THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, JULY 4, 1905, ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLII, Issue 12909, 4 July 1905, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, JULY 4, 1905, ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

To-day more than half of the Eng-lish-speaking world celebrates its national birthday. Much as we must always regret the political schism that rent'the United States from the United Kingdom, we can all join without reservation in expressions of goodwill to our American kinsmen and in fraternal greetings such as no other nation can give. For Washington has become a hero to British as to Americans, and the great principles for which the New England colonists fought at Lexington have become part and parcel of the Constitution in every British land, - Nor is it without intense national pride that an Englishman can regard the wonderful nation that has grown up from, those sturdy English colonies, pushing its frontier ever westward until its telegraphs and its railways stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific; ever southward until its cultivated fields extend from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico; and over seas until it has thrust a wedge of colonial conquest and acquisition between the British South Pacific and Asia itself. Within four days' steaming of Auckland to-day is being kept as a national holiday in a port over which flies the Stars and Stripes and which is not foreign soil to any Englishspeaking man. In all the wide Pacific, Spain is no longer known, her place having been taken by the nation that traces its lineage back until it joins our own. So in the years to come, possibly in the centuries to come, but still in some certain future, when ail European flags have disappeared from this side of the world, the flags of one or other of the English-speaking nations will be found in their stead.. For in

spite of a considerable alien immigration, and in spite of her negro problem, the United States has kept herself "English" in a most marvellous manner; has put the language into the mouth of all her citizens and maintained the chief of our institutions in the face of inconceivable difficulty. With the result that the (British and Americans, who parted on the Atlantic five generations ago, meet now in the Pacific as kinsmen and friends. We are so near to one another that while all other nations are "foreign" to both of us equally, to each other we are not "foreign" at all. And however much we may dispute and ■ wrangle upon petty questions and passing differences, when any other nation is in question British and Americans cannot avoid standing together. We may take the American possession of a Samqan port as an instance. No New Zealander likes to have Germany in Samoa, nor France in New Caledonia, however gracefully we may bow our heads to the inevitable, but we all know that the United States would not have to leave Samoa if she voluntarily left her retention of her port to a referendum of New Zealanders. Commercial rivalry apart, it is instinctively felt that the British and Americans are predestined to join hands for mutual purposes in this ocean, that it is in the Pacific that an" Anglo-American Alliance will be brought about and the first steps taken towards an inevitable English-speaking Federation. Under .these circumstances it is not to be wondered at that we regard the Fourth of July with the heartiest goodwill.

But we cannot, comment to-day upon the prospects of Anglo-Ameri-can reunion without paying a tribute to the memory of the great American statesman now lying dead. Mr. Hay was a recognised leader among his countrymen of the Anglo-Ameri-can movement, and did his utmost to commend it to their minds. He made the now famous statement that had it not been for the friendly offices of England a European coalition would have intervened in the Spanish-American War. He appreciated to the utmost the common basis that exists between the two divisions of 'the English-speaking world, and while never faltering in his duty to lids own division worked for many years to pave the way to their complete mutual understanding. By his death not the Americans, only, but the whole Englishspeaking people sustain a. loss that would be irreparable were it not that the friendly relations which he believed in and worked for are in the very nature of things. . When history comes to be written by impartial Anglo-American | historians, the late Mr. Hay will certainly be placed among the earliest and the most farsighted of Anglo-American statesmen. It is true that at the present moment industrial dangers threaten the vitality of the United States, but her statesmen are facing these dangers, and sooner or later they will be equitably solved. Commercial rivalry is to some extent producing irritation between lis, but it is not possible that in the'near future a mutually advantageous reciprocity will not be arrived at. For when we take a broader outlook upon world-politics we find that the instinctive leaning together of the English-speaking people is justified all the world over and justified nowhere more than in the Pacific. This ocean must obviously become the great theatre of national activity within the present century. Japan has awakened. China is awakening. How much more of Asia may similarly awaken we can only faintly surmise. At any rate, not less than 500,000,000 people, of alien race and ultimately antagonistic interests, producing with improved machinery armed with the most modern weapons and proved to possess military and naval capacity, will be dwelling on Pacific shores. The British of the Pacific are only five millions and the British of the Empire are only sixty millions; but the Englishspeaking Republic, that faces the Pacific as much as it faces the Atlantic, contains eighty million people, which, like our. own, still increases at a remarkable rate. Neither Britain nor America, alone, may be able to make their interests in the Pacific safe, excepting by gigantic sacrifices and crushing preparations for possible emergencies. But Britain and America together— the Anglo-American Alliance that must come— can compel respect from the most ambitious and would hardly have to display their strength to check the boldest aggressor. Statesmen like Mr. Hay could see this, even twenty years ago, while to-day it is so self-evident that the dullest politician in the Pacific ought to be able to understand it.