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SEVENTH SERIES
VOLUME XLIV.

No. 3395 July 31, 1909.

CONTENTS

FROM BEGINNING
VOL. CCLXII.

I. Great Britain, Germany and the United States. By Sydney

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III.

IV.

v.

VI.

VII.

VII.

Saleh: A Sequel. Chapters XXI and XXII. By Hugh Clifford.
BLACK WOOD'S MAGAZINE 275

(To be continued.)

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The Ethics of Greek Art. By L. March Phillipps

The Lord of the Pigeons.

Chapters VII, VIII and IX.

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CONTEMPORARY REVIEW 280 By Howard Ashton. (Concluded.) PALL MALL MAGAZINE 290 By Frederick Boyle CORNHILL MAGAZINE

The Oldest of Horticultural Societies.

Calvin. By the Dean of Ripon

Prince Bulow and the German Emperor. IX. A Literary Light. By A. A. M.

x.

XI.

Wayside Flowers.

299

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XII.

Xill.

A Mouth of Brass.

A PAGE OF VERSE

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GREAT BRITAIN, GERMANY AND THE UNITED STATES.

In much of the discussion that has recently been stirred up by Germany's naval expansion, it has been either assumed or openly stated that the matter is not one that concerns Great Britain and Germany alone, and that the United States is remotely but none the less unescapably affected by it. Put in this moderate form the proposition is, I think, indisputable, infinitely more so, at any rate, than some of the inferences drawn from it. The Americans, indeed, have not been slow to recognize and express their very real, if indirect, interest in the situation which threatens to throw Great Britain and Germany into an antagonism as sharp as that of two gladiators in a Roman arena. The gravity of the crisis has impressed them far more than our way of meeting it. We could not, as a matter of fact, have done more to alienate American sympathy than by the humiliating panics we have indulged in over phantom torpedo-boats, invisible airships, and belligerent German waiters. Like the rest of the world, Americans have noted our attack of "nerves" with ridicule and contempt, wondering, as they well might, what has come over us, and half-inclined to conclude that if we fail in the ordeal that awaits us it will be because we deserve to fail. But they have not on that account disguised from themselves that between American interests and the ultimate outcome, whatever it may be, of the prodigious preparations for war on both sides of the North Sea, there exists a tangible, and possibly a vital, connection. I do not say that the realization of this connection and of all that may be implied in it has as yet cut very deep into the American consciousness, or that it holds even રી

second place in the thoughts of the "man in the cars" and of the average journalist, or that it is potent enough to have any immediate influence on American policy or on the growth of American shipbuilding. Considering the self-contentment and isolation of American life, its happy or harmful immunity from the fierce juxtapositions and imminent contentions of Europe, and the lack of anything in the nature of a constant education in the realities of world-politics, one could not expect the ordinary, busy, and complacent citizen to feel much more than a purely spectacular interest in the successive phases of a distant old-world rivalry. That he should feel any sort of interest at all is, however, something; and that the better sort of American journals and of American politicians and should not only discern claim the fact that the question is an American

publicists

but proGerman

as well

as a British question, is little less than revolutionary. Thirteen years ago, at any rate, when I first visited America, nothing like it would have been possible. Americans in 1896 would not merely have disavowed, they would not even have suspected, any relationship whatever between their own fortunes and policies and the rivalries of two European Powers. Had the Anglo-German situation in its present or anything like its present form developed a decade and a half ago, Americans would have discussed it, as they discussed the Græco-Turkish war, with a wholly impersonal detachment, and would have repudiated with the most ingenuous incredulity any suggestion that its issue could possibly affect or involve themselves. In those untroubled days

they agreed with St. Paul that it is only the fool whose eyes are on the ends of the earth. International politics had no meaning for them; they were a hermit nation, eminently selfcentered and incurious, surveying the outer world with an almost comical pity as an institution whose one office of utility was to serve as a foil to the singular blessedness of American conditions. To-day, as the reflex of those breathless events that in the last twelve years have transformed the American Republic into an Empire, established her as an Asiatic Power, given her knowledge and experience, and brought her at more than one point into somewhat hazardous contact with the nations of the Orient and Occident alike, the old instinctive attitude of provincialism and disdain has been, not destroyed, but sensibly weakened. The discussion of the Anglo-German problem throughout the United States has been far wider, better informed, and more realistic than would have been possible before the Spanish-American war; and the number of Americans who perceive and acknowledge its bearings on American interests is far greater and far more authoritative than it could have been in the days when, apart from the Monroe Doctrine, the United States had virtually no external policy or commitments whatever.

