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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1379 ***
+
+A STRAIGHT DEAL
+
+OR
+
+THE ANCIENT GRUDGE
+
+
+By Owen Wister
+
+
+     To Edward and Anna Martin who give help in time of trouble
+
+
+
+
+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 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 II: What the Postman Brought
+
+
+During the winter of 1915 I came to think that Germany had gone
+dangerously but methodically 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 mistake 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 Germany absorb Russia and join Japan? What if the
+League of Nations break like a toy?
+
+Yeas and nays are put here without the consent 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.
+
+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 English
+traits, the other the American. I say English, 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.
+
+“Allow me to thank you for your article entitled ‘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 Atlantic 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 experience with the British, who proved to us how
+little 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 succeeded in converting one who
+needed conversion badly I beg to remain....”
+
+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 histories and hearsay behind them and
+judged the English for themselves? A good many, it is to be hoped. What
+that judgment finally becomes 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
+seeing 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 lots of them and have shown
+some of them where they are wrong but the Catholics and descendants of
+Ireland have a different argument and as my education isn’t very great,
+I know very little 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 between 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
+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 England.
+
+“Nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. We are a
+distinctive race--no more English, nationally, than the present King
+George is German--as closely related and as alike as a celluloid comb
+and a stick of dynamite.
+
+“We are bound up in the success of America only. The English 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 increase of
+our shipping and foreign trade, is likely to become more and more
+antagonistic to England’s.
+
+“England has been a commercially unscrupulous 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 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 Republic--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 persuade its
+citizens that England was anything less than an active, dangerous,
+competitor, especially 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
+intelligence--even grudges cannot live without real food. Should
+England become helpless tomorrow, 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 lies 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 irritates 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
+may be personally obnoxious. My own ancestors were from England.
+My personal relations 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 control--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 replied 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 English 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 England 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 corporations 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 dissolved; 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 purpose of our Constitution. Just as identically 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
+stability. My correspondent 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.
+
+I will point out no more of the latent weaknesses 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 discussed topic, which I am sure will
+help to remove from some of their minds a foolish bigoted antipathy.”
+
+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
+correspondent 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
+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 colonies... I rejoice that America has resisted”’; 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 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 purpose 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 Secretary’s regrettable slight to our British allies
+was 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 transported at all but
+for British assistance. There are many persons who still believe what
+our politicians and newspapers tell them. No incident 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 generalize 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
+opportunity 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.
+
+He justified the British opinion that we are a nation of braggarts.
+On the other hand, in London, we had Admiral Sims, another American, 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
+English 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 public positions are
+mostly on a lower level than those who elect them.
+
+I proceed with two more letters, both dissenting, 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 do not defend our own Indian policy.... Wounded and disabled in our
+Indian wars... 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 misunderstanding 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 Commissioners
+(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. England
+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 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 Company?
+
+“Come down to later times: to-day for instance. 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 specimens, high and low, of the English
+race. But 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 understanding 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 clipping.... 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 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 dissatisfaction and taking means to
+retaliate.”
+
+Of the editorial clipping 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 country. I quote it for its
+value as a specimen of that sort of journalistic and political 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 Washington’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 little 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.
+
+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 political freedom and representative government in England, used
+the American situation as a means to that end; that the English people,
+in so far as their voice could make itself heard, were solidly against
+both his English and American policy, and that the triumph of America
+contributed in no small measure to the salvation of those institutions
+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
+English 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,
+but for the entire world, of these two great democratic peoples knowing
+each other as they really are and cooperating as only they can cooperate
+to establish and maintain peace on just and permanent foundations.”
+
+
+
+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 already by the ten, but
+would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology 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 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 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming
+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 morale was burning very low
+and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and
+apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and
+thereafter, 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
+neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.
+
+Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the
+spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, 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 line 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 this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring
+at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt,
+Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small
+places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since,
+where lived peacefully a few hundred 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 little 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 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 like 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 slightly wobbling 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 member 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 was
+surrendered and naked, and when he was down they beat him some more.
+That’s Germans 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 promptness--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: slinking about, peeping, listening, 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, ourselves and Mexico, France and England, France and Italy,
+England and Russia, between everybody 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
+lies about us and then run to us with lies 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 Hohenzollern government.
+
+
+
+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 Zeppelin, “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 public 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 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 decorated
+by him for doing it. Even after the Armistice, 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 protested, 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 lies in the future as they were
+nourished by lies in the past. But we can prevent Germans or pro-Germans
+writing our own school histories; we can prevent that “army of spies” of
+which the Kaiser boasted to his council at Potsdam in June, 1908,
+from continuing its activities among us now and henceforth; 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 Christianity. 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
+disturbs a shallow, torpid, irresponsible, self-indulgent optimism.
+
+Our golden age of isolation is over. To attempt to return to it would
+be a mere pernicious day-dream. To hark back to Washington’s warning
+against entangling alliances is as sensible as to go by a map of the
+world made in 1796. We are coupled to the company of nations like a car
+in the middle of a train, only more inevitably and permanently, for we
+cannot 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 lives, 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 like to infer from his absence of
+“come-back.” But perhaps he was merely an innocent American who at
+school had studied, for instance, Eggleston’s history; thoughtless--but
+by no means harmless; for his school-taught “slant” against England, in
+the days we were living 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 because
+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, helps the Germany of to-morrow. The
+Germany of yesterday had her spies all over France and Italy, busily
+suggesting to rustic uninformed peasants that we had gone to France for
+conquest of France, and intended to keep some of her land. What is she
+telling them now? I don’t know. Something to her advantage and their
+disadvantage, 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 preparation, sprang at the throat of the world. Of all
+the nations in the late war, she alone is pulling herself together. She
+is hard at work. She means to spring again just as soon as she can.
+
+Did you read the letter written in April of 1919 by her Vice-Chancellor,
+Mathias Erzberger, also her minister of finance? A very able, compact
+masterpiece of malignant 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 desire 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,
+without 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 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
+transports 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 Government at Berlin 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 their daughters, or bayonet their babies, but were quiet, civil,
+disciplined, and apparently harmless, they changed. Their fawning faded
+away, they scowled and muttered. One day the Burgomaster at a certain
+place replied 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 enlightened through the only channel whereby light
+penetrates 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 encountered what
+we call the swift kick. It educated 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 delivery of the Treaty at Versailles. Perhaps he has
+done this already. 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 Belgium’s share, of Russia’s share, of
+France’s, Italy’s, England’s, our own, in winning the war, I believe
+that the greatest and mast 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 climb 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 English, published several years apart. The Baedeker in
+German recommended a path that went straight up the ascent, the Baedeker
+in English a path that went up more gradually around it. “Mine says
+this is the best way,” said the American. “Mine says straight up 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
+
+
+It was in Broad Street, Philadelphia, before we went to war, that I
+overheard the foolish--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 Berlin? 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 little bit of harm to the future of
+freedom and civilization, by repeating that England “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 (or
+life, and as they will be mentioning them in 1940, I presume, if they
+are still alive at that time).
+
+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? Well, 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 dined in London. And
+finally, 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 all commerce by Germany can be
+adjusted. Wool and everything else will belong to Mathias Erzberger
+and his breed, if they carry out their intention. And the way to insure
+their carrying it out is to let them split us and England and all their
+competitors asunder by their ceaseless and ingenious propaganda, which
+plays upon every international prejudice, historic, commercial, or
+other, 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.
+
+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 Alabama
+ponder upon this for a minute or two.
+
+
+
+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 prefer to glide lightly 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 wholly good, honorable, 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 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 grandsires 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 enlighten 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 behaved 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 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 independent, Europe jeered on. That dear old Europe!
