II AMERICAN AND BRITON

On the mutual understanding of each other by Americans and Britons, the future happiness of nations depends more than on any other world cause. Ignorance in Central Europe of the nature of American and Englishman tipped the balance in favour of war; and the course of the future will surely be improved by right comprehension of their characters.

Well, I know something at least of the Englishman, who represents four-fifths of the population of the British Isles.

And, first, there exists no more unconsciously deceptive person on the face of the globe. The Englishman does not know himself; outside England he is only guessed at.

Racially the Englishman is so complex and so old a blend that no one can say precisely what he is. In character he is just as complex. Physically, there are two main types; one inclining to length of limb, bony jaws, and narrowness of face and head (you will nowhere see such long and narrow heads as in our island); the other approximating more to the legendary John Bull. The first type is gaining on the second. There is little or no difference in the main mental character behind these two.

In attempting to understand the real nature of the Englishman, certain salient facts must be borne in mind.

The Sea. To be surrounded generation after generation by the sea has developed in him a suppressed idealism, a peculiar impermeability, a turn for adventure, a faculty for wandering, and for being sufficient unto himself in far and awkward surroundings.

The Climate. Whoso weathers for centuries a climate that, though healthy and never extreme, is, perhaps, the least reliable and one of the wettest in the world, must needs grow in himself a counterbalance of dry philosophy, a defiant humour, an enforced medium temperature of soul. The Englishman is no more given to extremes than his climate; and against its damp and perpetual changes he has become coated with a sort of protective bluntness.

The Political Age of His Country. This is by far the oldest settled Western power politically speaking. For 850 years England has known no serious military incursion from without; for nearly 200 years she has known no serious political turmoil within. This is partly the outcome of her isolation, partly the happy accident of her political constitution, partly the result of the Englishman’s habit of looking before he leaps, which comes, no doubt, from the climate and the mixture of his blood. This political stability has been a tremendous factor in the formation of English character, has given the Englishman of all ranks a certain deep, quiet sense of form and order, an ingrained culture which makes no show, being in the bones of the man as it were.

The Great Preponderance for Several Generations of Town Over Country Life. Taken in conjunction with generations of political stability, this is the main cause of a growing, inarticulate humaneness, of which however the Englishman appears to be rather ashamed.

The other chief factors have been:

The English Public Schools.

The Essential Democracy of the Government.

The Freedom of Speech and the Press (at present rather under a cloud).

The Old-Time Freedom from Compulsory Military Service.

All these, the outcome of the quiet and stable home life of an island people, have helped to make the Englishman a deceptive personality to the outside eye. He has for centuries been licensed to grumble. There is no such confirmed grumbler—until he really has something to grumble at; and then, no one perhaps who grumbles less. An English soldier was sitting in a trench, in the act of lighting his pipe, when a shell burst close by, and lifted him bodily some yards away. He picked himself up, bruised and shaken, and went on lighting his pipe, with the words: “These French matches aren’t ’alf rotten.”

Confirmed carper though the Englishman is at the condition of his country, no one perhaps is so profoundly convinced that it is the best in the world. A stranger might well think from his utterances that he was spoiled by the freedom of his life, unprepared to sacrifice anything for a land in such a condition. If that country be threatened, and with it his liberty, you find that his grumbles have meant less than nothing. You find, too, that behind the apparent slackness of every arrangement and every individual, are powers of adaptability to facts, elasticity, practical genius, a spirit of competition amounting almost to disease, and great determination. Before this war began, it was the fashion among a number of English to lament the decadence of their race. Such lamentations, which plentifully deceived the outside ear, were just English grumbles. All this democratic grumbling, and habit of “going as you please,” serve a deep purpose. Autocracy, censorship, compulsion destroy the salt in a nation’s blood, and elasticity in its fibre; they cut at the very mainsprings of a nation’s vitality. Only if reasonably free from control can a man really arrive at what is or is not national necessity and truly identify himself with a national ideal, by simple conviction from within.

