It is time we gave thanks—indeed, it is more than time! Perhaps, had we seen more clearly into the future we might have given thanks long before this—thanks for our kinship with America—for the ties of blood, of language, of tradition, memory, and association which have made us, as some say, “cousins,” but as we prefer to believe, brothers—brothers in heart and soul, as we are to-day brothers-in-arms. Let it be admitted that we have not always quite understood each other. Small rancours, petty jealousies, trifling differences have arisen casually from time to time between the people of a great Empire and the people of a great Republic, which seem now but the merest gossamer cobwebs spun by the ever-working spiders of rumour and mischief, easily brushed away at a touch. The trumpet blast of a noble Cause has brought to our side our youngest comrade, alive with energy, passion, and enthusiasm, expressing in every attitude Tennyson’s eloquent lines:—
And we have taken our comrade by both hands, and have knelt with him under the great dome of St. Paul’s, giving our thanks to God for bringing us this, our brother; and we claim to say with Lincoln that we do not presume to ask the Almighty to be on our side, but we do pray that we may be on the side of the Almighty! If President Wilson’s “Declaration of War” against Germany means anything, it means that right and justice, freedom and truth, are all of God; and therefore to fight for the maintenance of these things is to fight for God’s own Law and Order. The one piece of eloquence which stands out in distinctive greatness amid all that has yet been spoken concerning our world-contest, is this “Declaration,” which will go down to posterity as matchless for high principle, reasonableness, and clearness of diction—an oration which no statesman of old time, whether Greek or Roman, has ever surpassed, in what we know of history. It should have been read aloud in every church, every school, every theatre, every public assembly, with as much impressiveness as a Pope’s “Encyclical,” and more!
Nothing do we need so much in this country as to “catch on” to some of the enthusiasm and eagerness which fires our American Ally, as he springs to our side in the battle under the bright stars of the “Old Glory.” He is young, ardent, and ready for anything—quick eyed, alert of brain, he means to “hustle”! Some of us need to be infected by this splendid youth. A curious lethargy clings to us at times—a kind of dumb spell. Is it excess of feeling? Or—is it sheer egotism? Our French friends marvel at the indifference we show at the victories just won by Sir Douglas Haig. They thought to see all London beflagged in the great soldier’s honour. Very certainly they had hoped the “Stars and Stripes” might be flown from every public building on the day of the President’s Declaration—but no!—not even in Stratford-on-Avon, that shrine of America’s devoted Shakespeare-Worship, was any sign given of the momentous event. Rather discreditable to Stratford, remembering that in peace times Shakespeare’s Town depends very much for its livelihood on its crowds of American visitors. But what does Shakespeare himself say?
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
And so shall the “Old Glory” help to make for us all the New!