+
+Again, in 1909, it was not any European nation that returned to China
+their share of the indemnity exacted in consequence of the Boxer
+troubles; we alone returned our share to China--sixteen millions. It was
+we who prevented levying a punitive indemnity on China. Read the whole
+story; there is much more. We played the gentleman, Europe played the
+bully. But Europe calls 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, yes! we
+are quite good enough to keep quiet about these things. No need whatever
+to brag. Bragging, 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 like
+everybody else in having some dirty pages in our History. These pages it
+is a foolish 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 inclination 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 believed 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 life with a just and true notion of all
+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 today. 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 list 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 sailors 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 thrills through me. And we had pounded old
+John Bull 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 schooling 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 earlier? That during those years England
+had moderated her arrogance, was ready to moderate 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 fuddling 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 began by invading Canada from Detroit and surrendered 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
+English 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 barbarous
+vandalism--but did you know that we had burned Toronto a year earlier?
+
+I left school knowing none of this--it wasn’t in my school book, and
+I learned it in mature years with amazement. I then learned also that
+England, while she was fighting with us, had her hands full fighting
+Bonaparte, that her war with us was a sideshow, 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
+Cornwallis and compelled his surrender at Yorktown, October 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
+millions. No doubt you know that Santa Anna, the Mexican General, had
+a wooden leg. Well, there is more to know than that, and I found it out
+much later. I found out that General Grant, who had fought with
+credit as a lieutenant 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 bullied 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 Americans 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 whatever, and read little but the morning paper for the
+rest of their lives?
+
+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 country would be just
+as strong, and far more intelligent, were we honestly and wisely taught
+in our early years those acts and policies 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 relief. 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
+
+
+The blackest page in our history is our treatment of the Indian. To
+speak of it is a thankless 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 smaller. We allowed him such and such territory, then took
+it away and gave him less and worse in exchange. Throughout 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 lived according to their
+desires, enjoying life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We came.
+To-day the hunting and fishing are 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 civilization. Neither you,
+nor I, nor any man, can remold 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 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 Independence, 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
+inalienable rights,” and that these were now to be protected by law. Ah,
+no, look at it as you will, 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 trespassing 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 self-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
+little harm can still be done is being done through dishonest 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, A Century
+of Dishonor; it is not new. It assembles 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 satisfaction,
+this land-grabbing indictment. Most of them know little 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 shall 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
+one 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 millions 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 already, long before La Salle came by.
+
+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
+Louisiana 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 call
+it Discovery; 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 followed some years after
+the Florida operation. “By request” we “annexed” most of present
+Texas--in 1845. That was a trick of our slaveholders. They sent people
+into Texas and these people swung the deal. It was virtually a theft
+from Mexico. A little while later, in 1848, we “paid” Mexico for
+California, Arizona, and Nevada. But if you read the true story of
+Fremont 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 fall
+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, brutality, and greed. All
+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 miles.
+
+Please understand me very clearly: I am not 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 all 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 in 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 miles.
+Her population in 1811 was eighteen and one half millions. At that
+same time our area was 408,895 square miles, 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 little 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 alight, is doing
+his bit against human peace and human happiness.
+
+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
+
+
+So far as I know, it was Mr. Sydney Gent Fisher, an American, who was
+the first to go back to the original documents, and to write from study
+of these documents the complete truth about England and ourselves during
+the Revolution. His admirable book tore off the cloak which our school
+histories had wrapped round the fables. He lays bare the political
+state of Britain at that time. What did you learn at your school of that
+political state? Did you ever wonder able General Howe and his manner
+of fighting us? Did it ever strike you that, although we were more often
+defeated than victorious in those engagements with him (and sometimes he
+even seemed to avoid pitched battles with us when the odds were all
+in his favor), yet somehow England did seem to reap the advantage she
+should be reaped from those contests, didn’t follow them, 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. Well, 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 schooling was like 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! England 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 liberty and
+the rights of Englishmen. 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 political beliefs 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 shown they deserve to
+be.... I own there are very able Englishmen 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 all Englishmen were entitled. These men
+considered us the champions of that British liberty 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 Parliament: “I rejoice that America has resisted....
+If ever this nation should have a tyrant for a King, six millions of
+freemen, so dead to all the feelings of liberty 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
+Englishmen were on our side that they would not enlist 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
+English soil, through English disapproval of his course, almost as much
+as it was lost here through the indomitable 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 Parliament, largely elected by fake votes, which did not
+represent the English people; that this fake Parliament was autocracy’s
+last ditch in England; that it choked for a time the English democracy
+which, after the setback given it by the excesses of the French
+Revolution, went forward again until to-day the King of England 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 anything 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 authors may consciously or unconsciously have felt
+that our case against England was not in truth very strong, that in fact
+she had been very 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 slightest 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 reality upon
+very slender justification. If ever our authors read of the meeting
+between Franklin, 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 allowed for
+so long to be so nearly free that we determined to be free entirely,
+no matter what England conceded. Therefore these authors of our school
+textbooks felt that they needed to bolster our cause up for the benefit
+of the young. Accordingly our boys’ and girls’ sense of independence
+and patriotism must be nourished by making England out a far greater
+oppressor than ever she really had been. These historians dwelt as
+heavily as they could upon George III and his un-English autocracy, and
+as lightly as they could upon the English Pitt and upon all the English
+sympathy we had. Indeed, about this most of them didn’t say a word.
+
+Now that policy may possibly have been desirable 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 life 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 religion, down with
+education, down with marriage, down with law, down with property: 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 unchanged 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 understanding 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 history of our
+Revolution in the distorted form that I have briefly summarized. His
+book was published in 1917, by the George H. Doran Company, New York,
+and is entitled The American Revolution in our School Textbooks. Here
+following 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 Parliament, and thirty-two suppress it. To-day our books are not
+quite so bad, but it is not very much better; and-to-day, be it added,
+any reforming of these textbooks by Boards of Education is likely 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 all over our country are
+still being given a version of our Revolution and the political state
+of England then, which is as faulty as was George III’s government, with
+its fake parliament, 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 well-drilled and well-conducted
+army, is very glad that our boys and girls should be taught false
+history, and will do its best to see that they are not taught true
+history.
+
+Mr. Charles Altschul, in his admirable enterprise, addressed himself
+to those who preside over our school world all over the country;
+he received answers from every state in the Union, and he examined
+ninety-three history textbooks in those passages and pages which they
+devoted to our Revolution. These books he grouped according to the
+amount of information they gave about Pitt and Burke and English
+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 prominent Englishmen 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 political
+conditions in England prior to the American Revolution, nor to any
+prominent Englishmen who devoted themselves to the cause of the
+Americans.” Of course, what dwindles is the amount said about our
+English 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 policy of George III;
+in group five nothing is said about this at all. The boys and girls who
+studied books in group five would grow up believing that England was
+undividedly autocratic, tyrannical, and hostile to our liberty. 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 will 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 published his volume, and of these only group five,
+where the facts about English sympathy with us are totally 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
+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 followed me from the beginning, he will recollect
+a letter, parts of which I quoted, from a correspondent who spoke of
+Montgomery’s history, giving passages in which a fair and adequate
+recognition of Pitt and our English sympathizers and their opposition to
+George III is made. This would seem to indicate a revision of the work
+since Mr. Altschul published his lists, 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 publisher and any patriotic board of education, school
+principal, or educator, will watch and resist all propaganda and other
+sinister influence tending to perpetuate this error of these school
+histories! 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 England. It has descended from father to son. It has been
+further solidified 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 IX: Concerning a Complex
+
+
+All of these books, history and fiction, drop into the American mind
+during its early springtime the seed of antagonism, establish 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 specialist or psychological doctor would
+tell you---it savors slightly of hysteria, that hundreds of thousands of
+American men and women of every grade of education and ignorance should
+automatically 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
+familiar 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
+pleasurable or painful emotion, lie buried in our minds, unthought-of
+but alive, 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 complex” I need not describe, as our English
+complex is by no means suppressed. Known to us all, probably, is the
+political complex. Year after year we have been excited about elections
+and candidates and policies, preferring one party to the other. If
+this preference has been very marked, or even violent, you know how
+disinclined we are to give credit to the other party for any act or
+policy, 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.
