What America Means to an Englishwoman: A Letter to an English Friend

I

THE Atlantic has told us that ‘To an American, the adventure of going to England now is for the first time to discover Englishmen.’ I came to America two years ago, to rest after thirty years’ work, and feel as if I had been discovering Americans.

I wanted to use the time in gaining general experience to help me in future work, so I was not labeled an Inquirer into Education or any other Cause; I just came to see what folk were like here, and took what came, just as I found it. I started with good friends, but I was not handed on by letters. They keep a traveler to one kind of friend, whereas, though my hosts were a warranty for me in the first instance, I made friends from one house to another, so that new friends could take me or leave me as they would, without feeling obliged to honor a friend’s draft. Also, I avoided Pullman cars where ‘lettered’ people travel, preferring day cars, where I could make friends with the rest of the world.

I went East, West, Middle West, South, and, above all, to Arizona, forming a gathering snowball of friends, spending nearly two years in a succession of short visits to previously unknown folk, with the result that, if you pin me down to one adjective to describe America, it would be lovable.

It goes to my heart when I see inquiring deputations from England entertained with princely hospitality in hotels: they eat good dinners to the sound of good bands; they hear good speeches, are told remarkable facts, and see magnificent sights; but from first to last they remain ignorant of the America I love so dearly and admire so heartily.

I can, indeed, echo what a member of such a deputation said to me: ‘ I have only three times enjoyed private hospitality in this country, but America will always stand out in my mind as a land of perfect hosts and hostesses.’

‘ Are we what you expected us to be ? ’ is a question by which people over here have often puzzled me. It seemed ‘ unregardful,’ to say that I had formed no expectation at all, though I am convinced that is t he ideal temper of mind for a traveler, since it lets the country speak for itself. I was supported in this by hearing that a wise old man had recalled from the train a hurrying grandson to receive a parting counsel, which proved to be, ‘My boy, wherever you go, remember that folks is just folks.’

The tendency of the average Englishman is to come to America expecting to find, not Red Indians, as the Americans always hope to catch us doing, but rather a community of English marooned some time ago; and his chief curiosity about them is to see if they have kept true to type. If he notices delightedly that in this and that they are like himself, his joy in the fact sounds as if he were bidding them give God thanks because they are still recognizably English: where he sees differences, he either objects or forgives, according to his temperament; but in both cases his critical faculty is concentrated on judging a whole new continent by the local codes of a small island three thousand miles away.

Columbus the First was a little misled by preconceived ideas (about the Indies); and an English Columbus of to-day has almost inevitably preconceived ideas (about cousinship), which put his eyes out of focus for things as they are. Every Englishman used to travel with his bath; he now leaves that behind, but he still takes his bed of Procrustes and measures everything by an English standard. Before you come, say Jean Paul Richter’s prayer against ‘premature ideas.’

When you come, do not imagine you are visiting a New England, but give thanks for your more happy fortune in discovering a New Atlantis. Instead of cousins with a strong family likeness, you will find charming strangers. Enjoy their individuality as a new flavor in life — and enjoy also the unexpected touch of likeness and sympathy which you will come upon here and there (most largely in the South); as if, in some old foreign castle, you should come upon a familiar face among the family portraits, and should suddenly remember a forgotten tie of blood which had made some one of the family so curiously familiar as you were shown round.

What does America mean to me?

It is hard to say, since I doubt if Americans themselves can fully understand the America of 1918. One of them said to me the other day, ‘Have you found an American novel which you can send to England as expressing the American spirit? ’ But ‘ this strange New World that yet was never young,’the New America, was born only in 1917, and its chronicler has not been born yet.

It has plenty of clever Europeanized books, — read Henry James and Mrs. Wharton, — but they really date back to Longfellow’s Norse and Spanish strains. It has plenty of descriptive geography such as Bret Harte wrote, and Edward Stewart White, O. Henry, Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Brown, Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Grace King, and the Woman RicePlanter. It has philosophy like Emerson’s, poetry like Bryant’s, piety like Whittier’s, which belong to human nature, and are American because they happen to be born here.

But if you ask me what is essentially American and could not have been born anywhere else, I can only think of The Education of Henry Adams, the Introduction to Victor Chapman’s Letters, and Walt Whitman, the Rodin of poetry.

Where does my beloved Hawthorne come? I am inclined to think that he and Heine play round the gateways of their respective countries, like children unwilling to come in from their play in the forest.

