afflicted with the complex can keep their eyes upon the Alabama and the
London Times, and avert them from Bright, and Cobden, and the
cotton-spinners, and the Union and Emancipation Society, and Queen
Victoria. But to any reader of this whose complex is not incurable, or
who has none, I will put this question: What opinion of the brains of any
Englishman would you have if he formed his idea of the United States
exclusively from the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst.



Chapter XIII: Benefits Forgot


In our next war, our war with Spain in 1898, England saved us from
Germany. She did it from first to last; her position was unmistakable,
and every determining act of hers was as our friend. The service that she
rendered us in warning Germany to keep out of it, was even greater than
her suggestion of our Monroe doctrine in 1823; for in 1823 she put us on
guard against meditated, but remote, assault from Europe, while in 1898
she actively averted a serious and imminent peril. As the threat of her
fleet had obstructed Napoleon in 1803, and the Holy Alliance in 1823, so
in 1898 it blocked the Kaiser. Late in that year, when it was all over,
the disappointed and baffled Kaiser wrote to a friend of Joseph
Chamberlain, "If I had had a larger fleet I would have taken Uncle Sam by
the scruff of the neck." Have you ever read what our own fleet was like
in those days? Or our Army? Lucky it was for us that we had to deal only
with Spain. And even the Spanish fleet would have been a much graver
opponent in Manila Bay, but for Lord Cromer. On its way from Spain
through the Suez Canal a formidable part of Spain's navy stopped to coal
at Port Said. There is a law about the coaling of belligerent warships in