h Chamberlain, "If I had had a larger fleet I would have taken
Uncle Sam by the scruff of the neck." Have you ever read what our own
fleet was like in those days? Or our Army? Lucky it was for us that we
had to deal only with Spain. And even the Spanish fleet would have been
a much graver opponent in Manila Bay, but for Lord Cromer. On its way
from Spain through the Suez Canal a formidable part of Spain's navy
stopped to coal at Port Said. There is a law about the coaling of
belligerent warships in neutral ports. Lord Cromer could have construed
that law just as well against us. His construction brought it about
that those Spanish ships couldn't get to Manila Bay in time to take part
against Admiral Dewey. The Spanish War revealed that our Navy could hit
eight times out of a hundred, and was in other respects unprepared and
utterly inadequate to cope with a first-class power. In consequence of
this, and the criticisms of our Navy Department, which Admiral Sims as
a young man had written, Roosevelt took the steps he did in his first
term. Three ticklish times in that Spanish War England stood our
friend against Germany. When it broke out, German agents approached
Mr. Balfour, proposing that England join in a European combination in
Spain's favor. Mr. Balfour's refusal is common knowledge, except to the
monomaniac with his complex. Next came the action of Lord Cromer, and
finally that moment in Manila Bay when England took her stand by our
side and Germany saw she would have to fight us both, if she fought at
all.

If you saw any German or French papers at the time of our troubles
with Spain, you saw undisguised hostility. If you have talked with any
American who was in Paris during that April of 1898, your impression
will be more vivid still. There was an outburst of European hate for
us. Germany, France, and Austria all looked expectantly to England--and
England disappointed their expectations. The British Press was as much
for us as the French and German press were hostile; the London Spectator
said: "We are not, and we do not pretend to be, an agreeable people, but
when there is trouble in the family, we know where our hearts are."

In those same days (somewhere about the third week in April, 1898), at
the British Embassy in Washington, occurred a scene of significance and
interest, which has probably been told less often than that interview
between Mr. Balfour and the Kaiser's emissary in London. The British
Ambassa