Three English residents of the United States, two of them public school men and the other a university man, were drawn into a discussion on this subject of England's knowledge of the United States. In the group and participating was an American of English descent who has connections in England which take him frequently to that country.
The youngest of the three, who is in his early thirties, told how he had come out ten years ago because he felt he could make more rapid progress in America in his line of work. He had left England with an intense dislike for the country to which he was going and for its people, Yet he knew neither except for a meagre bit of geography, the impressions he had received through the cinema, and the controversy over the war debts, "I was fully aware," he said, "that a man named Washington had cut down a cherry tree, that Indians hunted gangsters, and that an American divided his time chasing dollars and divorcing his wife."
This young man has had the advancement he had hoped for, has married an American, and he intends in the near future to take her with him back to England and fit himself into a position there, made attainable by reason of the opportunities he used well in the States.
Did he still retain any of his precau. ceived dislike of Americans? "Ni he laughed. "I married one! My ideas evaporated soon after my arrival, The Americans with whom I came in contüct seemed to want to like me and I sensed that if I were to nurse this American continued, "brought home to me vividly in London in the early years of the World War, It was then that George V, speaking to Ambassador Page, wondered at the delay in America's entrance, All my English acquaintances, some not too politely, kept asking why we were not in on the side of the Allies.
I told them that the Germans and the Irish and their offspring in America were decidedly anti-English, and that their votes controlled a pivotal number of the most populous States, I asked in turn how the Scandinavians and the Dutch in America could be expected to rush into a war 4000 miles away while their mother countries, bordering on the scene of the conflict, stood aloof.
"There were other factors such as the American tradition of isolation, and the law that the President could not declare war except by a favoutable vote of the representatives of the forty-eight States, a vote which he could not get until German pró- vocation broke down tradition and the racial and sectional prejudices against the Allies, "Yet I could convince no one that the mere fact that a common language was spoken in America did not outweigh all ether considerations,"
The fourth member of the group was a British subject about sixty years old, and for twenty years a resident of the States. His position brings him into constant touch with the literary and political. personages of the two countries.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.