It took Dante’s Eagle of Empire, in the Paradiso, long years to tune his many voices through one throat. The American Eagle is as great, and may take as long — and may eventually give the same message to the World: Diligit justitiam qui judicatio terram.

Unity. — The new unity of America, instantaneously forged on the anvil of war, is one of the chief difficulties in describing her. Two years ago I found East, South, West, Middle West as distinct as if I were traveling from country to country in Europe. To-day, not only are the American-born welded together by a white heat of enthusiastic national pride, but Italians, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, are all eager to prove themselves good Americans. A giant Polish mill-hand came to one of the War-Loan offices and put down one hundred dollars. ‘Wait for your coupon,’ said the cashier, ‘or you will lose your interest.’ ‘I want no paper,’said he in halting English; ‘I give it to the country.’ At the Northfield Student Conference, last January, a representative of each of the South American and Eastern nations assembled on the platform and testified to their belief in America’s honesty of purpose and to their gratitude to her for missionary help. It was a. wonderful object-lesson for the alien races who make their home with her, and showed the true basis of her unity.

Army Discipline. — The obedience of an undisciplined nation to the army draft was not the same as in conscript races such as France or Germany — nor even like the volunteers of England, where the ‘great prize of Death in battle’ has always been an accepted idea: here it was a complete reversal of the national tendency to a peaceful life.

The training that followed the Draft Call fashioned a new army, the like of which was never seen in the world before, if we except Cromwell’s New Instrument. Kipling was just, in time to put on record Ortheris and Mulvaney; but his soldiers are of a different mould from the grave, earnest, thoughtful faces of the men I watched in the Hostess House at Camp Devens.

For the first time in history, an army proved to be the means of raising its whole nation morally: aliens were Americanized; English became the one language; morals and health wore seen to for all; and so were amusement and education. The camps had libraries and lectures, classes and movies, with coaches for athletics and songs; while neighboring towns also were provided with clean amusements; although, only a year before, on the Mexican border, five thousand men were sent every night into a town with no amusement but saloons. The Prince in the ‘Sleeping Beauty’ saw no greater change in the life around him than did America in 1917.

It seemed suitable that all this should be done by a nation so rich in ideals of peace; but over and above this, her boys proved a match for the best of the old fighting races as hard fighters. Besides, the American soldier was always on his job, with no idea of truces or times off.

Tommy fought like a hero all day, and then, with his supper and pipe, put it all out of his head, as he used to with his games at school. The American was busy all the evening fighting the day’s battles over again in his mind, to see where he could have made a better move, as he did aforetime in his school football. The peace nation was second to none in the great game of war!

Mothers. — Just before this war, the ‘Cellar Mother’ was spoken of with understanding, if not with laughing sympathy — the woman who decoyed husband and sons into the cellar, and then sat on the door, resolved that no menkind of hers should engage in such a fool business as war!

Many of the mothers who so spoke had made the schoolmaster’s life a burden by their nervous telephoning when Ned or Harry went to school; yet when the country demanded it and their boys were ten years dearer, they gave them to the war without a sign of anything but pride.

They had never been trained, like English mothers, to live through ordinary life with a boy in danger on some frontier firing-line; but they learned heroism and nerve when the need came.

The American mother learned daily self-denial, too; the most extravagant of nations learned thrift in food-conservation ; and the most set in her ways of any woman on earth, the New England house-mother, altered those ways in that most unalterable part of her house, the kitchen, where everything had been ‘thus and so’ for generations.

And this thrift and adaptability were not drawn out of her by the needs of her own men, but by a quick imaginative sympathy, which bridged three thousand miles of ocean and felt, with all Sir Philip Sidney’s chivalry, for the stranger of alien race, ' whose necessity was greater than hers.’

The Little Red Schoolhouse. — As I crossed the country, and saw the schoolhouse standing out in every tiniest hamlet as the village church does in England, I learned that America stood by education; and a year later, when I saw what manner of men answered the call of the draft, I learned that education stood by America.

I came with the sound, old-fashioned English idea that character and duty and the Fifth Commandment outweighed book-learning. I also brought the related but unsound idea, that character and book-learning were alternative, not complementary.

But, as I watched those soldiers and (taught by this) watched more observantly stray men of the rougher sort, in train and car and elevator, I came to the conclusion that the little Schoolmarm had fashioned her boys into gentlemen.