Two words of caution to strangers trying to form an estimate of the Englishman: He must not be judged from his Press, which, manned (with certain exceptions) by those who are not typically English, is too hectic to illustrate the true English spirit; nor can he be judged entirely from his literature. The Englishman is essentially inexpressive, unexpressed; and his literary men have been for the most part sports—Nature’s attempt to redress the balance. Further, he must not be judged by the evidence of his wealth. England may be the richest country in the world in proportion to its population, but not ten per cent of that population have any wealth to speak of, certainly not enough to have affected their hardihood; and, with few exceptions, those who have enough wealth are brought up to worship hardihood.

I have never held a whole-hearted brief for the British character. There is a lot of good in it, but much which is repellent. It has a kind of deliberate unattractiveness, setting out on its journey with the words: “Take me or leave me.” One may respect a person of this sort, but it’s difficult either to know or to like him. An American officer said recently to a British Staff Officer in a friendly voice: “So we’re going to clean up Brother Boche together!” and the British Staff Officer replied: “Really!” No wonder Americans sometimes say: “I’ve got no use for those fellows!”

The world is consecrate to strangeness and discovery, and the attitude of mind concreted in that: “Really!” seems unforgivable till one remembers that it is manner rather than matter which divides the hearts of American and Briton.

In your huge, still half-developed country, where every kind of national type and habit comes to run a new thread into the rich tapestry of American life and thought, people must find it almost impossible to conceive the life of a little old island where traditions persist generation after generation without anything to break them up; where blood remains undoctored by new strains; demeanour becomes crystallised for lack of contrasts; and manner gets set like a plaster mask. Nevertheless the English manner of to-day, of what are called the classes, is the growth of only a century or so. There was probably nothing at all like it in the days of Elizabeth or even of Charles II. The English manner was still racy not to say rude when the inhabitants of Virginia, as we are told, sent over to ask that there might be despatched to them some hierarchical assistance for the good of their souls, and were answered: “D——n your souls, grow tobacco!” The English manner of to-day could not even have come into its own when that epitaph of a Lady, quoted somewhere by Gilbert Murray, was written: “Bland, passionate, and deeply religious, she was second cousin to the Earl of Leitrim; of such are the Kingdom of Heaven.” About that gravestone motto you will admit there was a certain lack of self-consciousness; that element which is now the foremost characteristic of the English manner.

But this English self-consciousness is no mere fluffy gaucherie; it is our special form of what Germans would call “Kultur.” Behind every manifestation of thought or emotion, the Briton retains control of self, and is thinking: “That’s all I’ll let myself feel; at all events all I’ll let myself show.” This stoicism is good in its refusal to be foundered; bad in that it fosters a narrow outlook; starves emotion, spontaneity, and frank sympathy; destroys grace and what one may describe roughly as the lovable side of personality. The English hardly ever say just what comes into their heads. What we call “good form,” the unwritten law which governs certain classes of the Briton, savours of the dull and glacial; but there lurks within it a core of virtue. It has grown up like callous shell round two fine ideals—suppression of the ego lest it trample on the corns of other people; and exaltation of the maxim: ‘Deeds before words.’ Good form, like any other religion, starts well with some ethical truth, but in due time gets commonised, twisted, and petrified till at last we can hardly trace its origin, and watch with surprise its denial and contradiction of the root idea.

Without doubt, before the war, good form had become a kind of disease in England. A French friend told me how he witnessed in a Swiss Hotel the meeting between an Englishwoman and her son, whom she had not seen for two years; she was greatly affected—by the fact that he had not brought a dinner-jacket. The best manners are no “manners,” or at all events no mannerisms; but many Britons who have even attained to this perfect purity are yet not free from the paralytic effects of “good form”; are still self-conscious in the depths of their souls, and never do or say a thing without trying not to show how much they are feeling. All this guarantees perhaps a certain decency in life; but in intimate intercourse with people of other nations who have not this particular cult of suppression, we English disappoint, and jar, and often irritate. Nations have their differing forms of snobbery. At one time, if we are to believe Thackeray, the English all wanted to be second cousins to the Earl of Leitrim, like that lady bland and passionate. Now-a-days it is not so simple. The Earl of Leitrim has become etherialised. We no longer care how a fellow is born, so long as he behaves as the Earl of Leitrim would have; never makes himself conspicuous or ridiculous, never shows too much what he’s really feeling, never talks of what he’s going to do, and always “plays the game.” The cult is centred in our Public Schools and Universities.

