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not mine,
is the momentous issue of civil war. The Gov
ernment will not assail you. You can have no
conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
You can have no oath registered in heaven to
destroy the Government; while I shall have the
most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend
it." This changed nothing in the slave states.
It was not enough for them that slavery could
keep on where it was. To spread it where it
was not, had been their aim for a very long whUe.
The next day, March 5th, Lincoln had letters
from Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. Major
Anderson was besieged there by the batteries
of secession, was being starved out, might hold
on a month longer, needed help. Through stag
gering complications and embarrassments, which
were presently to be outstaggered by worse ones,
Lincoln by the end of March saw his path clear.
"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-country
men, and not mine, is the momentous issue of
civil war." The clew to the path had been in
those words from the first. The flag of the Union,

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 143
the Uttle island of loyalty amid the waters- of
secession, was covered by the Charleston bat
teries. "Batteries ready to open Wednesday
or Thursday. What instructions?" Thus, on
AprU 1st, General Beauregard, at Charleston,
telegraphed to Jefferson Davis. They had all
been hoping that Lincoln would give Fort Sumter
to them and so save their having to take it. Not
at all. The President of the United States was
not going to give away property of the United
States. Instead, the Governor of South Caro
lina received a polite message that an attempt
would be made to supply Fort Sumter with food
only, and that if this were not interfered with,
no arms or ammunition should be sent there with
out further notice, or in case the fort were
attacked. Lincoln was leaning backwards, you
might say, in his patient effort to concUiate.
And accordingly our transports sailed from New
York for Charleston with instructions to supply
Sumter with food alone, unless they should be
opposed in attempting to carry out their errand.
This did not suit Jefferson Davis at all; and, to
cut it short, at half-past four, on the morning of
AprU 12, 1861, there arose into the air from the

144 A STRAIGHT DEAL
mortar battery near old Fort Johnson, on the
south side of the harbor, a bomb-sheU, which
curved high and slow through the dawn, and
fell upon Fort Sumter, thus starting four years
of civil war. One week later the Union pro
claimed a blockade on the ports of Slave Land.
Bear each and aU of these facts in mind, I beg,
bear them in mind well, for in the hght of them
you can see England clearly, and wiU have no
trouble in following the different threads of her
conduct towards us during this struggle. What
she did then gave to our ancient grudge against
her the reddest coat of fresh paint which it had
received yet — the reddest and the most enduring
since George III.
England ran true to form. It is very interest
ing to mark this; very interesting to watch in
her government and her people the persistent
and conflicting currents of sympathy and antip
athy boil up again, just as they had boiled in
1776. It is equally interesting to watch our
ancient grudge at work, causing us to remember
and hug all the ill will she bore us, all the harm
she did us, and to forget all the good. Roughly
comparing 1776 with 1861, it was once more the

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 145
Tories, the aristocrats, the Lord Norths, who
hoped for our overthrow, while the people of
England, with certain liberal leaders in Parlia
ment, stood our friends. Just as Pitt and Burke
had spoken for us in our Revolution, so Bright
and Cobden befriended us now. The parallel
ceases when you come to the Sovereign. Queen
Victoria declined to support or recognize Slave
Land. She stopped the Government and aris
tocratic England from forcing war upon us, she
prevented the French Emperor, Napoleon III,
from recognizing the Southern Confederacy. We
shall come to this in its turn. Our Civil War
set up in England a huge vibration, subjected
England to a searching test of herself. Nothing
describes this better than a letter of Henry Ward
Beecher's, written during the War, after his
return from addressing the people of England.
"My own feelings and judgment underwent a
great change while I was in England ... I
was chiUed and shocked at the coldness towards
the North which I everywhere met, and the sym
pathetic prejudices in favor of the South. And
yet everybody was alike condemning slavery
and praising Uberty!"

146 A STRAIGHT DEAL
How could England do this, how with the
same breath blow cold and hot, how be against
the North that was fighting the extension of slav
ery and yet be against slavery too? Confusing
at the time, it is clear to-day. Imbedded in Lin
coln's first inaugural address lies the clew: he
said, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly,
to interfere with the institution of slavery where
it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do
so, and I have no inclination to do so. Those
who elected me did so with full knowledge that
I had made this and many similar declarations,
and had never recanted them." Thus Lincoln,
March 4, 1861. Six weeks later, when we
went to war, we went, not "to interfere with the
institution of slavery," but (again in Lincoln's
words) "to preserve, protect, and defend" the
Union. This was our slogan, this our fight, this
was repeated again and again by our soldiers and
civilians, by our public men and our private citi
zens. Can you see the position of those English
men who condemned slavery and praised liberty?
We ourselves said we were not out to abolish
slavery, we disclaimed any such object, by our
own words we cut the ground away from them.

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 147
Not until September 22d of 1862, to take effect
upon January 1, 1863, did Lincoln proclaim
emancipation — thus doing what he had said
twenty-two months before "I believe I have no
lawful right to do."
That interim of anguish and meditation had
cleared his sight. Slowly he had felt his way,
slowly he had come to perceive that the preser
vation of the Union and the abohtion of slavery
were so tightly wrapped together as to merge
and be one and the same thing. But even had
he known this from the start, known that the
North's bottom cause, the ending of slavery,
rested on moral ground, and that moral ground
outweighs and must forever outweigh what
ever of legal argument may be on the other side,
he could have done nothing. "I believe I have
no lawful right." There were thousands in the
North who also thus beheved. It was only an
extremist minority who disregarded the Consti
tution's acquiescence in slavery and wanted
emancipation proclaimed at once. Had Lin
coln proclaimed it, the North would have split
in pieces, the South would have won, the Union
would have perished, and slavery would have

148 A STRAIGHT DEAL
remained. Lincoln had to wait until the season
of anguish and meditation had unblinded thou
sands besides himseh, and thus had placed behind
him enough of the North to struggle on to that
saving of the Union and that freeing of the slave
which was consummated more than two years
later by Lee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox.
But it was during that interim of anguish and
meditation that England did us most of the harm
which our memories vaguely but violently treas
ure. Until the Emancipation, we gave our
English friends no pubhc, official grounds for
their sympathy, and consequently their influence
over our Enghsh enemies was hampered. In
stantly after January 1, 1863, that sympathy
became the deciding voice. Our enemies could
no longer say to it, "but Lincoln says himself
that he doesn't intend to abolish slavery."
Here are examples of what occurred : To WU-
Uam Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist, an English
sympathizer wrote that three thousand men of
Manchester had met there and adopted by accla
mation an enthusiastic message to Lincoln. These
men said that they would rather remain unem
ployed for twenty years than get cotton from the

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 149
South at the expense of the slave. A month
later Cobden writes to Charles Sumner: "I
know nothing in my pohtical experience so strik
ing, as a display of spontaneous public action,
as that of the vast gathering at Exeter Hall
(in London), when, without one attraction in the
form of a popular orator, the vast building, its
minor rooms and passages, and the streets ad
joining, were crowded with an enthusiastic audi
ence. That meeting has had a powerful effect
on our newspapers and pohticians. It has closed
the mouths of those who have been advocating
the side of the South. And I now write to assure
you that any unfriendly act on the part of our
Government — no matter which of our aristo
cratic parties is in power — towards your cause
is not to be apprehended. If an attempt were
made by the Government in any way to commit
us to the South, a spirit would be instantly aroused
which would drive that Government from power."
I lay emphasis at this point upon these instances
(many more could be given) because it has been
the habit of most Americans to say that Eng
land stopped being hostile to the North as soon
as the North began to win. In January, 1863,

150 A STRAIGHT DEAL
the North had not visibly begun to win, it had
suffered almost unvaried defeat so far; and the
battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, where the
tide turned at last our way, were still six months
ahead. It was from January 1, 1863, when Lin
coln planted our cause firmly and openly on
abolition ground, that the undercurrent of British
sympathy surged to the top. The true wonder
is, that this undercurrent should have been so
strong all along, that those English sympathizers
somehow in their hearts should have known
what we were fighting for more clearly than we
had been able to see it ourselves. The key to
this is given in Beecher's letter — it is nowhere
better given — and to it I must now return.
"I soon perceived that my first error was in
supposing that Great Britain was an impartial
spectator. In fact, she was morally an actor
in the conflict. Such were the antagonistic
influences at work in her own midst, and the
division of parties, that, in judging American
affairs she could not help lending sanction to one
or the other side of her own internal conflicts.
England was not, then, a judge, sitting calmly
on the bench to decide without bias ; the case

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 151
brought before her was her own, in principle,
and in interest. In taking sides with the North,
the common people of Great Britain and the labor
ing class took sides with themselves in their
struggle for reformation ; while the wealthy
and the privileged classes found a reason in their
own pohtical parties and phflosophies why they
should not be too eager for the legitimate govern
ment and nation of the United States.
"AU classes who, at home, were seeking the
elevation and poUtical enfranchisement of the
common people, were with us. All who studied
the preservation of the state in its present un
equal distribution of poUtical privileges, sided
with that section in America that were doing the
same thing.
"We ought not to be surprised nor angry that
men should maintain aristocratic doctrines which
they beheve in fuUy as sincerely, and more con
sistently, than we, or many amongst us do, in
democratic doctrines.
"We of aU people ought to understand how a
government can be cold or semi-hostile, while the
people are friendly with us. For thirty years
the American Government, in the hands, or

152 A STRAIGHT DEAL
under the influence of Southern statesmen, has
been in a threatening attitude to Europe, and
actually in disgraceful conflict with all the weak
neighboring Powers. Texas, Mexico, Central
America, and Cuba are witnesses. Yet the
great body of our people in the Middle and North
ern States are strongly opposed to aU such tend
encies." It was in a very brief visit that Beecher man
aged to see England as she was : a remarkable
letter for its insight, and more remarkable stiU
for its moderation, when you consider that it
was written in the midst of our Civil War, whole
loyal Americans were not only enraged with Eng
land, but wounded to the quick as well. When
a man can do this — can have passionate con
victions in passionate times, and yet keep his
judgment unclouded, wise, and calm, he serves
his country well.
I can remember the rage and the wound. In
that atmosphere I began my existence. My
chUdhood was steeped in it. In our house the
London Punch was stopped, because of its hostile
ridicule. I grew to boyhood hearing from my
elders how England had for years taunted us with

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 153
our tolerance of slavery whUe we boasted of
being the Land of the Free — and then, when we
arose to abohsh slavery, how she "jack-knived"
and gave aid and comfort to the slave power
when it had its fingers upon our throat. Many
of that generation of my elders never wholly got
over the rage and the wound. They hated all
England for the sake of less than half England.
They counted their enemies but never their
friends. There's nothing unnatural about this,
nothing rare. On the contrary, it's the usual,
natural, unjust thing that human nature does
in times of agony. It's the Henry Ward Beechers
that are rare. In times of agony the average
man and woman see nothing but their agony.
When I look over some of the letters that I re
ceived from England in 1915 — • letters from
strangers evoked by a book called The Pentecost
of Calamity, wherein I had pubhshed my convic
tion that the cause of England was righteous,
the cause of Germany hideous, and our own
persistent neutrality unworthy — I'm glad I lost
my temper only once, and replied caustically
only once. How dreadful (wrote one of my corre
spondents) must it be to belong to a nation that

154 A STRAIGHT DEAL
was behaving like mine ! I retorted (I'm sorry
for it now) that I could all the more readily
comprehend English feehng about our neutrahty,
because I had known what we had felt when Glad
stone spoke at Newcastle and when England let
the Alabama loose upon us in 1862. Where was
the good in replying at aU? Silence is almost
always the best reply in these cases. Next
came a letter from another English stranger, in
which the writer announced having just read
The Pentecost of Calamity. Not a word of friend
liness for what I had said about the righteousness
of England's cause or my expressed unhappiness
over the course which our Government had taken
— nothing but scorn for us all and the hope that
we should reap our deserts when Germany de
feated England and invaded us. Well? What
of it? Here was a stricken person, writing in
stress, in a land of desolation, mourning for the
dead already, waiting for the next who should
die, a poor, unstrung average person, who had
not long before read that remark of our Presi
dent's made on the morrow of the Lusitania:
that there is such a thing as being too proud to
fight; had read during the ensuing weeks those

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 155
notes wherein we stood committed by our Chief
Magistrate to a verbal slinking away and sitting
down under it. Can you wonder? If the mere
memory of those days of our humihation stabs
me even now, I need no one to tell me (though I
have been told) what England, what France, felt
about us then, what it must have been like for
Americans who were in England and France at
that time. No : the average person in great
trouble cannot rise above the trouble and survey
the truth and be just. In Enghsh eyes our
Government — and therefore all of us — failed
in 1914 — 1915 — 1916 — failed again and again
— insulted the cause of humanity when we said
through our President in 1916, the third summer
of the war, that we were not concerned with either
the causes or the aims of that confhct. How
could they remember Hoover, or Robert Bacon,
or Leonard Wood, or Theodore Roosevelt then,
any more than we could remember John Bright,
or Richard Cobden, or the Manchester men in
the days when the" Alabama was sinking the
merchant vessels of the Union?
We remembered Lord John Russell and Lord
Palmerston in the British Government, and their

156 A STRAIGHT DEAL
fellow aristocrats in British society; we remem
bered the aristocratic British press — The Times
notably, because the most powerful — these are
what we saw, felt, and remembered, because
they were not with us, and were able to hurt us
in the days when our friends were not yet able
to help us. They made welcome the Southerners
who came over in the interests of the South, they
listened to the Southern propaganda. Why?
Because the South was the, American version of
their aristocratic creed. To those who came over
in the interests of the North and of the Union
they turned a cold shoulder, because they repre
sented Democracy ; moreover, a Dis-United States
would prove in commerce a less formidable com
petitor. To Captain Bullock, the able and ener
getic Southerner who put through in England the
building and launching of those Confederate
cruisers which sank our ships and destroyed our
merchant marine, and to Mason and Slidell,
the doors of dukes opened pleasantly; Beecher
and our other emissaries mostly had to dine
beneath uncoroneted roofs.
1 In the pages of Henry Adams, and of Charles
Francis Adams his brother, you can read of what

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 157
they, as young men, encountered in London, and
what they saw their father have to put up with
there, both from Enghsh society and the Enghsh
Government. Their father was our new minister
to England, appointed by Lincoln. He arrived
just after our CivU War had begun. I have
heard his sons talk about it famUiarly, and it is
aU to be found in their writings.
Nobody knows how to be disagreeable quite
so weU as the Enghsh gentleman, except the
Enghsh lady. They can do it with the nicety
of a medicine dropper. They can administer
the precise quantum suff. in every case. In the
society of Enghsh gentlemen and ladies Mr.
Adams by his official position was obhged to move.
They left him out as much as they could, but,
being the American Minister, he couldn't be left
out altogether. At their dinners and functions
he had to hear open expressions of joy at the
news of Southern victories, he had to receive
slights both veiled and unveiled, and all this he
had to bear with equanimity. Sometimes he
did leave the room; but with dignity and dis
cretion. A false step, a "break," might have
led to a request for his recall, He knew that his

