recent articles of Sir George Clarke and Mr. Arthur Silva White in the
"North American Review" are pleasant indications--is a sure evidence
that a common tongue and common descent are making themselves felt,
and are breaking down the barriers of estrangement which have
separated too long men of the same blood. There is seen here the
working of kinship,--a wholly normal result of a common origin, the
natural affection of children of the same descent, who have quarrelled
and have been alienated with the proverbial bitterness of civil
strife, but who all along have realized--or at the least have been
dimly conscious--that such a state of things is wrong and harmful. As
a matter of sentiment only, this reviving affection well might fix the
serious attention of those who watch the growth of world questions,
recognizing how far imagination and sympathy rule the world; but when,
besides the powerful sentimental impulse, it is remembered that
beneath considerable differences of political form there lie a common
inherited political tradition and habit of thought, that the moral
forces which govern and shape political development are the same in
either people, the possibility of a gradual approach to concerted
action becomes increasingly striking. Of all the elements of the
civilization that has spread over Europe and America, none is so
potential for good as that singular combination of two essential but
opposing factors--of individual freedom with subjection to law--which
finds its most vigorous working in Great Britain and the United
States, its only exponents in which an approach to a due balance has
been effected. Like other peoples, we also sway between the two,
inclining now to one side, now to the other; but the departure from
the normal in either direction is never very great.

There is yet another noteworthy condition common to the two states,
which must tend to incline them towards a similar course of action in