your own, were you fighting a deadly struggle against a despotism the
most galling on earth, were you engaged with an enemy whose grip was
around your neck and whose foot was on your chest, that English-speaking
cousin of yours over the Atlantic whose language is your language, whose
literature is your literature, whose civil code is begotten from your
digests of law would stir no hand, no foot, to save you, would gloat
over your agony, would keep the ring while you were, being knocked out of
all semblance of nation and power, and would not be very far distant when
the moment came to hold a feast of eagles over your vast disjointed
limbs. Make no mistake in this matter, and be not blinded by ties of
kindred or belief. You imagine that because he is your cousin-sometimes
even your very son-that he cannot hate you, and you nurse yourself in the
belief that in a moment of peril the stars and stripes would fly
alongside the old red cross. Listen one moment; we cannot go five miles
through any State in the American Union without coming upon a square
substantial building in which children are being taught one universal
lesson-the history of how, through long years of blood and strife, their
country came forth a nation from the bungling tyranny of Britain. Until
five short years ago that was the one bit of history that went home to
the heart of Young America, that Was the lesson your cousin learned, and
still learns, in spite of later conflicts. Let us see what was the lesson
your son had laid to heart. Well, your son learned his lesson, not from
books, for too often he could not read, but he learned it in a manner
which perhaps stamps it deeper into the mind than even letter-press or
schoolmaster. He left you because you would not keep him, because you
preferred grouse-moors and deer-forests in Scotland, or meadows and
sheep-walks in Ireland to him or his. He did not leave you as one or two
from a household--as one who would go away and establish a branch
connexion across the ocean; he went away by families, by clans, by kith
and kin, for ever and for aye and he went away with hate in his heart and