THE COÖPERATION OF ENGLISH-SPEAKING

PEOPLES 1

ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR

Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Chamber: The noble words to which we have just listened struck, I am well convinced, a sympathetic chord in the heart of everyone in your audience, but I don't think that in all the multitude gathered here to-day there was one to whom they went more home than to myself. Mr. President, I have had as the dream of my life a hope that before I died the union between the English-speaking, freedom-loving branches of the human race should be drawn far closer than in the past, and that all temporary causes of difference which may ever have separated two great peoples would be seen in its true and just proportion, and that we should all realize, on whatever side of the Atlantic fortune had placed us, that the things wherein we have differed in the past sink into absolute insignificance compared with those vital agreements which at all times, but never at such a time as the present, unite us in one great spiritual whole.

My friend Mr. Choate, in a speech that he delivered yesterday at the City Hall, told his audience that as Ambassador to Great Britain he had been in close official relations with me through many years, and that during all of these years I had stood solid - I think that was his phrase for American friendship. That is strictly and absolutely true, and the feelings that I have this great opportunity of expressing are not born, believe me, of the necessities of the Great War; they are not the offspring of recent events; they are based upon my most enduring convictions,

1 Speech made before the New York Chamber of Commerce, May 12, 1917, by the head of the British Mission to the United States.

convictions of which I cannot remember the beginning, which I have held with unalterable fidelity through the political life which is now a long life, and which, I am quite sure, I shall cherish to the end.

You, Mr. President, have referred to the preparations that were made only, I suppose, a little more than two years and a half ago - though how long those two and a half years seem to all of us! preparations that were made two and a half years ago to celebrate the one hundred years of peace between our two countries. I ardently supported that movement, and yet the very phrases in which its objects were expressed show how inadequate it was to reach the real truth and heart of the matter. It is true that one hundred years have passed, and many hundreds of years, I hope, were to pass, before any overt act of war should divide those whom, as you said in your final words, should never be asunder. But, after all, normal and official peace is but a small thing compared with that intimate mutual comprehension which ought always to bind the branches of the English-speaking peoples together. You have absorbed in your midst many admirable citizens drawn from all parts of Europe, whom American institutions and American ways of thought have molded and are molding into one great people. I rejoice to think it should be so. A similar process on a smaller scale is going on in the self-governing dominions of the British Empire. It is a good process; it is a noble process. Let us never forget that wherever be the place in which that great and beneficent process is going on, whether it be in Canada, whether it be in Australia, or whether on the largest scale of all it be in the United States of America, the spirit which the immigrant absorbs is a spirit in all these places largely due to a historic past in which your forefathers and my forefathers, gentlemen, all had their share.

You incidentally mentioned, Mr. President, that this very body I am addressing dates the origin of its society to a charter, I think you said of 1758. Is not that characteristic and symbolic of what happens on both sides of the Atlantic? We strike

our roots into a distant past. We have known how through revolutions, in spite of revolutions, sometimes because of revolutions, we have known how to weld the past and the present into one organic whole, and I see around me in a country which calls itself and is, in one sense, a new country

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-I everywhere see signs of these roots which draw their nourishment and their strength from epochs far removed from us, and I feel when I talk to those who are born and bred under the American flag, who have absorbed all their political ideas from American institutions-I feel, and I think I speak for my friends here that they also feel I feel that I am speaking to those brought up, as it were, under one influence, in one house, under one set of educational conditions. I require no explanations of what they think, and I am required to give no explanations of what I think, because our views of great questions seem to be shared-born, as it were, of common knowledge which we know instinctively, and which we do not require explicitly to expound or to define.

This is a great heritage to have in common, and I think, nay, I am sure, that you, Mr. President, struck a true note when you told us that all the sentiments which I have imperfectly tried to express this afternoon will receive a double significance, an infinitely increased significance from the fact that we are now not merely sharing a common political ideal in some speculative fashion, but that all of us are committed to sacrificing everything that we hold most dear to carry these ideals into practical execution.

There will be a bond of union between our peoples which nothing will ever be able to shake, and which I believe to be the securest guarantee for the future of the world, for the future peace and freedom of the world.

Mr. President, I have already detained you too long, but there was one word which fell from you toward the end of your speech upon post-war problems and you indicated your view a view which I personally entirely share that when this tremendous

conflict has drawn to its appointed close, and when, as I believe, victory shall have crowned our joint efforts, there will arise not merely between nations, but within nations, a series of problems which will tax all our statesmanship to deal with. I look forward to that time, not, indeed, wholly without anxiety, but in the main with hope and with confidence; and one of the reasons of that hope and one of the foundations of that confidence is to be found in the fact that your nation and my nation will have so much to do with the settlement of the questions. I do not think anybody will accuse me of being insensible to the genius and to the accomplishments of other nations. I am one of those who believe that only in the multitude of different forms of culture can the completed movement of progress have all the variety in unity of which it is capable; and, while I admire other cultures, and while I recognize how absolutely all-important they are to the future of mankind, I do think that among the English-speaking peoples is especially and peculiarly to be found a certain political moderation in all classes, which gives one the surest hope of dealing in a reasonably progressive spirit with social and political difficulties. And without that reasonable moderation, interchanges are violent also, and the smooth advance of humanity is seriously interfered with. I believe that on this side of the Atlantic, and I hope on the other side of the Atlantic, when these great problems have actively to be dealt with, it will not be beyond the reach of your statesmanship or of our own to deal with them in such a manner that we cannot merely look back upon this great war as the beginning of a time of improved international relations, of settled peace, of deliberate refusal to pour out oceans of blood to satisfy some notion of domination; but that in addition to those blessings the war may prove to be the beginning of a revivified civilization, which will be felt in all departments of human activity, which will not merely touch the material but also the spiritual side of mankind, and which will make the second decade of the twentieth century memorable in the history of mankind.

THE MORAL EQUIVALENT OF WAR1

WILLIAM JAMES

THE war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party. The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as to individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade. There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man's relation to war. Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing in cold blood to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, only when an enemy's injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now thought permissible.

It was not thus in ancient times. The earlier men were hunting men, and to hunt a neighboring tribe, kill the males, loot the village, and possess the females was the most profitable, as well as the most exciting, way of living. Thus were the more martial 1 Copyright. Reprinted from Memories and Studies, by William James, by permission of the publishers, Longsmans, Green and Company.