A Straight Deal | Page 4

and upon which we especially grate. And now
for the letters.
The first is from a soldier, an enlisted man, writing from France.
"Allow me to thank you for your article entitled 'The Ancient
Grudge.' ... Like many other young Americans there was instilled in me
from early childhood a feeling of resentment against our democratic
cousins across the Atlantic and I was only too ready to accept as true
those stories I heard of England shirking her duty and hiding 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