tional ideas, to bridge the gulf of spiritual antipathy of which Americans never wholly lose the consciousness. On the contrary, whenever events, at any rate during the past ten or twelve years, have brought the two peoples into contact they have also brought them into conflict. The attitude, the decidedly waspish attitude, of Germany during the war with Spain, was one, and by no means the least startling, of the many surprises which that episode sprung upon the American people. The futile rudeness of the German squadron in Manila Bay, the Kaiser's swoop down upon the disjecta membra of the Spanish Empire in the Pacific, the clash over Samoa, and many smaller but not less irritating incidents, expanded the distrust of German policy into a national prepossession. Within a year of the signing of the Peace of Paris the Kaiser and the Wilhelmstrasse had between them contrived to oust Great Britain from her old position as the supreme object of American suspicion. All the doubts and apprehensions, the wilful misunderstandings, and irrational animosities that Americans used to project into their dealings with us, they have, since 1908, brought to bear against Germany. I do not say that the new enmity has any more root in reason than had the old. International likes and dislikes rarely are determined by broad principles of reason. As a rule, they are nothing but the outcome of caprice, and accident, and uninquiring prejudice-which is one of the causes why one should doubt whether anything is of so little consequence as not to have its influence in shaping na tional preferences and aversions. I merely state the fact that in American eyes at the beginning of the twentieth century it was no longer Great Britain but Germany that was "the enemy." Washington took to watching Berlin as the French Republic during

the crisis of the Dreyfus case watched Paris, as Pretoria in the old days watched Johannesburg. The American Navy Department began quite openly to measure its requirements by the growth of German sea-power. When Mr. Hay failed, at the last moment, to carry through the negotiations for the purchase of the Danish West Indies, the conviction grew up that Germany, in some recondite manner, had blocked the sale. The conduct of the German troops in China during and after the relief of the Legations profoundly shocked the moral sense of America. The "man in the cars" came to look upon it as almost axiomatic that in her ceaseless endeavors to lower the social pressure by emigration and carve out exclusive preserves for her traders, Germany's ambitions would one day bring her inevitably athwart the Monroe Doctrine. It was the belief that Germany meant, if she could, to secure a foothold on South American soil and a naval station in South American waters that accounted for the explosion of angry amazement that greeted the Anglo-German Alliance of 1903 against Venezuela. Anybody, indeed, who is at all in touch with Americans is aware how keenly during recent years they have been exercised by the spectacle of Germany's growing stake and influence in Brazil, by rumors of her attempts to lease the island of Margarita, off the Venezuelan coast, as a naval base, and by speculations as to how far the Pan-German programme for the economic absorption of Holland would affect, if it were to be realized, the political interest of the United States in preserving the present status of the Dutch possessions in and about the Southern Continent. And whoever is aware of all this, is aware, also, how assiduously German diplomacy has worked, and how all but completely it has failed, to remove American suspicions of Ger

many's aims and policies. The visit of Prince Henry of Prussia, the Kaiser's importunate gifts and blandishments, the sustained shower of articles and interviews which the late Baron von Sternberg, most zealous and ingratiating of ambassadors, kept up whenever Germany's acts or ambitions in Europe, in South America, or in the Far East were called into question, have only served to show that the latent uneasiness with which Americans follow Germany's activities will not be lightly dispelled.

This uneasiness has been in no way diminished by such study as Americans have been able to devote to Germany's European policy-by her championship, for instance, of Abdul Hamid in the days of his prosperity, by her pounce upon France in 1905, by her remorseless exploitation of Russia's weakness a few months ago, and by her swift accumulation of a material and political power almost Napoleonic in its range and effectiveness. But these events, while leaving on American observers a very definite impression both of Germany's might and of the uses to which she was prepared to put it, were too strictly European to excite them keenly. It is quite another matter now that she is seen to be stretching forth a hand for the trident so long and securely and with such general acquiescence held in the British grasp, now that she is making a bid, in circumstances desperate indeed but not hopeless, for the naval supremacy of the world. This is a development that all Americans look upon with a certain interest, that few or none view with approval, and that some, though probably not very many, regard with a proleptic apprehension. It is not merely because their commercial and financial interests are inextricably bound up with ours, or because wherever the two countries meet in the sphere of foreign affairs it

