between nations are next
to impossible. If you escape one danger of offending, you are sure to
give offence in some other way, they seem to say. They are hysterical
in their self-consciousness, "as if a man did flee from a lion and a
bear met him, or went in the house and leaned his hand on the wall and
a serpent bit him." Sir Edward Grey writes on this subject: "I
sometimes think that half the difficulties of foreign policy arise
from the exceeding ingenuity of different countries in attributing
motives and intentions to the governments of each other. As far as I
can observe, the press of various countries is much more fertile in
inventing motives and intentions for the governments of the different
countries than the foreign ministers of these countries are
themselves. Foreign governments and our own government live from hand
to mouth and have fewer deep plans than people might suppose. There is
an old warning that you should not spend too much time in looking at
the dark cupboard for the black cat that is not there, and I think if
sometimes we were a little less suspicious of deep design or motive
that the affairs of the world would progress more smoothly."

The trouble lies in our undertaking the impossible, to the neglect of
the obvious and the possible. The basic fact of nationality is a
preference for our own ways, customs, and habits over those of other
people. If the Chinese and Japanese, the Servians and Albanians, the
English and the Germans liked one another as well as they like their
own, there would be no nationalism to protect or to preserve. Such
racial and traditional liking of nation for nation is impossible of
achievement. No journeyings, speechifyings, banquets, or compliments
will bring it about. On the contrary, I am not sure that it is not
these very differences which cheer us and give us a new flavor in our
pleasure in living, when we cross the Atlantic, the Channel, or the
Rhine. What we should strive for is not social and racial absorption,
but social and racial difference and distinction, with that pride in
our own which makes for patience in the understanding of others.

It is the petty, self-conscious American who hates the English, the
provincial Englishman who hates the German, the socially insecure
German who hates the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American.
Those of us who are poised, secure, satisfied, and at bottom proud of
our race, our breeding, and our country, are neither irr