Owen Wister

“ An Englishman not only sticks closer than a brother to his own rights, he respects the rights of his neighbor just as strictly. We Americans are losing our grip on this. It is the bottom of the whole thing. It is the moral keystone of democracy. Howsoever we may talk about our own rights to-day, we pay less and less respect to those of our neighbors. The result is that to-day there is more liberty in England than here. Liberty consists and depends upon respecting your neighbor’s rights every bit as fairly and squarely as your own. ”

“ This was the result of that game of jackstraws.
Let us remember several things: in our Revolution, France had befriended us, not because she loved us so much, but because she loved England so little. In the Treaty of Paris, England stood with us, not because she loved us so much, but because she loved France so little. We must cherish no illusions. Every nation must love itself more than it loves its neighbor. Nevertheless, in this pattern of England’s policy in 1783, where she takes her stand with us and against other nations, there is a deep significance. ”

“ He would be sorry if Germany beat France, but not if she beat England—when France and England were joined in keeping the wolf not only from their door but from ours! It matters not in the least that they were fighting our battle, not because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t help it: they were fighting it just the same. That they were compelled doesn’t matter, any more than it matters that in going to war when Belgium was invaded, England’s duty and England’s self-interest happened to coincide. ”

“ Did you ever learn there that George III had a fake Parliament, largely elected by fake votes, which did not represent the English people; that this fake Parliament was autocracy’s last ditch in England; that it choked for a time the English democracy which, after the setback given it by the excesses of the French Revolution, went forward again until to-day the King of England has less power than the President of the United States? I suppose everybody in the world who knows the important steps of history knows this—except the average American. ”

“ Other evils have been made better. In this very war, the outcry against Germany has been because she deliberately brought back into war the cruelties and the horrors of more barbarous times, and with cold calculations of premeditated science made these horrors worse. Our recoil from this deed of hers and what it has brought upon the world is seen in our wish for a League of Nations. The thought of any more battles, tenches, submarines, air-raids, starvation, misery, is so unbearable to our bruised and stricken minds, that we have put it into words whose import is, Let us have no more of this! ”

“ Germans do not come back when it goes against them, they bleat “Kamerad!”—or disappear. Perhaps this man was a spy—a poor one, to be sure—yet doing his best for his Kaiser: slinking about, peeping, listening, trying to wedge the Allies apart, doing his little bit towards making friends enemies, just as his breed has worked to set enmity between ourselves and Japan, ourselves and Mexico, France and England, France and Italy, England and Russia, between everybody and everybody else all the world over, in the sacred name and for the sacred sake of the Kaiser. ”

“ They would strip life of every resource gathered through centuries of struggle. Mad mobs, whole races of people who have never thought at all, or who have now hurled away all pretense of thought, aim at mere destruction of everything that is. They don’t attempt to offer any substitute. Down with religion, down with education, down with marriage, down with law, down with property: Such is their cry. Wipe the slate blank, they say, and then we’ll see what we’ll write on it. Amid this stands Germany with her unchanged purpose to own the earth ”

“ I have not sought to persuade him that Great Britain is a charitable institution. What nation is, or could be, given the nature of man? Her good treatment of us has been to her own interest. She is wise, farseeing, less of an opportunist in her statesmanship than any other nation. She has seen clearly and ever more clearly that our good will was to her advantage. And beneath her wisdom, at the bottom of all, is her sense of our kinship through liberty defined and assured by law. ”

“ Agreeable Germany!—whose Kaiser, if his fleet had been larger, would have taken us by the scruff of the neck. “Then Thou, Almighty One, send Thy lightnings! Let dwellings and cottages become ashes in the heat of fire. Let the people in hordes burn and drown with wife and child. May their seed be trampled under our feet; May we kill great and small in the lust of joy. ”

“ In my opinion, a navy somewhat larger than England’s would practically eliminate from America that ‘Ancient Grudge’ you deplore. It is England’s navy—her boasted and actual control of the seas—which threatens and irritates every nation on the face of the globe that has maritime aspirations. She may use it with discretion, as she has for years. It may even be at times a source of protection to others, as it has—but so long as it exists as a supreme power it is a constant source of danger and food for grudges. ”

“ It’s a favorite trick of our anti-British friends to call England a “land-grabber.” The way in which England has grabbed land right along, all over the world, is monstrous, they say. England has stolen what belonged to whites, and blacks, and bronzes, and yellows, wherever she could lay her hands upon it, they say. England is a criminal. ”

“ It is we ourselves to-day, not England, that are pushing friendship away. It is our politicians, papers, and propagandists who are making the trouble and the noise. In England the will to friendship rules, has ruled for a long while. Does the will to hate rule with us? Do we prefer Germany? Do we prefer the independence of Ireland to the peace of the world? ”

“ England met us with a compromise, advantageous to us and reasonable for herself. Thus, again, was her conduct moderate and pacific. If you think that this was through fear of us, I can only leave you to our western blow-hards of 1845, or to your anti-British complex. What I see in it, is another sign of that fundamental sense of kinship, that persisting unwillingness to have a real scrap with us, that stares plainly out of our whole first century—the same feeling which prevented so many English from enlisting against us in the Revolution that George III was obliged to get Hessians. ”

“ In English eyes our Government—and therefore all of us—failed in 1914—1915—1916—failed again and again—insulted the cause of humanity when we said through our President in 1916, the third summer of the war, that we were not concerned with either the causes or the aims of that conflict. How could they remember Hoover, or Robert Bacon, or Leonard Wood, or Theodore Roosevelt then, any more than we could remember John Bright, or Richard Cobden, or the Manchester men in the days when the Alabama was sinking the merchant vessels of the Union? ”

“ It was in a very brief visit that Beecher managed to see England as she was: a remarkable letter for its insight, and more remarkable still for its moderation, when you consider that it was written in the midst of our Civil War, while loyal Americans were not only enraged with England, but wounded to the quick as well. When a man can do this—can have passionate convictions in passionate times, and yet keep his judgment unclouded, wise, and calm, he serves his country well. ”

“ I suppose that the American who denounces England for her land-grabbing has forgotten, or else has never known, how we grabbed Florida from Spain. The pittance that we paid Spain in one of the Florida transactions never went to her. The story is a plain tale of land-grabbing; and there are several other plain tales that show us to have been land-grabbers, if you will read the facts with an honest mind. I shall not tell them here. The case of the Indian is enough in the way of an instance. Our own hands are by no means clean. It is not for us to denounce England as a land-grabber. ”

“ In America, what with the newspaper reporters and this and that and the other, the territory of a man’s privacy has been lessened and lessened until very little of it remains; but most of us still do draw the line somewhere; we may not all draw it at the same place, but we do draw a line. The difference, then, between ourselves and the English in this respect is simply, that with them the territory of a man’s privacy covers more ground, and different ground as well. An Englishman doesn’t expect strangers to ask him questions of a guide-book sort. ”

“ With Canada, Australia, and all those other colonies that I have named above, satisfied with England’s rule, hastening to her assistance, and with only Ireland selling herself to Germany, is it not just possible that something is the matter with Ireland rather than with England? Sinn Fein will hear of no Home Rule. Sinn Fein demands independence. Independence Sinn Fein will not get. Not only because of the outrage to unconsenting Ulster, but also because Britain, having just got rid of one Heligoland to the East, will not permit another to start up on the West. ”

“ 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. ”