On the other hand, a long list of occasions could very
easily be compiled on which we had helped them in some common cause,
from the days of Marlborough to those of Blucher. Until the twentieth
century had turned they had no possible cause for political hatred
against us. In commerce our record was even more clear. Never in any way
had we interfered with that great development of trade which has turned
them from one of the poorest to one of the richest of European States.
Our markets were open to them untaxed, while our own manufactures paid
20 per cent. in Germany. The markets of India, of Egypt, and of every
portion of the empire which had no self-appointed tariff, were as open
to German goods as to British ones. Nothing could possibly have been
more generous than our commercial treatment. No doubt there was some
grumbling when cheap imitations of our own goods were occasionally found
to oust the originals from their markets. Such a feeling was but natural
and human. But in all matters of commerce, as in all matters political
before the dawn of this century, they have no shadow of a grievance
against us.

* * * * *

And yet they hated us with a most bitter hatred, a hatred which long
antedates the days when we were compelled to take a definite stand
against them. In all sorts of ways this hatred showed itself, in the
diatribes of professors, in the pages of books, in the columns of the
press. Usually it was a sullen, silent dislike. Sometimes it would flame
up suddenly into bitter utterance, as at the time of the unseemly
dispute around the deathbed of the Emperor's father, or on the occasion
of the Jameson Raid. And yet this bitter antagonism was in no way
reciprocated in this country. If a poll had been taken at any time up to
the end of the century as to which European country was our natural
ally, the vote would have gone overwhelmingly for Germany. "America
first and then Germany" would have been the verdict of nine men out of
ten. But then occurred two events which steadied the easy-going Briton,
and made him look more intently and with a more questioning gaze at his
distant cousin over the water. Those two events were the Boer war and
the building of the German fleet. The first showed us, to our amazement,
the bitter desire which Germany had to do us some mischief, the second
made us realize that she was forging a weapon with which that desire
might be fulfilled.

_The Boer