She failed because England refused to join the league, or to enter with the other powers into a naval demonstration before Cuba, but so long as the war lasted with Spain the Russian diplomats kept pounding at every backdoor in Europe with an insistence that something be done to cut our comb, or make trouble or lose us the friendship of England. Our people in Washington know all this. They know also the behavior of the Russian minister at Washington who thought to poison us against England in the very days when we were buying in that country and shipping in secret from that country the vital necessities which the war demanded and which we had not got; when great steamers were found abandoned off New York loaded with contraband of war, cannon, arms, ammunition, etc., and towed into port by United States warships; when coal and ammunition were left on desert islands in the Philippines by British warships for the use of the United States navy; when England's fleet at Manila stood ready to take sides with Dewey and to open fire, to begin war on the Germans should occasion arise. American naval officers who were there know these facts to be true, and it is very significant that the Navy Department has not published the correspondence between it and Admiral Dewey at that time. We are hated all over the continent of Europe. Paris made a fete day when she imagined Sampson's fleet was destroyed.
The Germans hate us for taking 3,000,000 fighting men away from them, and also because we prevented them from purchasing the Philippines from Spain, and because the Monroe doctrine prevents them from obtaining colonies or naval stations in the Western Hemisphere. The Austrians hate us for humiliating Spain. There is not a country to the south of us but what hates us. Every republic in South America would put a knife in our back if the opportunity occurs.
Very significant, too, was the reception and banquet given at Windsor Castle in 1896 by Queen Victoria to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston—the oldest military organization in the Western Hemisphere—and the grand reception they received everywhere they went in England. It was a revelation to the Americans, as every one of them acknowledged, to receive such marked expression of kindliness and brotherhood at the old home. It was something they did not expect. The company more than reciprocated when the parent company, The Honourable Artillery of London, visited Boston in 1903. Once more were seen armed British sailors and soldiers marching through Boston's streets under the British flag, the buildings along the entire route beautifully decorated, and the visitors received with vociferous welcome wherever they went. We will hope that something even better and more substantial may yet come to us, when the United States and Great Britain will be allied in amity as firm as that which now holds together these federal states. "Old prejudices should be cast aside; the English-speaking states recognizing their kinship, should knit bonds together around the world, forming a kingly brotherhood inspired by beneficence, to which supreme dominion in the earth would be sure to fall; for whatever may be said today for other stocks, the 135,000,000 of English-speaking men have been able to make themselves masters of the world to an extent which no people has thus far approached.
"If love would but once unite, the seas could never sever. Earth has never beheld a co-mingling of men, so impressive, so likely to be frought with noble advantages through ages to come, as would be the coming together of English-speaking men in one cordial bond."[100]
The statesmen of Britain and America can do no worthier service than to find a way by which their strength may be combined to secure the peace of the world and the betterment of mankind. It is not necessary that their governments should be unified, or even that any hard and fast treaty obligation incurred. It is only necessary that they should agree to be friends and to stand by each other in all that will further these great objects. They alone of all the nations can do this and that they ought to do it few will deny. Both must forget certain bitterness born of the past and certain jealousies growing out of the greatness of both.
What Great Britain is doing for the many peoples under her care and what this nation is doing for the few outside our borders that we have in hand we might unitedly do for a great portion of the globe and its inhabitants. This combination must be strong enough to check certain highwaymen in international relations and to install a wholesome regard for human rights. Such an outcome of present friendliness will not be achieved in a day or generation. But it will come; it must come. Asia and the continent of Europe may become Chinese or Cossack, but the English-speaking race shall rule over every other land and all the islands and every sea.
The present time is a critical period in the life of the American Republic, and therefore in the life of the world. The impotence of the federal government to stop strike disturbances, lynchings and disfranchisements, the growing power of an oligarchial and plutocratic Senate, and the perils of imperialism are disquieting enough, but worst of all is the evil of party rule and party strife.
Washington abhorred party and regarded it as a disease which he hoped to avert by putting federalists and anti-federalists in his cabinet together. The intuition of the founders of the Republic was that the president should be elected by a chosen body of select and responsible citizens, but since the Jacksonian era, nomination and election have been completely in the hands of the Democracy at large, and the election has been performed by a process of national agitation and conflict which sets at work all the forces of political intrigue and corruption on the most enormous scale, besides filling the country with persons almost as violent and anti-social as those of the Civil War.
The qualification for public office from that of president down to that of a member of a city council in national, state or city politics is not a question of which man is most worthy of public confidence. It is no longer eminence but availability. The great aim of each party is to prevent the country from being successfully governed by its rival. Each will do anything to catch votes and anything rather than lose them. Government consequently is at the mercy of any organization which has votes on a large scale to sell, or corporations that will freely contribute its funds. The Grand Army of the Republic is thus enabled to levy upon the nation tribute to the amount of a hundred and fifty million dollars each year, thirty-six years after the war, although General Grant at the close of the war said that the pensions should never exceed seven millions each year. And now both parties in their platform promise their countenance to this exaction.
The recent exposures of the millions contributed by the trusts, tariff protected industries, life insurance companies, etc., to the campaign funds has astonished the world. The history of the most corrupt monarchies could hardly furnish a more monstrous case of financial abuse, to say nothing of the effect upon national character.