Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28. 1918. THE KING AND PRESIDENT

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 155, 28 December 1918, Page 6

Evening Post. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28. 1918. THE KING AND PRESIDENT

The visit of King George to Paris was -a great and thrilling event, and so was that of President Wilson which followed hard upon it. But, alike for the nations immediately concerned and for ihe world, the arrival of the President of the United States at Buckingham Palace must be said to commemorate something of a still deeper and more picturesque significance. Foi the first time the highest representatives of the two branches into which the British race was- divided nearly a century and a-half ago^have met face to face, and they have met as friends. A mutual indifference may be said to have been the prevailing characteristic of the normal relations between the two peoples during the long period of estrangement —a condescending and irritating indifference on the one side, an indifference simmering with suspicion and occasionally galvanised into frenzied spasms of hostility on the other. After Time with his healing touch had been at work for more than a century upon'the fierce passions, which the War of Independence had inevitably excited, an American Secretary of State, who ultimately succeeded in effecting a great improvement in the relations between the two countries, testified to '.' tho mad-dog hatred of England prevalent amongst newspapers and politicians" in America, and recorded apropos of the " open door " negotiations iv China that "every Senator one sees says ' For God's sake, don't let it appear that we have any understanding with England.'" And even during the present war the great American Ambassador who lately returned in shattered health to bis own country, and whose death was announced this week, mentions that, when American contraband consigned to Donmark was intercepted by British cruisers, the New York exporters said . " Don't you see? The British Government pretends to be at war with Germany, but the truth of the matter is that it is using its naval power to gain commerce, with Denmark at our expense " These things are worth noting, both that we may realise the distance that the two nations had to travel m order to reach their present enthusiastic unity of thought and feeliug, and that we may strengthen our determination not to allow a unity, which is based upon an agreement in all the essentials of national life to be obscured and undermined by an exaggerated insistence upon accidental and trivial differences. "In our dealings," said Mr Page about a yeai before the outbreak of war, " blood answers to blood, and our fundamental qualities of manhood are the same." When the reluctance of his countrymen to pass the rigid limits Jiitherfco set to their foreign policy had been overcome, and they had entered the war, not for the purpose of interfering in a European quarrel but to save the world for democracy, Mr. Page's faith was triumphantly vindicated. We have come in. (he Hien said) for the preservation, tho deepening-, and the extension of free government. • The same human coin rings true to each of us; thn same «ng;s false We shall get out of this association an indissoluble companionship, and shall henceforth have indissoluble duties to mankind. 'It was ignorance that previously prevented cither of the two nations from recognising that essential unity of their aims and ideals which had long been apparent to broad-minded observers on bath »id««' «f Urn- Atlantic. SbUi nations have been revealed to tfeesutelvei aud to

one another in the lurid light of a conflagration that threatened everything that they valued with destruction. What has been revealed in this electric and convulsive fashion must not be lost sight of again. The constant and laborious •exercise of care and patience' and other unheroic virtues will be needed, in order that we,, may keep what a crisis which has raised a.ll the noblest qualities of both nations to a white heat has brought into being. Of the various humdrum means by which peace must be enabled to retain the greatest blessing that the war has brought, the most fundamental, the most far-reaching, and the most efficacious is contact. " Beside the companionship of arms," says Mr. Page, " formed where death comes swiftly and frequently, other cojnpanionships seem weak " But the weaker companionships of peace the intimacy which is the sovereign antidote to misunderstanding and estrangement, must be cultivated by the freest possible interchange of persons and ideas between the two nations. Pleadhifc before the London Chamber of Commerce for the promotion of interchange of this kind, Mr. B. T Meredith. Director of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States,- urged that Britain should send missions to America, and that America should reciprocate. " One of the biggest words in the English language;" said Mr Meredith, "is contact, and I hope that we may have contact and know each other." The neglect of such opportunities in the past seems, in the light of recent events and of the proved dependence of freedom itself upon the unity of the English-speaking peoples, to have been almost' criminal. Mr. Page illustrated this neglect in a striking fashion. Addressing a large gathering of British M.P.'s soon after Mr Balfour's return from the United States, he said. Gentlemen who trade do make visits and get to know one another, but tho gentle-, men who rule do not make visits and do not know one another. Mr. Balfour's visit to the United States was most welcome there, and was an historic event. Unfil then I believe I am right in saying that since tho days of James Buchanan, who had been President in 1856. and was Minister to this Court, there never had been a man of the American Administration who while he was in office had personal acquaintance with ai^y msmber 1 of His Majesty's Government,' or any member of His Majesty's Government who in office had had personal acquaintance with any member of the American Administration. Wonderful indeed is the contrast between the circumstances of President | Wilson's visit to Buckingham TPalace and those under which a representative of America, first presented himself at the Court of St. James. Yet there was a manliness and a magnanimity displayed j by both parties on that memorable, occa-! sion which makes it worth recalling now for other purposes than those of contrast. When John Adams came to London as the first Minister of the United States, he naturally felt some delicacy about, opening up the purport of his mission to the King of whom he had been an implacable opponent. But he did so with perfect simplicity and good taste, and not without deep feeling, expressing' the hope that "the old good humour "'might be restored between the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. George 111. met the advances of the ex-rebel, who vvas now the Ambassador of an independent Power, in precisely the same spirit in which they had been made Speaking with a. dignity and a deliberation far removed from the precipitate confusion of his normal conversational style, the King replied I wish you, Sir, to believe, and that it may be understood in America, that I have- done nothing in the late contest but what I thought myself indispensably bound to do by ray duty to my people. I will bo very frank with you. I was the last to consent to the separation, but the separation having become inevitable, I have always said, and I say now, that I would be the first to meet the friendship of the United States as an independent Power , These words were, as Mr. Fortescue . says, " the vcprds of a man "; and they should be duly credited to the King, whose anxiety to retrieve as far as possible his terrible blunder almost moved his once rebellious subject to tears. Had the spirit displayed by both parties in that remarkable interview been more sedulously cultivated by those who came after'them, the nations might not have had to wait for the Kaiser's mailed fist to Tepair the ancient breach and weld them into unity. Both the exorcism of the evil spirits of misunderstanding and distrust, and the efficacy of personal contact as a means of preventing their return, are symbolised in th'fe interchange of courtesies between the King and the President. There is no question of despotism on the one side or revolt on the other, no thought of past differences ov antagonisms to embarrass or constrain. The King, according to the testimony based by scores of American soldiers and journalists upon, their personal experience, is as good a democrat as any of them. The President exercises during his term of office & fulness of executive power which both the King and his Prime Minister might well envy. Be- . tween them they represent tho two greatest of democracies, the two Powers whose oblivion of their ancient feud has saved the whole world from despotism j and the interview reported to-day is a happy augury that the determination of both nations to maintain a comradeship which has achieved this glorious result will succeed.