At a very typical and honoured old Public School, he to whom you are listening passed on the whole a happy time; but what an odd life educationally speaking! We lived rather like young Spartans; and were not encouraged to think, imagine, or see anything we learned, in relation to life at large. It’s very difficult to teach boys, because their chief object is not to be taught anything; but I should say we were crammed, not taught. Living as we did the herd-life of boys with little or no intrusion from our elders, and they men who had been brought up in the same way as ourselves, we were debarred from any real interest in philosophy, history, art, literature, and music, or any advancing notions in social life or politics. We were reactionaries almost to a boy. I remember one summer term Gladstone came down to speak to us, and we repaired to the Speech Room with white collars and dark hearts, muttering what we would do to that Grand Old Man if we could have our way. But, after all, he contrived to charm us. Boys are not difficult to charm. In that queer life we had all sorts of unwritten rules of suppression. You must turn up your trousers; must not go out with your umbrella rolled. Your hat must be worn tilted forward; you must not walk more than two abreast till you reached a certain form; nor be enthusiastic about anything, except such a supreme matter as a drive over the pavilion at cricket, or a run the whole length of the ground at football. You must not talk about yourself or your home people; and for any punishment you must assume complete indifference.

I dwell on these trivialities, because every year thousands of British boys enter these mills which grind exceeding small; and because these boys constitute in after life the great majority of the official, military, academic, professional, and a considerable proportion of the business classes of Great Britain. They become the Englishmen who say: “Really!” and they are for the most part the Englishmen who travel and reach America. The great defence I have always heard put up for our Public Schools is that they form character. As oatmeal is supposed to form bone in the bodies of Scotsmen, so our Public Schools are supposed to form good sound moral fibre in British boys. And there is much in this plea. The life does make boys enduring, self-reliant, good-tempered, and honourable, but it most carefully endeavours to destroy all original sin of individuality, spontaneity, and engaging freakishness. It implants, moreover, in the great majority of those who have lived it the mental attitude of that swell, who when asked where he went for his hats, replied: “Blank’s; is there another fellow’s?”

To know all is to excuse all—to know all about the bringing-up of English Public School boys makes one excuse much. The atmosphere and tradition of those places is extraordinarily strong, and persists through all modern changes. Thirty-eight years have gone since I was a new boy, but cross-examining a young nephew who left not long ago, I found almost precisely the same features and conditions. The War, which has changed so much of our social life, will have some, but no very great, effect on this particular institution. The boys still go there from the same kind of homes and preparatory schools and come under the same kind of masters. And the traditional unemotionalism, the cult of a dry and narrow stoicism, is rather fortified than diminished by the times we live in.

Our Universities, on the other hand, have lately been but the ghosts of their old selves. At my old College in Oxford last year they had only two English students. In the Chapel under the Joshua Reynolds window, through which the sun was shining, hung a long “roll of honour,” a hundred names and more. In the College garden an open-air hospital was ranged under the old City wall, where we used to climb and go wandering in the early summer mornings after some all-night spree. Down on the river the empty College barges lay stripped and stark. From the top of one of them an aged custodian broke into words: “Ah! Oxford’ll never be the same again in my time. Why, who’s to teach ’em rowin’? When we do get undergrads again, who’s to teach ’em? All the old ones gone, killed, wounded and that. No! Rowin’ll never be the same again—not in my time.” That was the tragedy of the War for him. Our Universities will recover faster than he thinks, and resume the care of our particular ‘Kultur,’ and cap the products of our public schools with the Oxford accent and the Oxford manner.

