or entertain any question of
England's good faith: "first, because it would be inconsistent with the
self-respect which every government is bound to feel...." In Mr. John
Bassett Moore's History of International Arbitration, Vol. I, pages
496-497, or in papers relating to the Treaty of Washington, Vol. II,
Geneva Arbitration, page 204... Part I, Introductory Statement, you will
find the whole of this. What I give here suffices to show the position
we ourselves and England took about the Alabama case. She backed down.
Her good faith was put in issue, and she paid our direct claims. She ate
"humble pie." We had to eat humble pie in the affair of the Trent. It
has been done since. It is not pleasant, but it may be beneficial.
Such is the story of the true England and the true America in 1861; the
divided North with which Lincoln had to deal, the divided England where
our many friends could do little to check our influential enemies, until
Lincoln came out plainly against slavery. I have had to compress much,
but I have omitted nothing material, of which I am aware. The facts
would embarrass those who determine to assert that England was our
undivided enemy during our Civil War, if facts ever embarrassed a
complex. Those afflicted with the complex can keep their eyes upon the
Alabama and the London Times, and avert them from Bright, and Cobden,
and the cotton-spinners, and the Union and Emancipation Society,
and Queen Victoria. But to any reader of this whose complex is not
incurable, or who has none, I will put this question: What opinion of
the brains of any Englishman would you have if he formed his idea of
the United States exclusively from the newspapers of William Randolph
Hearst.
Chapter XIII: Benefits Forgot
In our next war, our war with Spain in 1898, England saved us from
Germany. She did it from first to last; her position was unmistakable,
and every determining act of hers was as our friend. The service that
she rendered us in warning Germany to keep out of it, was even greater
than her suggestion of our Monroe doctrine in 1823; for in 1823 she put
us on guard against meditated, but remote, assault from Europe, while in
1898 she actively averted a serious and imminent peril. As the threat
of her fleet had obstructed Napoleon in 1803, and the Holy Alliance in
1823, so in 1898 it blocked the Kaiser. Late in that year, when it
was all over, the disappointed and baffled Kaiser wrote to a friend
of Josep
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