How England Feels Toward America

I

WHEN the Great War broke out and Germany’s invasion of Belgium made British participation in it inevitable, Englishmen instantly and instinctively looked across the Atlantic for sympathy and understanding. It could not have been otherwise. For us in Great Britain it is impossible to feel or affect indifference to American opinion upon our actions and policies in any part of the globe. American approval is frankly valued. American hostility or criticism is as frankly deplored. Not for nothing have the two great communities, politically separated, preserved the surer bonds of a common tongue, identical ideals and aspirations, and a kindred form of government. They are bound to influence and react upon each other with lightning decisiveness and through a thousand impalpable channels. Their judgment of each other’s doings, whether favorable or unfavorable, cannot help having weight. Each nation, at more than one crisis of its history, in more than one phase of its development, has been stimulated by the other’s example and support, has been disheartened, checked, or bewildered by the other’s disapproval.

There could, therefore, be no question of England’s not caring to know what Americans were saying and thinking about the tremendous decision of the British Government two and a half years ago, and all t he subsequent events in which Great Britain has played a part. England did care and does care. Indifferent as we are, and as every strong, assured, and rather unimaginative people must be, to foreign opinion, we have for many decades got into the habit of making an exception in favor of America. The serene nobility of temper with which the British people gathered itself together to redeem a pledge of honor and to repel the most dastardly assault that has yet been perpetrated upon the fabric of civilization, could not, of course, have been damped down, but it might easily have been chilled and depressed, had we felt that America was against us or alienated from our cause.

We never felt that. We never had any reason to feel it. Every test which it was possible for us to apply showed the popular sentiment of America to be overwhelmingly on the side of the Allies and ungrudging in its commendation of the course pursued and the spirit displayed by the British Government and people. We saw an America sharing to the full our own passionate indignation over the bloody rape of Belgium, revolted by the atrocities that accompanied it, and appalled by the spectacle of Teutonic power and ruthlessness. We had no need to ask where the American people ' stood.’ Their whole history answered the question before there was any need to frame it. We in England simply took it for granted that Americans would have ceased to be Americans if they did not regard Germany’s pounce upon Belgium with an almost frenzied detestation, and if they did not recognize that that act of unspeakable treachery had transformed Germany into an enemy of the human race. We could not detect, we could not even imagine, one single ground of sympathy between the people of the United States and the military clique at Potsdam that had precipitated this measureless cataclysm. ‘Necessity knows no law’ is not a maxim of American statecraft. The violation of treaties and pledges and of the rights of smaller nations is not a proceeding they applaud. It never even occurred to us, that with the record before them, Americans would hesitate for a moment in making up their minds as to who brought on the war and who went to the uttermost limits to avert it; on which side it was a war of conquest and on which a war in defense of civilization. Nor did we even for an instant entertain the preposterous notion that between democratic America and the German ideal of jackbooted force there could be anything other than a fundamental antagonism. Not only, therefore, did we assume that the vast majority of Americans were ranged in hope and sympathy on the side of the Allies, but we dismissed from our minds the thought of any other attitude on their part as utterly incredible.

In this, I think, we were quite right. Idle average Englishman does not know much about America, but he showed in 1914 that he at least knew enough to scout the idea that America was or could be pro-German. He trusted his instinct, and very soon had proof that the trust was not misplaced. In the opening months of the war the American people justified by their expressions of goodwill all that their friends in Europe had ever claimed for them. To us in England the innumerable demonstrations of American partiality came with a peculiarly bracing effect. They cemented anew that sense of racial kinship of which the Englishman is always conscious, and to which no doubt he attaches a quite excessive importance, whenever he thinks of England and America together. At a time when half the world was writhing in the agony of a ferocious war, it may have seemed absurd and even sentimental to set so high a value on mere words and feelings. But that is the English way. No Englishman with any vision at all but felt strengthened and encouraged by the reflection that in this ghastly struggle the moral force of American sympathies was by an easy preponderance behind the Allies. That at least was a stimulating fact, and though it has often in the past thirty months seemed to have been obscured, or to have lacked adequate expression, or even to have been partially counterbalanced by other emotions, Englishmen believe it to be a fact still. They find even now a certain comfort in the conviction that America by a huge majority is with them, not because she is pro-French or pro-British, but because she recognizes in a German triumph a menace to her own ideals and her own interests. They do not, however, read into the American attitude any special political significance. They do not expect it to bear fruit in overt and national action. It is simply that they are glad to know that a people whom they persist in regarding as kinsmen are wishing them well and backing them up in a tough struggle.