+
+Established 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, statements 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 established in the regular way of
+all complexes, this anti-English complex 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 Republican because of the political complex, so does the great--the
+vast--majority of Americans automatically and easily remember everything
+against England and forget everything in her favor. Just try it any day
+you like. 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-French complex. Under its workings we automatically remember
+every good turn France has done us and automatically forget the evil
+turns. Again try the experiment yourself. 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 Washington requested his recall? Or the French
+privateers that a little 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
+
+
+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 lie under each other and above
+each other in intricate confusion, not unlike cross timber in a western
+forest, only instead of being logs, they are about two inches long and
+very light. The players sit round the table and with little 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 inspect 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 lift out its own jackstraw. Luckily for us,
+we have not often been involved in these 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
+negotiations 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 England’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 declared
+war upon Spain, the pattern is so clear that it could not be mistaken by
+any one who was not willfully blinded by an anti-English complex. 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 herself better than anybody. So
+must every nation. So does every nation.
+
+Let me briefly speak of the first game of jackstraws, played at Paris
+in 1783. Our Revolution 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
+satisfactory; and David Hartley, another friend of Franklin’s and also
+a sympathizer with our Revolution, was added; and in these circumstances
+and by these men the Treaty was made. To France we broke our promise to
+reach no separate agreement with England. We negotiated directly with
+the British, and the Articles were signed without consultation with the
+French Government. When Vergennes, the French Minister, 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 because she loved us so much, but because she loved England so
+little. 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 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 life, 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 Purchase, I have already touched;
+but not upon its diplomatic side. In those years the European game of
+diplomacy was truly portentous. Bonaparte had appeared, and Bonaparte
+was the storm centre. From the heap of jackstraws I shall lift out only
+that which directly concerns us and our acquisition of that enormous
+territory, then called Louisiana. Bonaparte had dreamed and planned
+an empire over here. Certain vicissitudes disenchanted him. A plan to
+invade England also helped to deflect his mind from establishing an
+outpost of his empire upon our continent. For us he had no love. Our
+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 light. 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 Talleyrand
+expressed the view that socially 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 projects regarding
+Louisiana. In the second volume of Henry Adams, at pages 23 and 24, you
+will find Addington remarking to our minister to Great Britain, Rufus
+King, that it would not do to let Bonaparte establish 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 acceptance in the mind of Thomas Jefferson. A year before the
+Louisiana Purchase was consummated, and when the threat of Bonaparte
+was in the air, Thomas Jefferson wrote to Livingston, 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 alludes to the British fleet. He also points
+out that France may by taking a certain 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 follow 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: “She will 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 prophetic vision. But I must keep to my
+jackstraws. On April 17, 1803, Bonaparte’s brother, Lucien, reports
+a conversation held with him by Bonaparte. 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 definitely 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 while, he said to Lucien, to sell when you could what
+you were certain to lose; “for the English... are aching for a chance
+to capture it.... Our navy, so inferior to our neighbor’s across the
+Channel, will 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 English navy is, and long will be, too dominant.”
+
+That was on April 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 miles. The formal transfer was made on December 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 democratic kinship
+with our ideals, ranged her with us.
+
+To place my third jackstraw, which follows 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 Monroe Doctrine. It was England that suggested
+the Monroe Doctrine to us. From the origin of this in the mind of
+Canning to its public 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
+Alliance. Among these, Prince Metternich the Austrian was undoubtedly
+the master mind. He saw that by England’s victory at Waterloo a threat
+to all monarchical and dynastic systems of government had been created.
+He also saw that our steady growth was a part of 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
+incompatible 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 veiled, not only against South
+America, but against ourselves. 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.
+Canning understood the threat to us contained in the Holy Alliance.
+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 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 public life 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 question presented by the letters you
+have sent me is the most momentous which has ever been offered to my
+contemplation since that of independence.... One nation most of all
+could disturb us.... She now offers to lead, aid and accompany us....
+With her on our side we need not fear the whole world. With her, then,
+we should most seriously cherish a cordial friendship, and nothing would
+tend more to unite our affections than to be fighting once more, side by
+side, in the same cause.”
+
+Thus for the second time, Thomas Jefferson advises a friendship with
+Great Britain. He realizes 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 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 countries
+were opposed to any intervention by Europe in the western hemisphere.
+Over our announcement there was much delight in England. In the London
+Courier occurs a sentence, “The South American Republics--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
+diplomatic game, and from England’s preference for us who spoke her
+language and thought her thoughts about liberty, 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
+occurred to obscure this recognition of kinship with us and preference
+for us upon the part of the English people, such interruptions are
+always temporary and lie always upon the surface of English sentiment.
+Beneath the surface the recognition of kinship persists unchanged and
+invariably reasserts itself.
+
+That is my third jackstraw. Canning spoke to Rush, Rush consulted
+Monroe, Monroe consulted 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 public 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
+
+
+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 lightly 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 political aspect of
+this war which casts upon it a light not generally shed by our school
+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
+declaring war upon her at such a time, played into Bonaparte’s hands,
+and virtually, by embarrassing England, struck a blow on the side of
+autocracy and against our own political faith. It was a feeble blow, it
+did but slight 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 respected and feared, was not realized. We made 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
+English felt justified in taking from us a large slice 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 all 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 allusion 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 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 Civil War. Chronologically, of
+course, Venezuela and Alaska fall 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 sentiment. But this was on the surface, and it
+always 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 undefined 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 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 baseball 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 line of California and the south line of Alaska, which then
+belonged to Russia, was called 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 apparently
+meant war; his words were bellicose. We blustered rudely. Feeling ran
+high in England; but she didn’t take off her coat. Her ambassador,
+Pakenham, stiff at first, unbent later. Under sundry missionary
+impulses, more Americans than British had recently settled along the
+Columbia River and in the Willamette 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
+tells at length everything I am telling you briefly about these boundary
+disputes. The settlers wished to be under our Government. Virtually upon
+their preference the matter was finally 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 enlisting
+against us in the Revolution that George III was obliged to get
+Hessians.
+
+Nicaragua comes next. There again they were quite angry with us on top,
+but controlled in 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. England yielded. The years went on and we
+grew, until 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? All this happened in the
+lifetime 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 many and intricate details 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 limit 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 conspicuously the opposite; we had done an unwarrantable 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 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 disputed
+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 declined. On December 17th Cleveland
+announced to England that the Monroe Doctrine applied to every stage of
+our national Life, and that as Great Britain had for many years refused
+to submit the dispute to impartial arbitration, 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 Doctrine’s very existence to
+English backing. Second, the Doctrine itself had been a declaration
+against autocracy in the shape of the Holy Alliance, and England was not
+autocracy. Lastly, as a nation, Venezuela seldom conducted herself or
+her government on the steady plan of democracy. England was exasperated.
+And yet England yielded. It took a little time, but arbitration settled
+it in the end--at about the same time that we flatly declined to
+arbitrate our quarrel with Spain. History will not acquit us of
+groundless meddling and arrogance in this matter, while 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 boundaries 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
+Roosevelt’s first administration. You will find it all 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 Oliver Wendell Holmes, about to sail for an English holiday,
+Roosevelt wrote a private letter privately to be shown to Mr. Balfour,
+Mr. Chamberlain, and certain other Englishmen 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 believe 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 all 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, especially
+to Lodge and Root, was that they had committed themselves on the general
+proposition. No man in public life in any position of prominence could
+have possibly avoided committing himself on the proposition, any more
+than Mr. Chamberlain could avoid committing himself 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 appointed a commission to settle up all these questions, I certainly
+should not expect him to appoint three men, if he could find them, who
+believed 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 line 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 taken it because I wish to exhaust every effort to have the affair
+settled peacefully and with due regard to England’s honor.”