An acute critic tells me that Americans hearing such deprecatory words as these from an Englishman about his country’s institutions would say that this is precisely an instance of what an American means by the Oxford manner. Americans whose attitude towards their own country seems to be that of a lover to his lady or a child to its mother, cannot—he says—understand how Englishmen can be critical of their own country, and yet love her. Well, the Englishman’s attitude to his country is that of a man to himself; and the way he runs her down is rather a part of that special English bone-deep self-consciousness of which I have been speaking. Englishmen (the speaker amongst them) love their Country as much as the French love France, and the Americans America; but she is so much a part of us that to speak well of her is like speaking well of ourselves, which we have been brought up to regard as impossible. When Americans hear Englishmen speaking critically of their own country I think they should note it for a sign of complete identification with their country rather than of detachment from it. But to return to English Universities: They have, on the whole, a broadening influence on the material which comes to them so set and narrow. They do a little to discover for their children that there are many points of view, and much which needs an open mind in this world. They have not precisely a democratic influence, but taken by themselves they would not be inimical to democracy. And when the War is over they will surely be still broader in philosophy and teaching. Heaven forefend that we should see vanish all that is old, all that has as it were the virginia-creeper, the wistaria bloom of age upon it; there is a beauty in age and a health in tradition, ill dispensed with. But what is hateful in age is its lack of understanding and of sympathy; in a word—its intolerance. Let us hope this wind of change may sweep out and sweeten the old places of my country, sweep away the cobwebs and the dust, our narrow ways of thought, our mannikinisms. But those who hate intolerance dare not be intolerant with the foibles of age; they should rather see them as comic, and gently laugh them out.

The educated Briton may be self-sufficient, but he has grit; and at bottom grit is, I fancy, what Americans at any rate appreciate more than anything. If the motto of my old Oxford College: “Manners makyth man,” were true, I should often be sorry for the Briton. But his manners don’t make him, they mar him. His goods are all absent from the shop window; he is not a man of the world in the wider meaning of that expression. And there is, of course, a particularly noxious type of travelling Briton, who does his best, unconsciously, to take the bloom off his country wherever he goes. Selfish, coarse-fibred, loud-voiced—the sort which thanks God he is a Briton—I suppose because nobody else will do it for him!

We live in times when patriotism is exalted above all other virtues, because there have happened to lie before the patriotic tremendous chances for the display of courage and self-sacrifice. Patriotism ever has that advantage as the world is now constituted; but patriotism and provincialism of course are pretty close relations, and they who can only see beauty in the plumage of their own kind, who prefer the bad points of their countrymen to the good points of foreigners, merely write themselves down blind of an eye, and panderers to herd feeling. America is advantaged in this matter. She lives so far away from other nations that she might well be excused for thinking herself the only country in the world; but in the many strains of blood which go to make up America, there is as yet a natural corrective to the narrower kind of patriotism. America has vast spaces and many varieties of type and climate, and life to her is still a great adventure.

