at war a hundred years
ago. The news of Austerlitz, brought to him during his illness, is said
to have killed him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a decade,
and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens even heavier than
Pitt's, happily retains his health; and his is the indomitable spirit
characteristic of the new Britain as well as of the old. For it is a new
Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformed
Britain, a Britain modernized and democratized. Like the Englishman who,
when he first witnessed a performance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," cried
out, "How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen!" the American who
lunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim: "How different from
Lord North and Palmerston!" We have, I fear, been too long accustomed
to interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what they
represented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an inimical
aristocracy. Three out of the five men who form the war cabinet of an
empire are of what would once have been termed an "humble origin."
One was, if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General Smuts,
unofficially associated with this council, not many years ago was in
arms against Britain in South Africa, and the prime minister himself
is the son of a Welsh tailor. A situation that should mollify the most
exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats!

I listened to many speeches and explanations of the prejudice that
existed in the mind of the dyed-in-the-wool American against England,
and the reason most frequently given was the "school-book" reason;
our histories kept the feeling alive. Now; there is no doubt that the
histories out of which we were taught made what psychologists would
call "action patterns," or "complexes," in our brains, just as the
school-books have made similar complexes in the brains of German
children and prepared them for this war. But, after all, there was a
certain animus behind the histories. Boiled down, the sentiment was one
against the rule of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had it
long before the separation took place. The Middle-Western farmer has no
prejudice against France, because France is a republic. The French are
lovable, and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can give them.
But Britain is still nominally a monarchy; and our patriot thinks of its
people very much as the cowboy used to regard citizens of New York. They
all lived