158 A STRAIGHT DEAL
constant presence, close to the English Govern
ment, was vital to our cause. RusseU and Palm
erston were by turns insolent and shifty, and
once on the very brink of recognizing the Southern
Confederacy as an independent nation. Glad
stone, Chancellor of ithe Exchequer, in a speech
at Newcastle, virtually did recognize it. You
will be proud of Mr. Adams if you read how
he bore himself and fulfilled his appaUingly
deUcate and difficult mission. He was an
American who knew how to behave himseh,
and he behaved himself all the time; while
the Enghsh had a way of turning their behavior
on and off, hke the hot water. Mr. Adams was
no admirer of "shirt-sleeves" diplomacy. His
diplomacy wore a coat. Our experiments in
"shirt-sleeves" diplomacy faU to show that it ac
complishes anything which diplomacy decently
dressed would not accomplish more satisfac
torily. Upon Mr. Adam,s fell some consequences
of previous American crudities, of which I shall
speak later.
Lincoln had declared a blockade on Southern
ports before Mr. Adams arrived in London. Upon
his arrival he found England had proclaimed her

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 159
neutrahty and recognized the belhgerency of the
South. This dismayed Mr. Adams and excited
the whole North, because feehng ran too high
to perceive this first act on England's part to
be really favorable to us ; she could not recognize
our blockade, which stopped her getting Southern
cotton, unless she recognized that the South was
in a state of war with us. Looked at quietly,
this act of England's helped us and hurt herself,
for it deprived her of cotton.
It was not with this, but with the reception
and treatment of Mr. Adams that the true hos
tility began. Slights to him were slaps at us,
sympathy with the South was an active moral
injury to our cause, even if it was mostly an under
tone, politically. Then all of a sudden, some
thing that we did ourselves changed the under
tone to a loud overtone, and we just grazed Eng
land's declaring war on us. Had she done so,
then indeed it had been all up with us. This
incident is the comic going-back on our own doc
trine of 1812, to which I have aUuded above.
On November 8, 1861, Captain Charles
Wilkes of the American steam-sloop San Jacinto,
fired a shot across the bow of the British vessel

160 A STRAIGHT DEAL
Trent, stopped her on the high seas, and took
four passengers off her, and brought them pris
oners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. Mason
and Slidell are the two we remember, Confed
erate envoys to France and Great Britain. Over
this the whole North burst into glorious joy.
Our Secretary of the Navy wrote to Wilkes his
congratulations, Congress voted its thanks to
him, governors and judges laureled him with
oratory at banquets, he was feasted with meat
and drink all over the place, and, though his
years were sixty-three, ardent females probably
rushed forth from throngs and kissed him with
the purest intentions : heroes have no age. But
presently the Trent arrived in England, and the
British lion was aroused- We had violated in
ternational law, and insulted the British flag.
Palmerston wrote us a letter — or RusseU, I forget
which wrote it — a letter that would have left us
no choice but to fight. But Queen Victoria had to
sign it before it went. "My lord," she' said, "you
must know that I will agree tp no paper that
means war with the United States." So this didn't
go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff, naturaUy,
yet stiU possible for us to swallow. Some didn't

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 161
want to swallow even this; but Lincoln, humor
ous and wise, said, "Gentlemen, one war at a
time;" and so we made due restitution, and
Messrs. Mason and Shdell went their way to
France and England, free to bring about action
against us there if they could manage it. Cap
tain Wilkes must have been a good fellow. His
picture suggests this. England, in her English
heart, really liked what he had done, it was in
its gaUant flagrancy so remarkably hke her own
doings — though she couldn't, naturaUy, per
mit such a performance to pass ; and a few years
afterwards, for his services in the cause of explo
ration, her Royal Geographical Society gave him
a gold medal! Yes; the whole thing is comic
¦ — to-day ; for us, to-day, the point of it is, that
the Enghsh Queen saved us from a war with
England. Within a year, something happened that was
not comic. Lord John Russell, though warned
and warned, let the Alabama shp away tp sea,
where she proceeded to send our merchant ships
to the bottom, until the Kearsarge sent her her
self to the bottom. She had been built at Liver
pool in the face of an Enghsh law which no quib-
M

162 A STRAIGHT DEAL
bling could disguise to anybody except to Lord
John Russell and to those who, hke him, leaned
to the South. Ten years later, this leaning cost
England fifteen million dollars in damages.
Let us now Usten to what our British friends
were saying in those years before Lincoln issued
his Emancipation Proclamation. His blockade had
brought immediate and heavy distress upon many
Enghsh workmen and their families. That had
been April 19, 1861. By September, five sixths of
the Lancashire cotton-spinners were out of work,
or working half time. Their starvation and that
of their wives and chUdren could be stemmed
by charity alone. I have talked with people
who saw those thousands in their suffering. Yet
those thousands bore it. They somehow looked
through Lincoln's express disavowal of any in
tention to interfere with slavery, and saw that
at bottom our war was indeed against slavery,
that slavery was behind the Southern camou
flage about independence, and behind the North
ern slogan about preserving the Union. They
saw and they stuck. "Rarely," writes Charles
Francis Adams, "in the history of mankind, has
there been a more creditable exhibition of human

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 163
sympathy." France was Ukewise damaged by
our blockade; and Napoleon III. would have
liked to recognize the South. He estabhshed,
through MaximiUan, an empire in Mexico, be
hind which lay hostility to our Democracy.
He wished us defeat ; but he was afraid to move
without England, to whom he made a succession
of indirect approaches. These nearly came to
something towards the close of 1862. It was on
October 7th that Gladstone spoke at Newcastle
about Jefferson Davis having made a nation.
Yet, after all, England didn't budge, and thus
held Napoleon back. From France in the end
the South got neither ships nor recognition, in
spite of his deceitful connivance and desire;
Napoleon flirted a whUe with Slidell, but grew
cold when he saw no chance of Enghsh co
operation. Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other
Enghsh friends of influence and celebrity: John
Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith,
Leshe Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Har
rison are some of them. AU from the first sup
ported us. AU from the first worked and spoke
for us. The Union and Emancipation Society

164 A STRAIGHT DEAL
was founded. "Your Committee," says its final
report when the war was ended, "have issued
and circulated upwards of four hundred thousand
books, pamphlets, and tracts . . . and nearly
five hundred official and pubhc meetings have
been held ..." The president of this Society,
Mr. Potter, spent thirty thousand dollars in the
cause, and at a time when times were hard and
fortunes as well as cotton-spinners in distress
through our blockade. Another member of the
Society, Mr. Thompson, writes of one of the
pubhc meetings: "... I addressed a crowded
assembly of unemployed operatives in the town
of Heywood, near Manchester, and spoke to them
for two hours about the Slaveholders' RebeUion.
They were united and vociferous in the expres
sion of their willingness to suffer aU hardships
consequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby
the hberty of the victims of Southern despotism
might be promoted. All honor to the half mil
lion of our working population in Lancashire,
Cheshire, and elsewhere, who are bearing with
heroic fortitude the privation which your war
has entailed upon them! . . . Their sublime
resignation, their self-forgetfulness, their observ-

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 165
ance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause
of human freedom, their quick and clear percep
tion of the merits of the question between the
North and the South ... are extorting the
admiration of aU classes of the community ..."
How much of aU this do you ever hear from the
people who remember the Alabama?
Strictly in accord with Beecher's vivid summary
of the true England in our Civil War, are some
passages of a letter from Mr. John Bigelow,
who was at that time our Consul-General at
Paris, and whose impressions, written to our
Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, on February
6, 1863, are interesting to compare with what
Beecher says in that letter, from which I have
aheady given extracts.
"The anti-slavery meetings in England are
having their effect upon the Government already
. . . The Paris correspondent of the Londorb
Post also came to my house on Wednesday even
ing ... He says . . . that there are about a
dozen persons who by their position and influ
ence over the organs of pubhc opinion have pro
duced aU the bad feeling and treacherous con
duct of England towards America. They are

166 A STRAIGHT DEAL
people who, as members of the Government in
times past, have been bulhed by the U. S. . . .
they are not entirely ignorant that the class
who are now trying to overthrow the Government
were mainly responsible for the brutahty, but
they think we as a nation are disposed to bully,
and they are disposed to assist in any pohcy
that may dismember and weaken us. These
scars of wounded pride, however, have been
carefully concealed from the pubhc, who there
fore cannot be readily made to see why, when the
President has distinctly made the issue between
slave labor and free labor, that England should not
go with the North. He says these dozen people
who rule England hate us cordially ..."
There were more than a dozen, a good many
more, as we know from Charles and Henry Adams.
But read once again the last paragraph of Beecher's
letter, and note how it corresponds with what
Mr. Bigelow says about the feehng which our
Government (for thirty years "in the hands or
under the influence of Southern statesmen")
had raised against us by its bad manners to Euro
pean governments. This was the harvest sown
by shirt-sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr.

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 167
Adams in 1861. Only seven years before, we
had gratuitously offended four countries at once.
Three of our foreign ministers (two of them from
the South) had met at Ostend and later at Aix
in the interests of extending slavery, and there,
in a joint manifesto, had ordered Spain to sell
us Cuba, or we would take Cuba by force. One
of the three was our minister to Spain. Spain
had received him courteously as the representa
tive of a nation with whom she was at peace.
It was hke ringing the doorbell of an acquaint
ance, being shown into the parlor and telhng him
he" must seU you his spoons or you would snatch
them. This doesn't inchne your neighbor to
hke you. But, as has been said, Mr. Adams was
an American who did know how to behave, and
thereby served us weU in our hour of need.
We remember the Alabama and our Enghsh
enemies, we forget Bright, and Cobden, and all
our EngUsh friends; but Lincoln did not forget
them. When a young man, a friend of Bright's,
an EngUshman, had been caught here in a plot
to seize a vessel and make her into another
Alabama, John Bright asked mercy for him ; and
here are Lincoln's words in consequence :

168 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"Whereas one Rubery was convicted on or
about the twehth day of October, 1863, in the
Circuit Court of the United States for the District
of CaUfornia, of engaging in, and giving aid and
comfort to the existing rebeUion, against the
Government of this Country, and sentenced to
ten years' imprisonment, and to pay a fine of
ten thousand dollars ;
"And whereas, the said Alfred Rubery is of
the immature age of twenty years, and of highly
respectable parentage ;
"And whereas, the said AUred Rubery is a
subject of Great Britain, and his pardon is desired
by John Bright, of England ;
"Now, therefore, be it known that I, Abraham
Lincoln, President of the United States of America,
these and divers other considerations me there
unto moving, and especiaUy as a pubUc mark
of the esteem held by the United States of America
for the high character and steady friendship of
the said John Bright, do hereby grant a pardon
to the said Alfred Rubery, the same to begin
and take effect on the twentieth day of January
1864, on condition that he leave the country within
thirty days from and after that date."

ON THE RAGGED EDGE 169
Thus Lincoln, because of Bright; and because
of a word from Bright to Charles Sumner about
the starving cotton-spinners, Americans sent
from New York three ships with flour for those
faithful English friends of ours. v
And then, at Geneva in 1872, England paid
us for what the Alabama had done. This Court
of Arbitration grew slowly ; suggested first by Mr.
Thomas Balch to Lincoln, who thought the mil
lennium wasn't quite at hand but favored "airing
the idea." The idea was not aired easily. Cob
den would have brought it up in Parhament, but
illness and death overtook him. The idea found
but few other friends. At last Horace Greeley
"aired" it in his paper. On October 23, 1863,
Mr. Adams said to Lord John Russell, "I am
directed to say that there is no fair and equitable
form of conventional arbitrament or reference
to which the United States will not be willing to
submit." This, some two ,years later, RusseU
recalled, saying in reply to a statement of our
grievances by Adams: "It appears to Her Ma
jesty's Government that there are but two ques
tions by which the claim of compensation could
be tested; the one is, Have the British Govern-

170 A STRAIGHT DEAL
ment acted with due dihgence, or, in other words,
in good faith and honesty, in the maintenance
of the neutrahty they proclaimed? The other
is, Have the law officers of the Crown properly
understood the foreign enUstment act, when they
dechned, in June 1862 to advise the detention
and seizure of the Alabama, and on other occa
sions when they were asked to detain other ships,
building or fitting in British ports? It appears
to Her Majesty's Government that neither of
these questions could be put to a foreign govern
ment with any regard to the dignity and char
acter of the British Crown and the British Nation.
Her Majesty's Government are the sole guard
ians of their own honor. They cannot admit
that they have acted with bad faith in main
taining the neutrahty they professed. The law
officers of the Crown must be held to be better
interpreters of a British statute than any foreign
Government can be presumed to be . . ." He
consented to a commission, but drew the Une at
any probing of England's good faith.
We persisted. In 1868, Lord Westbury, Lord
High Chancellor, declared in the House of Lords
that "the animus with which the neutral powers
acted was the only true criterion."

ON THE RAGGED EDGE ' 171
This is the test which we asked should be
apphed. We quoted British remarks about us,
Gladstone, for example, as evidence of unfriendly
and insincere animus on the part of those at
the head of the British Government.
Replying to our pressing the point of animus,
the British Government reasserted Russell's re
fusal to recognize or entertain any question of
England's good faith: "first, because it would
be inconsistent with the seh-respect which every
government is bound to feel. ..." In Mr.
John Bassett Moore's History of International
Arbitration, Vol. I, pages 496^497, or in papers
relating to the Treaty of Washington, Vol. II,
Geneva Arbitration, page 204 . . . Part 1, In
troductory Statement, you will find the whole
of this. What I give here suffices to show the
position we ourselves and England took about
the Alabama case. She backed down. Her good
faith was put in issue, and she paid our direct
claims. She ate "humble pie." We had to eat
humble pie in the affair of the Trent. It has
been done since. It is not pleasant, but it may
be beneficial.
Such is the story of the true England and the

172 A STRAIGHT DEAL
true America in 1861 ; the divided North with
which Lincoln had to deal, the divided England
where our many friends could do httle to check
our influential enemies, until Lincoln came out
plainly against slavery, I have had to compress
much, but I have omitted nothing material,
of which I am aware. The facts would embarrass
those who determine to assert that England was
our undivided enemy during our Civil War, if
facts ever embarrassed a complex. Those afflicted
with the complex can keep their eyes upon the
Alabama and the London Times, and avert them
from Bright, and Cobden, and the cotton-spin
ners, and the Union and Emancipation Society,
and Queen Victoria. But to any reader of this
whose complex is not incurable, or who has none,
I will put this question : What opinion of the
brains of any Englishman would you have if
he formed his idea of the United States exclu
sively from the. newspapers of William Randolph
Hearst ?

