A Straight Deal | Page 4

behind her colonies, etc. It was not until I came over here and saw what she was really doing that my opinion began to change.
"When first my division arrived in France it was brigaded with and received its initial experience with the British, who proved to us how little we really knew of the war as it was and that we had yet much to learn. Soon my opinion began to change and I was regarding England as the backbone of the Allies. Yet there remained a certain something I could not forgive them. What it was you know, and have proved to me that it is not our place to judge and that we have much for which to be thankful to our great Ally.
"Assuring you that your ... article has succeeded in converting one who needed conversion badly I beg to remain...."
How many American soldiers in Europe, I wonder, have looked about them, have used their sensible independent American brains (our very best characteristic), have left school histories and hearsay behind them and judged the English for themselves? A good many, it is to be hoped. What that judgment finally becomes must depend not alone upon the personal experience of each man. It must also come from that liberality of outlook which is attained only by getting outside your own place and seeing a lot of customs and people that differ from your own. A mind thus seasoned and balanced no longer leaps to an opinion about a whole nation from the sporadic conduct of individual members of it. It is to be feared that some of our soldiers may never forget or make allowance for a certain insult they received in the streets of London. But of this later. The following sentence is from a letter written by an American sailor:
"I have read... 'The Ancient Grudge' and I wish it could be read by every man on our big ship as I know it would change a lot of their attitude toward England. I have argued with lots of them and have shown some of them where they are wrong but the Catholics and descendants of Ireland have a different argument and as my education isn't very great, I know very little about what England did to the Catholics in Ireland."
Ireland I shall discuss later. Ireland is no more our business to-day than the South was England's business in 1861. That the Irish question should defeat an understanding between ourselves and England would be, to quote what a gentleman who is at once a loyal Catholic and a loyal member of the British Government said to me, "wrecking the ship for a ha'pennyworth of tar."
The following is selected from the nays, and was written by a business man. I must not omit to say that the writers of all these letters are strangers to me.
"As one American citizen to another... permit me to give my personal view on your subject of 'The Ancient Grudge'...
"To begin with, I think that you start with a false idea of our kinship-- with the idea that America, because she speaks the language of England, because our laws and customs are to a great extent of the same origin, because much that is good among us came from there also, is essentially of English character, bound up in some way with the success or failure of England.
"Nothing, in my opinion, could be further from the truth. We are a distinctive race--no more English, nationally, than the present King George is German--as closely related and as alike as a celluloid comb and a stick of dynamite.
"We are bound up in the success of America only. The English are bound up in the success of England only. We are as friendly as rival corporations. We can unite in a common cause, as we have, but, once that is over, we will go our own way--which way, owing to the increase of our shipping and foreign trade, is likely to become more and more antagonistic to England's.
"England has been a commercially unscrupulous nation for generations and it is idle to throw the blame for this or that act of a nation on an individual. Such arguments might be kept up indefinitely as regards an act of any country. A responsible nation must bear the praise or odium that attaches to any national action. If England has experienced a change of heart it has occurred since the days of the Boer Republic--as wanton a steal as Belgium, with even less excuse, and attended with sufficient brutality for all practical purposes....
"She has done us many an ill turn gratuitously and not a single good turn that was not dictated by selfish policy or jealousy of others. She has shown herself, up till yesterday at least, grasping and