I pretend to no proper knowledge of the American people. It takes more than two visits of two months each to know the American people; there is just one thing, however, I can tell you: You seem easy, but are difficult to know. Americans have their own form of self-absorption; but they appear to be free as yet from the special competitive self-centrement which has been forced on Britons through long centuries by countless continental rivalries and wars. Insularity was driven into the very bones of our people by the generation-long wars of Napoleon. A Frenchman, André Chevrillon, whose book: “England and the War” I commend to anyone who wishes to understand British peculiarities, justly, subtly studied by a Frenchman, used these words in a recent letter to me: “You English are so strange to us French; you are so utterly different from any other people in the world.” It is true; we are a lonely race. Deep in our hearts, I think, we feel that only the American people could ever really understand us. And being extraordinarily self-conscious, perverse, and proud, we do our best to hide from Americans that we have any such feeling. It would distress the average Briton to confess that he wanted to be understood, had anything so natural as a craving for fellowship or for being liked. We are a weird people, though we look so commonplace. In looking at photographs of British types among photographs of other European nationalities, one is struck at once by something which is in no other of those races—exactly as if we had an extra skin; as if the British animal had been tamed longer than the rest. And so he has. His political, social, legal life was fixed long before that of any other Western country. He was old before the Mayflower touched American shores and brought there avatars, grave and civilised as ever founded nation. There is something touching and terrifying about our character, about the depth at which it keeps its real yearnings, about the perversity with which it disguises them, and its inability to show its feelings. We are, deep down, under all our lazy mentality, the most combative and competitive race in the world, with the exception perhaps of the American. This is at once a spiritual link with America, and yet one of the great barriers to friendship between the two peoples. Whether we are better than Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Italians, Chinese, or any other race, is of course more than a question; but those peoples are all so different from us that we are bound, I suppose, secretly to consider ourselves superior. But between Americans and ourselves under all differences there is some mysterious deep kinship which causes us to doubt, and makes us irritable, as if we were continually being tickled by that question: Now am I really a better man than he? Exactly what proportion of American blood at this time of day is British, I know not; but enough to make us definitely cousins—always an awkward relationship. We see in Americans a sort of image of ourselves; feel near enough, yet far enough, to criticise and carp at the points of difference. It is as though a man went out and encountered, in the street, what he thought for the moment was himself; and, decidedly disturbed in his self-love, instantly began to disparage the appearance of that fellow. Probably community of language rather than of blood accounts for our sense of kinship, for a common means of expression cannot but mould thought and feeling into some kind of unity. Certainly one can hardly overrate the intimacy which a common literature brings. The lives of great Americans, Washington and Franklin, Lincoln and Lee and Grant are unsealed for us, just as to Americans are the lives of Marlborough and Nelson, Pitt and Gladstone, and Gordon. Longfellow and Whittier and Whitman can be read by the British child as simply as Burns and Shelley and Keats. Emerson and William James are no more difficult to us than Darwin and Spencer to Americans. Without an effort we rejoice in Hawthorne and Mark Twain, Henry James and Howells, as Americans can in Dickens and Thackeray, Meredith and Thomas Hardy. And, more than all, Americans own with ourselves all literature in the English tongue before the Mayflower sailed; Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, Raleigh, Ben Jonson, and the authors of the English Bible Version are their spiritual ancestors as much as ever they are ours. The tie of language is all-powerful—for language is the food formative of minds. Why! a volume could be written on the formation of character by literary humour alone. It has, I am sure, had a say in planting in American and Briton, especially the British townsman, a kind of bone-deep defiance of Fate, a readiness for anything which may turn up, a dry, wry smile under the blackest sky, an individual way of looking at things, which nothing can shake. Americans and Britons both, we must and will think for ourselves, and know why we do a thing before we do it. We have that ingrained respect for the individual conscience, which is at the bottom of all free institutions. Some years before the War, an intelligent and cultivated Austrian who had lived long in England, was asked for his opinion of the British. “In many ways,” he said, “I think you are inferior to us; but one great thing I have noticed about you which we have not. You think and act and speak for yourselves.” If he had passed those years in America instead of in England he must needs have pronounced the very same judgment of Americans. Free speech, of course, like every form of freedom, goes in danger of its life in war time. In 1917 an Englishman in Russia came on a street meeting shortly after the first revolution had begun. An Extremist was addressing the gathering and telling them that they were fools to go on fighting, that they ought to refuse and go home, and so forth. The crowd grew angry, and some soldiers were for making a rush at him; but the Chairman, a big burly peasant, stopped them with these words: “Brothers, you know that our country is now a country of free speech. We must listen to this man, we must let him say anything he will. But, brothers, when he’s finished, we’ll bash his head in!”

I cannot assert that either Britons or Americans are incapable in times like these of a similar interpretation of “free speech.” Things have been done in my country, and perhaps in America, which should make us blush. But so strong is the free instinct in both countries, that it will survive even this War. Democracy, in fact, is a sham unless it means the preservation and development of this instinct of thinking for oneself throughout a people. “Government of the people by the people for the people” means nothing unless the individuals of a people keep their consciences unfettered, and think freely. Accustom the individual to be nose-led and spoon-fed, and democracy is a mere pretence. The measure of democracy is the measure of the freedom and sense of individual responsibility in its humblest citizens. And democracy is still in the evolutionary stage.