CHAPTER XIII
BENEFITS FORGOT

CHAPTER XIII
BENEFITS forgot
In our next war, our war with Spain in 1898,
England saved us from Germany. She did it
from first to last ; her position was unmistakable,
and every determining act of hers was as our
friend. The service that she rendered us in warn
ing Germany to keep out of it, was even greater
than her suggestion of our Monroe doctrine in
1823; for in 1823 she put us on guard against
meditated, but remote, assault from Europe,
while in 1898 she actively averted a serious and
imminent peril. As the threat of her fleet had
obstructed Napoleon in 1803, and the Holy Alli
ance in 1823, so in 1898 it blocked the Kaiser.
Late in that year, when it was aU over,, the dis
appointed and baffled Kaiser wrote to a friend of
Joseph Chamberlain, "If I had had a larger fleet
I would have taken Uncle Sam by the scruff of
the neck." Have you ever read what our own
175

176 A STRAIGHT DEAL
fleet was like in those days? Or our Army?
Lucky it was for us that we had to deal only with
Spain. And even the Spanish fleet would have
been a much graver opponent in Manila Bay,
but for Lord Cromer. On its way from Spain
through the Suez Canal a formidable part of
Spain's navy stopped to coal at Port Said. There
is a law about the coaling of belhgerent war
ships in neutral ports. Lord Cromer could have
construed that law just as well against us. His
construction brought it about that those Spanish
ships couldn't get to Manila Bay in time to take
part against Admiral Dewey. The Spanish War
revealed that our Navy could hit eight times
4)ut of a hundred, and was in other respects un
prepared and utterly inadequate to cope with a
first-class power. In consequence of this, and the
criticisms of our Navy Department, which Ad
miral Sims as a young man had written, Roosevelt
took the steps he did in his first term. Three
tickhsh times in that Spanish War England stood
our friend against l Germany. When it broke
out, German agents approached Mr. Balfour,
proposing that England join in a European com
bination in Spain's favor. Mr. Balfour's refusal

BENEFITS FORGOT 177
is common knowledge, except to the monomaniac
with his complex. Next came the action of Lord
Cromer, and finally that moment in Manila
Bay when England took her stand by our side
and Germany saw she would have to fight us
both, if she fought at aU.
If you saw any German or French papers at
the time of our troubles with Spain, you saw
undisguised hostility. If you have talked with
any American who was in Paris during that April
of 1898, your impression wiU be more vivid still.
There was an outburst of European hate for us.
Germany, France, and Austria all looked expect
antly to England — and England disappointed
their expectations. The British Press was as
much for us as the French and German press
were hostile; the London Spectator said: "We
are not, and we do not pretend to be, an agree
able people, but when there is trouble in the
family, we know where our hearts are."
In those same days (somewhere about the third
week in AprU, 1898), at the British Embassy in
Washington, occurred a scene of significance
and interest, which has probably been told less
often than that interview between Mr'. Balfour

178 A STRAIGHT DEAL
and the Kaiser's emissary in London. The
British Ambassador was standing at his window,
looking out at the German Embassy, across the
street. With him was a member of his diplo
matic household. The two watched what was
happening. One by one, the representatives
of various European nations were entering the
door of the German Embassy. "Do you see
them?" said the Ambassador's companion;
"they'll all be in there soon. There. That's
the last of them." "I didn't notice the French
Ambassador." "Yes, he's gone in, too." "I'm
surprised at that. I'm sorry for that. I didn't
think he would be one of them," said the British
Ambassador. "Now, I'll tell you what. They'U
all be coming over here in a Uttle while. I want
you to wait and be present." Shortly this pre
diction was verified. Over from the German
Embassy came the whole company on a visit
to the British Ambassador, that he might add
his signature to a document to which they had
affixed theirs. He read it quietly. We may
easily imagine its purport, since we know of
the meditated European coalition against us at
the time of our war with Spain. Then the British

BENEFITS FORGOT 179
Ambassador remarked: "I have no orders from
my Government to sign any such document as
that. And if I did have, I should resign my post
rather than sign it." A pause : The company
fell silent. "Then what wiU your ExceUency
do?" inquired one visitor. "If you wUl all do
me the honor of coming back to-morrow, I shaU
have another document ready which all of us
can sign." That is what happened to the Euro
pean coahtion at this end.
Some few years later, that British Ambassador
came to die ; and to the British Embassy repaired
Theodore Roosevelt. "Would it be possible
for us to arrange," he said, "a funeral more hon
ored and marked than the United States has
ever accorded to any one not a citizen ? I should
hke it. And," he suddenly added, shaking his
fist at the German Embassy over the way, "I'd
like to grind aU their noses in the dirt."
Confronted with the awkward fact that Britain
was almost unanimously with us, from Mr. Bal
four down through the British press to the British
people, those nations whose ambassadors had
paid so unsuccessful a caU at the British Em
bassy had to give it up. Their coahtion never

180 A STRAIGHT DEAL,
came off. Such a thing couldn't come off with
out England, and England said No.
Next, Lord Cromer, at Port Said, stretched out
the arm of international law, and laid it upon the
Spanish fleet. Belligerents may legally take coal
enough at neutral ports to reach their nearest
"home port." That Spanish fleet was on its
way from Spain to Manila through the Suez
Canal. It could have reached there, had Lord
Cromer aUowed it coal enough to make the
nearest home port ahead of it — Manila. But
there was a home port behind it, still nearer,
namely, Barcelona. He let it take coal enough
to get back to Barcelona. Thus, England again
stepped in.
The third time was in ManUa Bay itself, after
Dewey's victory, and whUe he was in occupation
of the place. Once more the Kaiser tried it, not
discouraged by his failure with Mr. Balfour and
the British Government. He desired the Philip
pines for himself ; we had not yet acquired them ;
we were poUcing them, superintending the harbor,
administering whatever had fallen to us from
Spain's defeat. The Kaiser sent, under Admiral
Diedrich, a squadron stronger than Dewey's.

BENEFITS FORGOT 181
Dewey indicated where the German was to anchor.
"I am here by the order of his Majesty the Ger
man Emperor," said Diedrich, and chose his own
place to anchor. He made it quite plain in other
ways that he was taking no orders from America.
Dewey, so report has it, at last told him that
"if he wanted a fight he could have it at the
drop of the hat." Then it was that the German
called on the Enghsh Admiral, Chichester, who
was hkewise at hand, anchored in ManUa Bay.
"What would you do," inquired Diedrich, "in
the event of trouble between Admiral Dewey and
myself?" "That is a secret known only to
Admiral Dewey and me," said the Enghshman.
Plainer talk could hardly be. Diedrich, though
a German, understood it. He returned to his
flagship. What he saw next morning was the
British cruiser in a new place, interposed between
Dewey and himself. Once more, he understood;
and he and his squadron sailed off; and it was
soon after this incident that the disappointed
Kaiser wrote that, if only his fleet had been
larger, he would have taken us by the scruff of
the neck.
TeU these things to the next man you hear

182 A STRAIGHT DEAL
talking about George III or the Alabama. You
may meet him in front of a bulletin board, or in
a drawing-room. He is amongst us everywhere,
in the street and in the house. He may be a
paid propagandist or merely a sUly ignorant
puppet. But whatever he is, he wUl not find
much to say in response, unless it be vain, sterUe
chatter. True come-back wiU fail him as it
failed that man by the bulletin board who asked,
"What is England doing, anyhow?" and his
neighbor answered, "Her fleet's keeping the
Kaiser out of your front yard."

CHAPTER XIV
ENGLAND THE SLACKER!

CHAPTER XIV
ENGLAND THE SLACKER !
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
Let us have these disregarded facts also. From
the shelves of history I have puUed down and dis
played the facts which our school textbooks
have suppressed ; I have told the events wherein
England has stood our timely friend throughout
a century ; events which our implanted prejudice
leads us to ignore, or to forget; events which
show that any one who says England is our
hereditary enemy might just about as well say
twice two is five.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
They go on asking it. The propagandists, the
prompted puppets, the paid parrots of the press,
go on saying these eight senseless words because
they are easy to say, since the man who can
answer them is generally not there : to every
man who is a responsible master of facts we have
— weU, how many? — irresponsible shouters in
185

186 rA STRAIGHT DEAL
this country. What is your experience? How
often is it your luck — as it was mine in front
of the bulletin board — to see a fraud or a fool
promptly and satisfactorily put in his place?
Make up your mind that wherever you hear
any person whatsoever, male or female, clean
or unclean, dressed in jeans, or dressed in silks
and laces, inquire what England "did in the war,
anyhow?" such person either shirks knowledge, or
else is a fraud or a fool. Tell them what the man
said in the street about the Kaiser and our front
yard, but don't stop there. Tell them that in May,
1918, England was sending men of fifty and boys
of eighteen and a half to the front ; that in August,
1918, every third male available between those
years was fighting, that eight and a half miUion
men for army and navy were raised by the British
Empire, of which Ireland's share was two and
three tenths per cent, Wales three and seven
tenths, Scotland's eight and three tenths, and
England's more than sixty per cent; and that
this, taken proportionately to our greater popu
lation would have amounted to about thirteen
million Americans, When the war started, the
British Empire maintained three soldiers out of

ENGLAND THE SLACKER I 187
every 2600 of the population; her entire army,
regular establishment, reserve and territorial
forces, amounted to seven hundred thousand
men. Our casualties were three hundred and
twenty-two thousand, one hundred and eighty-
two. The casualties in the British Army were
three million, forty-nine thousand, nine hundred
and seventy-one — a nulhon more than we sent
— and of these six hundred and fifty-eight thou
sand, seven hundred and four, were killed. Of her
Navy, thirty-three thousand three hundred and
sixty-one were kiUed, six thousand four hundred
and five wounded and missing; of her merchant
marine fourteen thousand six hundred and sixty-
one were lulled; a total of forty-eight thousand
killed — or ten per cent of all in active service.
Some of those of the merchant marine who escaped
drowning through torpedoes and mines went back
to sea after being torpedoed five, six, and seven
times. What did England do in the war, anyhow ?
Through four frightful years she fought with
splendor, she suffered with splendor, she held
on with splendor. The second battle of Ypres is
but one drop in the sea of her epic courage; yet

188 A STRAIGHT DEAL
it would fill full a canto of a poem. So spent was
Britain's single line, so worn and thin, that after
all the men available were brought, gaps remained.
No more ammunition was coming to these men,
the last rounds had been served. Wet through,
heavy with mud, they were shelled for three days
to prevent sleep. Many came at last to sleep
standing ; and being jogged awake when officers of
the line passed down the trenches, would salute
and instantly be asleep again. On the fourth day,
with the Kaiser come to watch them crumble,
three hnes of Huns, wave after wave of Germany's
picked troops, fell and broke upon this single hne
of British — and it held. The Kaiser, had he
known of the exhausted ammunition and the
mounded dead, could have walked unarmed to
the Channel. But he never knew.
Surgeons being scantier than men at Ypres, one
with a compound fracture of the thigh had himself
propped up, and thus all day worked on the
wounded at the front. He knew it meant death
for him. The day over, he let them carry him to
the rear, and there, from blood-poisoning, he died.
Thus through four frightful years, the British met
their duty and their death.

ENGLAND THE SLACKER! 189
There is the great story of the little penny
steamers of the Thames — a story lost amid
the gigantic whole. Who will tell it right?
Who wiU make this drop of perfect valor shine
hr'prose or verse for future eyes to see? Imagine
a Hoboken ferry boat, because her country
needed her, starting for San Francisco around
Cape Horn, and getting there. Some ten or
eleven penny steamers under their own steam
started from the Thames down the Channel,
across the Bay of Biscay, past Gibraltar, and
through the submarined Mediterranean for the
River Tigris. Boats of shallow draught were
urgently needed on the River Tigris. Four or
five reached their destination. Where are the
rest? What did England do in the war, anyhow?
During 1917-1918 Britain's armies held the
enemy in three continents and on six fronts, and
cooperated with her Alhes on two more fronts.
Her dead, those six hundred and fifty-eight
thousand dead, lay by the Tigris, the Zambesi,
the iEgean, and across the world to Flanders'
fields. Between March 21st and April 17th,
1918, the Huns in their drive used 127 divisions,

190 A STRAIGHT DEAL
and of these 102 were concentrated against the
British. That was in Flanders. Britain, at the
same' time she was fighting in Flanders, had also
at various times shared in the fighting in Russia,
Kiaochau, New Guinea, Samoa, Mesopotamia,
Palestine, Egypt, the Sudan, Cameroons, Togo-
land, East Africa, South West Africa, Saloniki,
Aden, Persia, and the northwest frontier of India.
Britain cleared twelve hundred thousand square
miles of the enemy in German colonies. While
fighting in Mesopotamia, her soldiers were re
constructing at the same time. They reclaimed
and cultivated more than 1100 square miles of
land there, which produced in consequence enough
food to save two million tons of shipping an
nually for the Alhes. In Palestine and Mesopo
tamia alone, British troops in 1917 took 23,590
prisoners. In 1918, in Palestine from Septem
ber 18th to October 7th, they took 79,000 pris
oners. What did England do in the war, anyhow?
With "French's contemptible httle army"
she saved France at the start — but I'll skip
that — except to mention that one division lost
10,000 out of 12,000 men, and 350 out of 40Q

ENGLAND THE SLACKER 1 191
officers. At Zeebrugge and Ostend — do not
forget the Vindictive — she dealt with sub
marines in April and May, 1918 — but I'll skip
that ; I cannot set down all that she did, either
at the start, or nearing the finish, or at any par
ticular moment during those four years and three
months that she was helping to hold Germany
off from the throat of the world ; it would make
a very thick book. But I am giving you enough,
I think, wherewith to answer the ignorant, and
the frauds, and the fools. Tell them that from
1916 to 1918 Great Britain increased her tillage
area by four milUon acres : wheat 39 per cent,
barley 11, oats 35, potatoes 50 — in spite of the
shortage of labor. She used wounded soldiers,
college boys and girls, boy scouts, refugees, and
she produced the biggest grain crop in fifty years.
She started fourteen hundred thousand new war
gardens; most of those who worked them had
worked aheady a long day in a munition factory.
These devoted workers increased the potato crop
in 1917 by three million tons — and thus released
British provision ships to carry our soldiers across.
In that Boston speech which one of my correspond
ents referred to, our Secretary of the Navy did

192 A STRAIGHT DEAL
not mention this. Mention it yourself. And
tell them about the boy scouts and the women.
Fifteen thousand of the boy scouts joined the
colors, and over fifty thousand of the younger
members served in various ways at home.
Of England's women seven million were en
gaged in work on munitions and other necessaries
and apparatus of war. The terrible test of that
second battle of Ypres, to which I have made
brief allusion above, wrought an industrial revolu
tion in the manufacture of shells. The energy of
production rose at a rate which may be indicated
by two or three comparisons : In 1917 as many
heavy howitzer shells were turned out in a single
day as in the whole first year of the war, as many
medium shells in five days, and as many field-
gun shells in eight days. Or in other words, 45
times as many field-gun shells, 73 times as many
medium, and 365 times as many heavy howitzer
shells, were turned out in 1917 as in the first year
of the war. These shells were manufactured in
buildings totaling fifteen miles in length, forty feet
in breadth, with more than ten thousand machine
tools driven by seventeen miles of shafting with
an energy of twenty-five thousand horse-power

ENGLAND THE SLACKER! 193
and a weekly output of over ten thousand tons'
weight . of projectiles — all this largely worked
by the women of England. While the fleet
had increased its personnel from 136,000 to about
400,000, and 2,000,000 men by July, 1915, had
voluntarily enUsted in the army before England
gave up her birthright and accepted compulsory
service, the women of England left their ordinary
hves to fabricate the necessaries of war. They
worked at home while their husbands, brothers,
and sons fought and died on six battle fronts
abroad — six hundred and fifty-eight thousand
died, remember; do you remember the number
of Americans killed in action ? — less than thirty-
six thousand ; — those Enghsh women worked on,
seven milhons of them at least, on milk carts,
motor-busses, elevators, steam engines, and in
making ammunition. Never before had any
woman worked on more than 150 of the 500
different processes that go to the making of mu
nitions. They now handled T. N. T., and ful
minate of mercury, more deadly still; helped
build guns, gun carriages, and three-and-a-hah
ton army camions; worked overhead travehng
cranes for moving the boilers of battleships;

