THE past few years have been notable for the pricking of bubbles. Spain was supposed to have a navy, England an organised army, Russia an unassailable military force, and America an impregnable industrial preponderance unparalleled in modern history. These bubbles have been pricked. Spain with characteristic hauteur has taken her true position at the end of the line, England is trying to create the organised army she supposed she had, Russia grieves at this moment over the wounds inflicted upon her by the Japanese onslaught, with the impotent, emotion of a quivering jelly-fish, and the United States have discovered that their title to the earth cannot be sustained in a competitive court. These nations have been found out; whether others, subjected to similar tests, would suffer similar shocks can be a matter only of conjecture. One fact, however, is certain: the pricking of these bubbles has taught the lesson of

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interdependence to the Anglo-Saxon race at least, with so much of force and clarity that, for the first time since Paul Revere rode out of Boston, that race is now practically a unit in its relationship with the remainder of the world, not as a result of written words, but as the effect of that intuitive understanding which is more potent and more enduring than explicit covenants, for the reason that it combines the quality of chivalrous sentiment with regard for material selfinterest.

I

The antipathy which long existed between the two Englishspeaking peoples, which often threatened to culminate in war between them, and which did once (in 1812) plunge them into a fratricidal contest, was due, partly to their ignorance of one another, partly to an actual or supposed lack of common interests, and partly to an absence of kindliness born of services rendered and welcomed. After the disappearance of the generation of colonists which had grown to maturity before the outbreak of the revolutionary struggle, there was less social and friendly intercourse between Americans and Englishmen than between Americans and Frenchmen; and misconceptions became rife in the mother country and the daughter state concerning their respective ideas, sentiments, and intentions that would have been grotesque had they not been lamentable. For three-quarters of a century after the Peace of Versailles, Englishmen were content to take their notions of American civilisation from a few superficial and prejudiced observers, of whom Mrs. Trollope and Dickens were examples, while Americans imbibed from their schoolbooks and newspapers the conviction that in England their nation had a rancorous, an implacable, and a sleepless enemy. This mutual misunderstanding might have been corrected gradually had there been more personal contact between intelligent and influential representatives of the kindred peoples. Up to the close of the Civil War, however, Englishmen of education and of station seldom visited the United States. On the other hand, nearly all the graduates of American colleges, who at that time sought a supplemental course in a foreign university, went to Germany rather than to England, while of those rich Americans who desired to sojourn in a European capital, not London but Paris was the bourne.

It is not surprising that, for many years after the Revolutionary War, Americans and Englishmen should have failed to recognise the community of their material interests. Throughout the long contest of the Allied Powers against the French Republic and the French Empire, the United States and England were rivals for the carrying-trade between the European Continent and the New World. This rivalry continued until, in the decade preceding our Civil War, the ocean-borne commerce of the daughter state had grown to

equal nearly that of the mother country. On the other hand, it was not until after the repeal of the Corn Laws, or near the close of the fifth decade of the nineteenth century, that the British people realised in any measure the importance of the United States as the principal purveyor of breadstuffs imperatively needed to eke out Britain's domestic supply. It is true that, during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the cotton-mills of central Britain had become dependent upon American growers of the raw staple; but, as cotton was a product of the Southern States alone, it could be plausibly argued in 1861-65 that British manufacturers would have no less, if not indeed more, to gain by the triumph of the Confederacy than by the maintenance of the Union.

The failure to perceive any community of economical interests between the American Union and Great Britain undoubtedly explains in part the sympathy for the Confederacy which was felt and expressed almost unanimously by the British governing class; and which wounded the people of the Northern States deeply and [not unreasonably. When that sympathy took concrete forms in a hasty recognition of the Confederacy as a belligerent, in a failure to prevent the building of Confederate cruisers in British shipyards, and in the escape of such vessels therefrom, it not unnaturally provoked on the part of the American people a widespread feeling of resentment, which, for at least a generation, outlived our Civil War. The good-will evinced by cotton-spinners and weavers, amid great privations, and the few eloquent voices raised on behalf of the North in Parliament and in the press by such men as John Bright and Goldwin Smith, were by no means unappreciated; but the fact could not be overlooked that they did not reflect the opinions and feelings of that section of society by which Britain was governed.

It appears then that, up to a few. years ago, there was no historical basis for the idea that there is an instinctive sympathy between the United States and England, such as is sometimes alleged to be irrepressible because of the possession by these two nations of a common language, and, to a large extent, of a common law and common political institutions. Experience indeed has shown that such incentives to international harmony do not suffice. Thucydides records that the first example of a sea-fight on a large scale among the Greeks was between the navies of Corinth and of her daughter state, Corcyra. An identity or a close similarity of race, language, laws and institutions did not prevent Italians or Germans from warring against each other for centuries. Moreover, while we Americans have always been proud of the great poets, philosophers, jurists, historians, and novelists of England, we have regarded the debt as personal, not national. So, too, while recognising a fellowship with the stout Britons who sheared the Stuart kings of their prerogatives, and with the British martyrs who died

for freedom of worship, we are grateful to them, not to the Government that persecuted and repressed them.

