Generation after generation of American settlers have been refugees from European persecution. Refugee Puritans, refugee Quakers, refugee Catholics, French Huguenots, English and German Republicans, in later days persecuted Jews and Poles and Russian revolutionaries have all found shelter and freedom in America, and most of them some degree of prosperity and public respect. And far more numerous than these definite sufferers from religious or political persecution have been the swarms of settlers who, for one reason or another, had found life too hard in the Old World. In every generation the effect is repeated. Europe is the place that people fly from; the place of tyrants and aristocracies, of wars and crooked diplomacy, the place where the poor are so miserable that they leave their homes and families and spend their last shilling in order to work at the lowest manual labour in the one land on earth which will really assure them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." No wonder it is easy for an American to reject all responsibility for the troubles of Europe!
Nay, when you meet an American who is really interested in Europe, you will be surprised to find how little he cares for the things that we consider liberal or progressive. Such things are not what he wants of Europe. He can get them at home. He likes Europe to be European. What he asks of Europe is picturesqueness; old castles, and Louis XIV., and Austrian rules of etiquette and an unreformed House of Lords. When we reform such things away he is rather regretful, as we in England might be at the Chinese cutting off their pigtails. In his leisure hours he likes us as we are, and when it comes to business his only determination is that we shall never again interfere with him.
I do not say that such an attitude is wise or right; much less that it is universal in America. But it is a state of mind which is easily intelligible and which must always be reckoned with.
A Liberal Englishman will quite understand it. He may, perhaps, regard it with a good deal of sympathy, and even imagine that it must lead, on the whole, to a feeling of friendliness towards England as contrasted with the less liberal Powers. But it is not so. Every large wave of feeling demands a human representative or symbol, and the course of history has decreed that to the average American the symbol of European tyranny is England. He knows, of course, that the government of Russia or Prussia or Austria or divers other nations may be much worse than that of England; but his own historical quarrel, repeated through many generations, has been with England, and the typical fight for human freedom against tyranny is the American War of Independence; next to that comes the War of 1812. The cause is now won. Freedom is safe, and his relations with England are peaceful, and even friendly. Yet the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. When he hears the words Orders in Council, Restriction of Trade, Right of Search, Black List, something argumentative and anxious rises within him. When he hears that some person has been condemned as a rebel against the British Government, he tends to murmur, "So was George Washington!"
No; he bears no grudge against his old enemy, but England belongs to Europe, not to America; and she can stay where she belongs. For his part, what does he want with other nations?
He is a citizen of the greatest free nation in the world, and not only the greatest but, by every sane standard that he believes in, infinitely the best. It has a larger white population than the whole British Empire. Its men and women are more prosperous, cleaner, better paid, better fed, better dressed, better educated, better in physique than any others on the face of the globe. They have simpler and saner ideals, more kindliness and common-sense, more enterprise, and more humanity. Silly people in Europe, blind, like their ancestors, imagine that America somehow lacks culture, and must look abroad for its art and learning; why, as a matter of fact, the greatest sculptor since Michael Angelo was an American, St. Gaudens; the two best painters of the last decades, Abbey and Sargent, were both Americans; up to last year the most famous English novelist was an American; the best public architecture is notoriously to be found in America, as well as the best public concerts and libraries, and the most important foundations for scientific research. And to crown our friend's confident picture, there is no country on earth where the children are so happy.
A friend of mine stayed last year in a summer camp of young men and women in a forest in the Middle-West, and never once heard the European war mentioned. One night, as they looked over a moon-lit lake, a young student spoke thoughtfully of the peacefulness of the scene, and the contrast it made with the terrible sufferings of mankind elsewhere. My friend agreed, and murmured something about the sufferings of Europe. "Lord, I wasn't thinking of Europe," said the young man; "I was thinking of the thunder-storms in Dakota."
If only they could really remain aloof! But they cannot. There is, at least, one Power with whom they are constantly in contact, and whose world-wide interests are constantly rubbing against theirs both by land and sea; and that Power is Great Britain.
"When two empires find their interests continually rubbing against each other in different parts of the world," said Sir Edward Grey in 1911, "there is no half-way house possible between constant liability to friction and cordial friendship." That is the gentle and statesmanlike way of putting it. An eloquent American, whose speech this year has been circulated widely across the continent, phrased the matter more strongly. He advocated definitely a British Alliance on the ground that, between two nations so intimately connected and touching each other at so many points, there is no third way: it must be either Alliance or War. Yet Alliance, after what we have seen, seems impossible; and War cannot even for an instant be thought of. It would be the last disgrace to the modern world, the final downfall of civilisation.
Let us try to consider what forces are working in either direction.