Whatever may happen, this is not going to change all at once. We are not going to fall on each other's neck and swear eternal friendship. Nevertheless, a great new fact has come into existence. In the most momentous crisis in the history of the world the whole Englishspeaking race is at last standing shoulder to shoulder. Nothing but criminal unwisdom or malignant ill-fortune can cancel or turn to evil the beneficent results that ought to flow from this wonderful and almost unhoped-for achievement of German political genius. Never again can it be said that "all active political relations between Great Britain and America have been hostile relations." That remark is expunged from the page of history.

And now it is up to us-why should we not talk American?-to make the best of this new situation. Hithertotake us all around—we have been culpably and stupidly inappreciative of America. The time has been, no doubt, when there was a great deal of rawness in American life, which lent itself to caricature, and when, on the other hand, many Americans displayed at once great self-assertiveness and morbid resentfulness of criticism. But the civil war may fairly be said to have made an end to all that or at least the beginning of an end. Since then half a century has passed, and now we have not the smallest rational excuse for carelessness or captiousness in our judgments of America.

To any one with a spark of imagination the United States is the most fascinating country in the world. Its past is romantic, its present marvelous, its future inconceivable.

Let me give one instance of the romance of the past that clings to so many places in America. I will not speak of Lexington or Concord; I will not speak of Mount Vernon or Charleston; I will speak of the place in all America which most people in England, perhaps, think of as the very antithesis of romance-I mean Pittsburgh. It is called "hell with the lid off," and I don't say it does not merit that term of endearment; but to stand on the big bluff over against the city, and look down upon the confluence

of the Allegheny and the Monongahela (most beautiful of words!) is to experience a strange and complex emotion. For the two rivers (each as great as the Rhine or the Rhone) unite to form the magnificent Ohio. And the Ohio rolls on into the still mightier Mississippi; and down these gigantic waterways the first French adventurers paddled thousands of leagues through the boundless, sinister wilderness; and Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley sought the city of Eden; and Huckleberry Finn and Jim went drifting through an Odyssey which I, for one, believe to be as surely immortal as any story in this world. A few miles up the Monongahela is the spot where General Braddock, with George Washington and George Warrington in his train, fell into the fatal ambush. And there, at the very tip of the tongue of land between the two rivers, nestling in the shadow of the skyscrapers like a beehive under St. Peter's, is the little octagonal blockhouse, pierced for musketry, which was once Fort Duquesne, and after that Fort Pitt, and from which the city takes its name. Of the titanic, lurid picturesqueness of the scene I shall not attempt to speak. I have merely tried to suggest a few of the historic and literary associations which cluster around the spot itself, and the vast river system to which it is, as it were, the northeastern gateway. How any one can find America prosaic or uninteresting passes my comprehension.

As for its present, as summed up and typified in New York, what is there in the world to compare with it? The view of the mountainous city, towering between its noble estuaries, is by far the most impressive testimony that can anywhere be found to the genius and daring of man. Beautiful? I don't know. There is an immense amount of beautiful architecture to be seen in New York and all through the Eastern States; but the whole impression of New York is more than beautiful-it is exciting, thrilling, inspiring. To land in New York on a cloudless day (and they are many) of Spring or Autumn is to realize why America is bound to lead the world. It is because there is some as yet un

identified element in the pure, keen air, which, passing into the blood, tingles through the whole system in the form of energy and capacity.

Yet there is no greater error than to think that New York is a city of unresting rush, clatter, and whirl. It is a city where not only women but men have plenty of leisure and know how to enjoy it. Above all, it is a city where they have always time to be helpful and hospitable to the stranger within their gates. Nowhere are the amenities of life carried to higher perfection. I never return to England without feeling that I have come back some five-and-twenty years in the art of living, at any rate on the material side. Indeed, one might say fifty years, were it not that we have of late had the sense to learn a good deal from America.

And think, now, of the future! America has been, and still is, largely occupied in the development of her material resources; yet think what strides she has also made on the intellectual side! The splendid universities which stud the land may not rival those of Europe in pure scholarship; but they are humming hives of all sorts of eager intellectual activity. It will not, perhaps, be to their disadvantage if intimate relations with Germany are severed for a time. Their leading scholars confess that the German influence has not been wholly beneficial. But everywhere they have magnificent apparatus for research, and everywhere they make full use of it. Who does not know that the cultivated American is one of the finest products of civilization? And civilization of the best sort is spreading with enormous rapidity.

I am aware that in some ways my vision of America is unduly roseate, for the simple reason that it has been my good fortune, wherever I went, to move almost exclusively in the circles that were most congenial to me. Of course there are many less desirable sides of American life with which I have scarcely come in contact, or not at all. There are, for instance, the vulgarities and crudities inseparable from every great half-educated democracy-that is a matter in which we certainly have no right to

throw the first stone. Of course America, like all the rest of the world, has great social struggles, and possibly convulsions, to go through, before she can attain something like a just and stable social order. New York, Boston, Chicago, St. Louis-there is much that is terrible as well as much that is admirable in the life of these swarming, seething cities. But nowhere is there a more alert social idealism at work, or a more ardent spirit of social service.

My point, then, is this: Let us realize what an enormous advantage we possess in our community of language, of historical and intellectual traditions, and of political and moral ideals, with this nation of marvelous achievements and still more marvelous potentialities. If these ideals are to survive and flourish, it is of the utmost importance that America and Great Britain should grow together, instead of growing apart. The community of speech, while it is a priceless bond, is also a source of danger. Careless, carping, supercilious talk, narrow-minded comment, uncivil jesting, whether with pen or pencil, rankles doubly when it is brought home to us in our own language. This is an admonition to both sides, but mainly to England. We are the older people, and ought to show the finer consideration. In this respect our sins are many-sins, mainly, of ignorance and thoughtlessness. But, in spite of everything, we are, and have been any time this century, drawing together in a remarkable way. Note how half the most successful pieces on the London stage are of American origin, and are often most acceptable when played by American actors. Note how the bookstalls are piled with the writings of an author so redolent of the soil as O. Henry. Think how the cinema is familiarizing even the street arab and the factory girl with the surface aspects of American life. We have now a unique opportunity to draw closer all the countless ties which unite us with our gigantic daughter of the West." Let us have done with carelessness, ignorance, supercilious patronage, flippant criticism, and make the best of this great boon which the Germans have so kindly forced upon us.