The other day Mr. Kipling ascribed their reticence in word to the ascendency of women in their schools. We are apt to feel as if red-blooded masculine vigor must be weakened thereby; but perhaps it is only that primæval masculine brutality is being refined away. At all events, America’s soldier sons have proved themselves a quick-tempered, hard-hitting race, who would be bad to beat. All honor to the little Schoolmarm who has gentled them as well.

The Church. — Here the school takes the place of the village church, and the difference stands for much.

It does not mean indifference to religion. This is the Age of the Spirit all the world over, and America has seen a wonderful rise in her religious tide during the last fifteen years. But her lack of an established church points to an adaptation to the future, which may prove of moment, to America’s leadership in the coming age.

Just as ‘the Papal Church met the needs of the Roman Empire, and National Churches, Gallican or Anglican, suited that rise of nationalities which followed that Empire,’ so the absence of a State Church here (not its abolition, with the accompanying tearing down of old pieties and loyalties) may prove to be the opportunity for America to inaugurate a new era of religious unity, which will suit the needs of an age of wider brotherhood — not with any falsifying of truth, or pooling of national ideals, but rather with deeper fulfillment of both.

The Saints. — I nearly quarreled with a friend who wanted me to say, soon after my arrival, what I most liked, and most disliked, in America.

‘Idealism’ came quickly enough in answer to the first question; but I had nothing to say for the second, and I believe she suspected me of concealing much. But my difficulty lay in my relationship to Kipling’s Tramp Royal, whose last will and testament was, —

With my present longer observation, I am able to say that the excellence of the telephone service is what I most find fault with — I doubt if any nerves or any inner life can survive being liable to unexpected inroads of conversation at any hour of the day or night. Even the Old Man of the Sea gave Sinbad intervals of sleep.

But to return to my friend: she met me again the other day and asked if I now knew more. She patted me approvingly when I said I had learned that America was, like St. Patrick’s Ireland, a land of saints.

Someone else looked up at that, a little suspiciously, as if suspecting Romanizing tendencies in an Episcopalian. ‘ I mean someone in whose presence my soul feels on its knees’; and the definition proved a bond of union instead of a war-note.

Why should I feel this here, when England has just as many? I think it is because, at home, we all have definite relations with those we meet, and live perforce within those limits. Here I was a stray human soul, perched by the fireside for a few days before flitting off into space again, and our most real, in many cases our only, meeting-ground was the deeper values of life. As Hawthorne taught Hilda in The Marble Faun, it is the stranger, whom you will never see again, to whom you can talk most simply of these things.

Idealism. — Are you by this time discounting what I say, from a suspicion that I see America only as a Utopia of mediæval chivalry and beauty?

I certainly choose to dwell on her enduring features, instead of on the workman’s rubbish and the scattered chips of the yard where the Statue of Liberty was fashioned, all of which will sooner or later be swept away. Besides, a purely personal record like this loses its only value unless it is true to the temperament of the recorder, and mine was largely fashioned by a wise old woman, who used to say, ‘They talk a great deal of “Realism” nowadays, but I have never been able to see that a black beetle was any more real than a butterfly.’

Every American can tell you the faults of his country, and you had better let me try to make you see her with my English eyes, which have been taught by Wordsworth (who is England) that we see as well as live

Of course, there are squalid shacks in suburbs, loud-voiced tourists, hustlers eager for the Almighty Dollar; and of course, a princess on the hunt for peas under her mattress can always find them.

But the shacks are being fast ‘made over,’ and it seems waste of time to dwell on them when so much beauty is showered around them by Nature and is being created by Art, It was an Oxford man who said to me the other day, that American modem architecture beat ours out of the field, and that we could not touch such beauty as Mr. Cram put into his work.

As for the legend of the Almighty Dollar, I had not been here many months before I saw through that ‘ Great Illusion.’ A man, whom I would gladly see the next President, was assuming, as a matter of course, that America worshiped the dollar. I felt that an outsider had no right to interfere, but I plucked up my courage and said, ‘I wish you would talk as you really feel; you know as well as I do, that America worships ideals and that to her, the dollar stands for success in playing the game. She is able and ready to lose a fortune and to build up another, without ever loving pounds, shillings, and pence as a miser does. It is a mere matter of accidental surroundings that the game meant mostly diplomacy or war in the Old World and business in the New.’

He stopped a moment and then said, ‘ You are perfectly right, and I do think that; but the other is the usual thing to say.’

