Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude!”
Let us hope that it is not so much ingratitude as inability to appreciate the situation.
* * * * *
No wonder Americans find it sometimes difficult to know or to understand us. For months they have heard their President persistently abused, they have seen him cruelly caricatured and jeered at in the lower sections of the British Press, and they have had to possess their souls in patience till their day of triumph came. It has come—the bitter tongues are now all honey—and their generosity in forgiving and forgetting wrongs and coming to us in perfect amity, glittering in the panoply of battle, and placing almost inexhaustible supplies at our service, is a truly great and wonderful thing. We have done ourselves honour by the thanksgiving in St. Paul’s; and some of us who knelt in the dim shadows of that vast shrine and heard the thunderous chords of the American National Hymn surging in our ears, prayed that the two great English-speaking peoples, now joined in a vaster Crusade than was ever before undertaken, might find their union cemented, not only by the blood shed for country, but by all the ties of mutual comprehension and sympathy. To-day, we are as one in the resolve, that
“God’s just wrath shall be wreaked on a giant liar,
And noble thought be freer under the sun!”
And so shall the “Old Glory” help to make for us all the New!