+
+That is the way to do these things: not by a peremptory public letter,
+like Olney’s to Salisbury, 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 peacefully 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
+investigating the facts, decided in our favor.
+
+Our list 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 between 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
+chance--he had been trying it already 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 allies 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 still 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 summarizing those international
+episodes of our Civil War wherein England was concerned.
+
+This completes my list of minor troubles with England that we have had
+since Canning suggested our Monroe Doctrine in 1823. Minor troubles, I
+call them, because they are all smaller than those during our Civil War.
+The full record of each is an open page of history for you to read at
+leisure in any good library. You will find that the anti-English
+complex has its influence sometimes in the pages of our historians, but
+Professor Dunning is free from it. You will find, whatever transitory
+gusts of anger, jealousy, hostility, 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
+itself in the treaty at the close of our Revolution, and it has been the
+ultimate controlling factor in English dealings 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
+
+
+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 unanimously declared “that the Union now subsisting 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,
+half-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 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 Government 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 while. 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 staggering 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-countrymen, 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, the little island of loyalty amid the waters of
+secession, was covered by the Charleston batteries. “Batteries ready
+to open Wednesday or Thursday. What instructions?” Thus, on April 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 without further notice, or in case the fort were attacked.
+Lincoln was leaning backwards, you might say, in his patient effort
+to conciliate. 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 April 12, 1861, there arose into the air from
+the mortar battery near old Fort Johnson, on the south side of the
+harbor, a bomb-shell, 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 proclaimed a blockade on the ports of Slave Land.
+
+Bear each and all of these facts in mind, I beg, bear them in mind well,
+for in the light of them you can see England clearly, and will 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 interesting to mark this; very
+interesting to watch in her government and her people the persistent and
+conflicting currents of sympathy and antipathy 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 Tories, the aristocrats,
+the Lord Norths, who hoped for our overthrow, while the people of
+England, with certain liberal leaders in Parliament, 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 aristocratic 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 chilled and shocked at the coldness towards the North
+which I everywhere met, and the sympathetic prejudices in favor of
+the South. And yet everybody was alike condemning slavery and praising
+liberty!”
+
+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 slavery and
+yet be against slavery too? Confusing at the time, it is clear to-day.
+Imbedded in Lincoln’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 citizens. Can you see the position of
+those Englishmen 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.
+
+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 preservation
+of the Union and the abolition 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 whatever 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 believed. It
+was only an extremist minority who disregarded the Constitution’s
+acquiescence in slavery and wanted emancipation proclaimed at once. Had
+Lincoln proclaimed it, the North would have split in pieces, the South
+would have won, the Union would have perished, and slavery would have
+remained. Lincoln had to wait until the season of anguish and meditation
+had unblinded thousands besides himself, 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
+treasure. Until the Emancipation, we gave our English friends no public,
+official grounds for their sympathy, and consequently their influence
+over our English enemies was hampered. Instantly 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 William Lloyd Garrison, the
+Abolitionist, an English sympathizer wrote that three thousand men of
+Manchester had met there and adopted by acclamation an enthusiastic
+message to Lincoln. These men said that they would rather remain
+unemployed for twenty years than get cotton from the South at the
+expense of the slave. A month later Cobden writes to Charles Sumner:
+“I know nothing in my political experience so striking, an 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
+adjoining, were crowded with an enthusiastic audience. That meeting has
+had a powerful effect on our newspapers and politicians. 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 aristocratic 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
+England stopped being hostile to the North as soon as the North began
+to win. In January, 1863, 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 Lincoln 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 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 laboring class took sides with
+themselves in their struggle for reformation; while the wealthy and the
+privileged classes found a reason in their own political parties
+and philosophies why they should not be too eager for the legitimate
+government and nation of the United States.
+
+“All classes who, at home, were seeking the elevation and political
+enfranchisement of the common people, were with us. All who studied
+the preservation of the state in its present unequal distribution of
+political 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 believe in fully as sincerely,
+and more consistently, than we, or many amongst us do, in democratic
+doctrines.
+
+“We of all 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 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 Generics, and Cuba are witnesses. Yet the great
+body of our people in the Middle and Northern States are strongly
+opposed to all such tendencies.”
+
+It was in a very brief visit that Beecher managed to see England as she
+was: a remarkable letter for its insight, and more remarkable still for
+its moderation, when you consider that it was written in the midst of
+our Civil War, while loyal Americans were not only enraged with England,
+but wounded to the quick as well. When a man can do this--can have
+passionate convictions 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 childhood 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 our tolerance
+of slavery while we boasted of being the Land of the Free--and then,
+when we arose to abolish 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 received from England in 1915--letters from strangers evoked by
+a book called The Pentecost of Calamity, wherein I had published my
+conviction 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 correspondents) must it be to belong to a nation that was
+behaving like mine! I retorted (I’m sorry for it now) that I could
+all the more readily comprehend English feeling about our neutrality,
+because I had known what we had felt when Gladstone spoke at Newcastle
+and when England let the Alabama loose upon us in 1862. Where was the
+good in replying at all? 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 friendliness 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 defeated 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 President’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 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 humiliation 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 English 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 conflict. 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 fellow aristocrats in British society; we
+remembered 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
+represented Democracy; moreover, a Dis-United States would prove in
+commerce a less formidable competitor. To Captain Bullock, the able
+and energetic 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.
+
+In the pages of Henry Adams, and of Charles Francis Adams his brother,
+you can read of what they, as young men, encountered in London, and
+what they saw their father have to put up with there, both from English
+society and the English Government. Their father was our new minister to
+England, appointed by Lincoln. He arrived just after our Civil War had
+begun. I have heard his sons talk about it familiarly, and it is all to
+be found in their writings.
+
+Nobody knows how to be disagreeable quite so well as the English
+gentleman, except the English 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 English gentlemen and ladies Mr. Adams by his
+official position was obliged 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
+discretion. A false step, a “break,” might have led to a request for
+his recall. He knew that his constant presence, close to the English
+Government, was vital to our cause. Russell and Palmerston were by
+turns insolent and shifty, and once on the very brink of recognizing the
+Southern Confederacy as an independent nation. Gladstone, Chancellor of
+the 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 appallingly delicate and difficult mission. He was an American who
+knew how to behave himself, and he behaved himself all the time; while
+the English had a way of turning their behavior on and off, like the
+hot water. Mr. Adams was no admirer of “shirt-sleeves” diplomacy. His
+diplomacy wore a coat. Our experiments in “shirt-sleeves” diplomacy fail
+to show that it accomplishes anything which diplomacy decently dressed
+would not accomplish more satisfactorily. Upon Mr. Adams 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
+neutrality and recognized the belligerency of the South. This dismayed
+Mr. Adams and excited the whole North, because feeling 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 hostility 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 undertone, politically. Then all of a sudden, something that
+we did ourselves changed the undertone to a loud overtone, and we just
+grazed England’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 doctrine of 1812, to which I have alluded 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 Trent,
+stopped her on the high seas, and took four passengers off her, and
+brought them prisoners to Fort Warren, in Boston harbor. Mason and
+Slidell are the two we remember, Confederate 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 international law, and insulted the British
+flag. Palmerston wrote us a letter--or Russell, 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 to no paper that means war with the United
+States.” So this didn’t go, but another in its stead, pretty stiff,
+naturally, yet still possible for us to swallow. Some didn’t want to
+swallow even this; but Lincoln, humorous and wise, said, “Gentlemen, one
+war at a time;” and so we made due restitution, and Messrs. Mason and
+Slidell went their way to France and England, free to bring about action
+against us there if they could manage it. Captain 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 gallant flagrancy so
+remarkably like her own doings--though she couldn’t, naturally, permit
+such a performance to pass; and a few years afterwards, for his services
+in the cause of exploration, 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 English 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 slip away to sea, where she
+proceeded to send our merchant ships to the bottom, until the Kearsarge
+sent her herself to the bottom. She had been built at Liverpool in the
+face of an English law which no quibbling could disguise to anybody
+except to Lord John Russell and to those who, like him, leaned to
+the South. Ten years later, this leaning cost England fifteen million
+dollars in damages.
