Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/694



UCH has been said in these latter days of the good understanding, or the better understanding, which has established itself between the two great English-speaking peoples on the two shores of the Atlantic. This specific cordiality does not include the Irish, on the eastern shore, possibly because they are taking so much to their ancestral Erse that they can hardly be called English-speaking, or the Canadians on the western shore, where the close contact of their interests with ours is not favorable to the growth of sentiment; but, upon the whole, the understanding is fairly broad, and the question concerning it is how to deepen and confirm it. At present it would be easy to exaggerate its facts. Mr. George Ade, whom Mr. Andrew Lang cannot, on his conscience, accept as a humorist, has noted in the case of a coal-dealer going to Europe from a small town on a branch road in the Middle West that the unintroduced American traveller is not always welcomed at the dock by titled Englishmen; the only Englishmen who did welcome the coal-dealer anywhere were those who were pecuniarily interested in him, such as porters, waiters, cabmen, and publicans.

It is perhaps a cynical view of the case, and there must be exceptions to the coal-dealer's experience; yet it may be doubted whether the intermarriage of our plutocracy with the British aristocracy has operated to the social advantage of all the Americans landing in England. Probably the same want of logical effect is noted by Englishmen coming to America, with possibly greater disappointment. The belief in the political usefulness of high matrimonial contracts among the flower of the two countries is said to prevail rather more in England than here, where it is a favorite superstition of society journalism rather than a popular conviction. In fact, Mrs. Jeannette Duncan Cotes, in her very amusing satire, "Those Delightful Americans" (the burlesque is only a little pushed), makes us observe that the average American would be willing to have the millionaire follow his daughter with all his dollars when she marries abroad, so that the average American could have a better chance to make some dollars for himself in their exile. It may not be so bad as this, quite, but we believe that the truth lies in some such direction, and we are quite sure that the vast general public with us would regard with indifference the marriage of every moneyed American maiden with every moneyless English nobleman; or experience in such an event only the sort of kindly pleasure which any high act of circus imparts.

Then, if the international marriages are not the basis of our good understanding with the English, it may well be asked what is. Many people think it came about, if we grant its existence, through the mystical support which England gave us in the war we made a few years ago upon Spain, when it was believed by our more impressionable publicists that England stood ready not only to back us in case Spain miraculously got the better of us, but was silently figuring about, and letting the other nations know that she would not suffer any interference in the fight, in case we got the better of Spain. Hard upon this situation developed another in which two kindred peoples could hardly fail to draw closely together, if there is any reason in human events at all. At the end of the Spanish war we found ourselves embarrassed with the task of destroying an infant republic in the Philippines, and almost at the same moment Great Britain had laid upon her the duty of destroying an adolescent republic in South Africa. Of the two, ours was the more odious office, but we had the full sympathy of Great Britain in it, and we were in honor, in common decency, bound to reciprocate her kindness. It was a dose, for we had always professed a tenderness for republics, but we swallowed the dose, and we believe it was this rather than those plutocratic and aristocratic intermarriages which awakened the sense of consanguinity and community of civiliza-