My task is done. I have discussed with as much brevity as I could the
three foundations of our ancient grudge against England: our school
textbooks, our various controversies from the Revolution to the Alaskan
boundary dispute, and certain differences in customs and manners. Some of
our historians to whom I refer are themselves affected by the ancient
grudge. You will see this if you read them; you will find the facts, which
they give faithfully, and you will also find that they often (and I think
unconsciously) color such facts as are to England’s discredit and leave
pale such as are to her credit, just as we remember the Alabama, and
forget the Lancashire cotton-spinners. You cannot fail to find, unless
your anti-English complex tilts your judgment incurably, that England has
been to us, on the whole, very much more friendly than unfriendly—if
not at the beginning, certainly at the end of each controversy. What an
anti-English complex can do in the face of 1914, is hard to imagine:
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Boers, all Great Britain’s
colonies, coming across the world to pour their gold and their blood out
for her! She did not ask them; she could not force them; of their own free
will they did it. In the whole story of mankind such a splendid tribute of
confidence and loyalty has never before been paid to any nation.
In this many-peopled world England is our nearest relation. From Bonaparte
to the Kaiser, never has she allowed any outsider to harm us. We are her
cub. She has often clawed us, and we have clawed her in return. This will
probably go on. Once earlier in these pages, I asked the reader not to
misinterpret me, and now at the end I make the same request. I have not
sought to persuade him that Great Britain is a charitable institution.
What nation is, or could be, given the nature of man? Her good treatment
of us has been to her own interest. She is wise, farseeing, less of an
opportunist in her statesmanship than any other nation. She has seen
clearly and ever more clearly that our good will was to her advantage. And
beneath her wisdom, at the bottom of all, is her sense of our kinship
through liberty defined and assured by law. If we were so far-seeing as
she is, we also should know that her good will is equally important to us:
not alone for material reasons, or for the sake of our safety, but also
for those few deep, ultimate ideals of law, liberty, life, manhood and
womanhood, which we share with her, which we got from her, because she is
our nearest relation in this many-peopled world.
