BRITAIN AND U.S.A.

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 6, 2 October 1937, Page 4

BRITAIN AND U.S.A.

Seeking - Basis For Friendship

A REALIST POLICY

An American magazine recently held a nation-wide straw ballot in which 54 per cent, of voters decided that American intervention in the last war had been a mistake, writes James Hilton in the London "Daily Telegraph.” When some of my American friends have tried to apologise for or to explain away such a percentage, I have replied (usually to their surprise) that a similar vote in England might well lead to a similar result.

Such opinion in both countries is, indee, more a reflection of feeling about the next war than about the last. Never, perhaps, have America and England —without knowing it —been nearer to a common determination: that determination being to have peace at almost any price. “Almost.” That word is. important.

The British refusal to protect shipping within the three-mile limit seems to parallel the Washington decision that in any future war America will trade with the belligerents only a cash-and-carry basis. This is not cowardicft It is not even the Wilsonian gesture of being too i>roud to fight It is just the sane person’s decision' to keep out ol trouble as long as he can. In fact, as one American expressed it to me: “When a drunken man in a crowded bar challenges everybody else to a fight, the answer is usually silence—not because everybody else is afraid, but because everybody else is sober.” Little good is., done by the sentimentalists of both countries who stress the bonds of race and language. To begin with, the bonds of race do not apply to a majority of Americans; and there is no reason why the bonds of language should be, of themselves, any more efficacious than they are between Engle d and Southern Ireland or between Germany and Northern Switzerland. Nor should America’s huge interest in our Coronation be exaggerated or interpreted out of its context. Americans love pageantry, and'are worshippers of most things that they haven’t got—ancient ritual, fifteenth-century cathedrals, thousand-year-old traditions, and a Royal family. “Alliance” Talk. Even less good is done by those who advocate a definite Anglo-American alliance, even of a defensive kind. America, herself in no danger of physical attack by any other power, feels it to be psychologically probable that alliances are only sought by the weaker party, i.e., by those who hope to get more than they give. Moreover, there is a growing unwillingness on the part of America to underwrite the future of any imperial system —even its own. As a well-known publicist said to me (but not for publicatiqn with his name attached) : “American imperialism was fortunately stillborn. We.would slough off the Philippines if we could, and in any war with Japan we should probably not waste time and lives in trying to defend them. You see, we are lucky to be what'as well as where we are—an empire within our own boundaries, with as much to occupy us. in our undeveloped lands as in any dominion over pajm and pine. “And we realise, too, that overseas empire yields no profit when the constituent parts have the right to restrict immigration and put up tariff walls against the mother country. We do better, trade with the South American countries than if we held any political control over them. If they want any favour from us, they have to bar- . gain for it like business men, they cannot demand it like spoilt children. Trade doesn’t nowadays follow the flag —it runs away from it if it can.” Much to Hearten.

Eschewing sentiment, however, there is much to hearten the Englishman who feels that Anglo-American friendship is the brightest hope of the world today.

There is, to begin with, America’s slightly wistful admiration for the English, way of managing things. Two points are bound to crop up in anyone’s discussion of Anglo-American relations. First, the debt question. I have met taw Americans who expect the debts ever to be paid, and fewer still who can understand why we cannot pay them.

The second point—and perhaps, in all its complications, a significant one —is the detached yet sympathetic way in which America is watching the British rearmament programme. Most Americans regard British rearmament as an additional guarantee of world peace, and I have never yet met any American who felt that the two countries need match one another, even on paper, as potential enemies. On the contrary, the launching of every new British warship not ’ only gives America no qualms, but affords the extra satisfaction of an insurance policy for which somebody else is paying the premiums. The two countries are. jp this frantic world, perhaps the only cool-headed realists left—as far removed from the truculence of a Palmerston or a Theodore Roosevelt as from the idealisms of a Lansbury or a Wilson. Indeed, of their common policy to-day Britain and America might vary the famous slogan by saying. “It may not be magnificent, but at any rate it is not war.”