'7th October.
"As truly as such a thing can ever be said, it can be said that England greatly admires, and is greatly fond of America."
This is the remarkable testimony of, an American writer living for the present under the shade of the British Museum, and it is, speaking generally, no less true than remarkable. We have heard a great deal lately of the expansion of the United States, of the unparalleled commercial prosperity, the unrivalled riches, and general well-being of the giant of the West, but from only one quarter of the globe have there been sympathetic answering echoes to the chorus of American jubilation. When young Columbia has drunk with musical honours to its self-constituted deity Uncle Sam, the strains of the classical chorus "For he's a jolly good fellow" reverberating from the western cliffs of old England, seem to have found the exact measure in space and sentiment necessary for ohn Bull's echoed reply to be " good fellow!" The few leagues farther across from the one continent to the other, and the immensurable gulf otherwise, have turned the answering murmur of continental Europe into the final syllable, " low and to it have been added " mean, grasping, blustering, hypocritical," and other epithets fuller of vigour than of love, Tt is by no means easy entirely to understand this difference. American competition will cut deeper into English life than it is likely to do into that of France or Germany, and yet it is the former that welcomes, and the latter that repels it. Possibly it may be that we have beet. so long expecting our giant offspring to beat us that his successful achievement of the task has not come as a surprise. As far as the nations of the Continent are concerned, there can be no more doubt of the suddenness of their awakening than of the resentment of it, For some of the good folks on the European mainland, American sprang into existence asa full-fledged Power only in 1898. Up to that time she had been only " geographical express sion, Ibat year, too, advertised for the first time in history the fact that there is a practical union in heart amongst the English-speaking peoples, however diverse their forms of government. It was a revelation, not to the Continental nations only, but to Great Britain and the United States aswell. Only a year or two before, President Cleveland had sent his historical Venezuelan message, bringing about a tremendous crisis in Wall Street, but causing no flurry in London, where the idea of the impossibility of war between the States and England was so firmly fixed that nothing short of its declaration and the appearance of an American fleet off Liverpool could have shaken it. We know how easily that trouble was disposed of, Others of greater danger had been similarly settled before, and the close of last year witnessed another instance in the settlement of the Canal question.
But these, though important, have been isolated instances of general good will on both sides. The fact is, the peoples of the two nations are year by year growing closer together as ties between them increase and multiply. There is no greater bond than blood, there is no closer tie than interest. Blood is thicker than water, as our services have proved each for the other more than once, and as, Ged willing, should occasion ever arise, they would gallantly do again and yet again. We are allied by descent and intermarriage, by language, literature, life, and thought more than any two other great nations on the earth's surface. Recently an interesting little return was made by the American post office showing the number of smal! postal orders sent more or less for presents from the United States to Europe at Christmas time. They made altogether a total of $1,100,000 gold, and almost exactly one-half of this amount went tothe United Kingdom, the rest being divisible amongst all the other States of Europe.
But ties of the nature above-named are not alone in binding the English of the Old to those of the New World.
Had there been no natural bonds of this description, we should yet have been driven together by the univer-salify of the hate which the past decade has developed against us. This first showed itself in its greatest virulence against America in 1898, only to he fanned into still fiercer flame against ourselves by the Boor War, and against Americans their phenomenal expansiveness. It was bad enough, it was thought, for Great Britain to become Imperialistic, but when to her assertiveness that of the Yankees was added, life was no longer worth living for anybody else. Which to any sane Britisher or American seems almost inexpressibly absurd, since neither wishes to attack anybody, however determined they may be that it shall be risky for anybody to attack them. Mr. Gosse has told us lately in the "Cosmopolitan" that the isolation of the English race is extending to their literature. Except ourselves, and the French, he says, nobody knows and nobody cares what we read and write. From this sweeping assertion we must of course except those Continental authors who for reasons not far to seek publish in English. Our Imperialism is to blame for it. "The incessant glorification of the national idea," Mr. Gorse tells us, "which has taken forms radically so similar in America and in England is exquisitely distasteful to the Continent, The foreigner reads Kipling, indeed, but with fascinated horror, shuddering with dislike, and supposes that all other Anglo-Saxon writers of the day are of the same class, only less forcibly."
Our old proverb says there is no accounting for tastes, and when the world hoots and jeers at us we must even let it go at that, The Boer war has cemented the British Empire with bonds of blood and iron. Is there in the near future any possibility of another that shall do the like for all the English-speaking race
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.