194 A STRAIGHT DEAL
turned lathes, made every part of an aeroplane.
And who were these seven million women?
The eldest daughter of a duke and the daughter
of a general won distinction in advanced munition
work. The only daughter of an old Army family
broke down after a year's work in a base hospital
in France, was ordered six months' rest at home,
but after two months entered a munition factory
as an ordinary employee and after nine months'
work had lost but five minutes working time.
The mother of seven enhsted sons went into
munitions not to be behind them in serving
England, and one of them wrote her she was
probably killing more Germans than any of the
family. The stewardess of a torpedoed passenger
ship was among the few survivors. Reaching
land, she got a job at a capstan lathe. Those
were the seven million women of England —
daughters of dukes, torpedoed stewardesses,
and everything between.
Seven hundred thousand of these were engaged
on munition work proper. They did from 60
to 70 per cent of all the machine work on shells,
fuses, and trench warfare supphes, and 1450 of
them were trained mechanics to the Royal Fly-

ENGLAND THE SLACKER I 195
ing Corps. They were employed upon practically
every operation in factory, in foundry, in labora
tory, and chemical works, of which they were
physically capable ; in making of gauges, forging
billets, making fuses, cartridges, bullets — "look
what they can do," said a foreman, "ladies from
homes where they sat about and were waited
upon." They also made optical glass; driUed
and tapped in the shipyards; renewed electric
wires and fittings, wound armatures; lacquered
guards for lamps and radiator fronts; repaired
junction and section boxes, fire control instru
ments, automatic searchhghts. "We can hardly
believe our eyes," said another foreman, "when
we see the heavy stuff brought to and from the
shops in motor lorries driven by girls. Before
the war it was aU carted by horses and men.
The girls do the job all right, though, and the
only thing they ever complain about is that
their toes get cold." They worked without
hesitation from twelve to fourteen hours a day,
or a night, for seven days a week, and with the
voluntary sacrifice of pubhc hohdays.
That is not all, or nearly all, that the women
of England did — I skip their welfare work,

196 A STRAIGHT DEAL
recreation work, nursing — but it is ' enough
wherewith to answer the ignorant, or the fraud,
or the fool.
What did England do in the war, anyhow?
On August 8, 1914, Lord Kitchener asked for
100,000 volunteers. He had them within fourteen
days. In the first week of September 175,000
men enrolled, 30,000 in a single day. Eleven
months later, two million had enlisted. Ten
months later, five million and forty-one thousand
had voluntarily enrolled in the Army and Navy.
In 1914 Britain had in her Royal Naval Air
Service 64 aeroplanes and 800 airmen. In 1917
she had many thousand aeroplanes and 42,000
airmen. In her Royal Flying Corps she had in
1914, 66 planes and 100 men; in 1917, several
thousand planes and men by tens of thousands.
In the first nine months of 1917 British airmen
brought down 876 enemy machines and drove
down 759 out of control. From July, 1917, to
June, 1918, 4102 enemy machines were destroyed
or brought down with a loss of 1213 machines.
Besides financing her own war costs she had by
October, 1917, loaned eight hundred million dollars
to the Dominions and five billion five hundred

ENGLAND THE SLACKER I 197
milhon to the Alhes. She raised five bilhon in
thirty days. In the first eight months of 1918
she contributed to the various forms of war loan
at the average rate of one hundred and twenty-four
milhon, eight hundred thousand a week.
Is that enough? Enough to show what Eng
land did in the War? No, it is not enough for
such people as continue to ask what she did.
Nothing would suffice these persons. During
the earher stages of the War it was possible that
the question could be asked honestly — though
never intelhgently — because the facts and figures
were not at that time always accessible. They
were stiU piling up, they were scattered about,
mention of them was incidental and fugitive,
they could be missed by anybody who was not
diligently alert to find them. To-day it is quite
otherwise. The facts and figures have been com
piled, arranged, pubhshed in accessible and con
venient form ; therefore to-day, the man or woman
who persists in asking what England did in the
war is not honest but dishonest or mentally
spotted, and does not want to be answered.
They don't want to know. The question is
merely a camouflage of their spite, and were

198 A STRAIGHT DEAL
every item given of the gigantic and magnificent
contribution that England made to the defeat of
the Kaiser and all his works, it would not stop
their evil mouths. Not for them am I here setting
forth a part of what England did ; it is for the
convenience of the honest American, who does
want to know, that my collection of facts is
made from the various sources which he may not
have the time or the means to look up for himself.
For his benefit I add some particulars concerning
the British Navy which kept the Kaiser out of
our front yard.
Admiral Mahan said in his book — and he was
an American of whose knowledge and wisdom
Congress seems to have known nothing and cared
less — "Why do Enghsh innate pohtical concep
tions of popular representative government, of the
balance of law and liberty, prevail in North Amer
ica from the Arctic Circle to the Gulf of Mexico,
from the Atlantic to the Pacific? Because the
command of the sea at the decisive era belonged
to Great Britain." We have seen that the deci
sive era was when Napoleon's mouth watered
for Louisiana, and when England took her stand
behind the Monroe Doctrine.

ENGLAND THE SLACKER! 199
Admiral Sims said in the second installment of
his narrative The Victory at Sea, published
in The World's Work for October, 1919, at page
619: "... Let us suppose for a moment that an
earthquake, or some other great natural disturb
ance, had engulfed the British fleet at Scapa
Flow. The world would then have been at
Germany's mercy and all the destroyers the
Alhes could have put upon the sea would have
availed them nothing, for the German battleships
and battle cruisers could have sunk them or
driven them into their ports. Then Alhed com
merce would have been the prey, not only of the
submarines, which could have operated with the
utmost freedom, but of the German surface
craft as well. In a few weeks the British food
supphes would have been exhausted. There
would have been an early end to the soldiers and
munitions which Britain was constantly sending
to France. The United States could have sent
no forces to the Western front, and the result
would have been the surrender which the Alhes
themselves, in the spring1 of 1917, regarded as
a not remote possibility. America would then
have been compelled to face the German power

200 A STRAIGHT DEAL
alone, and to face it long before we had had an
opportunity to assemble Our resources and equip
our armies. The world was preserved from all
these calamities because the destroyer and the
convoy solved the problem of the submarines, and
because back of these agencies of victory lay
Admiral Beatty's squadrons, holding at arm's
length the German surface ships while these
comparatively fragile craft were saving the liber
ties of the world."
Yes. The High Seas Fleet of Germany, costing
her one bilhon five hundred milhon dollars, was
bottled up. Five million five hundred thousand
tons of German shipping and one million tons of
Austrian shipping were driven off the seas or
captured; oversea trade and oversea colonies
were cut off. Two milhon oversea Huns of fight
ing age were hindered from joining the enemy.
Ocean commerce and communication were stopped
for the Huns and secured to the Allies. In 1916,
2100 mines were swept up and 89 mine sweepers
lost. These mine sweepers and patrol boats
numbered 12 in 1914, and 3300 by 1918. To
patrol the seas British ships had to steam eight
mUUon miles in a single month. During the four

ENGLAND THE SLACKER! 201
years of the war they transported oversea more
than thirteen milhon men (losing but 2700 through
enemy action) as well as transporting two million
horses and mules, five hundred thousand vehicles,
twenty-five milhon tons of explosives, fifty-one
milhon tons of oil and fuel, one hundred and thirty
milhon tons of food and other materials for the
use of the Alhes. In one month three hundred
and fifty-five thousand men were carried from
England to France.
It was after our present Secretary of the Navy,
in his speech in Boston to which allusion has been
made, had given our navy all and the British
navy none of the credit of conveying our soldiers
overseas, that Admiral Sims repaired the singular
obhvion of the Secretary. We Americans should
know the truth, he said. We had not been too
accurately informed. We did not seem to have
been told by anybody, for instance, that of the
five thousand anti-submarine craft operating
day and night in the infested waters, we had 160,
or 3 per cent; that of the milhon and a haU
troops which had gone over from here in a few
months, Great Britain brought over two thirds
and escorted hah.

202 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"I would hke American papers to pay particular
attention to the fact that there are about 5000
anti-submarine craft in the ocean to-day, cutting
out mines, escorting troop ships, and making it
possible for us to go ahead and win this war.
They can do this because the British Grand Fleet
is so powerful that the German High Seas Fleet
has to stay at home. The British Grand Fleet is
the foundation stone of the cause of the whole of
the Alhes."
Thus Admiral Sims.
That is part of what England did in the war.
Note. — The author expresses thanks and acknowledg
ment to Pearson's Magazine for permission to use the passages
quoted from the articles by Admiral Sims.

CHAPTER XV
RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA

CHAPTER XV
RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA
It may have been ten years ago, it may have
been fifteen — and just how long it was before
the war makes no matter — that I received an
invitation to join a society for the promotion of
more friendly relations between the United States
and England.
"No, indeed," I said to myself.
Even as I read the note, hostihty rose in me.
Refusal sprang to my lips before my reason had
acted at all. I remembered George III. I
remembered the Civil War. The ancient grudge,
the anti-Enghsh complex, had been instantly set
fermenting in me. Nothing could better dis
close its lurking persistence than my virtually
automatic exclamation, "No, indeed!" I knew
something about England's friendly acts, about
Venezuela, and Manila Bay, and Edmund Burke,
and John Bright, and the Queen, and the Lan
cashire cotton spinners. And more than this
205

206 A STRAIGHT DEAL
historic knowledge, I knew hving Enghsh people,
men and women, among whom I counted dear
and even beloved friends. I knew also, just as
well as Admiral Mahan knew, and other Americans
by the hundreds of thousands have known and
know at this moment, that all the best we have
and are — law, ethics, love of hberty — all of it
came from England, grew in England first, ripened
from the seed of which we are merely one great
harvest, planted here by England. And yet I
instantly exclaimed, "No, indeed!"
Well, having been inflicted with the anti-
Enghsh complex myself, I understand it all the
better in others, and am begging them to counter
act it as I have done. You will. recollect that I
said at the outset of these observations that, as I
saw it, our prejudice was founded upon three
causes fairly separate, although they often melted
together. With two of these causes I have now
dealt — the school histories, and certain acts and
pohcies of England's throughout our relations
with her. The third cause, I said, was certain
traits of the Enghsh and ourselves which have
produced personal friction. An American does
or says something which angers an EngUshman,

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 207
who thereupon goes about thinking and saying,
"Those insufferable Yankees!" An Enghshman
does or says something which angers an American,
who thereupon goes about thinking and saying,
' ' To Hell with England ! " Each makes the well-
nigh universal — but none the less perfectly
ridiculous — blunder of damning a whole people
because one of them has rubbed him the wrong
way. Nothing could show up more forcibly and
vividly this human weakness for generahzing from
insufficient data, than the incident in London
streets which I promised to tell you in full when
we should reach the time for it. The time is now.
In a hospital at no great distance from San
Francisco, a wounded American soldier said to
one who sat beside him, that never would he go
to Europe to fight anybody again — except the
Enghsh. Them he would hke to fight; and to
the astonished visitor he told his reason. He, it
appeared, was one of our Americans who marched
through London streets on that day when the
eyes of London looked for the first time upon the
Yankees at last arrived to bear a hand to England
and her Alhes. From the mob came a certain
taunt :

208 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"You silly ass."
It was, as you will observe, an unflattering
interpretation of our national initials, U. S. A.
Of course it was enough to make a proper American
doughboy entirely "hot under the collar." To
this reading of our national initials our national
readiness retorted in kind at an early date :
A. E. F. meant After England Failed. But why,
months and months afterwards, when everything
was over, did that foolish doughboy in the
hospital hug this lone thing to his memory? It
was the act of an unthinking few. Didn't he
notice what the rest of London was doing that
day? Didn't he remember that she flew the
Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes together
from every symbohc pinnacle of creed and govern
ment that rose above her continent of streets and
dwellings to the sky ? Couldn't he feel that Eng
land, his old enemy and old mother, bowed
and stricken and strugghng, was opening her arms
to him wide ? She's a person who hides her tears
even from herself ; but it seems to me that, with
a drop of imagination and half a drop of thought,
he might have discovered a year and a hatf after
a few street roughs had insulted him, that they

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 209
were not all England. With two drops of thought
it might even have ultimately struck him that
here we came, late, very late,' indeed, only just in
time, from a country untouched, unafflicted, un-
bombed, safe, because of England's ships, to tired,
broken, bleeding England; and that the sight
of us, so jaunty, so fresh, so innocent of suffer
ing and bereavement, should have been for a
thoughtless moment galhng to unthinking brains ?
I am perfectly sure that if such considerations
as these were laid before any American soldier
who still smarted under that taunt in London
streets, his good American sense, which is our
best possession, would grasp and accept the thing
in its true proportions. He wouldn't want to
blot an Empire out because a handful of muckers
called him names. Of this I am perfectly sure,
because in Paris streets it was my happy lot four
months after the Armistice to talk with many
American soldiers, among whom some felt sore
about the French. Not one of these but saw
with his good American sense, directly I pointed
certain facts out to him, that his hostile general
ization had been unjust. But, to quote the oft-
quoted Mr. Kipling, that is another story.

210 A STRAIGHT DEAL
An American regiment just arrived in France
was encamped for purposes of training and
experience next a British regiment come back
from the front to rest. The streets of the two
camps were adjacent, and the Tommies walked
out to watch the Yankees pegging down their
tents. "Aw," they said, "wot a shyme you've brought
nobody along to tuck you in."
They made other similar remarks ; commented
unfavorably upon the alignment; "You were a
bit late in coming," they said. Of course our
boys had answers, and to these the Tommies had
further answers, and this encounter of wits very
naturally led to a result which could not possibly
have been happier. I don't know what the Tom
mies expected the Yankees to do. I suppose they
were as ignorant of our nature as we of theirs,
and that they entertained preconceived notions.
They suddenly found that we were, once again
to quote Mr. Kipling, "bachelors in barricks most
remarkable hke" themselves. An American first
sergeant hit a British first sergeant. Instantly
a thousand men were milling. For thirty minutes
they kept at it. Warriors reeled together and

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 211
feU and rose and got it in the neck and the jaw
and the eye and the nose — and all the whUe the
British and American officers, splendidly discreet,
saw none of it. British soldiers were carried
back to their streets, still fighting, bunged Yankees
staggered everywhere — but not an officer saw
any of it. Black eyes the next day, and other
tokens, very plainly showed who had been at this
party. Thereafter a much better feeling pre
vailed between Tommies and Yanks.
A more peaceful contact produced exceUent
consequences at an encampment of Americans
in England. The Americans had brought over
an idea, apparently, that the Enghsh were "easy."
They tried it on in sundry ways, but ended by
the discovery that, while engaged upon this
enterprise, they had been in sundry ways quite
completely "done" themselves. This gave them
a respect for their Enghsh cousins which they had
never felt before.
Here is another tale, similar in moral. This
occurred at Brest, in France. In the Y hut sat
an Enghsh lady, one of the hostesses. To her
came a young American marine with whom she
aheady had some acquaintance. This led him to

212 A STRAIGHT DEAL
ask for her advice. He said to her that as his
permission was of only seventy-two hours, he
wanted to be as economical of his time as he
could and see everything best worth while for
him to see during his leave. Would she, there
fore, tell him what things in Paris were the most
interesting and in what order he had best take
them? She rephed with another suggestion;
why not, she said, ask for permission for England ?
This would give him two weeks instead of seventy-
two hours. At this he burst out violently that
he would not set foot in England ; that he never
wanted to have anything to do with England or
with the Enghsh: "Why, I am a marine!" he
exclaimed, "and we marines would sooner knock
down any Enghsh sailor than speak to him."
The Enghsh lady, naturaUy, did not then teU
him her nationality. She now reahzed that he
had supposed her to be American, because she
had frequently been in America and had talked
to him as no stranger to the country could. She,
of course, did not urge his going to England ; she
advised him what to see in France. He took his
leave of seventy-two hours and when he returned
was very grateful for the advice she had given him.

