It is a relief to turn from the quarrels and jealousies of distracted Europe to contemplate the majestic edifice of Anglo-American friendship.

We can best serve the cause of Anglo-American friendship if we examine the past as well as the present.

As a nation, we have short memories. We fight and forget. But others remember.

The founders of America fled from Britain to escape persecution. Tyranny — or what can be more disastrous than tyranny, a purblind, pettifogging legalism — pursued them across the Atlantic.

Taxed by men they had never seen, sitting in a Parliament in whose deliberations they had no voice, the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Virginian Cavaliers raised, together, the standard of revolt.

But we forget — and America remembers — that the first shots in the War of Independence were fired by British troops — "unmolested and unprovoked," says the contemporary Massachusetts Spy — on men who offered no resistance.

The long war, in which German mercenaries were lavishly if unsuccessfully employed, was ended by a grudging peace. Suspicion and bitterness remained.

France beheaded a king — and crowned an emperor whose armies trampled the map of Europe. At death grips with Napoleon, Britain blockaded the coast of the United States, seized American ships, and pressed American sailors into service on her men-o'-war.

The resulting War of 1812 to 1815 was to Britain only a vexatious diversion. But it was a life-and-death struggle to the United States, and its incidents left an indelible impress on the American mind.

Indian tribes, fighting as allies of England, killed and ravaged. Fort Dearborn, on the site where Chicago now stands, was stormed by painted savages and the entire garrison massacred. Women and children were murdered.

A British fleet sailed up the Potomac to Washington, burned the Capitol and the government offices and the President's house.

It is doubtful if one in ten thousand of our population has ever heard of that raid of reprisals.

But we should remember — vividly for centuries after the event, if London were, even for a day, in the hands of an American force that destroyed Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Whitehall, and Downing Street.

True, we should also remember the strong ties of blood and race that bound the Americans and ourselves. But might not these make the injury all the worse?

In the American Civil War, again, it seemed to the North that we thought more of cotton than of principles. A majority of Englishmen, including Mr. Gladstone, believed that it was impossible to maintain the Union by force of arms, and were prepared — at any rate, at one point in the struggle — to recognize the Confederate States. There was a moment when Britain and America almost blundered into a war which would inevitably have established the independence of the South and perpetuated the shame of slavery.

During the early stages of the last war, many awkward incidents arose from differing interpretations of neutral rights. But for the U-boat campaign and its atrocities, the blockade of Germany might have led to a grave crisis in Anglo-American relations. In the long series of quarrels and disputes, Britain was not always in the wrong nor America always in the right. Usually at the root of our differences there was the clash of incompatible rights, or sheer misunderstanding.

We have done terrible things to each other through misunderstanding. Odious chapters of our common history are stained with blood and the hatreds that are fed by blood. Wrongs, revenges, insults, calumnies, battles, and executions crowd the pages, with noble, suffering, or conquering figures silhouetted against the dull red haze.

To us, however, these conflicts have, as a rule, been aide issues. That has helped us to forget. And sometimes we have wanted to forget because we were ashamed.

But America was concerned more vitally, and some of the most glorious episodes of her history are bound up with these tragic happenings. So Americans have a double reason to remember. The cheers of vanished armies, the rumbling of long-silenced cannonades still come down to them today.

We must remember that for over a century America has attracted immigrants not only from Britain but from all Europe. There is a great German population in the Middle West. Swedes and Italians are to be found everywhere. Of every hundred American citizens, nine are Negroes. Practically every nation on earth has contributed its quota to this vast melting pot.

These foreign elements may learn to speak English, but will they think English thoughts?

Though those of European stock may be fused into the nation of their adoption and become "hundred-percent Americans," it can only be by processes which tend to separate the American mind from ours.

Yet when all has been urged and weighed it still remains true that the conceptions which unite us are incomparably stronger than those that divide; that they are vital, not morbid; that they embrace the future rather than the past.

The mischances of history have riven and sundered us, but our roots lie deep in the same rich soil. The great Republic of the West, no less than the British Empire, sprang from the loins of Shakespeare's England. The beginnings of American history are to be found not across the Atlantic but where the Thames flows between green lawns and woodlands down to a gray sea.

Britain and America are joint sharers in a great inheritance of law and letters. Our political institutions, under the mask of outward difference, bear the marks of a common origin and a common aim.

We are both democracies — and today our countries are the last great strongholds of parliamentary government and individual liberty.

It is the English-speaking nations who, almost alone, keep alight the torch of Freedom.

These things are a powerful incentive to collaboration. With nations, as with individuals, if you care deeply for the same things, and these things are threatened, it is natural to work together to preserve them.

Words cannot be effaced by time. The greatest tie of all is language. There is nothing like that.

Ancient alliances, solemn treaties, faithful services given and repaid, important mutual interests — not all these taken together are equal, or nearly equal, to the bond of a common tongue.

Words are the only things that last forever. The most tremendous monuments or prodigies of engineering crumble under the hand of time. The Pyramids molder, the bridges rust, the canals fill up, grass covers the railway track; but words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past but with all their pristine vital force.

Leaping across the gulf of time, they light the world for us today.

It is this power of words — words written in the past; words spoken at this moment; words printed in the newspapers; words sent speeding through the ether in a transatlantic broadcast; the flashing interchange of thought — that is our principal agency of union. Its work must continue indefinitely — will continue, indeed, on an ever larger scale.