That was before the war — I wish that one of the gains of the war could be that, after it, it may be the usual thing, in talking of other people, to ‘assume a virtue, if they have it.’

II

I end my list with idealism, since that is the keynote of whatever else I want to talk to you about.

Now or never, the Western World has an opportunity of rising to it, and America’s isolation has given her a unique chance of helping in this. Only last night I was hearing of a group of French diplomats who chimed in with an American’s wish that America were a full ally. But one of them returned next day to say that, on talking it over together, they had come to the conclusion that the position of co-belligerent left America better able to help Europe, as freeing her from the inherited jealousies and prejudices of the Old World.

If the West is ever to make a better world, it must be now, when everyone has just been forced to face the realities of Life.

It may be that the East, which gave all the great religious messages to the world, will have to come back after some future Armageddon to put those Messages into practice, but —

During the war we have been stirred to admire each other as never before, and to credit classes and nations with virtues that we used to allow only to individuals; but ‘War brings out friendly feelings; international jealousies may revive at the peace table, unless in both private and public talk we keep resolutely to the nobler atmosphere of the war.’ We need not only large-hearted, large-minded leaders, but also a rank and file which will allow, those leaders to be their best.

There is much talk of a League of Nations. The League I believe in is that of the people who mention pleasant things and let unpleasant things die with them; who expect their neighbor to be as large-hearted as themselves, and who sweep the snow from their own doorsteps.

If you have time, in these days of great causes, to join this little private league, it may be well to suggest to you two small matters which conduce to misjudgment of the English over here.

Every smallest earth of such misjudgment is worth stopping, since the harvest of the war depends on fellowship between us and America, and understanding is more essential to that fellowship than liking, for the root qualities of both nations are reason and fairness.

If America and England come together, there will be a steadying force for peace which will make the League of Nations a success, or enable the world to get on without it. But in these days of close international intercourse, Dr. Thomas Hodgkin’s warning should be heeded in every private letter as well as in newspapers. He says (I quote from memory), —

‘No family could hold together if every hasty criticism, every sharp word, were published. No more can nations, in these days of the power of the press, if every jealous insinuation, every belittling jest, of some village speech meant for home consumption, is telegraphed to the four ends of the Earth.’

One of my two suggestions to Englishmen is, to act in the spirit of Bishop Creighton’s warning, ‘Avoid giving away your friend, to conciliate your enemy.’

Avoid giving away your country, to write a good letter. If, in the interests of truth, you wish to give this or that bad impression, as being a national feature, do so: England can stand it. But if you are tempted to describe some instance of ‘cussedness’ or vulgarity, which strikes you just because it is a freak and not typical, remember that, over here, it will be largely quoted as first-hand evidence as to ‘how strangely people behave in England.’

You would hardly believe how many here imagine that Doggie in The Rough Road is a usual specimen of our leisure classes, and that country squires and squiresses usually have the morals of Mr. Britling and Mrs. Harrowdean.¹

We cannot possibly realize how absolutely unknown our daily atmosphere is, outside our own island, except to the cosmopolitan few. The mass of the ‘plain people’ here know English Literature far better than corresponding people in England; while many teachers have saved up to come to England, and have met Chaucer and Westminster Abbey, but not the English; just as people may come here and see Niagara and the Grand Cañon, but not America. Yet these well-read people will ask me questions about our point of view — our ‘reaction,’ they would call it — on small matters of daily life, which would seem to me to go without saying.

Nobody is at fault: you cannot stand on your doorstep and beg every passing American to come in (though Americans sometimes feel as if you could), any more than Americans could or would do it for you; but I do wish there could be some small private League of Nations, in which sets of, say, three English families would undertake to invite an American teacher for three days each, so that the coming generation of Americans would get truer views of the schools. A wise committee on each side could select those able to teach, and to learn new ideas.

The study of history does less good than one would expect, so I doubt if the millennium will be brought about by revising textbooks that bear on ’76! I have listened to history lessons in public schools, and have carried away an impression (as probably the children did also) that all the English sins of the past were active motor-forces in the present, and that no one realized that the Irish Cromwell died some time ago, and that folks are just folks.

My second suggestion is, avoid any words that take class distinctions for granted. It took me some time before it dawned on me that, except in the South, such words seriously jar on an American ear. As a matter of fact, social gulfs do exist in America, in a way that seemed strange to me, to whom it came as natural to make friends with the laborer as with the squire. I had not realized that with us recognized distinctions leave us free to be natural, whereas here people feel obliged to protect themselves.