is to prosecute a common policy, or because Great Britain and the United States stand substantially for the same principles in ethics and government, that Americans feel drawn towards the British rather than the German side of a struggle which, if it comes to a head, will be, as they are quick to see, a struggle for dominion on the part of Germany and a struggle for life on our part. It is also because Americans know that they can trust us, and are not yet convinced that they can trust Germany. Our supremacy at sea gives them not a moment's anxiety on behalf of a single one of their possessions or policies. They feel no confidence that Germany's supremacy at sea would be equally innocuous. Those Americans who think at all about foreign affairs realize perfectly well that, next to the security and well-being of their own country, there is and can be no higher American interest than the preservation of the British Empire on its present footing; that its downfall would react nowhere so disastrously as upon the United States; and that the rise of a Greater Germany in its place would be little less, in the long run, than a challenge to their position and freedom as a World-Power.

Captain Mahan, as one would expect, has been quick to seize on the essential point. In an article that appeared in Collier's Weekly a few weeks ago, he endeavored to rouse his countrymen to the duty of pondering the "portentous international fact and factor-that is, maker of further facts-" that had come so rapidly into existence. "It is surely incumbent upon us," he wrote, "to recognize that there is now visible in the near future a foreign fleet decisively superior to our own in the class of vessel accepted at present by preponderant naval opinion as the determinative factor in naval war." It was unthinkable, he argued,

that Great Britain should ever wish to contravene the Monroe Doctrine. Nobody, of course, had the right to impute any such intention to Germany either. "But we must look facts straight in the face, and see that, in case of future offence given by some future Castro-a condition almost sure to arise such superiority at sea as Germany is now establishing puts it in her power to exact whatever reparation she may please, irrespective of the Monroe Doctrine"; and he went on to pose to Americans the tremendous question whether they were willing "to have a permanent element of national policy dependent upon the uncertain indulgence of a foreign State, which is notoriously thirsting for colonization in the supposed interest of racial development." He warned his countrymen that history was full of instances in which navies built for one purpose had been used for another; that they had to ask themselves not what Germany's intentions were but what she could do with the naval force she was creating; that, in the event of a dispute between Germany and the United States, naval power alone could control the issue; and that if the Americans were to find themselves decisively inferior at sea, not only would they be beaten on the main issue but their commerce would be strangled by blockade, and they might even be coerced into paying the war-bills of both sides. The great bulk of his countrymen have not, of course, Captain Mahan's vision or his grasp of principles and consequences, or his sense of the complexity and interdependence of all human affairs. I quote his words less as a précis of what Americans are thinking to-day than as a forecast of what they will most likely be thinking ten or fifteen years hence. Very few, probably, of the readers of Collier's Weekly understood his argument or accepted his conclusions, or regarded his sombre

elucidation of America's concern in Germany's naval ambitions as other than fanciful. The average citizen has not yet been educated quite so far as all that in the realities of Weltpolitik. But that he would prefer not to see Great Britain disappear before the mailed fist, that sentiment and self-interest both incline his sympathies, as between Germany and Great Britain, towards the latter Power, and that he is conscious, or half conscious, with a sort of vague disquietude, that complications not wholly favorable to the United States might ensue if Germany were to acquire command of the seathis I believe to be the fact.

But it is a fact to which, in my judgment, little political moment can at present be attached. The notion that at any time within the range of rational prevision the United States would lend her active support to Great Britain against Germany is based, as it seems to me, on a wholly erroneous reading of the political characteristics and standpoint of the American people. Seven years ago, in the pages of this Review, I endeavored to combat the assumption, at that time a not uncommon one in England, that the United States was in some sort a third party to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. To-day I detect in some quarters a not dissimilar and equally baseless expectation that if Great Britain and Germany were to come to blows we might rely on something more than the moral sympathy of America. The course of American action in external affairs, depending, as it does, very largely upon the personality of the President and upon the incalculable conditions of domestic politics, is always difficult to forecast; but I think it fairly safe to assert that except in one contingency there is no possibility whatever of the United States taking sides in an Anglo-German conflict or of her departing from an attitude of

strict

neutrality-an attitude that might be relaxed here and there, if occasion offered and no risk of trouble was to be feared, in our favor, that would certainly be compatible with the heartiest wishes for our success, but that on the whole would be unfalteringly maintained till the struggle was over and whatever its issue. The contingency to which I have alluded, the contingency that might force America into the arena, would arise if Germany were to attempt any interference with the supply of food and grain from the United States to Great Britain. Any such attempt Americans would resist if necessary by force of arms. Short of that I can conceive no circumstance that would be likely to move the United States one inch beyond her traditional policy of non-interference. She would remain neutral partly because the political influence of the German-American and IrishAmerican "vote" would make it a most hazardous enterprise for any President to suggest to Congress an alliance with Great Britain, but chiefly because the great majority of Americans would look upon an Anglo-German conflict as primarily a European question in which their concern stopped far short of the point of intervention and participation.

