CHAPTER VII

RECONCILIATION

NGLISH students of American conservatism,

E nationalism, and imperialism, will often recog

nize with pleasure or with pain a striking family resemblance between these phenomena and similar manifestations in their own history; and they may even fancy that many ideas, which are sometimes claimed as American, had an English ancestry, if not an English origin, and played no small part in English history. The fancy is sometimes turned to wonder, as when they are told by the editor of Mr. Page's Letters that a letter from Colonel House to the ambassador, written on 27 March, 1915, "contains the first reference on record" to the freedom of the seas,1 and recollect that it was Queen Elizabeth's boast to have made the seas free for all men, and that the racial heterogeneity of the United States itself is due to the freedom of migration into American waters which England secured by break

'Ed. Hendrick, 1. 434. In 1856 the Democratic platform declared "the time has come for the people of the United States to declare themselves in favour of free seas and progressive free trade throughout the world" (Rhodes, Hist. U.S.A. III. 40-1).

ing the monopoly claimed by Spain. The establishment of the freedom of the seas was the first condition for any co-operation across the Atlantic; and one of the latest and most promising forms of Anglo-American fellowship is an equal partnership in the maintenance of that liberty throughout the world.

Even co-operation is, however, liable to suspicion, and a recent municipal document in New York charged the whole category of Anglo-American efforts towards mutual understanding-including the Sulgrave Institution and this Watson Chair—with being parts of a vast conspiracy to bring the United States once more under British dominion.2 Understanding itself is a word of ambiguous meaning; and, while the purpose of these lectures is to promote a better understanding of American history, no historian could consider it his business to promote a better understanding between two governments or two peoples. He remembers Lord Acton's insistent injunction to historians that they should "avoid the service of a cause" 3; and, if he talks about recon

J. T. Adams in the Atlantic Monthly, Sept., 1923, pp. 308-9. Charges of this kind are no novelty in American history. In 1801 a prominent Republican wrote to Jefferson that the Federalist party "is now almost universally considered as having been employed, in conjunction with Great Britain, in a scheme for the total destruction of the liberties of the people" (Henry Adams, Hist. i, 285).

3

In his editorial injunctions to contributors to the Cambridge Modern History; cf. his Lectures on Modern History, 1906, p.

ciliation, it is not to advocate the bringing together of the United States and Great Britain in any particular council-not even that of the League of Nations but merely to illustrate from the course of their history the causes and the growth of their habit of taking counsel together and adopting similar recommendations. British Dominions themselves have as yet formed no Imperial Council, though they take counsel together with some regularity; and, if the difference between council and counsel marks the limits of constitutional co-operation between British Dominions, there is little advantage in thinking of any more stereotyped methods of co-operation between the United States and British Dominions than those of conference and concerted action.

The less official the method, the more fruitful the results; and unofficial representation in the counsels of Europe has been an interesting and ingenious expedient of recent American diplomacy. For the sovereign State is stiff and stern, and friction is readily generated in its relations with its equally forbidding fellows. The ultimate authority should rarely be the first to feel the way, and American diplomacy might have done better at Paris in the hands of representatives less august than the President of the United States. In any case, co-operation is not in a democratic age limited to the diplomatic intercourse of governments, and an ironic practical comment on the theoretical omnicompetence of the

State is the number of things it wisely and inevitably leaves to other agencies.* A survey of AngloAmerican co-operation would extend to every sphere of intellectual activity, and participation in it has become almost a part of the normal duties of university professors on both sides of the Atlantic. Conferences are the order of the day, and interchange of teachers and students grows apace. "We must," wrote Page in 1915,5 "get their lads into our universities, ours into theirs"; and half-a-dozen or more organizations have sprung into existence for the purpose. Lawyers cross the Atlantic now and again for international visits; historians have not only an annual conference, but a standing jointcommittee which meets once a quarter, and a weekly gathering at the Institute of Historical Research. Against a fanciful conspiracy of British gold must be set a real debt to Rockefeller foundations; and against the bogey of the Anglicization of the United States may be placed impassioned appeals to Britons not to Americanize their universities. Well, the State of Michigan endows its university with a biennial appropriation of fourteen million dollars, about £1,600,000 a year; and the State of Michigan has a smaller population than that of London which endows its university with less than a sixteenth of that amount. There are American precedents against which British universities can hardly be ex

It is, however, a far cry to the contention that politics are dead (cf. William Kay Wallace, The Passing of Politics, 1924). 'Letters, II. 144.

pected to protest. That which a nation really has at heart comes not so much out of its mouth as out of its pocket; and faith in university education is a matter in which approximation is rather due from England to the United States than in the other direction.R

In other spheres the approach has been mutual, and patriotic outcries have been raised against Anglicization in America and Americanization in England. Both protests are the outcome of an exaggerated alarm and an inaccurate analysis. The approximation has not been due to British gold or American dollars, nor, indeed, to any other British influence upon America or American influence on Great Britain. The effective influence has been that of similar conditions upon a common human nature and a joint political inheritance. It was the force of circumstances and not the infection of British nationalism, which converted citizens of the world into hundred-per-cent. Americans; made nationality as vigorous a sentiment on one, as it had ever been on the other, side of the Atlantic; and constrained Americans in 1861 to adopt the principle that their Union, like the English Commonwealth in 1649 and the French Republic in 1793, was one and indivis

"The total amount of fresh private benefactions to American universities is now between 50 and 100 million dollars a year; and there are said to be more graduate students in American, than undergraduate students in British universities, The intellectual standard may be lower, but that is a question on which those who have had the largest experience of American and British universities will be the slowest to dogmatize.