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How, then, has it come about that now, in the opening years of the twentieth century, the relations of the two English-speaking peoples are more sympathetic than they were a generation or even a decade ago? It is evident, in the first place, that our knowledge of one another has been signally increased. It is safe to say that, for one educated English gentleman who, in the days of Palmerston, visited the United States for the purpose of studying their people and their institutions, such a tour is now undertaken by scores, even by hundreds. For one graduate of an American college, who, thirty or forty years ago, matriculated at a British University, there are now at least a dozen, and the number will be increased by the Rhodes bequest. I would not exaggerate the unifying effect of international marriages, but there is no doubt that matrimonial alliances between Englishmen and American women, which were very rare before the Civil War, have contributed materially to a better understanding. It is certain that the colony of American residents or sojourners in London is at the present day much larger than it was thirty years ago. The existence of personal contact at such a multiplicity of points, and the incessant interchange of ideas, have rendered difficult, if not impossible, the persistence of the old misconceptions on the part of one English-speaking people with reference to the other. Each has gained knowledge of the other at first hand, and from such knowledge has drawn logical and just deductions. The once conventional caricatures of Yankees on the British stage, and of Britons on the American stage, no longer convince or even amuse. They have been relegated happily and finally to the limbo of stale and outworn stage properties.

Simultaneously with the enlightenment due to an extension of social intercourse between the natives of the two countries, has come an awakening on the part of Great Britain to the immense economical importance of the friendship of the United States. It is not only cotton, the raw material of a single industry, for which the mother country is now dependent upon her daughter state; there is a far more fundamental necessity, to wit, England's food supply, without which her industries would wither, because her workmen would starve. To the paramountcy of this factor in the international situation Englishmen have become thoroughly alive only within very recent years. Nor is it strange that this should be the case. Since free trade in breadstuffs became the settled policy of the United Kingdom, its population has doubled, while the production of wheat at home has decreased by about one-half. Even the imports from the transmarine dependencies of Great Britain, viewed collectively, have dwindled during the last ten years. The result is that the dependence of the United Kingdom upon foreign countries for wheat

has grown to such an extent that at least three out of every five loaves that come to British tables are the products of grain received from the United States, from Russia, or from Argentina. Under the circumstances it is difficult to see how England could be shielded from famine should she ever be engaged in war with both the United States and Russia. It may indeed be asked: Would not the British navy be able to assure the transportation across the ocean of adequate quantities of wheat from Canada, Australia, and Argentina, even if the customary supplies from the United States and Russia were cut off? For the present, at all events, and probably for many years to come, the answer must be that the wheat surplus of Canada, Australia, India, and Argentina would bridge but a fraction of the vast and constantly increasing gap between England's demand for wheat and her home supply. In the supposed contingency, moreover, the surplus wheat of Canada could hardly be relied upon, because, if the event were war between the United States and Great Britain, the Canadian granaries would be overrun by the American land forces. It is equally probable that the transportation of wheat from Australia and Argentina would be seriously interrupted by commerce destroyers.

Happily for the English-speaking world, it is now extremely improbable that England will ever have to confront the United States and Russia at one and the same time. Such a contingency indeed might have occurred during our Civil War, had England attempted intervention on behalf of the Southern Confederacy. It might have occurred in 1896, had England, in defiance of Mr. Cleveland's unwarranted Venezuela Message, persisted in refusing to submit the boundary of British Guiana to arbitration. It might even have occurred six years ago, had England forbidden us to undertake the deliverance of Cuba, as she did forbid us at the time of the • Virginius affair. But not now; the danger time has passed.

I have endeavoured to indicate the economical grounds upon which the friendship of the United States has become of incomparable value to England. They obviously imply that to us also a quarrel with Great Britain would be disastrous. If her ports were closed to us, we should lose our principal customer, not only for our surplus cotton, but for our surplus breadstuffs. To the farmers of our prairie States and to the planters of our Southern States, such › an obstruction to the export of their staples would mean catastrophe. Our nation's agricultural interests would once more experience, now on a vastly extended scale, the species of strangulation to which they were subjected by Jefferson's Embargo. Never, without galling provocation, could we be prevailed upon to face such a calamity., Neither would we for a moment allow England's enemies to restrict ⚫ our neutral right to furnish her with requisite food-supplies and the 9 raw material needed for her manufactures. Never would we submit