you, and a time will come 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 think about them.  They follow the phases of the war in Great Britain, the strain, the blunderings, the tenacity, the onset of conscription in an essentially non-military community, with the complete understanding of a people similarly circumstanced, differing only by scale and distance.  They have been through something of the sort already; they may have something of the sort happen again.  It had not occurred to them hitherto how parallel we were.  They begin to have inklings of how much more parallel we may presently become.