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 213

She saw him often after this, and he grew to
rely very much upon her friendly counsel.
Finally, when the time came for her to go away
from Brest, she told him that she was Enghsh.
And then she said something hke this to him :
"Now, you told me you had never been in
England and had never known an Enghsh person
in your life, and yet you had aU these ideas
against us because somebody had taught you
wrong. It is not at aU your fault. You are only
nineteen years old and you cannot read about us,
because you have no chance ; but at least you do
know one Enghsh person now, and that Enghsh
person begs you, when you do have a chance to
read and inform yourseU of the truth, to find out
what England reaUy has been, and what she has
really done in this war."
The end of the story is that the boy, who had
become devoted to her, did as she suggested.
To-day she receives letters from him which show
that nothing is left of his anti-English complex.
It is another instance of how clearly our native
American mind, if only the facts are given it,
thinks, judges, and concludes.
It is for those of my countrymen who wiU

214 A STRAIGHT DEAL
never have this chance, never meet some one who
can guide them to the facts, that I tell these
things. Let them "cut out the dope." At this
very moment that I write — November 24,
1919 — the dope is being fed freely to all who are
ready, whether through ignorance or through
interested motives, to swallow it. The ancient
grudge is being played up strong over the whole
country in the interest of Irish independence.
Ian Hay in his two books so timely and so
excellent, Getting Together and The Oppressed
English, could not be as unreserved, naturaUy,
as I can be about those traits in my own country
men which have, in the past at any rate, retarded
English cordiality towards Americans. Of these
I shall speak as plainly as I know how. But
also, being an American and therefore by birth
more indiscreet than Ian Hay, I shall speak as
plainly as I know how of those traits in the
English which have helped to keep warm our
ancient grudge. Thus I may render both
countries forever uninhabitable to me, but shall
at least take with me into exile a character for
strict, if disastrous, impartiality.
I begin with an American who was traveling

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 215
in an English train. It stopped somewhere, and
out of the window he saw some buildings which
interested him.
"Can you tell me what those are?" he asked
an Englishman, a stranger, who sat in the other
corner of the compartment.
"Better ask the guard," said the Englishman.
Since that brief dialogue, this American does
not think weU of the English.
Now, two interpretations of the Englishman's
answer are possible. One is, that he didn't him
self know, and said so in his Enghsh way. English
talk is often very short, much shorter than ours.
That is because they all understand each other,
are much closer knit than we are. Behind them
are generations of "doing it" in the same estab
lished way, a way that their long experience of
life has hammered out for their own convenience,
and which they hke. We're not nearly so closely
knit together here, save in certain spots, especially
the old spots. In Boston they understand each
other with very few words said. So they do in
Charleston. But these spots of condensed and
hoarded understanding lie far apart, are never
confluent, and also differ in their detaUs; whUe

216 A STRAIGHT DEAL
the whole of England is confluent, and the details
have been slowly worked out through centuries
of getting on together, and are accepted and ob
served exactly like the rules of a game.
In America, if the American didn't know, he
would have answered, "I don't know. I think
you'll have to ask the conductor," or at any rate,
his reply would have been longer than the English
man's. But I am not going to accept the idea
that the Englishman didn't know and said so in
his brief usual way. It's equally possible that
he did know. Then, you naturally ask, why in
the name of common civility did he give such
an answer to the American?
I believe that I can teU you. He didn't know
that my friend was an American, he thought
he was an Englishman who had broken the rules
of the game. We do have some rules here in
America, only we have not nearly so many,
they're much more stretchable, and it's not all
of us who have learned them. But nevertheless
a good many have.
Suppose you were travehng in a train here, and
the man next you, whose face you had never
seen before, and with whom you had not yet ex-

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 217
changed a syllable, said: "What's your pet
name for your wife?"
Wouldn't your immediate inchnation be to
say, "What damned business is that of yours?"
or words to that general effect ?
But again, you most naturally object, there was
nothing personal in my friend's question about
the buildings. No ; but that is not it. At the
bottom, both questions are an invasion of the
same deep-seated thing — the right to privacy. In
America, what with the newspaper reporters
and this and that and the other, the territory of
a man's privacy has been lessened and lessened
until very httle of it remains ; but most of us
stiU do draw the Une somewhere ; we may not aU
draw it at the same place, but we do draw a hne.
The difference, then, between ourselves and the
Enghsh in this respect is simply, that with them
the territory of a man's privacy covers more
ground, and different ground as well. An EngUsh-
man doesn't expect strangers to ask him questions
of a guide-book sort. For aU such questions his
Enghsh system provides perfectly definite persons
to answer. If you want to know where the ticket
office is, or where to take your baggage, or what

218 A STRAIGHT DEAL
time the train goes, or what platform it starts
from, or what towns it stops at, and what churches
or other buildings of interest are to be seen in
those towns, there are porters and guards and
Bradshaws and guidebooks to tell you, and it's
they whom you are expected to consult, not any
fellow-traveler who happens to be at hand. If
you ask him, you break the rules. Had my
friend said: "I am an American. Would you
mind telhng me what those buildings are?" all
would have gone well. The Englishman would
have recognized (not fifty years ago, but cer
tainly to-day) that it wasn't a question of rules
between them, and would have at once explained
— either that he didn't know, or that the build
ings were such and such.
Do not, I beg, suppose for a moment that I am
holding up the English way as better than our
own — or worse. I am not making comparisons ;
I am trying to show differences. Very likely there
are many points wherein we think the Enghsh
might do well to borrow from us ; and it is quite
as Ukely that the Enghsh think we might here
and there take a leaf from their book to our
advantage. But I am not theorizing, I am not

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 219
seeking to show that we manage hfe better or
that they manage hfe better ; the only moral that
I seek to draw from these anecdotes is, that we
should each understand and hence make allowance
for the other fellow's way. You will admit, I
am sure, be you American or Enghsh, that
everybody has a right to his own way? The
proverb "When in Rome you must do as Rome
does" covers it, and would save trouble if we
always obeyed it. The people who forget it
most are they that go to Rome for the first time ;
and I shall give you both Enghsh and American
examples of this presently. It is good to as
certain before you go to Rome, if you can, what
Rome does do.
Have you never been mistaken for a waiter,
or something of that sort? Perhaps you will
have heard the anecdote about one of our am
bassadors to England. All ambassadors, save
ours, wear on formal occasions a distinguishing
uniform, just as our army and navy officers do ;
it is convenient, practical, and saves trouble.
But we have declared it menial, or despotic, or
un-American, or something equally silly, and
hence our ambassadors must wear evening dress

220 A .STRAIGHT DEAL
resembhng closely the attire of those who are
handing the supper or answering the door-bell.
An Englishman saw Mr. Choate at some diplo
matic function, standing about in this evening
costume, and said :
"Call me a cab."
"You are a cab," said Mr. Choate, obediently.
Thus did he make known to the Englishman
that he was not a waiter. Similarly in crowded
hotel dining-rooms or crowded railroad stations
have agitated ladies clutched my arm and
said: "I want a table for three," or "When does the
train go to Poughkeepsie?"
Just as we in America have regular people to
attend to these things, so do they in England;
and as the Enghsh respect each other's right to
privacy very much more than we do, they resent
invasions of it very much more than we do.
But, let me say again, they are hkely to mind it
only in somebody they think knows the rules.
With those who don't know them it is different.
I say this with all the more certainty because of a
fairly recent afternoon spent in an Enghsh garden
with Enghsh friends. The question of pro-

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 221
nunciation came up. Now you will readily see
that with them and their compactness, their
great pubhc schools, their two great Universities,
and their great London, the one eternal focus of
them aU, both the chance of diversity in social
customs and the tolerance of it must be far less
than in our huge unfocused country. With us,
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, San
Francisco, is each a centre. Here you can pro
nounce the word calm, for example, in one way
or another, and it merely indicates where you
come from. Departure in England from certain
estabhshed pronunciations has another effect.
"Of course," said one of my friends, "one
knows where to place anybody who says 'girl'"
(pronouncing it as it is spelled).
"That's frightful," said I, "because I say
'girl'." "Oh, but you are an American. It doesn't
apply." But had I been Enghsh, it would have been
something Uke coming to dinner without your
coUar. That is why I think that, had my friend in the
train begun his question about the buildings by

222 A STRAIGHT DEAL
saying that he was an American, the answer
would have been different. Not all the Enghsh
yet, but many more than there were fifty or even
twenty years ago, have ceased to apply their
rules to us.
About 1874 a friend of mine from New York
was taken to a London Club . Into the room where
he was came the Prince of Wales, who took out
a cigar, felt for and found no matches, looked
about, and there was a silence. My friend there
upon produced matches, struck one, and offered
it to the Prince, who bowed, thanked him, hghted
his cigar, and presently went away.
Then an Englishman observed to my friend :
"It's not the thing for a commoner to offer a
light to the Prince."
"I'm not a commoner, I'm an American," said
my friend with perfect good nature.
Whatever their rule may be to-day about the
Prince and matches, as to us they have come to
accept my friend's pertinent distinction : they
don't expect us to keep or even to know their
own set of rules.
Indeed, they surpass us in this, they make more
allowances for us than we for them. They don't

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 223
criticize Americans for not being Enghsh. Amer
icans still constantly do criticize the Enghsh for
not being Americans. Now, the measure in
which you don't allow for the customs of another
country is the measure of your own provincialism.
I have heard some of our own soldiers express
dislike of the Enghsh because of their coldness.
The Enghsh are not cold.; they are silent upon
certain matters. But it is all there. Do you
remember that sailor at Zeebrugge carrying the
unconscious body of a comrade to safety, not
sure yet if he were ahve or dead, and stroking
that comrade's head as he went, saying over and
over, "Did you think I would leave yer?" We
are more demonstrative, we spell things out which
it is the way of the Enghsh to leave between the
lines. But it is aU there! Behind that uncon-
cihating waU of shyness and reserve, beats and
hides the warm, loyal British heart, the most
constant heart in the world.
"It isn't done."
That phrase apphes to many things in England
besides offering a hght to the Prince, or asking a
fellow traveler what those buildings are; and I
think that the Enghshman's notion of his right

224 A STRAIGHT DEAL
to privacy hes at the bottom of quite a number of
these things. You may lay some of them to
snobbishness, to caste, to shyness, they may have
various secondary origins; but I prefer to cover
them all with the broader term, the right to
privacy, because it seems philosophically to
account for them and explain them.
In May, 1915, an Oxford professor was in New
York. A few years before this I had read a book
of his which had dehghted me. I met him at
lunch, I had not known him before. Even as we
shook hands, I blurted out to him my admiration
for his book.
"Oh."
That was the whole of his reply. It made me
laugh at myself, for I should have known better.
I had often been in England and could have told
anybody that you mustn't too abruptly or
obviously refer to what the other fellow does, still
less to what you do yourself. "It isn't done."
It's a sort of indecent exposure. It's one of the
invasions of the right to privacy.
In America, not everywhere but in many
places, a man upon entering a club and seeing
a friend across the room, wUl not hesitate to

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 225
call out to him, "HuUo, Jack!" or "Hullo,
George!" or whatever. In England "it isn't
done." The greeting would be conveyed by a
short nod or a glance. To call out a man's
name across a room fuU of people, some of whom
may be total strangers, invades his privacy and
theirs. Have you noticed how, in our Pullman
parlor cars, a party sitting together, generally
young women, wiU shriek their conversation in
a voice that bores hke a gimlet through the
whole place? That is an invasion of privacy.
In England "it isn't done." We shouldn't stand
it in a theatre, but in parlor cars we do stand it.
It is a good instance to show that the English
man's right to privacy is larger than ours, and
thus that his hberty is larger than ours.
Before leaving this point, which to my thinking
is the cause of many frictions and misunderstand
ings between ourselves and the Enghsh, I mustn't
omit to give instances of divergence, where an
Enghshman will speak of matters upon which
we are silent, and is silent upon subjects of which
we will speak.
You may present a letter of introduction to an
EngUshm^n, and he wishes to be civil, to help

226 A STRAIGHT DEAL
you to have a good time. It is quite possible
he may say something like this :
"I think you had better know my sister Sophy.
You mayn't like her. But her dinners are rather
amusing. Of course the food's ghastly because
she's the stingiest woman in London."
On the other hand, many Americans (though
less willing than the French) are willing to dis
cuss creed, immortality, faith. There is noth
ing from which the Englishman more peremptorily
recoils, although he hates welknigh as deeply all
abstract discussion, or to be clever, or to have
you be clever. An American friend of mine had
grown tired of an Enghshman who had been
finding fault with one American thing after
another. So he suddenly said :
"Will you tell me why you English when you
enter your pews on Sunday always immediately
smell your hats?"
The Enghshman stiffened. "I refuse to dis
cuss religious subjects with you," he said.
To be ponderous over this anecdote grieves me
— but you may not know that orthodox Enghsh
men usually don't kneel, as we do, after reaching
their pews ; they stand for a moment, covering

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 227
their faces with their well-brushed hats : with
each nation the observance is the same, it is in
the manner of the observing that we differ.
Much is said about our "common language,"
and its being a reason for our understanding
each other. Yes; but it is also almost as much
a cause for our misunderstanding each other. It
is both a help and a trap. If we Americans, spoke
something so wholly different from EngUsh as
French is, comparisons couldn't be made; and
somebody has remarked that comparisons are
odious. "Why do you call your luggage baggage?"
says the Enghshman — or used to say.
"Why do you call your baggage luggage?"
says the American — or used to say.
"Why don't you say treacle?" inquires the
Englishman. "Because we caU it molasses," answers the
American. "How absurd to speak of a car when you mean
a carriage ! " exclaims the Enghshman.
"We don't mean a carriage, we mean a car,"
retorts the American.
You, my reader, may have heard (or perhaps

228 A STRAIGHT DEAL
even held) foolish conversations like that; and
you will readily perceive that if we didn't say
"car" when, we spoke of the vehicle you get
into when you board a train, but called it a
voiture, or something else quite "foreign," the
Englishman would not feel that we had taken a
sort of liberty with his mother-tongue. A deep
point lies here : for most English the world is
divided into three peoples, Enghsh, foreigners,
and Americans; and for most of us hkewise it
is divided into Americans, foreigners, and Eng
hsh. Now a "foreigner" can call molasses what
ever he pleases ; we do not feel that he has taken
any liberty with our mother-tongue; his tongue
has a different mother; he can't help that; he's
not to be criticized for that. But we and the
English speak a tongue that has the same mother.
This identity in pedigree has led and still leads
to countless family discords. I've not a doubt
that divergences in vocabulary and in accent
were the fount and origin of some swollen noses,
some battered eyes, when our Yankees mixed
with the Tommies. Each would be certain to
think that the other couldn't "talk straight" —
and each would be certain to say so. I shall