+
+Let us now listen 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 English 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 children 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 intention to interfere with
+slavery, and saw that at bottom our war was indeed against slavery,
+that slavery was behind the Southern camouflage about independence, and
+behind the Northern 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 sympathy.”
+ France was likewise damaged by our blockade; and Napoleon III would have
+liked to recognize the South. He established, through Maximilian, an
+empire in Mexico, behind 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 while with Slidell,
+but grew cold when he saw no chance of English cooperation.
+
+Besides John Bright and Cobden, we had other English friends of
+influence and celebrity: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hughes, Goldwin Smith,
+Leslie Stephen, Robert Gladstone, Frederic Harrison are some of them.
+All from the first supported us. All from the first worked and spoke for
+us. The Union and Emancipation Society 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 public 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 public
+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’ Rebellion. They were united and vociferous in
+the expression of their willingness to suffer all hardships consequent
+upon a want of cotton, if thereby the liberty of the victims of Southern
+despotism might be promoted. All honor to the half million 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 observance of law, their whole-souled love of the cause of human
+freedom, their quick and clear perception of the merits of the question
+between the North and the South... are extorting the admiration of all
+classes of the community ...”
+
+How much of all 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 already given extracts.
+
+“The anti-slavery meetings in England are having their effect upon the
+Government already... The Paris correspondent of the London Post also
+came to my house on Wednesday evening... He says... that there are about
+a dozen persons who by their position and influence over the organs
+of public opinion have produced all the bad feeling and treacherous
+con-duct of England towards America. They are people who, as members of
+the Government in times past, have been bullied 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 brutality, but they think we
+as a nation are disposed to bully, and they are disposed to assist in
+any policy that may dismember and weaken us. These scars of wounded
+pride, however, have been carefully concealed from the public, who
+therefore 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
+feeling 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 European governments. This was the harvest sown by shirt
+sleeves diplomacy and reaped by Mr. 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 representative of a nation with whom she
+was at peace. It was like ringing the doorbell of an acquaintance, being
+shown into the parlor and telling him he must sell you his spoons or you
+would snatch them. This doesn’t incline your neighbor to like you. But,
+as has been said, Mr. Adams was an American who did know how to behave,
+and thereby served us well in our hour of need.
+
+We remember the Alabama and our English enemies, we forget Bright, and
+Cobden, and all our English friends; but Lincoln did not forget them.
+When a young man, a friend of Bright’s, an Englishman, 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:
+“whereas one Rubery was convicted on or about the twelfth day of
+October, 1863, in the Circuit Court of the United States for the
+District of California, of engaging in, and giving aid and comfort
+to the existing rebellion 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 Alfred 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
+thereunto moving, and especially as a public 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.”
+
+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.
+
+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 Batch to Lincoln, who thought the millennium wasn’t quite at hand
+but favored “airing the idea.” The idea was not aired easily. Cobden
+would have brought it up in Parliament, 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, Russell
+recalled, saying in reply to a statement of our grievances by Adams: “It
+appears to Her Majesty’s Government that there are but two questions by
+which the claim of compensation could be tested; the one is, Have the
+British Government acted with due diligence, or, in other words, in good
+faith and honesty, in the maintenance of the neutrality they proclaimed?
+The other is, Have the law officers of the Crown properly understood the
+foreign enlistment act, when they declined, in June 1862, to advise the
+detention and seizure of the Alabama, and on other occasions 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 government with any regard to the dignity and
+character of the British Crown and the British Nation. Her Majesty’s
+Government are the sole guardians of their own honor. They cannot admit
+that they have acted with bad faith in maintaining the neutrality 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 line 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.”
+
+This is the test which we asked should be applied. 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 refusal to recognize or entertain any question of
+England’s good faith: “first, because it would be inconsistent with the
+self-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 I, Introductory 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 true America in 1861; the
+divided North with which Lincoln had to deal, the divided England where
+our many friends could do little 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-spinners, 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 exclusively from the newspapers of William Randolph
+Hearst.
+
+
+
+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 warning 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 Alliance in
+1823, so in 1898 it blocked the Kaiser. Late in that year, when it
+was all over, the disappointed 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
+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
+belligerent warships 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 out of a hundred, and was in other respects unprepared and
+utterly inadequate to cope with a first-class power. In consequence of
+this, and the criticisms of our Navy Department, which Admiral Sims as
+a young man had written, Roosevelt took the steps he did in his first
+term. Three ticklish times in that Spanish War England stood our
+friend against Germany. When it broke out, German agents approached
+Mr. Balfour, proposing that England join in a European combination in
+Spain’s favor. Mr. Balfour’s refusal 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
+all.
+
+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
+will be more vivid still. There was an outburst of European hate for
+us. Germany, France, and Austria all looked expectantly 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 agreeable 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 April, 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 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 diplomatic
+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’ll
+all be coming over here in a little while. I want you to wait and be
+present.” Shortly this prediction 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 she time of our
+war with Spain. Then the British 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 will your Excellency do?” inquired one visitor. “If
+you will all do me the honor of coming back to-morrow, I shall have
+another document ready which all of us can sign.” That is what happened
+to the European coalition 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 honored and marked than the
+United States has ever accorded to any one not a citizen? I should like
+it. And,” he suddenly added, shaking his fist at the German Embassy over
+the way, “I’d like to grind all their noses in the dirt.”
+
+Confronted with the awkward fact that Britain was almost unanimously
+with us, from Mr. Balfour down through the British press to the British
+people, those nations whose ambassadors had paid so unsuccessful a call
+at the British Embassy had to give it up. Their coalition never came
+off. Such a thing couldn’t come off without 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 allowed 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 Manila Bay itself, after Dewey’s victory, and
+while 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 Philippines for himself; we had not yet
+acquired them; we were policing 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.
+
+Dewey indicated where the German was to anchor. “I am here by the order
+of his Majesty the German 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 English Admiral, Chichester, who was
+likewise at hand, anchored in Manila 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
+Englishman. 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.
+
+Tell these things to the next man you hear 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 silly ignorant puppet.
+But whatever he is, he will not find much to say in response, unless it
+be vain, sterile chatter. True come-back will 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!
+
+
+What did England do in the war, anyhow?
+
+Let us have these disregarded facts also. From the shelves of history I
+have pulled down and displayed 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--well,
+how many?--irresponsible shouters in 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 million 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 population would have amounted
+to about thirteen million Americans, When the war started, the British
+Empire maintained three soldiers out of 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 million more than we sent--and of these
+six hundred and fifty-eight thousand, seven hundred and four, were
+killed. Of her Navy, thirty-three thousand three hundred and sixty-one
+were killed, six thousand four hundred and five wounded and missing;
+of her merchant marine fourteen thousand six hundred and sixty-one were
+killed; 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 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 lines of Huns, wave after wave of Germany’s
+picked troops, fell and broke upon this single line 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.
+
+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 will
+make this drop of perfect valor shine in 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 Allies on two more fronts.
+Her dead, those six hundred and fifty-eight thousand dead, lay by the
+Tigris, the Zambesi, the AEgean, and across the world to Flanders’
+fields. Between March 21st and April 17th, 1918, the Huns in their
+drive used 127 divisions, 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, Togoland, 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
+reconstructing 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 annually for the Allies. In
+Palestine and Mesopotamia alone, British troops in 1917 took 23,590
+prisoners. In 1918, in Palestine from September 18th to October 7th,
+they took 79,000 prisoners.
+
+What did England do in the war, anyhow?