There has never, that I know of, been any disposition in England to quarrel with or to criticize the official policy of neutrality adopted at Washington. We accepted it as a matter of course that America would be neutral. At the beginning of the war neutrality was the obviously proper and sensible line for the United States to follow. Every one in Great Britain admitted as much. No one expected anything else. There was, it is true, some goodhumored surprise when the President attempted to expand national neutrality into a rule of private thought and sentiment; but to neutrality itself, as the policy of the United States Government, nobody took or could take the slightest exception. The war was not an American war; the issues at stake were not specifically American issues; there seemed every reason to hope that the United States could hold honorably aloof from it.

Nor even at this time would any Englishman desire to see America drawn into the war except under the constraint of purely American interests and in order to fulfill her own conception of what her self-respect and her duty as one of the great pillars of democracy demand. Were the United States, of her own initiative, to throw in her lot with the Allies, then, indeed, every Briton would feel that his dearest political wish had been realized in the mere fact of a working coöperation between all the English-speaking peoples; would say — and would be right in saying — that now at last the only possible foundations of a lasting peace had been well and truly laid. But that, as every one in Great Britain recognizes, is a matter for Americans to decide in their own way, at their own time, and in the light of exclusively American considerations. From first to last in this war I do not think you will be able to point to a single line in the British press or a single utterance of any British statesman that savored of the impertinence of urging the United States to abandon her neutrality or that tendered any advice whatever on the subject.

If America is satisfied to remain outside, we in England are well content to have her do so. While we most passionately believe that we are fighting for every sound principle of right-dealing between nations, for everything that makes democracy possible, and for the protection of freedom itself against the assaults of a panoplied absolutism, we do not expect America to go crusading on behalf of these causes unless and until her own national honor or security is involved in their maintenance. We are not quite so foolish as to look for an exhibition of international knighterrantry from the American or any other government. Still less do we stand in any need of either the naval or the military assistance of the United States. The war of European liberty will be won even if America remains neutral to the end. We can, and we shall, save civilization, if we have to, without her. For themselves the Allies want nothing from the United States beyond what their command of the sea enables them at this moment to receive — arms, food, raw material, equipment of all kinds; and in regard to some at least of these necessaries they will before long be independent of any source of supply but their own.

Many Englishmen have even argued that the belligerent interests of the Allies are better served by American neutrality than they would be by American intervention. That also is a favorite American contention and unquestionably there is a great deal to be said for it. But no Englishman, or none at least of any consequence, has been guilty of attempting to force either that opinion or its opposite upon the attention of the United States. Most emphatically we do not seek and have never sought American intervention; we are perfectly confident that we can dispense with it; at the same time, if it came, as of course it could only come, under the compulsion of American honor and American interests, we in Great Britain would welcome it, not so much for its effect on the present war, as because it would powerfully reinforce the guaranties of future peace.

II

But there are different kinds of neutrality, and I am not going to pretend that the kind adopted by the United States Government has commended itself to British opinion. I suppose that it must always and necessarily be the fate of neutrals to incur the dislike of both sets of belligerents. I suppose, too, that in England, as in every country that is fighting for what it most highly values, we do not see quite straight, have lost something of our sense of proportion, and find it unusually difficult to get away from our own point of view. One must allow for this. One must particularly allow for it in a war that reduces all other wars to the dimensions of a street brawl. But after every discount has been made, there is still a large and sober body of British opinion, friendly to the United States by instinct and conviction, that has found American diplomacy during the past two years a hard pill to swallow. It must even be said that disappointment with the figure America has been made to cut throughout the war is most acute precisely among those Englishmen who know America best and are most warmly disposed towards her.

What is it that they feel? They feel, first, that the authentic voice of the American people, whose accents they have caught occasionally in the speeches of private citizens, has hardly once found official expression. They feel, secondly, that the United States Government abdicated something of its old high position when it passed over in silence one of the most nefarious crimes in human history — the savage trampling down of Belgium in the interests of German militarism. How the American people regarded that execrable atrocity we in England knew well enough. But the one voice that could speak for them collectively, as a nation, as a community that had inherited unique traditions of liberty-loving independence, was silent. Not a word from the President, not a resolution in Congress, not a dispatch from the State Department, has even now placed on the record the judgment of the American nation. Americans by the score and hundred have spoken out in their old free and fearless fashion. But the United States has been dumb.