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 229
not here spin out a list of different names for the
same things now current in English and Amer
ican usage : molasses and treacle wiU suffice for
an example; you wUl be able easily to think of
v others, and there are many such that occur in
everyday speech. Almost more tricky are those
words which both peoples use alike, but with
different meanings. I shall spin no hst of these
either; one example there is which I cannot
name, of two words constantly used in both
countries, each word quite proper in one country,
while in the other it is more than improper.
Thirty years ago I explained this one evening
to a young Enghshman who was here for a whfle.
Two or three days later, he thanked me fervently
for the warning : it had saved him, during a
game of tennis, from a frightful shock, when his
partner, a charming girl, meaning to tell him to
cheer up, had used the word that is so harmless
with us and in England so far beyond the pale
of pohte society.
Quite as much as words, accent also leads to
dissension. I have heard many an American
speak of the English accent as "affected"; and
our accent displeases the English. Now what

230 A STRAIGHT DEAL
Englishman, or what American, ever criticizes
a Frenchman for not pronouncing our language
as we do ? His tongue has a different mother !
I know not how in the course of the years all
these divergences should have come about, and
none of us need care. There they are. As a
matter of fact, both England and America are
mottled with varying accents literate and il
literate; equally true it is that each nation
has its notion of the other's way of speaking- —
we're known by our shrill nasal twang, they by
their broad vowels and hesitation; and quite as
true is it that not aU Americans and not all EngUsh
do in their enunciation conform to these types.
One May afternoon in 1919 I stopped at Salis
bury to see that beautiful cathedral and its
serene and gracious close. "Star-scattered on
the grass," and beneath the noble trees, lay
New Zealand soldiers, solitary or in httle groups,
gazing, drowsing, talking at ease. Later, at the
inn I was shown to a small table, where sat al
ready a young Englishman in evening dress, at
his dinner. As I sat down opposite him, I bowed,
and he returned it. Presently we were talking.
When I said that I was stopping expressly to see

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 231
the cathedral, and how hke a trance it was to find
a scene so utterly EngUsh full of New Zealanders
lying all about, he looked puzzled. It was at
this, or immediately after this, that I explained
to him my nationality.
"I shouldn't have known it," he remarked,
after an instant's pause.
I pressed him for his reason, which he gave;
somewhat reluctantly, I think, but with ex-
ceUent good-wUl. Of course it was the same
old mother-tongue !
"You mean," I said, "that I haven't happened
to say 'I guess,' and that I don't, perhaps, talk
through my nose? But we don't all do that.
We do all sorts of things."
He stuck to it. "You talk like us."
"Well, I'm sure I don't mean to talk hke
anybody!" I sighed.
This diverted him, and brought us closer.
"And see here," I continued, "I knew you
were Enghsh, although you've not dropped a
single h."
"Oh, but," he said, "dropping h's — that's —
that's not—"
"I know it isn't," I said. "Neither is talking

232 A STRAIGHT DEAL
through your nose. And we don't all say 'Amur-
rican.'" But he stuck to it. "All the same there is an
American voice. The train yesterday was full
of it. Officers. Unmistakable." And he shook
his head.
After this we got on better than ever; and as
he went his way, he gave me some advice about
the hotel. I should do well to avoid the reading-
room. The hotel went in rather too much for
being old-fashioned. Ran it into the ground.
Tiresome. Good-night.
Presently I shall disclose more plainly to you
the moral of my Salisbury anecdote.
Is it their discretion, do you think, that closes
the hps of the French when they visit out shores ?
Not from the French do you hear prompt as
persions as to our differences from them. They
observe that proverb about being in Rome :
they may not be able to do as Rome does, but
they do not inquire why Rome isn't hke Paris.
If you ask them how they like our hotels or our
trains, they may possibly reply that they prefer
their own, but they will hardly volunteer, this
opinion. But the American in England and the

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 233
Englishman in America go about volunteering
opinions. Are the French more discreet? I
beheve that they are; but I wonder if there is
not also something else at the bottom of it. You
and I will say things about our cousins to our
aunt. Our aunt would not allow outsiders to
say those things. Is it this, the-members-of-
the-family principle, which makes us less discreet
than the French? Is it this, too, which leads us
by a seeming paradox to resent criticism more
when it comes from England? I know not how
it may be with you ; but with me, when I pick
up the paper and read that the Germans are
calhng us pig-dogs again, I am merely amused.
When I read French or Itahan abuse of us, I
am sorry, to be sure ; but when 'some Enghsh
paper jumps on us, I hate it, even when I know
that what it says isn't true. So here, if I am right
in my members-of-the-family hypothesis, you have
the English and ourselves feehng free to be dis
agreeable to each other because we are relations,
and yet feeling especiaUy resentful because it's a
relation who is being disagreeable. I merely
put the point to you, I lay no dogma down con
cerning members of the family; but I am per-

234 A STRAIGHT DEAL
fectly sure that discretion is a quaUty more
common to the French than to ourselves or our
relations : I mean something a httle more than
discretion, I mean esprit de conduite, for which
it is hard to find a translation.
Upon my first two points, the right to privacy
and the mother-tongue, I have lingered long,
feeling these to be not only of prime importance
and wide apphcation, but also to be quite beyond
my power to make lucid in short compass. I
trust that they have been made lucid. I must
now get on to further anecdotes, illustrating
other and less subtle causes of misunderstanding ;
and I feel somewhat like the author of Don
Juan when he exclaims that he almost wishes
he had ne'er begun that very remarkable poem.
I renounce all pretense to the French virtue of
discretion. Evening dress has been the source of many
irritations. Enghshmen did not appear to think
that they need wear it at American dinner parties.
There was a good deal of this at one time. During
that period an Enghshman, who had brought
letters to a gentleman in Boston and in conse
quence had been asked to dinner, entered the

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 235
house of his host in a tweed suit. His host, in
evening dress of course, met him in the hall.
"Oh, I see," said the Bostonian, "that you
haven't your dress suit with you. The man
will take you upstairs and one of mine will fit
you well enough. We'll wait."
In England, a cricketer from Philadelphia,
after the match at Lord's, had been invited to
dine at a great house with the rest of his
eleven. They were to go there on a coach.
The American discovered after arrival that he
alone of the eleven had not brought a dress suit
with him. He asked his host what he was to
do. "I advise you to go home," said the host.
The moral here is not that all hosts in England
would have treated a guest so, or that all Amer
ican hosts would have met the situation so well
as that Boston gentleman : but too many Enghsh
used to be socially brutal — quite as much so
~to each other as to us, or any one. One should
bear that in mind. I know of nothing more
English in its way than what Eton answered to
Beaumont (I think) when Beaumont sent a chal
lenge to play cricket :

236 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"Harrow we know, and Rugby we have heard
of. But who are you ? "
That sort of thing belongs rather to the Palm
erston days than to these; belongs to days
that were nearer in spirit to the Waterloo of
1815, which a haughty England won, than to the
Waterloo of 1914-18, which a humbler England
so nearly lost.
Turn we next the other way for a look at our
selves. An American lady who had brought a
letter of introduction to an Englishman in Lon
don was in consequence asked to lunch. He
naturally and hospitably gathered to meet her
various distinguished guests. Afterwards she
wrote him that she wished him to invite her
to lunch again, as she had matters of importance
to tell him. Why, then, didn't she ask him to
lunch with her? Can you see? I think I do.
An American lady was at a house party in
Scotland at which she met a gentleman of old
and famous Scotch blood. He was wearing the
kilt of his clan. While she talked with him she
stared, and finally burst out laughing. "I de
clare," she said, "that's positively the most
ridiculous thing I ever saw a man dressed in."

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 237
At the Savoy hotel in August, 1914, when
England declared war upon Germany, many
American women made scenes of confusion and
vocfferation. About England and the blast of
Fate which had struck her they had nothing to
say, but crowded and wailed of their own dis
comforts, meals, rooms, every paltry personal
inconvenience to which they were subjected, or
feared that they were going to be subjected.
Under the unprecedented stress this was, per
haps, not unnatural; but it would have seemed
less displeasing had they also occasionally showed
concern for England's plight and peril.
An American, this time a man (our crudities
are not limited to the sex) stood up in a theatre,
disputing the sixpence which you always have
to pay for your program in the London theatres.
He disputed so long that many people had to
stand waiting to be shown their seats.
During deals at a game of bridge on a Cunard
steamer, the talk had turned upon a certain
historic house in an English county. The talk
was friendly, everything had been friendly each
day. "WeU," said a very rich American to his Eng-

238 A STRAIGHT DEAL
lish partner in the game, "those big estates will
all be ours pretty soon. We're going to buy
them up and turn your island into our summer
resort." No doubt this millionaire intended to
be playfully humorous.
At a table where several British and one Amer
ican — an officer — sat during another ocean
voyage between Liverpool and Halifax in June,
1919, the officer expressed satisfaction to be
getting home again. He had gone over, he said,
to "clean up the mess the British had made."
To a company of Americans who had never
heard it before, was told the well-known exploit
of an American girl in Europe. In an ancient
church she was shown the tomb of a soldier who
had been killed in battle three centuries ago. In
his honor and memory, because he lost his life
bravely in a great cause, his family had kept a
httle glimmering lamp alight ever since. It
hung there, beside the tomb.
"And that's never gone out in all this time?"
asked the American girl.
"Never," she was told.
"WeU, it's out now, anyway," and she blew
it out.

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 239
All the Americans who heard this were shocked
— all but one, who said :
"Well, I think she was right."
There you are ! There you have us at our
very worst ! And with this plump specimen of
the American in Europe at his very worst, I
turn back to the English : only, pray do not fail
to give those other Americans who were shocked
by the outrage of the lamp their due. How wide
of the mark would you be if you judged us all
by the one who approved of that horrible vandal
girl's act ! It cannot be too often repeated that
we must never condemn a whole people for
what some of the people do.
In the two-and-a-half anecdotes which follow,
you must watch out for something which lies
beneath their very obvious surface.
An American sat at lunch with a great EngUsh
lady in her country-house. Although she had seen
him but once before, she began a conversation like
this: Did the American know the van Squibbers?
He did not.
Well, the van Squibbers, his hostess explained,
were Americans who lived in London and went

240 A STRAIGHT DEAL
everywhere. One certainly did see them every
where. They were almost too extraordinary.
Now the American knew quite all about these
van Squibbers. He knew also that in New York,
and Boston, and Philadelphia, and in many other
places where existed a society with still some
ragged remnants of decency and decorum left,
one would not meet this highly star-spangled
family "everywhere."
The hostess kept it up. Did the American
know the Butteredbuns ? No? Well, one met
the Butteredbuns everywhere too. They were
rather mpre extraordinary than the van Squib
bers. And then there were the Cakewalks, and
the Smith-Trapezes. Mrs. Smith-Trapeze wasn't
as extraordinary as her daughter — the one that
put the hve frog in Lord Meldon's soup — and
of course neither of them were "talked about"
in the same way that the eldest Cakewalk girl
was talked about. Everybody went to them,
of course, because one really never knew what
one might miss if one didn't go.
At length the American said :
"You must correct me if I am wrong in an
impression I have received. Vulgar Americans
seem to me to get on very well in London."

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 241
The hostess paused for a moment, and then
she said :
"That is perfectly true."
This acknowledgment was complete, and per
fectly friendly, and after that all went better
than it had gone before.
The hah anecdote is a part of this one, and
happened a few weeks later at table — dinner
this time.
Sitting next to the same American was an
Enghsh lady whose conversation led him to re
peat to her what he had said to his hostess at
lunch : "Vulgar Americans seem to get on very
well in London society."
"They do," said the lady, "and I wiU tell you
why. We Enghsh — I mean that set of Enghsh
— are blas6. We see each other too much, we
are all alike in our ways, and we are awfully tired
of it. Therefore it refreshes us and amuses us
to see something new and different."
"Then," said the American, "you accept these
hideous people's invitations, and go to their
houses, and eat their food, and drink their cham
pagne, and it's just hke going to see the monkeys
at the Zoo?"

242 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"It is," returned the lady.
"But," the American asked, "isn't that awfully
low down of you?" (He smiled as he said it.)
Immediately the Enghsh lady assented; and
grew more cordial. When next day the party
came to break up, she contrived in the manner
of her farewell to make the American understand
that because of their conversation she bore him
not ill will but good will.
Once more, the scene of my anecdote is at
table, a long table in a club, where men came
to lunch. All were Enghshmen, except a single
stranger. He was an American, who through
the kindness of one beloved member of that
club, no longer hving now, had received a card
to the club. The American, upon sitting down
alone in this company, felt what I suppose that
many of us feel in hke circumstances : he wished
there were somebody there who knew him and
could nod to him. Nevertheless, he was spoken
to, asked questions about various of his fellow
countrymen, and made at home. Presently,
however, an elderly member who had been silent
and whom I will designate as being of the Dr.
Samuel Johnson type, said :

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 243
"You seem to be having trouble in your pack
ing houses over in America?"
We were.
"Very disgraceful, those exposures."
They were. It was May, 1906.
"Your Government seems to be doing some
thing about it. It's certainly scandalous. Such
abuses should never have been possible in the
first place. It oughtn't to require your Govern
ment to stop it. It shouldn't have started."
"I fancy the facts aren't quite so bad as that
sensational novel about Chicago makes them
out," said the American. "At least I have been
told so."
"It aU sounds characteristic to me," said the
Sam Johnson. "It's quite the sort of thing one
expects to hear from the States."
"It is characteristic," said the American.
"In spite of all the years that the sea has sepa
rated us, we're still inveterately Uke you, a bully
ing, dishonest lot — though we've had nothing
quite so bad yet as your opium trade with China."
The Sam Johnson said no more.
At a ranch in Wyoming were a number of
Americans and one Englishman, a man of note,

244 A STRAIGHT DEAL
bearing a celebrated name. He was telhng the
company what one could do in the way of amuse
ment in the evening in London.
"And if there's nothing at the theatres and
everything else fails, you can always go to one
of the restaurants and hear the Americans eat."
There you have them, my anecdotes. They
are chosen from many. I hope and beUeve that,
between them all, they cover the ground; that,
taken together as I want you to take them after
you have taken them singly, they make my
several points clear. As I see it, they reveal the
chief whys and wherefores of friction between
English and Americans. It is also my hope that
I have been equally disagreeable to everybody.
If I am to be banished from both countries, I
shall try not to pass my exile in Switzerland,
which is indeed a lovely place, but just now too
full of celebrated Germans.
Beyond my two early points, the right to
privacy and the mother-tongue, what are the
generahzations to be drawn from my data? I
should hke to dodge spelUng them out, I should
immensely prefer to leave it here. Some readers
know it already, knew it before I began; while

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 245
for others, what has been said will be enough.
These, if they have the will to friendship instead
of the will to hate, will get rid of their anti-
Enghsh complex, supposing that they had one,
and understand better in future what has not
been clear to them before. But I seem to feel
that some readers there may be who will wish
me to be more exphcit.
First, then. England has a thousand years
of greatness to her credit. Who would not be
proud of that? Arrogance is the seamy side
of pride. That is what has rubbed us Amer
icans the wrong way. We are recent. Our
thousand years of greatness are to come. Such
is our passionate behef. Crudity is the seamy
side of youth. Our crudity rubs the Enghsh
the wrong way. Compare the American who
said we were going to buy England for a summer
resort with the Enghshman who said that when
aU other entertainment in London failed, you
could always Usten to the Americans eat. Cru
dity, "freshness" on our side, arrogance, top-
loftiness on theirs : such is one generahzation I
would have you disengage from my anecdotes.
Second. The EngUsh are blunter than we.

