When he asked me how we were to come closer together—­“closer
     together, with your old-time distrust of us and with your
     remoteness?”—­I stopped him at “remoteness.”

“That’s the reason,” I said.  “Your idea of our ‘remoteness.’  ‘Remoteness’ from what?  From you?  Are you not betraying the only real difficulty of a closer sympathy by assuming that you are the centre of the world?  When you bring yourself to think of the British Empire as a part of the American Union—­mind you, I am not saying that you would be formally admitted—­but when you are yourselves in close enough sympathy with us to wish to be admitted, the chief difficulty of a real union of thought will be gone.  You recall Lord Rosebery’s speech in which he pictured the capital of the British Empire being moved to Washington if the American Colonies had been retained under the Crown?  Well, it was the Crown that was the trouble, and the capital of English-speaking folk has been so moved and you still remain ‘remote.’  Drop ‘remote’ from your vocabulary and your thought and we’ll actually be closer together.”

It’s an enormous problem—­just how to bring these countries closer together.  Perhaps nothing can do it but some great common danger or some great common adventure.  But this is one of the problems of your lifetime.  England can’t get itself clean loose from the continent nor from continental mediaevalism; and with that we can have nothing to do.  Men like Kerr think that somehow a great push toward democracy here will be given by the war.  I don’t quite see how.  So far the aristocracy have made perhaps the best showing in defence of English liberty.  They are paying the bills of the war; they have sent their sons; these sons have died like men; and their parents never whimper.  It’s a fine breed for such great uses as these.  There was a fine incident in the House of Lords the other day, which gave the lie to the talk that one used to hear here about “degeneracy.”  Somebody made a perfectly innocent proposal to complete a list of peers and peers’ sons who had fallen in the war—­a thing that will, of course, be done, just as a similar list will be compiled of the House of Commons, of Oxford and Cambridge Universities.  But one peer after another objected vigorously lest such a list appear immodest.  “We are but doing our duty.  Let the matter rest there.”

In a time like this the aristocracy proves its worth.  In fact, all aristocracies grew chiefly out of wars, and perhaps they are better for wars than a real democracy.  Here, you see, you run into one of those contradictions in life and history which make the world so hard to change....

You know there are some reasons why peace, whenever it may come, will bring problems as bad as the problems of the war itself.  I can think of no worse task than the long conferences of the Allies with their conflicting interests