A RATHER curious series of misunderstandings seem to have occurred to the American press with regard to the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia to the States, and the, at one time, projected visit of Miss Roosevelt to King Edward's Coronation. Fortunately none of them are serious, nor in the slightest degree likely to disturb the excellent understanding at present existing between the two countries. Perhaps the more curious of the two is an idea that in some way the very cordial reception given to the brother of the Kaiser is distasteful to the people of England. Looked at from merely a narrow political point of view, there is of course nothing to justify such a thought; politically we have everything to gain from an improved political friendship between the three Powers, America need not love England less because she loves Germany more. The points in common between the three Teutonic peoples are really so very much more prominent than their divergencies, and our interests, political and commercial, have so much to gain by mutual understandings, that the deeper we seek to probe the mutual feelings of the peoples the more ground we feel for satisfaction, To take the very lowest ground, it would be difficult to find out in what respect a better commercial unier-standing could injure our own trade with either. That trade is already so great that any such understanding as would increase the mutual benefits to be derived from it by Germany and the States could not but be fu'lowed by direct benefits to ourselves; and this if for no other reason than that the more profit either make out of their trade, the more they will have to spend. Trade with a rich country is naturally more profitable than with a poor one, and some of the profits we naturally look to having a share in. But there is another and more sentimental outlook in which our American friends think we might feel hurt. Germany as a nation has recently gone out of her way to be rude to England but so she had with regard to the States themselves. In both cases we believe the unpleasantness arose from a mistake, not so much of the German people as of the German
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.