A Sulgrave Institution has been organized--Sulgrave Manor being the ancestral home of George Washington--which has raised $125,000 in England and is raising a fund of $1,000,000 in this country. The use of the fund was explained by John A. Stewart, chairman of the board of governors, who said it was “to establish scholarships in English universities and later in this country, and also to refit Sulgrave Manor.” King George was one of the first contributors to the English campaign, he said.
On June 28, 1919, the King of England sent by cable a message to the President, in which he said:
Mr. President, it is on this day one of our happiest thoughts that the American and British people, brothers in arms, will continue forever to be brothers in peace. United before by language, traditions, kinship and ideals, there has been set upon our fellowship the sacred seal of common sacrifice.
During the Paris peace conference the New York “Times” of February 13, 1919, in a Paris correspondence, declared that there was complete Anglo-American concord, the program of the conference revealing a fundamental identity of aims and the understanding between English-speaking peoples being never so complete as today. Former Attorney General Wickersham took the lead in proposing to remit England’s enormous debt to us, explaining that we owe them that much for “holding back the Huns,” and the proposition has been received with great favor by many of the 18,000 additional millionaires created by the war, meaning, of course, that England’s burden shall be transferred to the shoulders of the American tax payers.
Among the advocates of the merger are General Pershing, Lord Balfour, Chauncey M. Depew, James M. Beck, Lord Grey and the American bankers and great industrials, like Charles M. Schwab. Surrounded by distinguished men of England, General Pershing, in the Military Committee room of the House of Commons, dwelt with special pathos on the proposed Anglo-Saxon brotherhood. “I feel that the discharged and demobilized soldiers will carry with them into private life,” he said, “the necessity for closer and firmer union, =and that we may be united as peoples likewise forever=.” Subsequently he was made a Knight of the Bath by King George.