Page:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918).djvu/145

Rh to knit our affections than to be fighting once more, side by side, in the same cause."

As I write this, nearly a hundred years later, the daily paper before me announces in great headlines the wild enthusiasm greeting the arrival of the first American troops in London. They are there to fight once more, side by side, in the same cause. The same old cause, against despotism. They are now keeping faith with George Canning, who "emancipated a continent at one stroke." Curiously enough, the old Revolutionary patriot seems even to have foreseen the scream of the doubter who in similar circumstances cries out against fighting for England. He goes on to say, recently quoted by the Independent, and as true to-day as when it was written:

"The war in which the present proposition might engage us, should that be its consequence, is not her war, but ours. Its object is to introduce and establish the American system of keeping out of our land all foreign