An English scientist, Dr. Spurrell, in a recent book, “Man and his Forerunners,” thus diagnoses the growth of civilisations: A civilisation begins with the enslavement by some hardy race of a tame race living a tame life in more congenial natural surroundings. It is built up on slavery, and attains its maximum vitality in conditions little removed therefrom. Then, as individual freedom gradually grows, disorganisation sets in and the civilisation slowly dissolves away in anarchy. Dr. Spurrell does not dogmatise about our present civilisation, but suggests that it will probably follow the civilisations of the past into dissolution. I am not convinced of that, because of certain factors new to the history of man. Recent discoveries have so unified the world, that such old isolated successful swoops of race on race are not now possible. In our great Industrial States, it is true, a new form of slavery has arisen (the enslavement of men by their machines), but it is hardly of the nature on which the civilisations of the past were reared. Moreover, all past civilisations have been more or less Southern, and subject to the sapping influence of the sun. Modern civilisation is essentially Northern. The individualism, however, which according to Dr. Spurrell, dissolved the Empires of the past, exists already, in a marked degree, in every modern State; and the problem before us is to discover how democracy and liberty of the subject can be made into enduring props rather than dissolvents. It is, in fact, the problem of making democracy genuine. If that cannot be achieved and perpetuated, then I agree there is nothing to prevent democracy drifting into an anarchism which will dissolve modern States, till they are the prey of pouncing Dictators, or of other States not so far gone in dissolution—the same process in kind though different in degree from the old descents of savage races on their tamer neighbours.

Ever since the substantial introduction of democracy, nearly a century and a half ago with the American War of Independence, I would point out that Western Civilisation has been living on two planes or levels—the autocratic plane with which is bound up the idea of nationalism, and the democratic, to which has become conjoined in some sort the idea of internationalism. Not only little wars, but great wars such as this, come because of inequality in growth, dissimilarity of political institutions between States; because this State or that is basing its life on different principles from its neighbours.

We fall into glib usage of words like democracy, and make fetiches of them without due understanding. Democracy is certainly inferior to autocracy from the aggressively national point of view; it is not necessarily superior to autocracy as a guarantee of general well-being; it might even turn out to be inferior unless we can improve it. But democracy is the rising tide; it may be dammed or delayed but cannot be stopped. It seems to be a law in human nature that where, in any corporate society, the idea of self-government sets foot it refuses ever to take that foot up again. State after State, copying the American example, has adopted the democratic principle; and the world’s face is that way set. Autocracy has, practically speaking, vanished from the western world. It is my belief that only in a world thus uniform in its principles of government, and freed from the danger of pounce by autocracies, have States any chance to develop the individual conscience to a point which shall make democracy proof against anarchy, and themselves proof against dissolution; and only in such a world can a League of Nations to enforce peace succeed.

But though we have now secured a single plane for Western civilisation and ultimately, I hope, for the world, there will be but slow and difficult progress in the lot of mankind. And for this progress the solidarity of the English-speaking races is vital; for without that there is but sand on which to build.

The ancestors of the American people sought a new country, because they had in them a reverence for the individual conscience; they came from Britain, the first large State in the Christian era to build up the idea of political freedom. The instincts and ideals of our two races have ever been the same. That great and lovable people the French, with their clear thought and expression, and their quick blood, have expressed those ideals more vividly than either of us. But the phlegmatic tenacity of the English and the dry tenacity of the American temperament have ever made our countries the most settled and safe homes of the individual conscience. And we must look to our two countries to guarantee its strength and activity. If we English-speaking races quarrel and become disunited, civilisation will split up again and go its way to ruin. The individual conscience is the heart of democracy. Democracy is the new order; of the new order the English-speaking nations are the ballast.

