at you have developed for conserving it and adding to
it and in the institutions you have built up to perpetuate it--your
merchant ships, your insurance, your world-wide banking, your
mortgages on all new lands; but isn't this the only advantage you
have? This advantage will pass. You are now shooting away millions
and millions, and you will have a debt that is bound to burden
industry. On our side, we have a more recently mixed race than
yours; you've begun to inbreed. We have also (and therefore) more
adaptability, a greater keenness of mind in our masses; we are
Old-World men set free--free of classes and traditions and all that
they connote. Your so-called democracy is far behind ours. Your
aristocracy and your privileges necessarily bring a social and
economic burden. Half your people look backward.

"Your leadership rests on your wealth and on the power that you've
built on your wealth."

When he asked me how we were to come closer together--"closer
together, with your old-time distrust of us and with your
remoteness?"--I stopped him at "remoteness."

"That's the reason," I said. "Your idea of our 'remoteness.'
'Remoteness' from what? From you? Are you not betraying the only
real difficulty of a closer sympathy by assuming that you are the
centre of the world? When you bring yourself to think of the
British Empire as a part of the American Union--mind you, I am not
saying that you would be formally admitted--but when you are
yourselves in close enough sympathy with us to wish to be admitted,
the chief difficulty of a real union of thought will be gone. You
recall Lord Rosebery's speech in which he pictured the capital of
the British Empire being moved to Washington if the American
Colonies had been retained under the Crown? Well, it was the Crown
that was the trouble, and the capital of English-speaking folk has
been so moved and you still remain 'remote.' Drop 'remote' from
your vocabulary and your thought and we'll actually be closer
together."

It's an enormous problem--just how to bring these countries closer
together. Perhaps nothing can do it but some great common danger or
some great common adventure. But this is one of the problems of
your lifetime. England can't get itself clean loose from the
continent nor from contine