Baron Hayashi, now Japanese Ambassador in Rome, "when it learns all that we have done, and shall do in the future." This significant hint no doubt referred to the projected operations in Eastern Siberia, with Vladivostok as a base.

Both Japan and the United States will therefore emerge from the war as great military Powers. Their future relations depend upon the fate of China and Pacific problems bound up with it, political, economic, and strategic. Earnest efforts, following the Ishii Mission, are being made to improve these relations. Thus Japan has her "East and West News Bureau," an association for promoting cordiality between the two nations. Its director is Dr. Iyenaga, who is also linked with the University of Chicago as a lecturer. Mr. Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labour now cables fraternal greetings to President Suzuki, of the Workers' Friendly Society of Japan: "The most important duty of our movements is to maintain frank and friendly terms between our respective countries, and endeavour amicably to solve vexatious problems."

Asked whether America would fight for the Open Door in China, President Roosevelt declared that she would. His successor, Mr. W. H. Taft, held the contrary opinion, doubting whether Americans were sufficiently interested in Far Eastern affairs to make any substantial sacrifice for them. The present Administration sent Notes of great vigour to Tokio and Pekin over the Twenty-One Demands. President Wilson's Government confessed itself "greatly disturbed" over the further Japanese aggression which followed the squabble in Chen-chia-tun. But those were the days of America's "wooden sword," when protests from her were filed or ignored as a matter of course. With the habit and harness of war she will receive a very different hearing. America will in future have something stronger than "good offices" to offer her Allies and protégés, whether

Britain or Belgium; France, China, Mexico, or the LatinRepublics, to whom by the way the Monroe Doctrine was become a somewhat threadbare mantle of protection from foreign foes.

"WILL you not convey to His Majesty my appreciation of his sentiments, my confident expectation that the great principles of truth, liberty, and honour, which the people of this country hold so dear, will increasingly serve as a broad, solid foundation upon which the friendship and cordial relations of the two Governments may rest and develop?

"I believe that the righteous cause we are now prosecuting will bind more closely the people of the United States to the people of Great Britain.”—(President Wilson to Earl Reading, British High Commissioner in Washington.)

The above speech is a momentous break with tradition. Before the Great War there was no European nation which America esteemed so highly as Germany; there was but one nation in all the world for which America had an hereditary dislike, and that was England. The Scotsman escaped this feeling. As for the Irish, whether as citizens or as an "oppressed" people overseas, they were, of course, viewed with peculiar sympathy. Were they not living symbols of that "absolute Tyranny" which is impressed upon every American child in the Declaration of Independence, with its scathing indictment of King George the Third as a prince who "is unfit to be the ruler of a free people"?

The fallacy of "cousinship" with the United States was persistently held in this country in the face of all the facts, and the irritation it roused, by reason of the implied

condescension of which Lowell complained. War with America was stoutly declared to be unthinkable by British writers as though it had not loomed again and again since 1814, when John Quincy Adams met Lord Gambier in the old Carthusian Convent at Ghent, both sides smarting under humiliation, and signed at long last a treaty which left open more questions than it settled, especially the right of search at sea.

Our ruling classes of that time despised the young Republic. They believed it would soon break up, just as Gladstone, Russell, and Derby did at a later day, when Lincoln was at his wits' end to save the Union from disruption. The Treaty of Ghent left bad blood between the two nations, and it was a sullen affair in the making. After four months of obstinate haggling, it was only popular pressure on both sides which forced the Commissioners to sign a covenant of peace. On our part we declined to grant the United States the privilege of trade with the British-American colonies. Canada's haunting fear was not yet laid with regard to her neighbour's territorial designs.

On her side America resented British "arrogance" with Jeffersonian warmth, and rejoiced that she had for the second time humbled the haughty mistress of the seas. Then in the "roaring forties"-a period of expansion and pioneering to the South and West-there were boundary disputes and border incidents in Oregon and Maine which once more threatened Anglo-American relations. There were quarrels over Mexico and the Isthmus, and over the steps which our officers took to repress the slave trade. The Civil War saw latent antagonism flame up afresh. Rupture was very near when the Confederate envoys, Slidell and Mason, were seized at sea on an English ship and carried off as prisoners to Fort Warren by Captain Wilkes. Palmerston demanded an "instant apology for a violation

of international law." Troops were despatched, war was declared inevitable, and prayers were offered in the Washington Senate. It was one of those occasions when America mourned her impotence at sea, and wished she had a navy capable of curbing "the sway of an arbitrary trident."

From the very first a peculiar touchiness is discernible in the State Department's dealings with Great Britain: a liability to sudden anger with little provocation, as Cleveland's Message showed in 1895 over the Orinoco swamps of Venezuela, to which British Guiana laid claim. This alleged infringement of the Monroe Doctrine was declared in the Message to be "a wilful aggression upon the rights and interests of the United States." American protests to Great Britain, by the way, are seldom couched in the suavest terms-even those received after 1914, over the hold-up of American mails, our "hovering" cruisers, the Black List of traders, the status of "merchant" submarines like the Deutschland, and lastly our "so-called" Blockade, which was dealt with in a Note of quite forcible language.

Yet for a hundred years Anglo-American peace has remained unbroken, thanks to the sound sense of both democracies, who insisted upon finding a way out before extremes were reached.

During the American Civil War our neutrality was of a kind that vexed both belligerents and left us with few friends at the close, either in the North or the South. This irritation grew more intense when the struggle was over, thanks to unscrupulous angling for the Irish vote, and partly through the growth of American imperialism. The Irish question, I may say at once, has always lamed our relations with the Republic. Since 1914 German propaganda has made damaging use of it, pointing to the gulf between Britain's precept and practice in her treat