I don’t believe in formal alliances, or in grouping nations to exclude and keep down other nations. Friendships between countries should have the only true reality of common sentiment, and be animated by desire for the general welfare of mankind. We need no formal bonds, but we have a sacred charge in common, to let no petty matters, differences of manner, divergencies of material interest, destroy our spiritual agreement. Our pasts, our geographical positions, our temperaments make us beyond all other races, the hope and trustees of mankind’s advance along the only line now open—democratic internationalism. It is childish to claim for Americans or Britons virtues beyond those of other nations, or to believe in the superiority of one national culture to another; they are different, that is all. It is by accident that we find ourselves in this position of guardianship to the main line of human development; no need to pat ourselves on the back about it. But we are at a great and critical moment in the world’s history—how critical, none of us alive will ever realise to the full. The civilisation slowly built since the fall of Rome has either to break up and dissolve into jagged and isolated fragments through a century of revolutions and wars; or, unified and reanimated by a single idea, to move forward on one plane and attain greater height and breadth.

Under the pressure of this War there has often been, beneath the lip-service we pay to democracy, a disposition to lose faith in it, because of its undoubted weakness and inconvenience in a struggle with States autocratically governed; there has even been a sort of secret reaction towards autocracy. On those lines there is no way out of a future of bitter rivalries, chicanery, and wars, and the probable total failure of our civilisation. The only cure which I can see, lies in democratising the whole world, and removing the present weaknesses and shams of democracy by education of the individual conscience in every country. Goodbye to that chance, if Americans and Britons fall foul of each other, refuse to make common cause of their thoughts and hopes, and to keep the general welfare of mankind in view. They have got to stand together, not in aggressive and jealous policies, but in defence and championship of the self-helpful, self-governing, ‘live and let live’ philosophy of life.

Who would not desire, rushing through the thick dark of the future, to stand on the cliffs of vision—two hundred years, say—hence—and view this world?

Will there then be this League for War, this caldron where, beneath the thin crust, a boiling lava bubbles, and at any minute may break through and leap up, as of late, jet high? Will there still be reek and desolation, and man at the mercy of the machines he has made; still be narrow national policies and rancours, and such mutual fear, that no country dare be generous? Or will there be over the whole world something of the glamour that each one of us now sees hovering over his own country; and men and women—all—feel they are natives of one land? Who dare say?

The guns have ceased fire and all is still; from the woods and fields and seas, from the skeleton towns of ravaged countries the wistful dead rise, and with their eyes question us. In this hour we have for answer only this: We fought for a better Future for Mankind!

Did we? Do we? That is the great question. Is our gaze really fixed on the far horizon? Or do we only dream it; and have the slain no comfort in their untimely darkness; the maimed, the ruined, the bereaved, no shred of consolation? Is it all to be for nothing but the salving of national prides? And shall the Ironic Spirit fill the whole world with his laughter?

The House of the Future is always dark. There are few cornerstones to be discerned in the Temple of our Fate. But, of these few, one is the brotherhood and bond of the English-speaking races; not for narrow purposes, but that mankind may yet see Faith and Good Will enshrined, yet breathe a sweeter air, and know a life where Beauty passes, with the sun on her wings.

We want in the lives of men a “Song of Honour,” as in Ralph Hodgson’s poem:

“The song of men all sorts and kinds

As many tempers, moods and minds

As leaves are on a tree,

As many faiths and castes and creeds

As many human bloods and breeds

As in the world may be.”

In the making of that song the English-speaking races will assuredly unite. What set this world in motion we know not; the Principle of Life is inscrutable and will for ever be; but we do know, that Earth is yet on the upgrade of existence, the mountain top of man’s life not reached, that many centuries of growth are yet in front of us before Time begins to chill this planet, till it swims, at last, another moon, in space. In the climb to that mountain top, of a happy life for mankind, our two great nations are as guides who go before, roped together in perilous ascent. On their nerve, loyalty, and wisdom, the adventure now hangs. What American or British knife would sever the rope?

He who ever gives a thought to the life of man at large, to his miseries, and disappointments, to the waste and cruelty of existence, will remember that if American or Briton fail in this climb, there can but be for us both, and for all other peoples, a hideous slip, a swift and fearful fall into an abyss, whence all shall be to begin over again.

We shall not fail—neither ourselves, nor each other. Our comradeship will endure.