The feudal world, when ideally carried out, as in the days of guilds and ladies of the manor, was one of warm family relationships. To my American friend, it meant the heel of the rich crushing the soul of the poor; to me, it meant the ideal of loyalty to those above and responsibility for those below — a relationship which, though rightly passing away as all men are coming of age, yet bred the reverence which makes for beauty, and the pity which is akin to love.

The democratic world, which saw patronage in kindness and suspected welfare work of bribery, felt very cold to me when I first came. It was a good year before it dawned on me that it held an equally generous ideal — hot fervor for the ideal of such equality in the conditions of life as should enable your brother to stand on his own feet and be beholden to no one for the patronage of help or the impertinence of pity. Its kindliness was as strong, but of a different brand: it held a passionate fervor for the down-trodden; it had a real cult for the under dog, as such (which involves a curious suspicion of an upper dog, as such), regardless of attendant circumstances.

Land-relationship is the basis of Society in England, and the cash-nexus in America. It is partly because of this that pity flourishes more in England than in America, where the critical faculty never sleeps, or, at all events, sleeps with one eye open; indeed, American humor generally has three eyes open all at once.

In England the gods have preserved us from the fatal gift of quick-wittedness, so that the sub-conscious kindliness of primæval kinship gets a chance. It grows out of the land-tie of Feudalism, which fosters an instinct of tenderness for the weak that is seldom found in America (unless it springs from instinctive opposition to some capitalist who may be in fault).

If you venture a remark verging on pure pity, an American will look keenly at you for a moment, to detect whether you are a good-hearted imbecile, or merely a knave. He then sails on with some neat phrase which shows that ‘No fools need apply.’

America is rich beyond the dreams of avarice in love, friendliness, hospitality, warm-heartedness; but pity lingered to tend some wayside fool when he Pilgrims set out for the Mayflower, and never got aboard.

The Pilgrims have no use for fools, and show no aptitude for dealing with them — unless, in Moslem fashion, they accept them as prophets. The lack is a wise economy of Nature, since they have so few of them that they have no need to cultivate Izaak Walton’s gift for ‘handling the worm as though you loved it.’

They are proud of the lack, for they value keen intellect more than we do, — I don’t wonder, for they are so rich in it, — and it angers them to think of any mortal presuming to give pity or help to any other mortal. Away with privilege!

If a rich man does anything kind in his works, it is supposed that he has a ‘motive’ behind it; if he is kind to an individual, it is resented as charity. Fifth Avenue is told to keep at home, and not meddle with the East Side’s efforts to raise its poorer members, as they have no use for patronage. It seems hard to blame Fifth Avenue for ignorance of the claims of social justice, and yet to forbid it to go where it can learn. Surely it is a part of social justice to appreciate and develop the good points in Dives.

Every American is a born ‘good mixer,’ but he needs a dash of Irish or Southern blood (which gives that sixth sense of pity) to make him a first-rate mixer. If he is under the charm of a person or nation, he says more charming things than either French or Irish; and the fact that he says them only when it gives him pleasure to do it, adds a fine flavor of truth which makes him quite irresistible.

Our mind runs on prohibition just now, and I should be inclined to say that, in regard to pleasant words, an Englishman is a total abstainer; the American ‘puts his lips to them when so dispoged’; and only the Irishman can be relied on to have a drop of comfort handy, whenever the other fellow is lonely or downhearted.

The American view of humor, as well as of pity, is an outcome of democracy, though the humor which they feel to be so distinctively their own has an ancestry of the English countryside. The Tory villager was wont to say (of both people and ideas), ‘Here’s a stranger: let’s heave half a brick at him!’ The democratic American translates this into, ‘Here’s a superior: let’s have a good story on him.’ It is the wealth of American wit which produces their extraordinary prodigality of good stories, but it is the democratic instinct of antagonism to a superior which gives those stories the unlimited application, which the feudal mind would refrain from, even if it had the wit to make the story.

Feudalism and Democracy are both roads to the Kingdom: one is an old Roman road fast getting out of repair, the other is a motor-track. We live in a motor-world and there ‘must find our happiness or not at all.’ Kipling gave us a good lead when he found the poetry of the sea in the ship’s machinery. To you, poetry may lie in sails and quarter-deck etiquette, but remember that your form of speech gives a nasty jar to modern sympathies over here when it takes class distinctions for granted; and you seriously obscure the fact that the underlying ideals of liberty and the value of each individual man, on which England is built, are identical with American ideals.