With every new school that is opened, with every book that is printed, with every improvement in travel, with every film, with every record, identity of language gathers greater power and applies its processes more often to more people.

It is for us to see that this great lever of a common language is rightly used. We must employ it to explore and, so far as possible, compose the differences between us, and to bring to the surface our underlying identity of outlook and purpose.

Above all, we must use it to understand each other.

We, on this side of the Atlantic, know too little of American history. Not only are we ignorant of the full extent of our past quarrels with the United States, but we have only the most superficial comprehension of that great westward drive which carried civilization across a continent.

We have heard of Buffalo Bill. Thanks to The Plainsman, we have been introduced to Wild Bill Hickok. But we see the story through a reducing glass.

The Odyssey of a people has been an individual adventure; the epic has been dwarfed to the proportions of a fairy tale.

We talk glibly of the Monroe Doctrine. How many of us understand it? How many of us realize that for over a hundred years the United States has been the guarantor of the whole of the Western Hemisphere against aggression from without?

Such is the practical effect of the Monroe Doctrine.

I should like to see American history taught in our schools concurrently with our own island story. It might help to correct the popular idea of the United States as a land of money-grubbers and multiple divorces.

But that conception should also be assailed directly. No doubt there is a certain excuse for it. It is easier to secure a divorce in certain American states than it is here.

The American divorce law is merely the logical development of ideas held nearly 400 years ago by the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, and in the seventeenth century by the English Puritans.

Divorce, however, may be available for those who desire it without affecting the permanence of marriage.

For the vast majority of Americans, as for the vast majority of British people, marriage is a contract for life, a partnership which only death dissolves.

The charge of money-grubbing arises directly from the needs and circumstances of a dynamically expanding society. The great tasks which Americans have set themselves for a century have been in the economic field.

Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, Jackson, Adams, and Marshall — these men, soldiers, statesmen, lawyers, made a nation. They fashioned the instruments of government and established the broad lines on which American politics were to develop.

But when they leave the stage the searchlight of history wheels — save for the years of the Civil War — to the struggle to subdue and utilize a continent.

That struggle has necessarily and rightly taken the first place in the life of the American people. So business to the American is more than the means of earning a living or making a fortune; it is that career of interest, ambition, possibly even glory, which in the older world is afforded by the learned professions and state services, military and civilian.

A young American wishing to play a worthy part in the control of affairs directs himself instinctively toward the managing of factories, railroads, banks, stores, or some other of the thousand and one varieties of industrial or commercial enterprise.

Practically all the prizes of American life are to be gained in business. There, too, is the main path of useful service to the nation. Nearly all that is best and most active in the manhood and ability of the United States goes into business with the same sense of serving the country as a son of an old family in England might enter Parliament.

It is this concentration of American talent on business that has gained for the United States the title, The Land of the Dollar.

But, for the best type of Americans, dollars have been a by-product in business activity rather than its main aim.

On the other hand, dollars have played too great a part in American politics.

It is as a result of this that today, when the phase of intensive economic expansion is over, the flower of American manhood still regards the political scene with suspicion and distaste.

We, in this country, must try to understand these things, just as we must seek to correct American misconceptions of England.

Some of these are already being corrected. Americans have learned by bitter experience that to provide for the casualties of civilization by means of social insurance is not necessarily the sign of an effete society.

There are many ways in which both countries might, with advantage, learn from each other.

It is encouraging that so many American books are being read in England and so many English books in America. The literature of a nation is the best interpreter of its spirit. Reading each other's books, we come to appreciate more clearly our fundamental kinship, and to see our differences in truer perspective.

The best British and American films carry this work of mutual illumination a stage farther.

But direct personal contact is still of the first importance. We cannot dispense with it.

British lecture tours in America have been of immense value in this respect. They have taken a number of people from this side of the Atlantic — myself among them — over a considerable part of the American continent and enabled them to meet large numbers of American citizens of varying types.

These Americans have thus learned something of England; the lecturers have brought home with them a new and truer picture of America.

The friendliness of Americans to the traveler from Britain, their unfailing kindliness, their generous hospitality, are something to marvel at.

In spite of "British reserve," some of us manage to make friends. Ties are formed strong enough to defy time and distance. We cherish pleasant memories of American homes, and they of ours.

Such friendships make a notable contribution to the cause of Anglo-American understanding. It is in the homes, not the hotels, of a nation that we each can learn the truth about our people.

Here I might make an appeal to those British business men who have dealings with the United States. When Americans call upon you over here, don't be content with purely business contacts. Ask them to your homes and your clubs, so that they may see something of the real England. The social life of America is built mainly around business. When an Englishman crosses the Atlantic on a commercial mission, his business card opens to him a whole world of American social life. Let us respond in kind.

In these various ways the two great divisions of the English-speaking race may be drawn closer together.

Private contacts and friendships between individuals, by increasing the area of understanding and good will, pave the way for a closer understanding between the two nations and their governments, with all that this would mean to the peace of the world.

In spite of all impediments, Britain and America have never been closer in aim and purpose than now, or nearer to full mutual understanding.

Our ways have diverged in the past. I believe that, increasingly, they will lie together in the future.

We shall certainly follow the path of our joint destiny more prosperously, and far more safely, if we tread it together like good companions.

Publication Date: May 31, 1941