I imagine that had Mr. Wilson uttered but one sentence of reprobation all Americans to-day would have an easier conscience and would be holding their heads a little stiffer; and I am certain that, had that sentence been spoken, the moral standing of the United States throughout the world would be immeasurably higher than it is. A law of civilization, a main bulwark of international right, had been broken and cast down; and the United States looked on and said nothing. From that false start America has not yet recovered; that lost opportunity she has not yet retrieved; and the shock of her acquiescent silence and inaction still rumbles in the British consciousness like an aching nerve. Whenever Mr, Lansing talks of the sacred rights of neutrals, or the President dilates upon America’s championship of humanity and her mission to serve the world, the average Englishman irrepressibly brings these admirable phrases to the test of Belgium; and except in the welcome protest against the deportations, he has never once found that they could stand the test. We never felt that America owed it to the Allies to pass a public and emphatic verdict on Germany’s invasion of Belgium. We did feel, and feel acutely, that she owed it supremely to herself.

Remember that we in England take, or used to take, an exalted, possibly even an exaggerated, view of the influence and beneficent potentialities of the United States in the sphere of international relationships. It is because so little has been made of that influence and those potentialities that American diplomacy has disheartened us. It has seemed to us anaemic, immersed in legalism, lacking in nobility. If I were asked for a summary of what in British eyes have appeared to be its deficiencies, I should point to the speech delivered by Mr. Root on February 15 of last year — a speech in which a very great man rose to his full height of power and emotional intensity and political vision. Englishmen have rightly refrained from saying the things that Mr. Root as an American was free to say. Indeed, one of the pleasantest surprises that awaits an English visitor to the United States these days is to discover how mild is British dissatisfaction with the foreign policy of the Administration, and in what scrupulously temperate language it finds utterance, as compared with the full-blooded ferocity of American comment. But it seems to me clear that Mr. Root and the general run of Englishmen approach this question from approximately the same angle. Both feel that in what has been done and left undone at Washington there has been a failure to embody and interpret the best American sentiment. Both feel that it is the American people themselves and not the Allies who have the most cause to complain of, and to be chagrined by, the Administration’s acts of commission and omission.

That certainly was the average British view in regard to America’s passivity in the presence of the ruin of Belgium. It was still more definitely the British view in regard to Mr. Wilson’s handling of the issues raised by the sinking of the Lusitania. What ‘the man in the street’ says is, roughly, that the United States Government announced that it would hold Germany to ‘strict accountability’ and that it has not done so. From the interminable series of notes and the disputations over legal minutiæ he has derived a final impression of uncertainty and irresolution, an impression that could not but be confirmed by that unfortunate — in its effect on foreign opinion, that quite disastrous — obiter dictum of the President about being ‘ too proud to fight.’ Not even the German Chancellor’s ‘scrap of paper’ has more indelibly stamped itself upon the mind of Europe than Mr. Wilson’s too casual phrase. It has plastered on America a label that will not easily be removed.

How misleading that label is I, of course, after twenty years of acquaintanceship with American life, know well enough. But Englishmen who have had fewer opportunities, or none at all, to study the United States at first hand, and to whom it is largely an unknown and almost indeed an inconceivable land, — that is to say, the great body of my countrymen, — have fastened upon those four fatal words as accurately portraying the present spirit of America; and all that they have heard of American policy in Mexico and of the growth of American pacifism and of the American woman who did n’t raise her son to be a soldier, and all that the seeming indecisiveness of American diplomacy during the past two and a half years has taught them, has done nothing to weaken their belief that the President’s impromptu was and is a truthful representation of American sentiment. I have never had a more difficult task than in t rying to convince my English friends and readers that America is not really ‘too proud to fight.’

That used not to be the reputation that the United States enjoyed in Great Britain. There was a time, and a quite recent time, when the average Englishman thought of America as a land rather belligerently given to asserting her rights and resenting affronts. Mr. Cleveland’s Venezuela Message, the war with Spain, the plunge of the United States into a policy of Imperialism, the voyage of the American fleet round the world, the increasingly sharp intervention of the Government at Washington in the affairs of the more turbulent republics of the Caribbean and Central America, the dramatic stroke that made possible the building of the Panama Canal, the firm front that the United States always showed in its negotiations with Great Britain, the stir and spacious vigorof the Roosevelt administrations, the steadiness with which under Mr. Taft America made herself felt in the Far East — these were hardly the symptoms of a nation ossified in pacifism, unmindful of its interests, or slow to defend them.

