ome when they will be
sticking up under your nose. There is no real peace but the peace of the
whole world, and that is only to be kept by the whole world resisting
and suppressing aggression wherever it arises. To anyone who watches the
American Press, this realisation has been more and more manifest. From
dreams of aloofness and ineffable superiority, America comes round very
rapidly to a conception of an active participation in the difficult
business of statecraft. She is thinking of alliances, of throwing her
weight and influence upon the side of law and security. No longer a
political Thoreau in the woods, a sort of vegetarian recluse among
nations, a being of negative virtues and unpremeditated superiorities,
she girds herself for a manly part in the toilsome world of men.

So far as I can judge, the American mind is eminently free from any
sentimental leaning towards the British. Americans have a traditional
hatred of the Hanoverian monarchy, and a democratic disbelief in
autocracy. They are far more acutely aware of differences than
resemblances. They suspect every Englishman of being a bit of a
gentleman and a bit of a flunkey. I have never found in America anything
like that feeling common in the mass of English people that prevents the
use of the word "foreigner" for an American; there is nothing to
reciprocate the sympathy and pride that English and Irish republicans
and radicals feel for the States. Few Americans realise that there are
such beings as English republicans.

What has linked Americans with the British hitherto has been very
largely the common language and literature; it is only since the war
began that there seems to have been any appreciable development of
fraternal feeling. And that has been not so much discovery of a mutual
affection as the realisation of a far closer community of essential
thought and purpose than has hitherto been suspected. The Americans,
after thinking the matter out with great frankness and vigour, do
believe that Britain is on the whole fighting against aggression and not
for profit, that she is honestly backing France and Belgium against an
intolerable attack, and that the Hohenzollern Empire is a thing that
needs discrediting and, if possible, destroying in the interests of all
humanity, Germany included.

America has made the surprising discovery that, allowing for their
greater nearness, the British are thinking about these things almost
exactly as Americans thi