Even as I write I read in the “British Review” how Admiral Sir Percy Scott attacks Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, dubs him the “laughing-stock of the fleet,” accuses him of publishing in his book The Betrayal a series of “deliberate falsehoods,” and concludes by saying that the gallant Admiral is “not a seaman.”

And it is a fleet commanded by such Admirals as these that is to sweep the German navy from the seas!

During the Crimean war the allied British and French navies distinguished themselves by their signal failure to effect the reduction of such minor fortresses as Sveaborg, Helsingfors, and the fortified lighthouses upon the Gulf of Finland.  Their respective Admirals fired their severest broadsides into each other, and the bombardment of the forts was silenced by the smart interchange of nautical civilities between the two flagships.  Napoleon III, who sought an explanation of this failure of his fleet, was given a reply that I cannot refrain from recommending to the British Admiralty to-day.  “Well, Sire,” replied the French diplomatist, who knew the circumstances, “both the Admirals were old women, but ours was at least a lady.”  If British Admirals cannot put to sea without incurring this risk, they might, at least, take the gunboat woman with them to prescribe the courtesies of naval debate.

That England to-day loves America, no one who goes to the private opinions of Englishmen, instead of to their public utterances, or the interested eulogies of their press, can for a moment believe.

The old dislike is there, the old supercilious contempt for the “Yankee” and all his ways.  “God’s Englishman” no more loves an American citizen now than in 1846 when he seriously contemplated an invasion of the United States, and the raising of the negro-slave population against his “Anglo-Saxon kinsmen.”

To-day, when we hear so much of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance it may be well to revert to that page of history.  For it will show us that if a British premier to-day can speak as Mr. Asquith did on December 16th, 1912, in his reference to the late American Ambassador as “a great American and a kinsman,” one “sprung from a common race, speaking our own language, sharing with us by birth as by inheritance not a few of our most cherished traditions and participating when he comes here by what I may describe as his natural right in our domestic interests and celebrations,” then this new-found kinship takes its birth not in a sense of common race, indeed, but in a very common fear of Germany.

In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in robbing the Irish people of their harvest in order that the work of the famine should be complete and that the then too great population of Ireland should be reduced within the limits “law and order” prescribed, either by starvation or flight to America.

Fleeing in hundreds and thousands from the rule of one who claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multitude exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish king shipped across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugitive Irish Nation found friendship, hope, and homes in the great Celtic Republic of the West.  All that was denied to them in their own ancient land they found in a new Ireland growing up across the Atlantic.