2.  As the world stands, the United States and Great Britain must work together and stand together to keep the predatory nations in order.  A League to Enforce Peace and the President’s idea of disentangling alliances are all in the right direction, but vague and general and cumbersome, a sort of bastard children of Neutrality. The thing, the only thing is—­a perfect understanding between the English-speaking peoples.  That’s necessary, and that’s all that’s necessary.  We must boldly take the lead in that.  I frankly tell my friends here that the English have got to throw away their damned arrogance and their insularity and that we Americans have got to throw away our provincial ignorance ("What is abroad to us?"), hang our Irish agitators and shoot our hyphenates and bring up our children with reverence for English history and in the awe of English literature.  This is the only job now in the world worth the whole zeal and energy of all first-class, thoroughbred English-speaking men. We must lead.  We are natural leaders.  The English must be driven to lead.  Item:  We must get their lads into our universities, ours into theirs.  They don’t know how to do it, except the little driblet of Rhodes men.  Think this out, remembering what fools we’ve been about exchange professors with Germany!  How much good could Fons Smith[37] do in a thousand years, on such an errand as he went on to Berlin?  And the English don’t know how to do it.  They are childish (in some things) beyond belief.  An Oxford or Cambridge man never thinks of going back to his university except about twice a lifetime when his college formally asks him to come and dine.  Then he dines as docilely as a scared Freshman.  I am a D.C.L. of Oxford.  I know a lot of their faculty.  They are hospitality itself.  But I’ve never yet found out one important fact about the university.  They never tell me.  I’ve been down at Cambridge time and again and stayed with the Master of one of the colleges.  I can no more get at what they do and how they do it than I could get at the real meaning of a service in a Buddhist Temple.  I have spent a good deal of time with Lord Rayleigh, who is the Chancellor of Cambridge University.  He never goes there.  If he were to enter the town, all the men in the university would have to stop their work, get on their parade-day gowns, line-up by precedent and rank and go to meet him and go through days of ceremony and incantations.  I think the old man has been there once in five years.  Now this mediaevalism must go—­or be modified.  You fellers who have universities must work a real alliance—­a big job here.  But to go on.

The best informed English opinion is ripe for a complete working understanding with us.  We’ve got to work up our end—­get rid of our ignorance of foreign affairs, our shirt-sleeve, complaining kind of diplomacy, our sport of twisting the lion’s tail and such