This has not happened; and now, I think, it will not happen.  For one thing, the American colonists left us when already we had a great literature.  Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Spenser belong to America no less than to us, and America has never forgotten them.  The education which has been fostered in American schools and colleges keeps the whole nation in touch with the past.  Some of their best authors write in a style that Milton and Burke would understand and approve.  There is no more beautiful English prose than Nathaniel Hawthorne’s.  The best speeches of Abraham Lincoln, and, we may truly add, of President Wilson, are merely classic English.  During my own lifetime I am sure I have seen the speech usages of the two peoples draw closer together.  For one thing, we on this side now borrow, and borrow very freely, the more picturesque colloquialisms of America.  On informal occasions I sometimes brighten my own speech with phrases which I think I owe to one of the best of living American authors, Mr. George Ade, of Chicago, the author of Fables in Slang.  The press, the telegraph, the telephone, and the growing habit of travel bind us closer together every year; and the English that we speak, however rich and various it may be, is going to remain one and the same English, our common inheritance.

One question, the most important and difficult of all, remains to be asked.  Will this War, in its course and in its effects, tend to prevent or discourage later wars?  If the gains that it brings prove to be merely partial and national gains, if it exalts one nation by unjustly depressing another, and conquers cruelty by equal cruelty, then nothing can be more certain than that the peace of the world is farther off than ever.  When she was near her death, Edith Cavell, patriot and martyr, said that patriotism is not enough.  Every one who thinks on international affairs knows this; almost every one forgets it in time of war.  What can be done to prevent nations from appealing to the wild justice of revenge?

A League of Nations may do good, but I am surprised that any one who has imagination and a knowledge of the facts should entertain high hopes of it as a full solution.  There is a League of Nations to-day which has given a verdict against the Central Powers, and that verdict is being enforced by the most terrible War in all human history.  If the verdict had been given before the War began, it may be said, then Germany might have accepted it, and refrained.  So she might, but what then?  She would have felt herself wronged; she would have deferred the War, and, in ways that she knows so well, would have set about making a party for herself among the nations of the League.  Who can be confident that she would have failed either to divide her judges, or to accumulate such elements of strength that she might dare to defy them?  A League of Nations would work well only if its verdicts were loyally accepted by all the nations