thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on
my housetop is to be natural and in harmony with my surroundings. To
be hilarious in the Strand is to be unnatural, to court detention in a
police cell or a lunatic asylum. There is a wide gulf separating Sandy
Hook from Land's End, but a still wider between Pennsylvania Avenue
and the Westminster Bridge Road.

And so those who have dreamed of Anglo-American alliances awake to
find themselves deceived by the very intensity of their desires. The
bloodship between the nations is itself the surest deterrent of
alliance. Just as in the Church marriage between nigh kinsmen is
forbidden, so political marriage between the British and American
nations can never be. The United States is possessed of a single
idea--the consolidation and enrichment of the United States. No
interest is permitted to clash with that paramount national ambition.

To that end all share in the pomp and vanities of the world is
sacrificed; her ambassadors tolerated, not supported; her Secretary of
State snubbed; her President jealously watched in all his exchanges of
courtesy with foreign Powers. United States citizens may be maltreated
and murdered in Bulgaria or in China, the United States will not go to
war on their behalf. Her mission is confined to the Western
Hemisphere, and over its borders no insult, no cajolery will avail to
tempt her. Within her own sphere her temper is quick, and her arm
strong to avenge. Across the ocean she is long suffering and slow to
anger.

Down here at my feet the American is engaged in his nation-building
somewhat less satisfactorily than out in the wide world beyond. A
nation compounded of a dozen alien races may unite on matters of
foreign policy, but in that is no warranty of harmony at home.
Domestic strife is as bitter here as in Germany or Britain or France.
I watch from my housetop men marching in processions of protest; I
read of strikes; I hear of an infinity of rude wranglings, of senators
battling on the floor of the forum, of disputes in the sacred halls of
Tammany. Not yet has the Irish lamb lain down with the Virginian lion.

It were strange were it otherwise in a land where the city man has
destroyed the home. The American has shown no great genius for the
domestic virtues. He has hauled down the homes of his ancestors, has
builded in their stead vast apartment-houses and tenement
buildings--steam-heated Towers of Babel. Into each of these he has
packed the pop