sponsibilities of those world-privileges which she has in fact assumed, and was supposed, wrongly perhaps, to have demanded. That part of President Harding's message which was most cheered by all the men and women present, says the Times correspondent at Washington, was the phrase in which he announced that the United States would never enter the League of Nations.

Those who know most of America are least astonished by the refusal of the United States to allow their government to participate in the League of Nations. Nor does anyone challenge their perfect right so to refuse. But in this life political actions are not performed in vacuo. You have to pay a certain price for your fun. The crowds. who raised the cheers in the galleries of the House of Representatives probably did not think of, or care for, the effect that the Times correspondent's account of those cheers would have upon socalled progressive elements in England. It is not reasonable to suppose that they should; but it is a case of that tragic irony, which haunts AngloAmerican relations, and a fact that the two governments may have some day to reckon with that America, in Labor and other 'progressive' circles, is coming to occupy, not of course merely in its attitude toward the League of Nations, a position as a force on the side of reaction.

Now currents of this nature unite, and thereby a morbid condition of public opinion is produced. There are, of course, alternative methods of handling this, as other manifestations of morbidity a wrong way and a right way. It is possible for national beings to be hypnotized by symptoms they know to exist, and deplore. Deeper and deeper they become involved, and the disease, feeding on itself, proves fatal. It is important that thinking men and women, friendly to the United States,

should not allow themselves to fall victims to the mesmeric influence of those symptoms in the two nations that they wish to cure.

I remember that a United States Senator from a Western state, who all through his career had been a good friend of our country, told me that, in his early and middle life, he had wished to see an act passed for providing at public expense, silencers for the Fourth of July orators; but that, now that he was becoming an old man, he was not at all certain that he would not vote for preliminary legislation to provide such silencers for after-dinner Pilgrim speakers.

Now neither the Senator in question, nor anyone else of friendly disposition, is blind to the beneficent activities of the Pilgrim and kindred societies; but it cannot, on the other hand, be questioned that the gatherings and the publications of such societies have provided opportunities for pronouncements that anyone conversant with the real state of opinion in the two countries, must regard as highly injudicious.

During the war there was something very touching in the manifestation of good-will toward America that was shown by such acts as the flying of the Stars and Stripes over the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. But what was nobly done then, because spontaneously under the inspiration of a great crisis, has been adopted, with the best intention in the world, by some people, as a model for British behavior in these days, and in the fond hope that it will have a beneficial effect upon Anglo-American relations. One still, in articles or speeches written by British enthusiasts, meets with the tacit assumption that the United States is, as it were, a Dominion that 'chose the other ways'; hence the talk of 'hands across the sea,' or 'blood being thicker than water.' We are advised to re-write

our English history of the eighteenth century, and to tell falsehoods with a purpose about George III, or about English public opinion in the time of Burke.

No short cuts like this will take us to the desired goal. It is poor diplomacy to make overtures if they are not going to be accepted; and overtures of this nature indicate, and are taken for, not dignity or strength, but weakness. They may consequently do great mischief before they are openly repudiated by more responsible British opinion.

In other words, in the face of the obstacles to a full and perfect understanding between the two nations, I see no hope either in ignoring the obstacles or in seeking to avoid them by short cuts. I believe that a more normal attitude toward these obstacles is attained by shifting the centre of one's interest to a somewhat different quarter. By treating the United States objectively, by making it the object of disinterested and untendencious study, it may be found possible to set English ideas and institutions, never in such a state of flux as to-day, up against an external standard - a process which, rightly handled, may be made informative.

I prophesy that, for the next hundred years, whatever other changes may come over the higher education of this country, and I am not likely to undervalue our present system, the inclusion of a visit to Canada and the United States will increasingly be regarded as a normal part of the intellectual discipline of our educated classes. It may or may not be a novel idea, but I am sure it is a coming idea. Like all educational ideas, it will have its day and others will succeed it: but I find in the attitude of mind which will make its development on a general scale possible, a far more healthy outlook toward the United States than any other at present feasible.

Let me repeat my warning that all the study of America, on whatever scale and however successfully pursued, is not going necessarily to improve the relations between the countries. These are not patient of rapid improvement; there are pessimists who say that they can never really be improved; and others, with more wisdom, who say that the next steps taken to improve them will not be taken from the British side. Be that as it may, it is everything that in the meantime the English people should adopt a positive, not a merely negative, attitude toward the United States. The next fifty years under these conditions might, I believe, see English thought enriched in a great many directions.

