At first sight it may not seem the likeliest way to make two people care for each other to go laboriously about to tell each how the other underestimates his virtues. Don Pedro's wile would appear to be the more direct—to tell Benedick how Beatrice doted on him, and Beatrice how Benedick was dying for her love. I have always had my doubts, however, about the success of that alliance.
In the case of two peoples so much alike as the English and the American, between whom friendship and alliance would be so entirely in accord with eternal fitness, who are yet held apart by misunderstanding on the part of each of the other's character, there seems no better way than to face the misunderstandings frankly and to endeavour to make each see how unjustly it undervalues the other's good qualities or overestimates its faults. At present neither Americans nor Englishmen understand what good fellows the others are. Least of all do they understand how essentially they are the same kind of good fellows.
In summarising the contents of the foregoing pages, there is no need here to rehearse, except in barest outline, the arguments in favour of alliance between the countries. The fact that war between them is an ever-present possibility ought in itself to suffice—war which could hardly fail to be more sanguinary and destructive than any war that the world has known. The danger of such a war is greater, perhaps, than the people of either country recognises, certainly greater than most Englishmen imagine. The people of England do not understand the warlike—though so peace-loving—character of the American nation. It is just as warlike as, though no less peace-loving than, the English, without the restraint of that good-will which the English feel for the United States; without, moreover, the check, to which every European country is always subjected, of the fear of complications with other Powers. The American people, as a whole, it cannot be too earnestly impressed on Englishmen, have no such good-will towards Great Britain as Englishmen feel for them; and not even English reluctance to draw the sword, nor the protests of the better informed and the more well-to-do people in the United States would be able to restrain what Mr. Cleveland calls "the plain people of the land" if they once made up their mind to fight.
Apart from the possibility of war between the two nations themselves, there is the constant peril, to which both are exposed, of conflict forced upon them by the aggressions of other Powers. That peril is always present to both, to the United States now no less—perhaps even more—than to Great Britain. The fact that neither need fear a trial of strength with any other Power or any union of Powers, is beside the question. Consciousness of its own strength is no guarantee to any nation that it will not be forced into conflict. Rather, by making it certain that it, at least, will not draw back, does it close up one possible avenue of escape from catastrophe when a crisis threatens.
But beyond all this—apart from, and vastly greater than, the considerations of the interest or the security of either Great Britain or the United States—is the claim of humanity. The two peoples have it in their hands to give to the whole world no less a gift than that of Universal and Perpetual Peace. It involves no self-sacrifice, the giving of this wonderful boon, for the two peoples themselves would share in the benefit no less than other peoples, and they would be the richer by the giving. It involves hardly any effort, for they have but to hold out their hands together and give. It matters not that the world has not appealed to them. The fact remains that they can do this thing and they alone; and it is for them to ask their own consciences whether any considerations of pride, any prejudice, any absorption in their own affairs—any consideration actual or conceivable—can justify them in holding back. Still more does it rest with the American people—usually so quick to respond to high ideals—to ask its conscience whether any consideration, actual or conceivable, can justify it in refusal when Great Britain is willing—anxious—to do her share.
That such an alliance must some day come is, I believe, not questionable. That it has not already come is due only to the misunderstanding by each people of the character of the other. Primarily, the two peoples do not understand how closely akin—how of one kind—they are, how alike they are in their virtues, and how their failings are but the defects of the same inherited qualities, even though shaped to somewhat diverse manifestations by differences of environment. Two brothers seldom recognise their likeness one to the other, until either looks at the other beside a stranger. Members of one family do not easily perceive the family resemblance which they share; rather are they aware only of the individual differences. But strangers see the likeness, and in their eyes the differences often disappear. So Englishmen and Americans only come to a realisation of their resemblance when either compares the other critically with a foreign people. Foreigners, however, see the likeness when they look at the two together. And those foreigners who know only one of the peoples will sketch the character of that people so that it might be taken for a portrait of the other. In all essentials the characters are the same; in minor attributes only, such as exist between the individual members of any family, do they differ.
Not only does neither people understand with any clearness how like it is to the other, but each is under many misapprehensions—some trivial, some vital—in regard to the other's temperament and ways of life. These misapprehensions are the result chiefly of the geographical remoteness of the lands, so that intimate contact between anything like an appreciable portion of the two peoples has been impossible; and, when thus separated by so wide a sea, Great Britain has been too consumedly engrossed in the affairs of the world to be able to give much time or thought to the United States, while America has been too isolated from that world, too absorbed in her own affairs, to be able to look at England in anything like true perspective.
Arising thus from different causes, the errors of the two peoples in regard to each other have taken different forms. Great Britain, always at passes with a more or less hostile Europe, has never lost her original feeling of kinship with, or good-will towards, the United States. There has been no time when she would not gladly have improved her knowledge of, and friendship with, the other, had she at any time been free from the anxieties of the peril of war with one Power or another, from the burden of concern for her Empire in India, from the weight of her responsibilities in regard to Australia, South Africa, Egypt, and the various other parts of Britain over seas. Engrossed as she has been with things of immediate moment to her existence, she has been perforce compelled to take the good-will of the remote United States for granted, and to assume that there was no need to voice her own. Until at last she was awakened with a rudeness of awakening that shocked and staggered her.
For the United States had had no such constant burden of anxiety, no perpetual friction with other peoples, to keep her occupied. Rather, sitting aloof in her isolation she had looked upon all the Powers of Europe as actors in a great drama with which she had no other than a spectacular concern. Only of all the Powers, by the very accident of common origin, by the mere circumstances of the joint occupation of the continent, Great Britain alone has been constantly near enough to the United States to impinge at times upon her sphere of development, to rub against her, to stand in her way. Great Britain herself has hardly known that this was so. But it has had the effect to make Great Britain in the mind of the United States the one foreign Power most potentially hostile.
In aloofness and silence, ignorant of the world, the American people nursed its wrath and brooded over the causes of offence which have seemed so large to it, though so trivial or so unintentional on the part of England, till the minds of the majority of the people held nothing but ill-feeling and contempt in response to England's good-will towards them. And always the United States has had those at her elbow who were willing—nay, for their own interests, eager—to play upon her wounded feelings and to exaggerate every wrong and every slight, however small or imaginary, placed upon her by Great Britain.