Let it be granted that grave issues have arisen in the past to separate us; yet, after all, our interests and our sympathies, like our national histories, have more in common than they have apart.  The progress of each country now reacts for good on the other.[2]

[2] In this connection the testimony of Captain Alfred T. Mahan, in his recent work, “The Problem of Asia,” is worth quoting here.  He says (p. 187), speaking of our late war with Spain:  “The writer has been assured, by an authority in which he entirely trusts, that to a proposition made to Great Britain to enter into a combination to constrain the use of our [United States] power,—­as Japan was five years ago constrained by the joint action of Russia, France, and Germany,—­the reply [of Great Britain] was not only a positive refusal to enter into such a combination [against the United States], but an assurance of active resistance to it if attempted...Call such an attitude [on the part of England toward the United States] friendship, or policy, as you will—­the name is immaterial; the fact is the essential thing and will endure, because it rests upon solid interest.”

If we consider the total combined population of the United States and of the British Empire, we find that to-day upwards of 150,000,000 people speak the English tongue and are governed by the fundamental principles of that Common Law which has its root in English soil.  This population holds possession of more than 15,000,000 square miles of the earth’s surface,—­an area much larger than that of the united continents of North America and Europe.  By far the greater part of the wealth and power of the globe is theirs.

They have expanded by their territorial and colonial growth as no other people have.  They have absorbed and assimilated the multitudes of emigrants from every quarter of the globe that have poured into their dominions.

The result is that the inhabitants of the British Isles, of Australia, of New Zealand, of a part of South Africa, of the United States, and of Canada practically form one great Anglo-Saxon race,[1] diverse in origin, separated by distance, but everywhere exhibiting the same spirit of intelligent enterprise and of steady, resistless growth.  Thus considered, America and England are necessary one to the other.  Their interests now and in the future are essentially the same.  Bothe contries are virtually pledged to make every effort to maintain liberty and self-government, and also to maintain mutual peace by arbitration.

[1] Such apparent exceptions as the Dutch in South Africa, the French in Canada, and the Negroes in the United States do not essentially affect the truth of this statement, since in practice the people of these races uphold the great fundamental principles on which all Anglo-Saxon government rests.

In view of these facts let us say, with an eminent thinker[2] whose intellectual home was on both sides of the Atlantic:  “Whatever there be between the two nations to forget and forgive, is forgotten and forgiven.  If the two peoples, which are one, be true to their duty, who can doubt that the destinies of the world must be in large measure committed to their hands?”