It is difficult for Europeans, who live in a powder-magazine, and rarely have the fear of an explosion out of their minds, to realize the simplicity, spaciousness, and unhampered self-absorption of American life. Foreign politics are minimized over there at least as much as they are exaggerated over here; Americans can hardly be got to take them seriously; a diplomatic dispute with another Power, conducted on either side upon the implication of force, is of all experiences the one most foreign to their normal routine of existence; when you have mentioned the Monroe Doctrine you

have pretty well indicated the sum total of the average citizen's interest in external affairs. During several years in the United States I do not recall a single well-informed debate in Congress on the foreign policy of the Republic or a single member who ever treated his constituents to an address on so alien a topic. The operative opinion of the Commonwealth still desires to have as few dealings as possible with foreign Powers, still quotes and abides by Washington's warning against "entangling alliances," still shrinks from any course that threatens "complications," still clings to the policy of isolation as the one that most adequately squares with the needs of American conditions. This is so, even though facts and necessity have outrun many of the formulæ, prejudices, and traditions that a decade and a half ago were all but omnipotent. The peculiarity of America's position in the general scheme of Weltpolitik is, indeed, precisely this, that her people are unconsciously engaged in adapting their mental outlook to their achievements. The Spanish war launched them on a stream of tendencies that has already carried them far beyond their old confines, and is inexorably destined to carry them further still. But the instinct of many millions of American citizens is still to pretend that nothing essential has been changed. They have overthrown Spanish power in Cuba and the Philippines, but the far harder task of overthrowing the mental habits and prepossessions of a hundred years' growth they have not yet accomplished. They have an Empire, but they have not yet become Imperial. They have expanded physically, but they have still to expand mentally. They are a World-Power in fact, but not in consciousness, in breadth of vision, in a resolute acceptance of new conditions, in a not less resolute eman

cipation from the precepts of an outworn past. They are multiplying every year fresh points of diplomatic contact with the outer world, and yet no American statesman would dare to proclaim it as a fact that the days of America's isolation are over. Without quite realizing it, they are undergoing a course of education in the realities of their new international position. Events are teaching them, but the progress of enlightenment will be arduous and protracted.

Americans, for instance, have not yet put tradition so far behind them as to admit the word "alliance" or any word pointing in that direction, into their political vocabulary. Mr. Root, when he signed his Agreement with Japan a few months ago, did not venture to submit it to the Senate in the form of a Treaty. It is even possible that had the Presidential election resulted in a victory for Mr. Bryan, the Agreement would never have been divulged, or, if divulged, would have been repudiated by the next Democratic Secretary of State. Americans as a whole are still far from realizing how much their prejudice against any kind of formal understanding and cooperation with other Powers militates against their effectiveness in world-politics. They do not see that a Power that automatically and unreflectingly rules out the possibility of alliances in The Fortnightly Review.

any circumstances whatsoever is a Power that wilfully handicaps its freedom of action and runs the risk of sacrificing its interests to a theory. In the broader field on which the United States has now entered, immutable rules and cast-iron systems are a hindrance, not a help. That nice adaptation of means to ends which is the essence of diplomacy cannot possibly be effected if the choice of means is abridged beforehand by a hard and fast formula. Americans will understand this in time, but they do not understand it now. Happily, we in Great Britain can well afford to wait while they are gathering wisdom from experience and to wait with an assurance that prevents anxiety as decisively as it forbids over-precipitancy. It is simply a question of time before the bonds that already link British and American policy on more than one international field are formally cemented. Temporary circumstances and accidental events may hasten that consummation or retard it; it may be evolved from America's necessity or from our own; no one can foresee how or when it will come. But that come it ultimately will, that the permanent currents of national interests and sentiment are setting full and fair towards it, is no longer, I think, open to question.

Sydney Brooks.