And is it not conceivable that the same period may witness also changes in the nature and outlook of the two countries, countries, changes not now imaginable, which would rob half the present points of friction of their smart? Who can yet say that anyone living to-day has an accurate measurement of the Pacific problem as it will be presented to the coming generations? It is a comforting thought in this connection that hardly a quarter of a century ago we were on the verge of war with France. The vast and dreary waste in which are to be found the matters which divide the English-speaking peoples has not yet been scientifically surveyed. 'Here be lyons,' was a frequent entry on old-fashioned maps. There are lyons,' emblems of contention on the maps which Americans and Englishmen to-day are using. Perhaps they too will disappear at the mandate of exacter science.

It is hardly possible for me, within the limits of to-day's opportunity, to convey to you the individual features which in my judgment make a visit to the United States a source of constant stimulus to the educated Englishman. It is

obligatory on me then to compress them within the limits of a general idea. That idea I would call 'a study in the influence of enthusiasm upon tradition.' For tradition within its limits is immensely powerful in the United States. The last three quarters of a century have seen a cataclysmic change from the unlovely America described by Dickens, the gloomy Victorian America of the red stone, Dutch houses of New York, the more attractive, but still intensely provincial New England of the Transcendentalists, or the Baltimore and Richmond of high hearts and lovely women. There has been the peopling of the West and the coming of the immigrants. There has been the industrialization of the North, no longer kept from sprawling over that historic, but imaginary, line, across which, with varying fortune, was fought the greatest, and, please God, the last, war between English-speaking combatants. There has grown up the America of the Interstate Commerce Commission and of the Federal Reserve Board.

Yet tradition still holds fast. I do not refer alone to the rigidity of the Constitution, which has sometimes been exaggerated. The spell of tradition is felt in political ideas,-vide the tenacity of individualism, which is traceable not merely to the natural proclivities of an expanding country, in social customs (have you read Main Street, the latest novel of the Middle West?), in almost every form of thought and word and deed. That this is so gives providentially a point of contact with English thought: alone, however, it would not provide it with a stimulus. The arresting feature lies in the fact that, while the traditional element is strong in American belief and practice, it is combined with qualities which make the American the most daring of experimenters. It needs no disquisition on the part played by the interaction of au

thority and initiative in all extension of knowledge, to indicate that, if my diagnosis is right, America is very well worth watching at the moment. Before I go further, however, let me give a concrete example for discussion.

It was, as a matter of fact, in considering the architecture of New York that I began to stumble on my theory. I suppose there is no one upon whom it does not leave an ineffaceable impression. It was amusing to see how every foreigner responded to the classic purity of design, the gleaming white marble showing its razor-edge against the blueness of the sky, the refinement, and sureness of the scale, in detail. The diplomat saw the interior of those two vast terminals, which make St. Peter's, seen beneath the dome, look squat; the graduate saw a street, which in its blazing and exciting beauty made the High look sordid.

I shall never forget walking down town beneath the sky-scrapers with a member of my staff, that ingenious architect, Mr. T. H. Lyon, whose lectures in Cambridge on American architecture have recently provoked no little interest. He showed me the evolution of the sky-scraper: how, its builders being faced with the necessity of building up by the restricted building-space available, the original sky-scraper-one may see an example in the so-called flat-iron building - consisted of a number of horizontal stories piled one upon another. The external appearance, however, of such a building could never have been anything but monstrous. Any house must present to the onlooker a front of which the base, the roofing, and the intermediate space will be arranged in some intelligently agreeable proportion. How was one to order this proportion on the front of a sky-scraper of thirty stories?

The problem defied solution. Either the base must have been so big as to

crush the passer-by and the ordinary furniture of an ordinary modern street; or, if made in proportion with these latter, the whole front of the building would have been jumbled out of scale. Tradition had beaten the American; but no, enthusiasm produced the experimenter, and it was an experiment which justified itself. Some architect, by a stroke not short of genius, abandoned the analogy with house-building, choosing to make his analogy a classic column. Here the component sections, capital, shaft, and base, offered precisely the proportion that was needed. The Biltmore building is a classic column, the lines are vertical, not horizontal, the windows giving the effect of fluting. Very exquisite are the capitals of certain of these monster columns; and they exhibit every variation, from what may be termed the simpler Doric style, through the Ionic, to the florescence of the Corinthian.

