The Republican journal. [volume] (Belfast, Me.) 1829-current, 1917-05-31
America and Great Britain.

Great Britain and America have been
hostile relations, writes William Archer,
in the Westminster Gazette. Twice the
two Nations have been at war, and there
are not few Americans who are fond of
boasting that in both of these conflicts
they whipped" us.
Our normal level relations have no
doubt been amicable enough; but when
ever the level has been broken it has been
by incidents which left certain legacy
of ill-feeling.
The general attitude of Britain during
the great Civil War was anything but
sympathetic. Once we were on the verge
of a rupture over the case of Mason and
Slidell. The affair of the Alabama was
exceedingly disagreeable; the Venezuelan
squabble led us, not perhaps to the brink
of hostilities, but some way in that direc-
ton.
The incident of Manila Bay is perhaps
the only international episode of any note
that has definitely tended to draw the two
Nations together.
Of course this does not mean that there
has not been real friendship between them.
There has never been moment when
thousands of Englishmen and thousands
of Americans have not felt the warmest
regard for each other. Perhaps it may
even be said that the reciprocal feeling of
the majority of both peoples has been
sort of vaguely critical and suspicious
kindness
Shoulder to Shoulder.
But there have always been certain
classes in America that cherished old
rancors against England and these were
not little encouraged by the general tone
of common school education.
No one can read the American news
papers of today without realizing that,
except among a cultured minority IN the
Eastern States, pro-Ally sympathies are
centered rather upon France and Belgium
than upon England, and that in the Middle
West and West the feeling of the masses
toward the Allies in general, and England
in particular, is at best one OF indifference.
Whatever may happen, this is not going
to change all at once. We are not going
to fall on each others neck and swear
eternal friendship.
Nevertheless, great new fact has come
into existence. In the most momentous
crisis in the history of the world the whole
English speaking race is at last standing
shoulder to shoulder.
Nothing but criminal unwisdom or ma
lignant ill fortune can cancel or turn to
evil the beneficent results that ought to
flow from this wonderful and almost I'M
hoped-for achievement of German politi-
cal genius.
Never again can it be said that call &C
tive political relations between Great
Britain and America have been hostile re-
lations" That remark is expunged from
the page of history.
And now it is up to us-why should we
not talk Americana to make the best of
this new situation. Hitherto-take us all
round-we have been culpably and stupid
ly inappreciative of America.
The time has been, no doubt, when
there was a great deal of rawness in
American life, which lent itself to Carl
cature, and when, on the other hand,
many Americans displayed at once great
self-assertiveness and morbid resentful-
ness of our criticism.
But the Civil War may fairly be said to
have made an end to all that-or at least
the beginning of an end. Since then half
century has passed, and now we have
not the smallest rational excuse for care
lessness or captiousness in our judgments
of America.
The Romance of Pittsburg.
To anyone with spark Of mag nation
country in the world. Its past is roman
tic. it's present marvellous, its future in
conceivable.
Let me give one instance of the romance
of the past that clings to so many places
in America.
will not speak of Lexington or Con-
cord: | will not speak of Mt Vernon or
Charleston; will speak of the place in all
America which most people in England,
perhaps, think of as the very antithesis of
romanceII mean Pittsburg.
1t is called "Hell with the lid off, 'and |
don't say it does not merit that term OF
endearment; but to stand on the big bluff
over against the city and look down upon
the confluence of the Allegheny and the
Monongahela tmost beautiful of wordsD
is to experience a strange and complex
emotion.
For the two rivers, each as great as the
Rhine or the Rhone, unite to form the
magnificent Ohio. And the Ohio rolls on
into the still Fighter Mississippi land down
these gigantic waterways the first French
adventures padded thousands of leagues
through the boundless, sinister wilderness,
and Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tap
ley sought the city of Eden; and Huckle-
berry Finn and Jim went drifting through
an ODYSSEY which |, for one, believe to be
as surely immortal as any story in this
world.
A few miles up the Monogahela is the
spot where Gen. Braddock, with George
Washington and George Warrington in
his train, fell into the fatal ambush.
And there, at the very tip of the tongue
of land between the two rivers, nestl-
ing in the shadow of the skyscrapers like
beehive under St Peters is the little
octagonal block house, pierced for muske-
try, which was once Fort Duquesne, and
after that Fort Pitt, and from which the
city takes it's name.
Of the titanic, lurid picturesqueness of
the scene | shall not attempt to speak.
l have merely tried to suggest few of
the historic and literary associations
which cluster around the spot itself, and
the vast river system to which it is, as it
were, the northeastern gateway How
any one can find America prosaic or I'M
interesting passes my comprehension
Genius and Daring.
AS for it's present, as summed up and
typified in New York, what is there in
the world to compare with it? The view
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