246 A STRAIGHT DEAL
They talk to us as they would talk to themselves.
The way we take it reveals that we are too often
thin-skinned. Recent people are apt to be thin-
skinned and self-conscious and self-assertive,
while those with a thousand years of tradition
would have thicker hides and would never feel
it necessary to assert themselves. Give an
Enghshman as good as he gives you, and you
are certain to win his respect, and probably
his regard. In this connection see my anecdote
about the Tommies and Yankees who physically
fought it out, and compare it with the Sahsbury,
the van Squibber, and the opium trade anecdotes.
"Treat 'em rough," when they treat you rough:
they hke it. Only, be sure you do it in the right
way. Third. We differ because we are alike. That
American who stood in the theatre complaining
about the sixpence he didn't have to pay at
home is exactly like Enghshmen I have seen
complaining about the unexpected here. We
share not only the same mother-tongue, we share
every other fundamental thing upon which our
welfare rests and our hves are carried on. We
hke the same things, we hate the same things.

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 247
We have the same notions about justice, law,
conduct; about what a man should be, about
what a woman should be. It is hke the mother-
tongue we share, yet speak with a difference.
Take the mother-tongue for a parable and symbol
of all the rest. Just as the word "girl" is iden
tical to our sight but not to our hearing, and
means oh ! quite the same thing throughout us
all in all its meanings, so that identity of nature
which we share comes often to the surface in
different guise. Our loquacity estranges the
Enghshman, his sUence estranges us. Behind
that silence beats the Enghsh heart, warm, con
stant, and true; none other hke it on earth,
except our own at its best, beating behind our
loquacity. Thus far my anecdotes carry me. May they
help some reader to a better understanding of
what he has misunderstood heretofore !
No anecdotes that I can find (though I am
sure that they are to be found) will illustrate
one difference between the two peoples, very
noticeable to-day. It is increasing. An Enghsh
man not only sticks closer than a brother to his
own rights, he respects the rights of his neighbor

248 A STRAIGHT DEAL
just as strictly. We Americans are losing our
grip on this. It is the bottom of the whole thing.
It is the moral keystone of democracy. How
soever we may talk about our own rights to-day,
we pay less and less respect to those of our neigh
bors. The result is that to-day there is more
hberty in England than here. Liberty consists
and depends upon respecting your neighbor's
rights every bit as fairly and squarely as your
own. On the other hand, I wonder if the EngUsh are
as good losers as we are? Hardly anything that
they could do would rub us more the wrong way
than to deny to us that fair play in sport which
they accord each other. J shall not more than
mention the match between our Benicia Boy and
their Tom Sayers. Of this the Enghsh version
is as defective as our school-book account of the
Revolution. I shall also pass over various other
international events that are somewhat well
known, and I will illustrate the point with an
anecdote known to but a few.
Crossing the ocean were some young EngUsh
and Americans, who got up an international
tug-of-war. A friend of mine was anchor of

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 249
our team. We happened to win. They didn't
take it very well. One of them said to the anchor :
"Do you know why you pulled us over the
hne?" "No." "Because you had all the blackguards on your
side of the hne."
"Do you know why we had aU the blackguards
on our side of the hne?" inquired the American.
"No." "Because we puUed you over the hne."
In one of my anecdotes I used the term Sam
Johnson to describe an Enghshman of a certain
type. Dr. Samuel Johnson was a very marked
specimen of the type, and almost the only illus
trious EngUshman of letters during our Revo
lutionary troubles who was not our friend. Right
down through the years ever since, there have
been Sam Johnsons writing and saying unfavor
able things about us. The Tory must be eternal,
as much as the Whig or Liberal; and both are
always needed. There will probably always be
Sam Johnsons in England, just hke the one who
was scandahzed by our Chicago packing-house
disclosures. No longer ago than June 1, 1919,

250 A STRAIGHT DEAL
a Sam Johnson, who was discussing the Peace
Treaty, said in my hearing, in London :
"The Yankees shouldn't have been brought
into any consultation. They aided and abetted
Germany." In Littell's Living Age of July 20, 1918, pages
151-160, you may read an interesting account of
British writers on the United States. The by
gone ones were pretty preposterous. They sati
rized the newness of a new country. It was hke
visiting the Esquimaux and complaining that
they grew no pineapples and wore skins. In
Littell you will find how few are the recent Sam
Johnsons as compared with the recent friendly
writers. You will also be reminded that our
anti-Enghsh complex was discerned generations
ago by Washington Irving. He said in his
Sketch Book that writers in this country were
"instilUng anger and resentment into the bosom
of a youthful nation, to grow with its growth
and to strengthen with its strength."
And he quotes from the Enghsh Quarterly
Review, which in that early day aheady wrote of
America and England :
t "There is a sacred bond between us by blood

RUDE BRITANNIA, CRUDE COLUMBIA 251
and by language which no circumstances can
break. . . . Nations are too ready to admit
that they have natural enemies; why should
they be less willing to beUeve that they have
natural friends?"
It is we ourselves to-day, not England, that
are pushing friendship away. It is our pohticians,
papers, and propagandists who are making the
trouble and the noise. In England the will to
friendship rules, has ruled for a long while. Does
the wiU to hate rule with us? Do we prefer
Germany? Do we prefer the independence of
Ireland to the peace of the world?

CHAPTER XVI
AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE

CHAPTER XVI
AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE
A part of the Irish is asking our voice and our
gold to help independence for the wh€»le of the
Irish. Independence is not desired by the whole
of the Irish. Irishmen of Ulster have plainly said
so. Everybody knows this. Roman Cathohcs
themselves are not unanimous. Only some of
them desire independence. These, known as
Sinn Fein, appeal to us for dehverance from their
conqueror and oppressor; they dwell upon the
oppression of England beneath which Ireland is
now crushed. They refer to England's brutal and
unjustifiable conquest of the Irish nation seven
hundred and forty-eight years ago.
What is the truth, what are the facts?
By his bull "LaudabiUter," in 1155, Pope
Adrian the Fourth invited the King of England to
take charge of Ireland. In 1172 Pope Alexander
the Third confirmed this by several letters, at
present preserved in the Black Book of the Ex-
255

256 A STRAIGHT DEAL
chequer. Accordingly, Henry the Second went to
Ireland. All the archbishops and bishops of Ire
land met him at Waterford, received him as king
and lord of Ireland, vowing loyal obedience to him
and his successors, and acknowledging fealty to
them forever. These prelates were followed by
the kings of Cork, Limerick, Ossory, Meath, and
by Reginald of Waterford. Roderick O'Connor,
King of Connaught, joined them in 1175. AU
these accepted Henry the Second of England as
their Lord and King, swearing to be loyal to him
and his successors forever.
Such was England's brutal and unjustifiable
conquest of Ireland.
Ireland was not a nation, it was a tribal chaos.
The Irish nation of that day is a legend, a myth,
built by poetic imagination. During the cen
turies succeeding Henry the Second, were many
eras of violence and bloodshed. In reading the
story, it is hard to say which side committed the
most crimes. During those same centuries, vio
lence and bloodshed and oppression existed every
where in Europe. Undoubtedly England was
very oppressive to Ireland at times ; but since the
days of Gladstone she has steadily endeavored to

AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE 257
reheve Ireland, with the result that today she is
oppressing Ireland rather less than our Federal
Government is oppressing Massachusetts, or South
Carohna, or any State. By the Wyndham Land
Act of 1903, Ireland was placed in a position so
advantageous, so utterly the reverse of oppression,
that DiUon, the present leader, hastened to ob
struct the operation of the Act, lest the Irish
genius for grievance might perish from starvation.
Examine the state of things for yourseU, I cannot
sweU this book with the detaUs ; they are as acces
sible to you as the few facts about the conquest
which I have just narrated. Examine the facts,
but even without examining them, ask yourseU
this question : With Canada, Austraha, and aU
those other colonies that I have named above,
satisfied with England's rule, hastening to her
assistance, and with only Ireland selling herseU to
Germany, is it not just possible that something is
the matter with Ireland rather than with England ?
Sinn Fein will hear of no Home Rule. Sinn
Fein demands independence. Independence Sinn
Fein will not get. Not only because of the outrage
to unconsenting Ulster, but also because Britain,
having just got rid of one Hehgoland to the East,

258 A STRAIGHT DEAL
will not permit another to start up on the West.
As early as August 25th, 1914, mention in German
papers was made of the presence in Berhn of
Casement and of his mission to invite Germany to
step into Ireland when England was fighting
Germany. The traffic went steadily on from that
time, and broke out in the revolution and the
crimes in Dublin in 1916. England discovered
the plan of the revolution just in time to foil the
landing in Ireland of Germany, whom Ireland had
invited there. Were England seeking to break
loose from Ireland, she could sue Ireland for a
divorce and name the Kaiser as co-respondent.
Any court would grant it.
The part of Ireland which does not desire inde
pendence, which desires it so little that it was
ready to resist Home Rule by force in 1914, is the
steady, thrifty, clean, coherent, prosperous part of
Ireland. It is the other, the unstable part of
Ireland, which has declared Ireland to be a Re
public. For convenience I wUl designate this part
as Green Ireland, and the thrifty, stable part as
Orange Ireland. So when our politicians sym
pathize with an "Irish" Republic, they befriend
merely Green Ireland ; they offend Orange Ireland.

AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE 259
Americans are being told in these days that
they owe a debt of support to Irish independence,
because the "Irish" fought with us in our own
struggle for Independence. Yes, the Irish did,
and we do owe them a debt of support. But it
was the Orange Irish who fought in our Revolu
tion, not the Green Irish. Therefore in paying
the debt to the Green Irish and clamoring for
"Irish" independence, we are double crossing
the Orange Irish.
"It is a curious fact that in the Revolutionary
War the Germans and Cathohc Irish should have
furnished the bulk of the auxiliaries to the regular
EngUsh soldiers; . . . The fiercest and most
ardent Americans of aU, however, were the Pres
byterian Irish settlers and their descendants."
History of New York, p. 133, by Theodore Roose
velt. Next, in what manner have the Green Irish
incurred our thanks ?
They made the ancient and honorable associa
tion of Tammany their own. Once it was Ameri
can. Now Tammany is Green Irish. I do not
beheve that I need pause to teU you much about
Tammany. It defeated Mitchel, a loyal but

260 A STRAIGHT DEAL
honest CathoUc, and the best Mayor of New
York in thirty years. It is a despotism buUt on
corruption and fear.
During our Civil War, it was the Green Irish
that resisted the draft in New York. They
would not fight. You have heard of the draft
riots in New York in 1862. They would not
fight for the Confederacy either. i
During the following decade, in Pennsylvania,
an association, called the Molly Maguires, ter
rorized the coal regions until their reign of assas
sination was brought to an end by the detection,
conviction, and execution of their ringleaders.
These were Green Irish.
In Cork and Queenstown during the recent
war, our American saUors were assaulted and
stoned by the Green Irish, because they had
come to help fight Germany. These assaults,
and the retaliations to which they led, became
so serious that no naval men under the rank of
Commander were permitted to go to Cork.
Leading citizens of Cork came to beg that this
order be rescinded. But, upon being cross-
examined, it was found that the Green Irish who
had made the trouble had never been punished.

AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE 261
Of this many of us had news before Admiral Sims
in The World's Work for November, pages 63-64,
gave it his authoritative confirmation.
Taking one consideration with another, it
hardly seems to me that our debt to the Green
Irish is sufficiently heavy for us to hinder England
for the sake of helping them and Germany.
Not all the Green Irish were guilty of the at
tacks upon our saUors ; not aU by any means were
pro-German; and I know personaUy of loyal
Roman Catholics who are wholly on England's
side, and are wholly opposed to Sinn Fein. Many
such are here, many in Ireland : them I do not
mean. It is Sinn Fein that I mean.
In 1918, when England with her back to the waU
was fighting Germany, the Green Irish killed the
draft. Here foUowing, I give some specific in
stances of what the Roman Cathohc priests said.
April 21st. After mass at Castletown, Bear
Haven, Father Brennan ordered his flock to
resist conscription, take the sacrament, and to be
ready to resist to the death ; such death insuring
the full benediction of God and his Church. If
the pohce resort to force, let the people kiU the
poUce as they would kill any one who threatened

262 A STRAIGHT DEAL
their lives. If soldiers came in support of the
draft, let them be treated like the pohce. Police
men and soldiers dying in their attempt to carry
out the draft law, would die the enemies of God,
while the people who resisted them would die in
peace with God and under the benediction of his
Church. Father Lynch said in church at Ryehill:
"Resist the draft by every means in your power.
Any minion of the Enghsh Government who fires
upon you, above all if he is a Catholic, commits
a mortal sin and God will punish him."
In the chapel at Kilgarvan Father Murphy said :
"Every Irishman who helps to apply the draft in
Ireland is not only a traitor to his country, but
commits a mortal sin against God's law."
At mass in Scariff the Rev. James Maclnerney
said : "No Irish Cathohc, whatever his station
be, can help the draft in this country without
denying his faith."
April 28th. After having given the communion
to three hundred men in the church at Eyries,
County Cork, Father Gerald Dennehy said :
"Any CathoUc who either as pohceman or as
agent of the government shall assist in applying

AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE 263
the draft, shall be excommunicated and cursed by
the Roman Catholic Church. The curse of God
will follow him in every land. You can kill him
at sight, God will bless you and it will be the most
acceptable sacrifice that you can offer."
Referring to any pohceman who should attempt
to enforce the draft, Father Murphy said at mass
in Killenna, "Any pohceman who is killed in such
attempt wUl be damned in hell, even if he was in a
state of grace that very morning."
Ninety-five percent of those Irish pohcemen
were Cathohcs and had to respect the commands
of those priests.
Ireland is England's business, not ours. But
the word "seU-determination" appears to hypno
tize some Americans. We must not be hypno
tized by this word. It is upon the "principle"
expressed in this word that our sympathies with
the Irish Republic are asked. The six north
eastern counties of Ulster, on the "principle" of
seU-determination, should be separated from the
Irish RepubUc. But the Green Irish will not listen
to that. Protestants in Ulster had to listen in
their own chief city to Sinn Fein rejoicings over
German victories. The rebellion of 1916, when

264 A STRAIGHT DEAL
Sinn Fein opened the back door that England's
enemies might enter and destroy her — this
dastardly treason was made bloody by cowardly
violence. The unarmed and the unsuspecting
were shot down and stabbed in cold blood. Later,
soldiers who came home from the front, wounded
soldiers too, were persecuted and assaulted. The
men of Ulster don't wish to fall under the power
of the Green Irish.
"We do not know whether the British states
men are right in asserting a connection between
Irish revolutionary feeling and German propa
ganda. But in such a connection we should see
no sign of a bad German policy." Thus wrote a
Prussian deputy in Das Grossere Deutschland.
That was over there. This was over here : —
"The fraternal understanding which unites the
Ancient Order of Hibernians and the German-
American Alliance receives our unqualified en
dorsement. This unity of effort in all matters
of a public nature intended to circumvent the
efforts of England to secure an Anglo-American
alliance have been productive of very successful
results. The congratulations of those of us who
hve under the flag of the United States are ex-

AN INTERNATIONAL IMPOSTURE 265
tended to our German-American fellow citizens
upon the conquests won by the fatherland, and we
assure them of our unshaken confidence that the
German Empire will crush England and aid in the
Uberation of Ireland, and be a real defender of
small nations." See the Boston Herald of July
22, 1916.
During our CivU War, in 1862, a resolution of
sympathy with the South was stifled in Pariia-
ment. On June 6, 1919, our Senate passed, with one
dissenting voice, the foUowing, offered by Senator
Walsh, democrat, of Massachusetts :
"Resolved, that the Senate of the United States
express its sympathy with the aspirations of the
Irish people for a government of its own choice."
What England would not do for the South in
1862, we now do against England our aUy, against
Ulster, our friend in our Revolution, and in support
of England's enemies, Sinn Fein and Germany.
Ireland has less than 4,500,000 inhabitants;
Ulster's share is about one third, and its Prot
estants outnumber its Cathohcs by more than
three fourths. Besides such reprisals as they
saw wrought upon wounded soldiers, they know

266 A STRAIGHT DEAL
that the Green Irish who insist that Ulster belong
to their Republic, do so because they plan to make
prosperous and thrifty Ulster their milch cow.
Let every fair-minded American pause, then,
before giving his sympathy to an independent
Irish Republic on the principle of self-determina
tion, or out of gratitude to the Green Irish. Let
him remember that it was the Orange Irish who
helped us in our Revolution, and that the Orange
Irish do not want an independent Irish Repub
lic. There will be none ; our interference merely
makes Germany happy and possibly prolongs
the existing chaos ; but there will be none. Be
fore such loyal and thinking Catholics as the
gentleman who said to me that word about
"spoiling the ship for a ha'penny worth of tar,"
and before a firm and coherent policy on Eng
land's part, Sinn Fein wUl fade like a poisonous
mist.

