phy.

America must now contribute what Britain and France, with all their
energies and resources and determination, have hitherto been unable
to contribute. It must not be men, money, and material alone, but some
quality that America has had in herself during her century and a half
of independent self-realization. Mr. Chesterton, in writing about the
American Revolution, observes that the real case for the colonists is
that they felt that they could be something which England would not help
them to be. It is, in fact, the only case for separation. What may
be called the English tradition of democracy, which we inherit, grows
through conflicts and differences, through experiments and failures and
successes, toward an intellectualized unity,--experiments by states,
experiments by individuals, a widely spread development, and new
contributions to the whole.

Democracy has arrived at the stage when it is ceasing to be national and
selfish.

It must be said of England, in her treatment of her colonies subsequent
to our Revolution, that she took this greatest of all her national
blunders to heart. As a result, Canada and Australia and New Zealand
have sent their sons across the seas to fight for an empire that
refrains from coercion; while, thanks to the policy of the British
Liberals--which was the expression of the sentiment of the British
nation--we have the spectacle today of a Botha and a Smuts fighting
under the Union Jack.

And how about Ireland? England has blundered there, and she admits it
freely. They exist in England who cry out for the coercion of Ireland,
and who at times have almost had their way. But to do this, of course,
would be a surrender to the German contentions, an acknowledgment of the
wisdom of the German methods against which she is protesting with all
her might. Democracy, apparently, must blunder on until that question
too, is solved.

V

Many of those picturesque features of the older England, that stir us by
their beauty and by the sense of stability and permanence they convey,
will no doubt disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the great
estates, some of which date from Norman times; I am thinking of
the aristocracy, which we Americans repudiated in order to set up
a plutocracy instead. Let us hope that what is fine in it will
be preserved, for there is much. By the theory of the British
constitution--that unwritten but very real document--in return for
honours, emoluments,