British fleet.  The next biggest fact is the American fleet, because of itself and still more because of the vast reserve power of the United States which it implies.  If these two fleets perfectly understand one another about the undesirability of wars of aggression, there’ll be no more big wars as long as this understanding continues.  Such an understanding calls for no treaty—­it calls only for courtesy.

     And there is no other peace-basis worth talking about—­by men who
     know how the world is governed.

Since I have lived here I have spent my days and nights, my poor brain, and my small fortune all most freely and gladly to get some understanding of the men who rule this Kingdom, and of the women and the customs and the traditions that rule these men—­to get their trick of thought, the play of their ideals, the working of their imagination, the springs of their instincts.  It is impossible for any man to know just how well he himself does such a difficult task—­how accurately he is coming to understand the sources and character of a people’s actions.  Yet, at the worst, I do know something about the British:  I know enough to make very sure of the soundness of my conclusion that they are necessary to us and we to them.  Else God would have permitted the world to be peopled in some other way.  And when we see that the world will be saved by such an artificial combination as England and Russia and France and Japan and Serbia, it calls for no great wisdom to see the natural way whereby it must be saved in the future.

For this reason every day that I have lived here it has been my conscious aim to do what I could to bring about a condition that shall make sure of this—­that, whenever we may have need of the British fleet to protect our shores or to prevent an aggressive war anywhere, it shall he ours by a natural impulse and necessity—­even without the asking.

I have found out that the first step toward that end is courtesy; that the second step is courtesy, and the third step—­such a fine and high courtesy (which includes courage) as the President showed in the Panama tolls controversy.  We have—­we and the British—­common aims and character.  Only a continuous and sincere courtesy—­over periods of strain as well as of calm—­is necessary for as complete an understanding as will be required for the automatic guidance of the world in peaceful ways.

Now, a difference is come between us—­the sort of difference that handled as between friends would serve only to bind us together with a sturdier respect.  We send a long lawyer’s Note, not discourteous but wholly uncourteous, which is far worse.  I am writing now only of the manner of the Note, not of its matter.  There is not a courteous word, nor a friendly phrase, nor a kindly turn in it, not an allusion even to an old acquaintance, to say nothing of an old friendship, not a word of thanks for courtesies or