The democratic phraseology and framework of France have had more to do than Lafayette with making America feel a closer tie to France than to England. The fact of our having a king is a real obstacle to her fellowship with us: it hides from her that we are really more democratic than she is, and our inherited trick of talking feudally in social life contributes to increase her misconception of us. She does not realize that our King may be one of the best helps to making the world ‘ safe for democracy.’

General Smuts, our most formidable enemy in the Boer War and now our firm friend, said that the possession of an hereditary king who ground no axes of his own would be one of the world’s chief assets in bringing about, after the war, that equal Confederacy of England and the Dominions which will make such a strong force for Peace. He pointed out that it would save all jealousy as to the Presidency, and avoid the almost insuperable difficulty of an election in such a world-wide electorate.

Old men are dreaming dreams of the Old World once more stabilized; young men are seeing visions of a New World of which — to quote one of our great statesmen — Jesus Christ shall not be ashamed. The young take their stand on the counsel to the rich young man, and expect a reversal of the established order— revolution, not evolution.

Must it be so? The old are apt not to be sufficiently alive to ‘changing winds,’ but I heard of a mill-owner the other day, whose experience may give us pause. In these mills, the pay is up to the highest level in the trade, as he feels that that is the most profitable way of spending money; the men’s self-respect is not sapped by welfare work, though each mill has a doctor and nurse, because health is as much the owner’s interest as the worker’s; but their votes as citizens can make the municipality erect baths and libraries, as suits the public good and theirs.

The business is kept small enough for the owner to hear promptly of any discontent, so that he can do justice at once, instead of leaving it to some indifferent middleman. All know that, in America, every man has a partnership in his bag of tools, if his wits warrant it; so here, of Tom, Harry, and Dick, if in this mill Tom shows aptitude for affairs, it pays both master and man to let Tom come up the ladder as his brains enable him, while it transgresses no sense of justice, if Harry and Dick, with ordinary wits, remain ordinary workmen on a fair-wage basis.

The owner said, ‘We let the minimum-wage question work itself out in varying mills and localities, instead of standardizing it. Most of my work is by the piece, and it would not pay me if a man earned too little for his wellbeing; we supervise the pay-roll carefully, and if a man won’t earn enough, we fire him; if health prevents him, we nurse him; if ignorance, we teach him.’

Owners like this man are increasing in every fresh generation of college graduates. President Lowell gave the keynote of Harvard’s work for the country when he said last month, to the students who had come up with war ambitions, ' I want you men to be officers in the civil life of the community.’

I find much comfort in the fact of that first motorless Sunday. It was the one before the Labor Day Monday holiday; and since, in these days of Fords, as many men as masters possess motors, it was evident that both classes were able to look at a matter of personal comfort from a public-spirited point of view.

At first it grieved me, out of pure love for America, that the war ended when she had had so much shorter a time than we to learn what war could teach.

I was half inclined to wish that she had entered the lists earlier, in order to bear more, although I had always held that the President’s waiting was of the same order as Cavour’s. But I was being misled by to-day’s worship of activity into undervaluing that time of looking on which taught America so much. It gave her time to dream of the League of Nations; it gave her time so to educate her home-workers that the womanhood of America will have a new start.

Above all, it gave time so to unite the nation in a great moral resolve that, to quote Bishop Butler of the Analogy, ‘The Public Determination was the result of the united Wisdom of the Community, faithfully executed by the united Strength of it.’ (Was there ever a nobler description of democracy?)

The older nations, with bloodstained hands, needed to be cleansed by a baptism of blood; but the younger nation, who, like David’s son, was to build the Temple of Peace, ‘in a short time fulfilled a long time.’ She gave her sacrifice — of her prejudices, her comforts, her sons — as whole-heartedly as Abraham gave Isaac; and now, like Abraham, she receives her sacrifice back, in order to do with it some better thing.

She did not need to learn lessons of hardihood and valor — they were in her blood; nor did she need to atone for past bloodshed. All nations now have a great peace-work on their shoulders, and Solomon is being prepared by peace for a very special share in it.

A new age is calling for new virtues, new methods, new vision. King David is dead! Long live King Solomon!