+
+With “French’s contemptible little 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 400 officers. At Zeebrugge and
+Ostend--do not forget the Vindictive--she dealt with submarines 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 particular 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 million 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 already 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
+correspondents referred to, our Secretary of the Navy did 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 engaged 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 revolution 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 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 enlisted in the army before England gave up her birthright
+and accepted compulsory service, the women of England left their
+ordinary lives 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 English women worked on, seven millions 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 munitions.
+They now handled T. N. T., and fulminate of mercury, more deadly still;
+helped build guns, gun carriages, and three-and-a-half ton army cannons;
+worked overhead traveling cranes for moving the boilers of battleships:
+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 enlisted 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 supplies, and 1450 of them were trained
+mechanics to the Royal Flying Corps. They were employed upon practically
+every operation in factory, in foundry, in laboratory, 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; drilled 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 instruments, automatic searchlights. “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 all 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 public holidays.
+
+That is not all, or nearly all, that the women of England did--I skip
+their welfare work, 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 170,000 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 million to the Allies. She raised five billion 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 million,
+eight hundred thousand a week.
+
+Is that enough? Enough to show what England 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 earlier stages of the War it
+was possible that the question could be asked honestly--though never
+intelligently--because the facts and figures were not at that time
+always accessible. They were still 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 compiled, arranged, published
+in accessible and convenient 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 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 English innate political conceptions of popular
+representative government, of the balance of law and liberty, prevail
+in North America 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 decisive era was
+when Napoleon’s mouth watered for Louisiana, and when England took her
+stand behind the Monroe Doctrine.
+
+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 disturbance, had engulfed the British fleet at Scapa Flow. The
+world would then have been at Germany’s mercy and all the destroyers the
+Allies 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 Allied commerce 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 supplies 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 Allies themselves, in the spring of 1917, regarded
+as a not remote possibility. America would then have been compelled to
+face the German power 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 liberties of the world.”
+
+Yes. The High Seas Fleet of Germany, costing her one billion five
+hundred million 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 million oversea Huns of fighting 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 million miles in a single month. During the four
+years of the war they transported oversea more than thirteen million
+men (losing but 2700 through enemy action) as well as transporting two
+million horses and mules, five hundred thousand vehicles, twenty-five
+million tons of explosives, fifty-one million tons of oil and fuel, one
+hundred and thirty million tons of food and other materials for the use
+of the Allies. 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 oblivion 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 million and a
+half troops which had gone over from here in a few months, Great Britain
+brought over two thirds and escorted half.
+
+“I would like 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 Allies.”
+
+Thus Admiral Sims.
+
+That is part of what England did in the war.
+
+Note.--The author expresses thanks and acknowledgment to Pearson’s
+Magazine for permission to use the passages quoted from the articles by
+Admiral Sims.
+
+
+
+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, hostility 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-English complex, had been
+instantly set fermenting in me. Nothing could better disclose 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 Lancashire cotton spinners. And more than this historic
+knowledge, I knew living English 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 liberty--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-English complex myself,
+I understand it all the better in others, and am begging them to
+counteract 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 policies of England’s throughout our
+relations with her. The third cause, I said, was certain traits of the
+English and ourselves which have produced personal friction. An American
+does or says something which angers an Englishman, who thereupon goes
+about thinking and saying, “Those insufferable Yankees!” An Englishman
+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
+generalizing 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 English. Them he would
+like 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 Allies. From
+the mob came a certain taunt: “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 symbolic pinnacle of creed and government
+that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky?
+Couldn’t he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed
+and stricken and struggling, 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 half after a few street roughs had insulted him,
+that they 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, unbombed,
+safe, because of England’s ships, to tired, broken, bleeding England;
+and that the sight of us, so jaunty, so fresh, so innocent of suffering
+and bereavement, should have been for a thoughtless moment galling 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 generalization had been unjust. But, to quote the
+oft-quoted Mr. Kipling, that is another story.
+
+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 Tommies 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 like” 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 fell and
+rose and got it in the neck and the jaw and the eye and the nose--and
+all the while 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
+prevailed between Tommies and Yanks.
+
+A more peaceful contact produced excellent consequences at an encampment
+of Americans in England. The Americans had brought over an idea,
+apparently, that the English 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 English 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 English lady, one of the hostesses. To
+her came a young American marine with whom she already had some
+acquaintance. This led him to 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, therefore, tell him what
+things in Paris were the most interesting and in what order he had best
+take them? She replied 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 English: “Why, I am a marine!” he exclaimed, “and we
+marines would sooner knock down any English sailor than speak to him.”
+
+The English lady, naturally, did not then tell him her nationality. She
+now realized 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.
+
+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 English. And then she said something
+like this to him:
+
+“Now, you told me you had never been in England and had never known an
+English person in your life, and yet you had all these ideas against us
+because somebody had taught you wrong. It is not at all 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 English person now, and
+that English person begs you, when you do have a chance to read and
+inform yourself of the truth, to find out what England really 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 will 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, naturally, as I
+can be about those traits in my own countrymen 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 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 well of the
+English.
+
+Now, two interpretations of the Englishman’s answer are possible. One
+is, that he didn’t himself know, and said so in his English 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 established way, a way
+that their long experience of life has hammered out for their own
+convenience, and which they like. 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 details;
+while the whole of England is confluent, and the details have been
+slowly worked out through centuries of getting on together, and are
+accepted and observed 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 Englishman’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 tell 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 traveling in a train here, and the man next you, whose
+face you had never seen before, and with whom you had not yet exchanged
+a syllable, said: “What’s your pet name for your wife?”
+
+Wouldn’t your immediate inclination 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 little of it remains;
+but most of us still do draw the line somewhere; we may not all draw it
+at the same place, but we do draw a line. The difference, then, between
+ourselves and the English in this respect is simply, that with them the
+territory of a man’s privacy covers more ground, and different ground as
+well. An Englishman doesn’t expect strangers to ask him questions of
+a guide-book sort. For all such questions his English 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 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 telling
+me what those buildings are?” all would have gone well. The Englishman
+would have recognized (not fifty years ago, but certainly 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 buildings 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 English might do well to borrow from us; and it is quite as
+likely that the English think we might here and there take a leaf from
+their book to our advantage. But I am not theorizing, I am not seeking
+to show that we manage life better or that they manage life 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 English, 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 English and American examples of this
+presently. It is good to ascertain 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 ambassadors
+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 resembling closely the
+attire of those who are handing the supper or answering the door-bell.
+An Englishman saw Mr. Choate at some diplomatic 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 English 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 likely 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 English garden with English friends.
+The question of pronunciation came up. Now you will readily see that
+with them and their compactness, their great public schools, their two
+great Universities, and their great London, the one eternal focus
+of them all, 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 pronounce the word calm, for example, in one way
+or another, and it merely indicates where you come from. Departure in
+England from certain established 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 English, it would have been something like coming to
+dinner without your collar.
+
+That is why I think that, had my friend in the train begun his question
+about the buildings by saying that he was an American, the answer would
+have been different. Not all the English 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 thereupon produced matches, struck one, and offered
+it to the Prince, who bowed, thanked him, lighted 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 criticize Americans for not being English.
+Americans still constantly do criticize the English 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 English because of
+their coldness. The English 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 alive 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 English to
+leave between the lines. But it is all there! Behind that unconciliating
+wall 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 applies to many things in England besides offering a light
+to the Prince, or asking a fellow traveler what those buildings are; and
+I think that the Englishman’s notion of his right to privacy lies 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 delighted 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, will not hesitate to call out
+to him, “Hullo, 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 full 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, will shriek their conversation in a voice that bores like
+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
+Englishman’s right to privacy is larger than ours, and thus that his
+liberty is larger than ours.