The comments of my friend appeared to me suggestive, and to have a general application. If this architectural achievement proved an isolated phenomenon, then it might have had no more importance than any clever device of a technician in any craft—than, for example, the invention of a new surgical saw or the perfection of the cowcatcher. The more I pondered the matter, the less content was I to leave it to be classed, like the egg-balancing feat of Christopher Columbus, with the achievements of a lucky cunning. There came to mind the modern short story, the contribution to literature of America's one world-influence in letters, Edgar Allan Poe, and the characteristic development of the short story in America by a succession of writers, down to O. Henry and George Ade. There came to mind also reports of the way in which American scientists saw and developed, before the scientists of other countries, those two branches of

science, to which we in England have recently waked up to pay so much attention, known as physical chemistry and bio-chemistry. There was too that great school of law, the Harvard Law School, whose revolutionary work in the last quarter of the nineteenth century might have remained unnoticed in this country, and without effect upon our study of the law, but for the perspicacity of Sir Frederick Pollock; not to mention the strides made by Americans in clinical medicine so great that a prominent London surgeon used to me, half-joking, but also half in earnest, the phrase that on the clinical side of the profession we 'were in the Middle Ages' as compared with the United States.

I will not extend the catalogue. I contend that the phenomena observed are widely distributed, and that they have a common feature; that each, I mean, is an instance in which, while working from within a tradition, progress of a startling kind has been produced by boldness in pushing forward, a readiness to scrap and start again, which often seems to outpace logic, and to treat scientific proof lightly. In other words, one is watching the action of enthusiasm.

I am not claiming that this quality has given the United States the leading position in letters, law or science. Whether there is any such thing as a 'leading position' in this sense is not too easy a question to answer. Anyone who lives in Cambridge at a time when the scientific schools of that University each term make life a little more exciting and romantic; when the dream of the Middle Ages, the transmutation of metals, has been accomplished not a stone's throw from one's door one, I say, living in these conditions is not likely to put forward preposterous claims on the part of the United States to a lone preeminence; but it is possible

any

to claim that it is something not far removed from a unique position which this enthusiasm gives her. For this enthusiasm is specifically American. It is not the same as imagination or intellectual energy, in which our British writers and scientists so much excel. It works in a more practical plane. It is the informing spirit of action, and without action it ceases to exist. Accordingly it produces much waste action, much failure which seems ludicrous, attempts that seem chimerical from the critical standpoint of pure intellect,

whose standards are static standards, not dynamic.

Half the personal friction between an American and Englishman, whenever it is found to exist, can be traced ultimately to the reciprocal misunderstanding of this quality and of its absence. However this may be, it is a quality which has a large part yet to play in the history of the globe; and the turn of the arts and sciences and economics, as England in this century is settling down to study or to practise them, is toward an atmosphere not unsympathetic to it.

IN calling to his aid in the Cabinet a man of first rank, like Walther Rathenau, and especially in entrusting to him a portfolio as important as that of reconstruction, Chancellor Wirth has broken the precedent that has hitherto prevailed in the German Republic of putting only mediocrities in high office. We all know Dr. Walther Rathenau. One of our journalists has thus described him: 'Lithe, nervous, with expressive eyes that light up his impassive and bony countenance like slumbering fires, with the face of an ascetic, and with the movements of a great cat, he seems consumed with eagerness to explain and convince.' Others have noted the brilliance of his eyes, the warm tint of his countenance, the absence of

anything distinctively German in his features.

His mentality and character are complex and original. He is a great captain of industry, and at the same time a philosopher, a sociologist, and a moralist. He combines a passion for pure theory with a genius for action. He is simultaneously an idealist and a realist. He succeeded his father as the head of the General Electric Company. He was secretary and, later, president, of the Chamber of Commerce of Berlin. It was at his suggestion that Germany, early in August, 1914, established its famous Raw-Materials Section in the War Office, to which is largely due the government's ability to hold out for four years and a half, in spite of the