The contrast, between that America which he knew or thought he knew and the one that now confronts him frankly bewilders the ordinary Englishman. He has seen the United States in the past few years submitting with unexampled meekness to a series of unexampled outrages. He has seen its government in almost so many words renouncing its duty of protecting American citizens in Mexico. He has seen them murdered, their property destroyed, their flag insulted. He has seen the ugly spectre of racial schism rear itself on American soil. He has seen the agents of the Central Powers instigating in the United States one conspiracy after another against American industries, against the American State Department, against the American Congress, against the American President; abusing every privilege that their official position gave them; acting in a spirit of open and cynical disdain for the Government and the nation to which they were accredited; corrupting opinion, interfering with the domestic politics of the American people, fomenting strikes, organizing forgery and arson, stopping, in short, at nothing that would serve the alien and wholly nonAmerican aims of their own governments. And he has seen these activities tolerated by the Administration with a patience quite unparalleled in modern history.

What, he is inclined to ask, has come over America? Was that New York journal right which declared that the sentiment of the West was against entering on a war ‘for the abstraction known as honor ’ ? Was that other New York journal right which declared that prolonged and ineffective silence and inaction in the presence of the infamies that have filled Mexico for over four years and all Europe for over two have induced in the American people an insensitiveness, a callousness, that makes them accept any outrage, even when they are its chief victims, almost as a matter of course? And this amazing spread of pacifism in the United States — what lies at the bottom of it? How much of it is genuine idealism and how much equally genuine materialism, selfishness, or indifference? Is America really a nation, beyond the bare fact that one hundred million Americans live under a single government? Have its vast and tranquil spaces and its medley of unassimilated immigrants strangled the impulse toward that coherency and compactness of feeling and action which is the hall-mark of a veritable nationality? Or is the ultraChristian forbearance of American diplomacy to be explained by the fact — if it be a fact — that the mass of the American people do not yet understand what is happening in Europe, and persist in denying that it touches them at all vitally, and in hugging to themselves the delusion that in any event their invulnerability is secure? Or should it be attributed to that avalanche of prosperity which the war has loosed upon the American people?

The average Englishman asks these questions, but without getting any very satisfactory reply. But on one point he is clear. He has been officially informed that there is such a thing as a nation being ‘too proud to fight.’ He has no evidence tending to show that the United States is not such a nation. Indeed, when he thinks of the Americans who were butchered in the Lusitania and who have been murdered in Mexico, he is more than half inclined to murmur with James Russell Lowell, —

III

I must again interject that the state of mind I am trying to portray is that of the ordinary untraveled Englishman who knows nothing of America at first hand, who judges her simply by what he hears or is told of her actions, and who, in the midst of such a war as this, has scant time for studying anything thoroughly. He has always had a strong bias of sentimental friendliness in favor of the American people; and he has had it on grounds that most Americans would instantly repudiate. He thinks of America as predominantly ‘English,’ and of the American as almost ‘one of us.’ He has a vivid sense, as an Imperial people ought to have, of racial pride and kinship; and he extends it to cover the United States. He does so quite simply and sincerely, without even suspecting the innumerable elements that in many ways make America more foreign to England than England is to Holland or France. He is proud, and justly proud, of the part played by Great Britain in preserving North America to the English-speaking peoples. He thinks that England and the United States ought always to work together; he regards a serious disagreement between them as proof of sheer bad statesmanship, and he would look upon an Anglo-American war as something so unnatural, so fratricidal, as to be altogether impossible. Goodwill toward America and Americans has for many years, for four decades at least, been, not merely a fixed point of British policy, but an inseparable part of the British consciousness. And the ‘man in the street,’ in his delightful ignorance of the varied strains that enter into the composition of the America of to-day, is apt to assume that this instinctively friendly attitude is reciprocated by the ‘man in the cars,’ with equal heartiness.

