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22 amicable issue. And we all know that a negotiation is already half assured of success when it is approached by both parties in a sincere and warm spirit of conciliation and good understanding. Such sentiment therefore, although it certainly will not obviate all possible differences, may be of exceedingly good service in helping to prevent their running into needless conflicts.

But if this is true with regard to England, is it not equally true with regard to the other members of the Germanic family? Is it not especially true with regard to old Germany, the mother of them all? Her soil is the original birthplace of those motive powers of character, those mental tendencies and those ideal aspirations which most distinguish the Germanic race from others—peculiarities common to Germanic peoples which more or less distinctly reveal themselves in their fundamental conceptions of right and wrong, their collective consciences, their ideals of liberty, their methods of truth-seeking, their philosophies and an almost endless variety of things denoting common instincts. I cannot undertake here to trace these peculiarities in all their various manifestations, but would point out one of them as an example which is strikingly characteristic.

I mention this merely as one of the outgrowths of that blood-kinship which utters itself in many other and more important respects, reminding us that the sentiment that “blood is thicker than water” should have a more constant and comprehensive hearing than it has hitherto received. We all remember than until recently it was a favorite resort of the American demagogue to “twist the British lion's tail,” as it had been the habit of a certain class of Englishmen to revile the Yankee, and that these things were done in most cases without there being the slightest tangible reason for it, and not infrequently in a manner as if a war between the two nations would be a welcome pastime for each. This we have bravely overcome.

Similarly there was, little more than a year ago, an artificial excitement between the United States and Germany on the occasion of the Venezuela affair, which, inflamed by a sensational and unscrupulous press on both sides, pictured to us irreconcilable antagonisms between the two nations, and seemed to rush us into actual danger of hostilities, which might indeed have