the sinister rumblings of approaching doom. Though his pessimism be in
great part born of his climate, it has had a very real effect upon his
statecraft. It has driven him outward to find hope and sunshine
abroad, in his colonies, and in India. It has made of the race a
nation of expansionists, reaping where they have not sown, gathering
where they have not strawed.

It is otherwise here with us under a sky that would make of Job an
optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and
hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets
glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad
promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the
Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of
hope from the sodden, mud-soaked thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on
my housetop is to be natural and in harmony with my surroundings. To
be hilarious in the Strand is to be unnatural, to court detention in a
police cell or a lunatic asylum. There is a wide gulf separating Sandy
Hook from Land's End, but a still wider between Pennsylvania Avenue
and the Westminster Bridge Road.

And so those who have dreamed of Anglo-American alliances awake to
find themselves deceived by the very intensity of their desires. The
bloodship between the nations is itself the surest deterrent of
alliance. Just as in the Church marriage between nigh kinsmen is
forbidden, so political marriage between the British and American
nations can never be. The United States is possessed of a single
idea--the consolidation and enrichment of the United States. No
interest is permitted to clash with that paramount national ambition.

To that end all share in the pomp and vanities of the world is