CHAPTER XVII
PAINT A

CHAPTER XVII
PAINT
Soldiers of ours — many soldiers, I am sorry
to say — have come back from Coblenz and
other places in the black spot, saying that they
found the inhabitants of the black spot kind and
agreeable. They give this reason for liking the
Germans better than they do the English. They
found the Germans agreeable, the Enghsh not
agreeable. WeU, this amounts to something as
far as it goes : but how far does it go, and how
much does it amount to? Have you ever seen
an automobile painted up to look like new, and
it broke down before it had run ten miles, and
you found its insides were wrong? Would you
buy an automobUe on the strength of the paint?
England often needs paint, but her insides are
all right. If our soldiers look no deeper than
the paint, if our voters look no further than the
paint, if our democracy never looks at anything
but the paint, God help our democracy! Of
269

270 A STRAIGHT DEAL
course the Germans were agreeable to our soldiers
after the armistice!
Agreeable Germany ! ¦ — who sank the Lusi-
tania; who sank five thousand British merchant
ships with the loss of fifteen thousand men,
women, and children, all murdered at sea, without
a chance for their lives ; who fired on boat-loads
of the shipwrecked, who stood on her submarine
and laughed at the drowning passengers of the
torpedoed Falaba.
Disagreeable England ! — who sank five hundred
German ships without permitting a single hfe to
be lost, who never fired a shot until provision had
been made for the safety of passengers and crews.
Agreeable Germany ! — who, as she retreated,
poisoned weUs and gassed the citizens from whose
village she was running away; who wrecked the
churches and the homes of the helpless hving, and
bombed the tombs of the helpless dead ; who
wrenched famflies apart in the night, taking their
boys to slavery and their girls to wholesale viola
tion, leaving the old people to wander in lone
liness and die ; who in her raids upon England
slaughtered three hundred and forty-two women,
and lolled or injured seven hundred and fifty-

PAINT 271
seven children, and made in all a Ust of four
thousand five hundred and sixty-eight, bombed
by her airmen; whose trained nurses met our
wounded and captured men at the railroad trains
and held out cups of water for them to see, and
then poured them on the ground or spat in them.
Disagreeable England ! — - whose colonies rushed
to help her : Canada, who within eight weeks
after war had been declared, came with a volun
tary army of thirty-three thousand men; who
stood her ground against that first meeting with
the poison gas and saved not only the day, but
possibly the whole cause ; who by 1917 had sent
over four hundred thousand men to help dis
agreeable England; who gave her wealth, her
food, her substance; who poured every symbol
of aid and love into disagreeable England's lap
to help her beat agreeable Germany. Thus did
aU England's colonies offer and bring both them
selves and their resources, from the smaUest to
the greatest; httle Newfoundland, whose regi
ment gave such heroic account of itself at Gallipoli ;
AustraUa who came with her cruisers, and with
also her arnues to the West Front and in South
Africa; New Zealand who came from the other

272 A STRAIGHT DEAL
side of the world with men and money — three
milhon pounds in gift, not loan, from one milhon
people. And the Boers? The Boers, who latest
of aU, not twenty years before, had been at war
with England, and conquered by her, and then
by her had been given a Boer Government. What
did the Boers do? In spite of the Kaiser's tele
gram of sympathy, in spite of his plans and his
hopes, they too, hke Canada and New Zealand
and all the rest, sided of their own free wUl with
disagreeable England against agreeable Germany.
They first stamped out a German rebelhon, in
stigated in their midst, and then these Boers left
their farms, and came to England's aid, and
drove German power from Southwest Africa.
And do you remember the wire that came from
India to London? "What orders from the
King-Emperor for me and my men?" These
were the words of the Maharajah of Rewa; and
thus spoke the rest of India. The troops she
sent captured Neuve Chapelle. From first to
last they fought in many places for the Cause of
England. What do words, or propaganda, what does
anything count in the face of such facts as these?

PAINT 273
Agreeable Germany ! — who addresses her God,
"Thou who dweUest high above the Cherubim,
Seraphim and Zeppelin" — Parson Diedrich Vor-
werck in his volume Hurrah and Hallelujah.
Germany, who says, "It is better to let a hundred
women and children belongmg to the enemy die
of hunger than to let a single German soldier
suffer" — General von der Goltz in his Ten
Iron Commandments of the German Soldier;
Germany, whose soldier obeys those command
ments thus : "I am sending you a ring made out
of a piece of sheU. . . . During the battle of
BudonviUer I did away with four women and
seven young girls in five minutes. The Captain
had told me to shoot these French sows, but I
preferred to run my bayonet through them" —
private Johann Wenger to his German sweet
heart, dated Peronne, March 16, 1915. Germany,
whose newspaper the Cologne Volkszeitung de
plored the doings of her Kultur on land and sea
thus: "Much as we detest it as human beings
and as Christians, yet we exult in it as Germans."
Agreeable Germany ! — whose Kaiser, if his fleet
had been larger, would have taken us by the scruff
of the neck.

274 A STRAIGHT DEAL
"Then Thou, Almighty One, send Thy lightnings!
Let dwellings and cottages become ashes
in the heat of fire.
Let the people in hordes burn and drown
with wife and child.
May their seed be trampled under our
feet;
May we kill great and small in the
lust of joy.
May we plunge our daggers into their
bodies,
May Poland reek in the glow of fire and
ashes."
That is another verse of Germany's hymn, hate
for Poland; that is her way of taking people by
the scruff of the neck; and that is what Senator
Walsh's resolution of sympathy with Ireland,
Germany's contemplated Heligoland, implies for
the United States, if Germany's deferred day
should come.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE WILL TO FRIENDSHIP — OR THE
WILL TO HATE?

CHAPTER XVIII
THE WILL TO FRIENDSHIP — OR THE WILL TO HATE ?
Nations do not like each other. No plainer
fact stares at us from the pages of history since
the beginning. Are we to sit down under this
forever? Why should we make no attempt to
change this for the better in the pages of history
that are yet to be written? Other evils have
been made better. In this very war, the outcry
against Germany has been because she deliber
ately brought back into war the cruelties and
the horrors of more barbarous times, and with
cold calculations of premeditated science made
these horrors worse. Our recoU from this deed
of hers and what it has brought upon the world
is seen in our wish for a League of Nations. The
thought of any more battles, trenches, sub
marines, air-raids, starvation, misery, is so un
bearable to our bruised and stricken minds, that
we have put it into words whose import is, Let
277

278 A STRAIGHT DEAL
us have no more of this! We have at least put
it into words. That such words, that such a
League, can now grow into something more than
words, is the hope of many, the doubt of many,
the belief of a few. It is the belief of Mr. Wilson ;
of Mr. Taft ; Lord Bryce ; and of Lord Grey,
a quiet Englishman, whose statesmanship during
those last ten murky days of July, 1914, when he
strove to avert the dreadful years that followed,
will shine bright and permanent. We must not
be chilled by the doubters. Especially is the
scheme doubted in dear old Europe. Dear old
Europe is so old ; we are so young ; we cause her
to smile. Yet it is not such a contemptible thing
to be young and innocent. Only, your innocence,
while it makes you an ideahst, must not blind
you to the facts. Your idea must not rest upon
sand. It must have a little rock to start with.
The nearest rock in sight is friendship between
England and ourselves.
The wUl to friendship — or the wUl to hate?
Which do you choose? Which do you think
is the best foundation for the League of Nations?
Do you imagine that so long as nations do not
hke each other, that mere words of good inten-

THE WILL TO FRIENDSHIP 279
tion, written on mere paper, are going to be
enough? Write down the words by all means,
but see to it that behind your words there shall
exist actual good wul. Discourage histories for
cluldren (and for grown-ups too) which breed
international dislike. Such exist among us aU.
There is a recent one, written in England, that
needs some changes.
Should an Englishman say to me :
"I have the wiU to friendship. Is there any
particular thing which I can do to help?" I
should answer him :
"Just now, or in any days to come, should you
be tempted to remind us that we did not protest
against the martyrdom of Belgium, that we were
a bit slow in coming into the war, — oh, don't
utter that reproach ! Go back to your own past ;
look, for instance, at your guarantee to Denmark,
at Lord John RusseU's words : 'Her Majesty could
not see with indifference a military occupation of
Holstein' — and then see what England shirked ;
and read that scathing sentence spoken to her
ambassador in Russia : ' Then we may dismiss
any idea that England will fight on a point of
honor.' We had made you no such guarantee.

280 A STRAIGHT DEAL
We were three thousand nules away — how far
was Denmark?
" And another thing. On August 6, 1919, when
Britain's thanks to her land and sea forces were
moved in both houses of Parliament, the gentle
man who moved them in the House of Lords
said something which, as it seems to me, adds
nothing to the tribute he had aheady paid so
eloquently. He had spoken of the greater in
centive to courage which the French and Belgians
had, because their homes and soU were invaded,
while England's soldiers had suffered no invasion
of their island. They had not the stimulus of
the knowledge that the frontier of their country
had been violated, their homes broken up, their
families enslaved, or worse. And then he added :
'I have sometimes wondered in my own mind,
though I have hardly dared confess the sentiment,
whether the gallant troops of our AlUes would
have fought with equal spirit and so long a time
as they did, had they been engaged in the High
lands of Scotland or on the marches of the Welsh
border.' Why express that wonder? Is there
not here an instance of that needless overlooking
of the feehngs of others, by which, in times past,

THE WILL TO FRIENDSHIP 281
you have chilled those others? Look out for
that." And should an American say to me :
"I have the will to friendship. What can I
personally do?" I should say :
"Play fair! Look over our history from that
Treaty of Paris in 1783, down through the Louisi
ana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manila
Bay ; look at the facts. You will see that no
matter how acrimoniously England has quarreled
with us, these were always family scraps, in
which she held out for her own interests just as
we did for ours. But whenever the question
lay between ourselves and Spain, or France, or
Germany, or any foreign power, England stood
with us against them.
" And another thing. Not all Americans boast,
but we have a reputation for boasting. Our
Secretary of the Navy gave our navy the
whole credit for transporting our soldiers to
Europe when England did more than half of it.
At Annapolis there has been a poster, showing
a big American sailor with a doughboy on his
back, and underneath the words, 'We put them
across. ' A brigadier general has written a book

282 A STRAIGHT DEAL
entitled, How the Marines Saved Paris. Beside
the marines there were some engineers. And how
about M Company of the 23d regiment of the
2d Division? It lost in one day at Chateau-
Thierry all its men but seven. And did the
general forget the 3d Division between Chateau-
Thierry and Dormans? Don't be like that
brigadier general, and don't be like that Ameri
can officer returning on the Lapland who told the
British at his table he was glad to get home after
cleaning up the mess which the British had made.
Resemble as little as possible our present Secretary
of the Navy. Avoid boasting. Our contribution
to victory was quite enough without boasting.
The head-master of one of our great schools has
put it thus to his schoolboys who fought : Some
people had to raise a hundred dollars. After
struggling for years they could only raise seventy-
five. Then a man came along and furnished the
remaining necessary twenty-five dollars. That is
a good way to put it. What good would our
twenty-five dollars have been, and where should
we have been, if the other fellows hadn't raised
the seventy-five doUars first?"

CHAPTER XIX
LION AND CUB

CHAPTER XLX

LION AND CUB

My task is done. I have discussed with as
much brevity as I could the three foundations of
our ancient grudge against England : our school
textbooks, our various controversies from the
Revolution to the Alaskan boundary dispute,
and certain differences in customs and manners.
Some of our historians to whom I refer are them
selves affected by the ancient grudge. You will
see this if you read them ; you will find the facts,
which they give faithfuUy, and you will also find
that they often (and I think unconsciously)
color such facts as are to England's discredit and
leave pale such as are. to her credit, just as we
remember the Alabama, and forget the Lan
cashire cotton-spinners. You cannot fail to find,
unless your anti-Enghsh complex tilts your judg
ment incurably, that England has been to us, on
the whole, very much more friendly than un
friendly — if not at the beginning, certainly at
285

286 A STRAIGHT DEAL
the end of each controversy. What an anti-
Enghsh complex can do in the face of 1914, is
hard to imagine : Canada, Australia, New Zea
land, India, the Boers, aU Great Britain's colonies,
coming across the world to pour their gold and
their blood out for her! She did not ask them;
she could not force them ; of their own free wiU
they did it. In the whole story of mankind such
a splendid tribute of confidence and loyalty has
never before been paid to any nation.
In this many-peopled world England is our
nearest relation. From Bonaparte to the Kaiser,
never has she allowed any outsider to harm us.
We are her cub. She has often clawed us, and
we have clawed her in return. This will probably
go on. Once earlier in these pages, I asked the
reader not to misinterpret me, and now at the
end I make the same request. I have not sought
to persuade him that Great Britain is a charitable
institution. What nation is, or could be, given
the nature of man? Her good treatment of us
has been to her own interest. She is wise, far-
seeing, less of an opportunist in her statesman
ship than any other nation. She has seen clearly
and ever more clearly that our good will was to

LION AND CUB 287
her advantage. And beneath her wisdom, at
the bottom of all, is her sense of our kinship
through liberty defined and assured by law.
If we were so far-seeing as she is, we also
should know that her good will is equaUy im
portant to us : not alone for material reasons,
or for the sake of our safety, but also for those
few deep, ultimate ideals of law, hberty, hfe,
manhood and womanhood, which we share with
her, which we got from her, because she is our
nearest relation in this many-peopled world.

Printed in the United States of America.

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