+
+Before leaving this point, which to my thinking is the cause of many
+frictions and misunderstandings between ourselves and the English, I
+mustn’t omit to give instances of divergence, where an Englishman 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 Englishman, and he wishes
+to be civil, to help 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 discuss creed, immortality, faith. There is nothing from
+which the Englishman more peremptorily recoils, although he hates well
+nigh 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 Englishman
+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 Englishman stiffened. “I refuse to discuss religious subjects with
+you,” he said.
+
+To be ponderous over this anecdote grieves me--but you may not know that
+orthodox Englishmen usually don’t kneel, as we do, after reaching
+their pews; they stand for a moment, covering 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 English 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 Englishman--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 call it molasses,” answers the American.
+
+“How absurd to speak of a car when you mean a carriage!” exclaims the
+Englishman.
+
+“We don’t mean a carriage, we mean a car,” retorts the American.
+
+You, my reader, may have heard (or perhaps 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, English, foreigners, and Americans; and
+for most of us likewise it is divided into Americans, foreigners, and
+English. Now a “foreigner” can call molasses whatever 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 not here spin out a list of
+different names for the same things now current in English and American
+usage: molasses and treacle will suffice for an example; you will be
+able easily to think of 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 list 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 Englishman who was here for a
+while. 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 polite 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 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 illiterate; 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 all Americans and not all English do in their enunciation
+conform to these types.
+
+One May afternoon in 1919 I stopped at Salisbury 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 little groups, gazing, drowsing, talking at ease. Later, at the
+inn I was shown to a small table, where sat already 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 the cathedral, and how like a trance it was to
+find a scene so utterly English 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 excellent good-will. 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 like anybody!” I sighed.
+
+This diverted him, and brought us closer.
+
+“And see here,” I continued, “I knew you were English, 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 through your nose. And we
+don’t all say ‘Amurrican.’”
+
+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 lips of the French
+when they visit our shores? Not from the French do you hear prompt
+aspersions 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 like 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 Englishman in America go about volunteering opinions.
+Are the French more discreet? I believe 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 calling us pig-dogs
+again, I am merely amused. When I read French or Italian abuse of us,
+I am sorry, to be sure; but when some English 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 feeling free to be disagreeable to each other because we are
+relations, and yet feeling especially resentful because it’s a relation
+who is being disagreeable. I merely put the point to you, I lay no dogma
+down concerning members of the family; but I am perfectly sure that
+discretion is a quality more common to the French than to ourselves or
+our relations: I mean something a little more than discretion, I mean
+esprit de conduits, 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 application, 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. Englishmen 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
+Englishman, who had brought letters to a gentleman in Boston and in
+consequence had been asked to dinner, entered the 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 American hosts would have met the situation so
+well as that Boston gentleman: but too many English 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 challenge to
+play cricket: “Harrow we know, and Rugby we have heard of. But who are
+you?”
+
+That sort of thing belongs rather to the Palmerston 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 ourselves. An American lady who
+had brought a letter of introduction to an Englishman in London 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 declare,” she said, “that’s positively the most ridiculous
+thing I ever saw a man dressed in.”
+
+At the Savoy hotel in August, 1914, when England declared war upon
+Germany, many American women made scenes of confusion and vociferation.
+About England and the blast of Fate which had struck her they had
+nothing to say, but crowded and wailed of their own discomforts, 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, perhaps, 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.
+
+“Well,” said a very rich American to his English 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 American--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 little 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.
+
+“Well, it’s out now, anyway,” and she blew it out.
+
+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 English 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 everywhere. One certainly did see them everywhere.
+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 more
+extraordinary than the van Squibbers. 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 live 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.”
+
+The hostess paused for a moment, and then she said:
+
+“That is perfectly true.”
+
+This acknowledgment was complete, and perfectly friendly, and after that
+all went better than it had gone before.
+
+The half 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 English lady whose conversation
+led him to repeat 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 will tell you why. We English--I mean
+that set of English--are blase. 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
+champagne, and it’s just like going to see the monkeys at the Zoo?”
+
+“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 English 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 Englishmen, except a single stranger.
+He was an American, who through the kindness of one beloved member of
+that club, no longer living 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 like 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:
+“You seem to be having trouble in your packing houses over in America?”
+
+We were.
+
+“Very disgraceful, those exposures.”
+
+They were. It was May, 1906.
+
+“Your Government seems to be doing something about it. It’s certainly
+scandalous. Such abuses should never have been possible in the first
+place. It oughtn’t to require your Government 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 all 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 separated us, we’re still inveterately like you, a
+bullying, 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, bearing a celebrated name. He was telling the company what
+one could do in the way of amusement 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 believe 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 generalizations to be drawn from my data? I should like
+to dodge spelling them out, I should immensely prefer to leave it here.
+Some readers know it already, knew it before I began; while 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-English 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 explicit.
+
+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 Americans the wrong way. We are recent. Our
+thousand years of greatness are to come. Such is our passionate belief.
+Crudity is the seamy side of youth. Our crudity rubs the English the
+wrong way. Compare the American who said we were going to buy England
+for a summer resort with the Englishman who said that when all other
+entertainment in London failed, you could always listen to the Americans
+eat. Crudity, “freshness” on our side, arrogance, toploftiness on
+theirs: such is one generalization I would have you disengage from my
+anecdotes.
+
+Second. The English are blunter than we. 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 Englishman 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 Salisbury, the van Squibber, and
+the opium trade anecdotes. “Treat ‘em rough,” when they treat you rough:
+they like 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 Englishmen 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 lives are carried
+on. We like the same things, we hate the same things. We have the same
+notions about justice, law, conduct; about what a man should be, about
+what a woman should be. It is like 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 identical 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
+Englishman, his silence estranges us. Behind that silence beats the
+English heart, warm, constant, and true; none other like 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 Englishman not only sticks
+closer than a brother to his own rights, he respects the rights of his
+neighbor 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.
+Howsoever we may talk about our own rights to-day, we pay less and less
+respect to those of our neighbors. The result is that to-day there is
+more liberty 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 English 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. I
+shall not more than mention the match between our Benicia Boy and
+their Tom Sayers. Of this the English 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 English and Americans, who got up an
+international tug-of-war. A friend of mine was anchor of 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 line?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Because you had all the blackguards on your side of the line.”
+
+“Do you know why we had all the blackguards on our side of the line?”
+ inquired the American.
+
+“No.”
+
+“Because we pulled you over the line.”
+
+In one of my anecdotes I used the term Sam Johnson to describe an
+Englishman of a certain type. Dr. Samuel Johnson was a very marked
+specimen of the type, and almost the only illustrious Englishman of
+letters during our Revolutionary troubles who was not our friend. Right
+down through the years ever since, there have been Sam Johnsons writing
+and saying unfavorable 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 like the one who was
+scandalized by our Chicago packing-house disclosures. No longer ago than
+June 1, 1919, 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 bygone
+ones were pretty preposterous. They satirized the newness of a new
+country. It was like 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-English complex was discerned
+generations ago by Washington Irving. He said in his Sketch Book that
+writers in this country were “instilling 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 English Quarterly Review, which in that early day
+already wrote of America and England:
+
+“There is a sacred bond between us by blood 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 believe that
+they have natural friends?”
+
+It is we ourselves to-day, not England, that are pushing friendship
+away. It is our politicians, 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 will 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
+
+
+A part of the Irish is asking our voice and our gold to help
+independence for the whole of the Irish. Independence is not desired
+by the whole of the Irish. Irishmen of Ulster have plainly said so.