But the change which has come over America's position and outlook is visible not merely in the amount and quality of the attention directed toward the gathering stringency of Anglo-German relations, but also in the whole tone of American comment and criticism. A decade and a half ago, it is not too much to say, Americans were incapable of a calm consideration of any fact or incident that concerned, however remotely, their relations with Great Britain. The spontaneous outburst of Anglophobia that followed on

Mr. Cleveland's Venezuelan Message of 1895 showed that a generation of Americans had grown up since the Civil War, nourished on the old traditions and entirely unconscious of the great change in British sentiment which synchronized with, and was largely caused by, the triumph of democracy in the politics of the United Kingdom. I need not trace the various influences and events which, in the past ten or twelve years, have brought enlightenment in a flood, have effectually ousted the old suspiciousness and ill-will, and have formulated Anglo-American relations on what has all the appearance of being an enduring basis of common sympathies and interests. It is enough to register the fact that the whole spirit of American comment on the recent developments in the Noth Sea attests a change that has all the sweep of a revolution in the national attitude towards the people and policies of Great Britain. You will hardly anywhere find in the United States, outside the ranks of the Irish-Americans and German-Americans, a single journal that favors Germany's naval ambitions, or that does not regard the growth of the German Navy as a direct challenge to Great Britain's supremacy at sea, or that does not perceive that if maritime ascendancy were to pass into German hands American interests of all kinds would not be merely prejudiced, but severely and perhaps permanently dislocated. There is a renewed and a more vivid consciousness of the innumerable bonds that link the United States to Great Britain and of the staggering shock that American commerce and power-to say nothing of other and rarer possessions-would experience if the might of Great Britain were to be suddenly humbled. However much Americans might gird at our diplomacy and our Empire and the form of our civilization, I have never

got the impression that they grudged us, or conceived themselves menaced by, our command of the sea. They are well aware that the possession of Canada binds us automatically to good behavior throughout the Americas; while they do not attach the same degree of magnanimity as certain Englishmen to the fact that a Power already gorged to repletion refrains from asking for more and somewhat irritatingly proclaims its perfect satisfaction with the status quo, they do not regard us as an aggressive nation, or our maritime strength as an instrument of spoliation; they know that our abandonment of one naval and military station after another in the West Indies and Canada is a tacit acknowledgement that we have wiped the United States from the list of possible enemies; they know, too, that except for purposes of Parliamentary debate the two-Power standard is calculated without reference to the American Navy; and they have long since acquitted us of all "designs" upon the Monroe Doctrine. I hardly think it an exaggeration to say that so long as they do not themselves care to be the first naval Power in the world, Americans would rather see Great Britain than any other nation at the head of the list.

Least of all, in my judgment, would they relish the prospect of Germany reaching that position. During the past twelve years a certain suspicious ness of Germany has permeated American opinion. It is founded perhaps at bottom on incompatability of temper. There are two instincts derived from their past which have struck firm roots in the national character and outlook of the American people. One is their dislike of kingship; the other is their dislike of bureaucracy. Germany offends against both instincts. Great Britain does not, partly because while those Americans who regard the

British Crown as a useful institution are comparatively few, and those who regard it with a more or less kindly amusement are very many, there is a general recognition that democracy in Great Britain, in spite of the monarchy, is the real and dominating fact. In Germany the case is held to be very different. Whereas Americans believe they detect in our form of government the veritable rule of the people, by the people, for the people, operating behind the veil of a constitional monarchy, in Germany they are persuaded that Parliamentary institutions serve merely as trappings for something little less than an effective and ubiquitous absolutism-an absolutism all the more offensive to their way of thinking because it appears to rest on a military, aristocratic, and beaureaucratic caste. The whole system which the Kaiser personifies, his whole conception of the State and of the respective parts that the people and the Sovereign should play in it, revolt not merely the opinion but the political conscience of the American people, and rasp unceasingly on their perfectly sincere and exalted sense of the worth and dignity of the individual and of the moral efficacy of "free institutions."

There exists, in short, between the genius of the two countries a permanent conflict of ideas and aspirations. Such a conflict is not in itself a bar to political friendship, or even to a political alliance when the argument from expediency or necessity is sufficiently strong. Two nations more absolutely different in the cast of their civilization and in their instinctive ways of looking at things than Russia and France, for instance, could hardly be imagined. But none of the secular conditions that dictated the Dual Alliance exists in the case of Germany and the United States. There has never been anything, except the slender bond of an interchange of educa

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