That of course is where he makes his mistake. He cannot get it out of his head that the United States is essentially and in spirit, though not of course politically, a member of the English-speaking brotherhood, with very much the same cast of mind, and responsive to very much the same sort of appeal, as his own country. And what more than anything else has puzzled and disconcerted him in the American Government’s attitude and temper and policies throughout the war is that they have struck him as singularly unlike the attitude, temper, and policies to be expected from ‘one of the family.’ Bewildering in themselves, they were still more so coming from the United States. The average Englishman felt as if a near relative had unaccountably failed to act in a crisis up to the family standard.

Another factor that has powerfully and unfavorably influenced British opinion has been the pertinacious stiffness with which the State Department has attacked the ‘blockade’ and our commercial use of sea-power. On the merits of the dispute and the endless and intricate technicalities involved in it, the ordinary man in Great Britain is, of course, wholly incompetent to pass judgment. But there are certain broad aspects that have become pretty firmly fixed in his mind. He believes profoundly that in this struggle he is fighting for a cause and an ideal that deeply concern the security and welfare of the United States. He altogether agrees with those Americans who hold and who have openly proclaimed that the British fleet is at this moment safeguarding the interests of America as much as it is safeguarding the British Isles themselves. He sees without a particle of resentment or envy that the war has prodigiously enriched the American people and altered their whole position in the world of international commerce and finance. He is convinced that the policy of cutting off Germany’s imports and exports is a sound policy and a legitimate one, and that our ‘blockade,’ while novel in form, was expressly devised to cause as little interference as possible with neutral trade. He is conscious also that, while the Central Powers have ruthlessly killed American citizens, no drop of innocent neutral blood has stained the ensign of the British Admiralty. He thought that under these circumstances American magnanimity and idealism, all that the two peoples have inherited in common, and the transcendent importance to every American interest that Germany should be defeated, would operate upon the United States Government and induce it, if not to overlook, at least to be patient under, the inevitable annoyances of any and every blockade.

In that hope he has been disappointed. Perhaps he should never have cherished it. But in these matters you cannot expect popular sentiment in war-time to be governed by the meticulous preciosity of the lawyer and the logician. The British people and British press have fully acknowledged the ability, frankness, and courtesy with which Mr. Lansing has pressed his case. What has disquieted and discomfited them is that he should have thought it worth while to press it at all. They could not at any rate help contrasting the firm and almost severe tone of some of his dispatches with the halting inconclusiveness of the Administration’s diplomacy in its dealings with Germany; and the contrast has made a rather bitter impression. The American Government seemed to be going as far as any government, could go in its protests against interference with American trade, while it dallied with, or at least did nothing to avenge, the loss of American lives.

I said just now that I had never had a more difficult task than that of attempting to convince Englishmen that America was not in reality ‘too proud to fight.’ But it has been even more difficult to persuade them that American policy is not guided in the main by sordid considerations. Quite the most unpopular article I have written since the war began was one in which I bluntly stated that Americans care much less for money than we do in England; that the American Government is, if anything, rather less selfish and commercialized in its outlook and its actions than other governments; and that in no land is a leader who appeals to what is best and least material and most self-sacrificing in human nature more certain of a national response.

That, in my conviction, is still the truth about America; but I was quickly made aware that many of those who read the article could not understand it. They could not understand it because the official policy of the United States Government seemed so little to square with my estimate of the American character. To the average Englishman the American protests against the British ‘blockade’ and the British ‘blacklist’ and the British censorship of mails — all of them valid and necessary measures, all of them measures that the United States will be forced to adopt if and when it finds itself at war with a first-class power — have appeared small — small when the very slight injury to American trade is compared with the immense prosperity that the war has brought in its train; smaller still when the damage done by British policy to a few scat tered American merchants is weighed in the balance against the German policy of murder on the high seas; smallest of all when petty problems of imports and exports, delayed ships and seized cargoes, are haggled over in the midst of a tooth-andclaw fight for civilization itself.

