Page:Victory at Sea - William Sowden Sims and Burton J. Hendrick.djvu/82

64 dim, abstract, perhaps even absurd; but in Great Britain, with the guns constantly booming almost within earshot of the people, the horrors of the situation were acutely realized. For this reason those American destroyers at Queenstown immediately became a symbol in the minds of the British people. They represented not only the material assistance which our limitless resources and our almost inexhaustible supply of men would bring to a cause which was really in desperate straits ; but they stood also for a great spiritual fact; for the kinship of the two great Anglo-Saxon peoples, which, although separated politically, had now joined hands to fight for the ideals upon which the civilization of both nations rested. In the preceding two years Great Britain had had her moments of doubt doubt as to whether the American people had remained true to the principles that formed the basis of their national life; the arrival of these ships immediately dispelled all such misgivings.

Almost instinctively the minds of the British people turned to the day, nearly three hundred years before, when the Mayflower sailed for the wilderness beyond the seas. The moving picture film, which depicted the arrival of our first destroyer division, and which was exhibited all over Great Britain to enthusiastic crowds, cleverly accentuated this idea. This film related how, in 1620, a few Englishmen had landed in North America; how these adventurers had laid the foundations of a new state based on English conceptions of justice and liberty; how they had grown great and prosperous; how the stupidity of certain British statesmen had forced them to declare their independence; how they had fought for this independence with the utmost heroism; how out of these disjointed British colonies they had founded one of the mightiest nations of history; and how now, when the liberties of mankind were endangered, the descendants of the old Mayflower pioneers had in their turn crossed the ocean this time going eastward to fight for the traditions of their race. Had Americans been making this film, they would have illustrated another famous episode in our history that antedated, by thirteen years, the voyage of the Mayflower that is, the landing of British colonists in Virginia, in 1607; but in the minds of the English people the name Mayflower had become merely a symbol of American progress and all that it represented. This whole story appealed to the British masses as one of the