“I have the will to friendship. What can I personally do?” I should say:
“Play fair! Look over our history from that Treaty of Paris in 1783, down through the Louisiana Purchase, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manila Bay; look at the facts. You will see that no matter how acrimoniously England has quarreled with us, these were always family scraps, in which she held out for her own interests just as we did for ours. But whenever the question lay between ourselves and Spain, or France, or Germany, or any foreign power, England stood with us against them.
“And another thing. Not all Americans boast, but we have a reputation for boasting. Our Secretary of the Navy gave our navy the whole credit for transporting our soldiers to Europe when England did more than half of it. At Annapolis there has been a poster, showing a big American sailor with a doughboy on his back, and underneath the words, ‘We put them across.’ A brigadier general has written a book entitled, How the Marines Saved Paris. Beside the marines there were some engineers. And how about M Company of the 23rd regiment of the 2nd Division? It lost in one day at Chateau-Thierry all its men but seven. And did the general forget the 3rd Division between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans? Don’t be like that brigadier general, and don’t be like that American officer returning on the Lapland who told the British at his table he was glad to get home after cleaning up the mess which the British had made. Resemble as little as possible our present Secretary of the Navy. Avoid boasting. Our contribution to victory was quite enough without boasting. The head-master of one of our great schools has put it thus to his schoolboys who fought: Some people had to raise a hundred dollars. After struggling for years they could only raise seventy-five. Then a man came along and furnished the remaining necessary twenty-five dollars. That is a good way to put it. What good would our twenty-five dollars have been, and where should we have been, if the other fellows hadn’t raised the seventy-five dollars first?”
My task is done. I have discussed with as much brevity as I could the three foundations of our ancient grudge against England: our school textbooks, our various controversies from the Revolution to the Alaskan boundary dispute, and certain differences in customs and manners. Some of our historians to whom I refer are themselves affected by the ancient grudge. You will see this if you read them; you will find the facts, which they give faithfully, and you will also find that they often (and I think unconsciously) color such facts as are to England’s discredit and leave pale such as are to her credit, just as we remember the Alabama, and forget the Lancashire cotton-spinners. You cannot fail to find, unless your anti-English complex tilts your judgment incurably, that England has been to us, on the whole, very much more friendly than unfriendly--if not at the beginning, certainly at the end of each controversy. What an anti-English complex can do in the face of 1914, is hard to imagine: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Boers, all Great Britain’s colonies, coming across the world to pour their gold and their blood out for her! She did not ask them; she could not force them; of their own free will they did it. In the whole story of mankind such a splendid tribute of confidence and loyalty has never before been paid to any nation.