American diplomacy, then, has succeeded in making on the British mind an impression of timidity, indecision, and commercialism, mingled with an incongruous obstinacy in applying to Armageddon the legal conventions of a world at peace. But it would be easy to exaggerate the extent to which British opinion has thereby been adversely affected. There is another side to the account, which we do not forget. We know how many thousands of Americans have enlisted in the Allied armies. We know of their work in succoring the wounded. We know of that unceasing stream of gifts in money and kind and service that flows eastward from the United States. And above all we know that the heart of America is with the Allies. Knowing all this, we do not allow trivial clashes of opinion between our respective governments to disturb us unduly. Rightly or wrongly, we distinguish between popular sentiment in the United States and official neutrality. We have not been blind to the President’s difficulties. Some of us, I imagine, make even greater allowance for them than do his own countrymen. Nowhere at any rate in Great Britain, not even in the intimacy of the most private talk, will you hear anything that approaches the indiscriminate virulence with which practically all Americans in Europe, and a good many Americans in the United States, assail the actions and attitude of the authorities at Washington. If at times those actions and that attitude have disappointed us, it has not been solely, or even mainly, on our own account. It has not been for any exclusively British reason. It has been because the actions and attitude of the American Government have struck us as falling below our ideal of what the United States is and stands for.

That America, not having entered the war, should yet have a voice in the terms of peace seems to most Englishmen incredible. Great Britain is not thinking of peace: she is thinking solely of victory. Nothing would more surely incense the British people than any proposals from a neutral power, opening up the possibility of an inconclusive settlement. That was clearly demonstrated by the reception accorded by British public opinion to the President’s note of December 18. After the repeated and formal assurances of the past two and a half years that the United States has no part or interest in the origins of the war and is equally unconcerned with its causes and objects, it follows naturally that the conditions of peace lie outside the sphere of American diplomacy. On this point there is not likely to arise any divergence of opinion between the British and American governments. The functions of a channel of communication between the belligerents at the right hour, are, as we saw in December, within the American competence. But the functions of an arbitrator or umpire are beyond it; and one cannot, of course, too strongly emphasize the need for extreme tactfulness on the part of the United States, or any other neutral power, in choosing the means and moment of any move toward peace. The temper of all the participants in this struggle is not a thing to be lightly trifled with.

But there is a bigger question than whether, and, if so, how and when, the United States will initiate negotiations for ending hostilities. There is a bigger question even than the still undetermined one, whether the United States will enter the war. That bigger question is, whether the United States will enter the world. There have been intimations, both specific and authoritative, that she will; that she recognizes that the days of seclusion are over, and that in the future she means to play her part as a working member of the family of nations. But Englishmen have hesitated to accept these intimations at their face-value. They have hesitated, first, because the impression of infirmity and instability of purpose wrought by American diplomacy during the past few years has not yet even begun to wear away; secondly, because they do not know what amount of popular backing, if any, these intimations command. At present they are no more than the dicta of a president. They will have to be the settled resolve and policy of a nat ion before they can be accepted as a permanent factor in the new scheme of Weltpolitik.

Do Americans realize the condit ions on which alone their utility in the future ordering of the universe can be assured? It cannot be assured unless they for their part get rid of certain inveterate prepossessions, readjust their political focus, and accept, responsibilities they have hitherto and deliberately declined to assume. However slight or however onerous the task of maintaining a lasting peace may hereaft er prove, Americans can take no effective hand in it so long as they confine themselves to expressions of goodwill and pacific protestations, and, for the rest, wash their hands of Europe. If the United States is to exert a genuine and firsthand influence in safeguarding and fortifying the peace of the world, there must be no more half-heartedness in American policy, no attempt to achieve by persuasion and exhortation what can be achieved only by force, no throwing out of suggestions accompanied by a refusal to guarantee their performance, but a resolute and definite entrance into the actual arena of worldpolitics and a willingness to undertake the inevitable commitments and run the inevitable risks.

If that is, indeed, the direction in which American statesmanship is tending, then it will be welcomed by no one more eagerly and more sincerely than by the people of the British Empire. It is what we have always hoped for. We have hoped for it because we knowthat, when America ceases to be a recluse among the nations, when she decides to coöperate on equal terms with the nationals and governments of other countries, to shoulder her part of the common liabilities and to contribute her due proportion of naval and military power to the general stock, no question is likely to separate, and a hundred questions are likely to bind together, the British and the American peoples. And it is on the close understanding of these two powerful, democratic and unaggressive peoples that the well-being of humanity, the security of whatever dispensation is evolved from the turmoil of this war, and the best hope of a durable peace, must chiefly depend. We in Great Britain stand ready to work with any nation to prevent a recurrence of the awful cataclysm now pulverizing Europe and detonating throughout the entire world. But we would rather work with the American nation than with any other — if, but only if, America shall at length make up her mind to be judged, not by her aspirations or her protestations, but by her deeds.