+Everybody knows this. Roman Catholics themselves are not unanimous. Only
+some of them desire independence. These, known as Sinn Fein, appeal to
+us for deliverance 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 “Laudabiliter,” 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 Exchequer. Accordingly, Henry the Second went
+to Ireland. All the archbishops and bishops of Ireland 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. All 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
+centuries 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, violence and bloodshed and
+oppression existed everywhere in Europe. Undoubtedly England was very
+oppressive to Ireland at times; but since the days of Gladstone she has
+steadily endeavored to relieve Ireland, with the result that today
+she is oppressing Ireland rather less than our Federal Government
+is oppressing Massachusetts, or South Carolina, 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 Dillon, the
+present leader, hastened to obstruct the operation of the Act, lest
+the Irish genius for grievance might perish from starvation. Examine the
+state of things for yourself, I cannot swell this book with the details;
+they are as accessible to you as the few facts about the conquest which
+I have just narrated. Examine the facts, but even without examining
+them, ask yourself this question: With Canada, Australia, and all those
+other colonies that I have named above, satisfied with England’s rule,
+hastening to her assistance, and with only Ireland selling herself
+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 Heligoland to the East, 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 Berlin 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 independence, 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
+Republic. For convenience I will designate this part as Green Ireland,
+and the thrifty, stable part as Orange Ireland. So when our politicians
+sympathize with an “Irish” Republic, they befriend merely Green Ireland;
+they offend Orange Ireland.
+
+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 Revolution,
+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
+Catholic Irish should have furnished the bulk of the auxiliaries to the
+regular English soldiers;... The fiercest and most ardent Americans
+of all, however, were the Presbyterian Irish settlers and their
+descendants.” History of New York, p. 133, by Theodore Roosevelt.
+
+Next, in what manner have the Green Irish incurred our thanks?
+
+They made the ancient and honorable association of Tammany their own.
+Once it was American. Now Tammany is Green Irish. I do not believe that
+I need pause to tell you much about Tammany. It defeated Mitchel, a
+loyal but honest Catholic, and the best Mayor of Near York in thirty
+years. It is a despotism built 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.
+
+During the following decade, in Pennsylvania, an association, called
+the Molly Maguires, terrorized the coal regions until their reign of
+assassination 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 sailors 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. 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 attacks upon our sailors; not
+all by any means were pro-German; and I know personally 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 wall was fighting Germany,
+the Green Irish killed the draft. Here following, I give some specific
+instances of what the Roman Catholic 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 police resort to force, let the people kill
+the police as they would kill any one who threatened their lives. If
+soldiers came in support of the draft, let them be treated like the
+police. Policemen 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 English 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 MacInerney said: “No Irish Catholic,
+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 Catholic
+who either as policeman or as agent of the government shall assist in
+applying 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 policeman who should attempt to enforce the draft,
+Father Murphy said at mass in Killenna, “Any policeman who is killed in
+such attempt will be damned in hell, even if he was in a state of grace
+that very morning.”
+
+Ninety-five percent of those Irish policemen were Catholics and had to
+respect the commands of those priests.
+
+Ireland is England’s business, not ours. But the word
+“self-determination” appears to hypnotize some Americans. We must not
+be hypnotized by this word. It is upon the “principle” expressed in
+this word that our sympathies with the Irish Republic are asked. The
+six northeastern counties of Ulster, on the “principle” of
+self-determination, should be separated from the Irish Republic. 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 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 statesmen are right in asserting a
+connection between Irish revolutionary feeling and German propaganda.
+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
+endorsement. 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 live under the flag of the United
+States are extended 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
+liberation of Ireland, and be a real defender of small nations.” See the
+Boston Herald of July 22, 1916.
+
+During our Civil War, in 1862, a resolution of sympathy with the South
+was stifled in Parliament.
+
+On June 6, 1919, our Senate passed, with one dissenting voice, the
+following, 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 ally, 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 Protestants outnumber its Catholics by more than three
+fourths. Besides such reprisals as they saw wrought upon wounded
+soldiers, they know 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-determination,
+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 Republic. There will be none; our
+interference merely makes Germany happy and possibly prolongs the
+existing chaos; but there will be none. Before such loyal and thinking
+Catholics as the gentleman who said to me that word about “spoiling the
+ship for a ha’pennyworth of tar,” and before a firm and coherent policy
+on England’s part, Sinn Fein will fade like a poisonous mist.
+
+
+
+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 English not agreeable. Well, 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 automobile 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 course the Germans were agreeable to our
+soldiers after the armistice!
+
+Agreeable Germany!--who sank the Lusitania; 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 life 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 wells and gassed
+the citizens from whose village she was running away; who wrecked the
+churches and the homes of the helpless living, and bombed the tombs
+of the helpless dead; who wrenched families apart in the night, taking
+their boys to slavery and their girls to wholesale violation, leaving
+the old people to wander in loneliness and die; who in her raids upon
+England slaughtered three hundred and forty-two women, and killed or
+injured seven hundred and fifty-seven children, and made in all a list
+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 voluntary
+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 disagreeable 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 all England’s colonies offer and bring both themselves and their
+resources, from the smallest to the greatest; little Newfoundland, whose
+regiment gave such heroic account of itself at Gallipoli; Australia who
+came with her cruisers, and with also her armies to the West Front and
+in South Africa; New Zealand who came from the other side of the world
+with men and money--three million pounds in gift, not loan, from one
+million people. And the Boers? The Boers, who latest of all, 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 telegram of sympathy, in spite of his plans and
+his hopes, they too, like Canada and New Zealand and all the rest,
+sided of their own free will with disagreeable England against agreeable
+Germany. They first stamped out a German rebellion, instigated 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 Neue
+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?
+
+Agreeable Germany!--who addresses her God, “Thou who dwellest high above
+the Cherubim, Seraphim and Zeppelin”--Parson Diedrich Vorwerck in his
+volume Hurrah and Hallelujah. Germany, who says, “It is better to let a
+hundred women and children belonging 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 commandments thus: “I am sending you a ring made out of a piece
+of shell.... During the battle of Budonviller 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 sweetheart, dated Peronne,
+March 16, 1915. Germany, whose newspaper the Cologne Volkszettung
+deplored 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.
+
+          “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?
+
+
+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 deliberately 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 recoil 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, tenches, submarines,
+air-raids, starvation, misery, is so unbearable to our bruised and
+stricken minds, that we have put it into words whose import is, Let
+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 idealist, 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 will to friendship--or the will 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 like each other, that mere words
+of good intention, 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 will. Discourage histories for children (and for
+grown-ups too) which breed international dislike. Such exist among us
+all. There is a recent one, written in England, that needs some changes.
+
+Should an Englishman say to me:
+
+“I have the will 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 Russell’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. We were three thousand miles
+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 gentleman
+who moved them in the House of Lords said something which, as it seems
+to me, adds nothing to the tribute he had already paid so eloquently.
+He had spoken of the greater incentive to courage which the French and
+Belgians had, because their homes and soil 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
+Allies would have fought with equal spirit and so long a time as they
+did, had they been engaged in the Highlands 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 feelings of others, by
+which, in times past, 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 Louisiana 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 entitled, How the
+Marines Saved Paris. Beside the marines there were some engineers. And
+how about M Company of the 23rd regiment of the 2nd Division? It lost
+in one day at Chateau-Thierry all its men but seven. And did the general
+forget the 3rd Division between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans? Don’t be
+like that brigadier general, and don’t be like that American 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 dollars first?”
+
+
+
+Chapter XIX: 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 themselves affected by the ancient
+grudge. You will see this if you read them; you will find the facts,
+which they give faithfully, 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 Lancashire cotton-spinners. You cannot fail to
+find, unless your anti-English complex tilts your judgment incurably,
+that England has been to us, on the whole, very much more friendly
+than unfriendly--if not at the beginning, certainly at the end of each
+controversy. What an anti-English complex can do in the face of 1914, is
+hard to imagine: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Boers, all
+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 will 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,
+farseeing, less of an opportunist in her statesmanship than any other
+nation. She has seen clearly and ever more clearly that our good will
+was to 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 equally important to us: not alone for material reasons, or for the
+sake of our safety, but also for those few deep, ultimate ideals of law,
+liberty, life, manhood and womanhood, which we share with her, which we
+got from her, because she is our nearest relation in this many-peopled
+world.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Straight Deal, by Owen Wister
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1379 ***