Published in Liberty, January 15th, 1938

I HAVE recently been going to and fro in America, talking to all sorts of people and hearing all kinds of opinions. I am one of those realists who refuse to be blinkered by current political institutions. I belong to that great and growing community which has a common literature and a common language in English. There has been a revolution in communications during the past hundred years, a virtual abolition of distance, which makes our old separations preposterous. The English-speaking states and nations scattered about the world are no longer divergent. They are coming together again, in their thoughts, knowledge, interests and purposes. They have a common future.

I believe profoundly in the synthetic power of a common idiom of thought and expression. Given a free movement of books, papers, radio beams and the like, this is a unifying force that will triumph ultimately over every form of particularism, nationalism and imaginative antagonism. It is bringing the Californian into clearer and closer understanding with the Kentishman, the New Yorker, the Scot, the Maori, the Afrikander, the Canadian, the Welshman, the Anglo-Indian and the Eurasian. I doubt if the green barriers of a censorship and an artificial language will suffice to keep the Irish Free State out of our world-wide coalescence for long. Irishmen are not going to live content talking faked Erse in a small damp island when they have for wit and abuse and the whole English-speaking world at their disposal. I refuse to call myself foreign or alien among any people who speak, read and think in English. It is because they are less reasonable today than ever they were, that I find the resistances to this greater fusion, increasingly remarkable. There are such resistances, one must admit. There are still all sorts of queer and out-of-date frictions and obstructions in the confluence of this new world-wide English-speaking community of ours. This is particularly evident between the United States and Britain. Partly this is due to bad tricks of manner and bad habits of mind on the part of the British which irritate many types of Americans excessively; partly it is due to deep-rooted traditions of distrust and antagonism which have long since ceased to have any practical justification.

Almost all English people forget that so far as origins go the population of the United States never was wholly British. They disregard the early Dutch, Swedish, French and other non-British settlers who slowly adopted the English language and traditions before the War of Independence and the immense infusion of the later immigrations, immigrants who had no earthly reason for Anglomania. These people accepted English and the forms of English thought, they amalgamated with the American school of the English-speaking culture, many of them transferred their ancestors to the Mayflower and acquired a kind of pre-natal pride in the Battle of Bunker Hill, yet steadily and particularly since the beginning of this century, their distinctive qualities have manifested themselves in a greater variety, a wider range, in American imaginative literature and a broader, more enterprising quality in American thought. For long Boston remained more English than England, but forty years ago my generation hailed the intellectual revolt against Boston (and refined Anglicanism) first in a sprinkling of isolated writers from Whitman to Stephen Crane, and then in a comprehensive expansion and release, which has now made American intellectual life not so much a continuation as a vast extension and Europeanisation of English culture. The annexations have been enormous. The English element has played the part, not so much of a direction as a flux. These are matters all too frequently ignored by English people. The thing has happened in history before. just as American education has oriented itself to the War of Independence, in which not one in a score of living Americans had an active ancestor, so the great Phoenician, Babylonian and Carthaginian populations acquired and entered into that tradition of Judea which holds together the comity of Judaism today. Probably, too, under the empire, millions of Roman citizens from York to Egypt without a drop of Roman blood in their veins felt a personal pride in Romulus and Remus. Assimilation is far easier and more powerful than inheritance. It is the linguistic link and the progressive development of common ideas and understandings that are destined to hold the English-speaking community together in the future. Britain never was the mother country of the United States, and the first thing an English visitor to America should do is to get rid of that illusion. Long years ago, a century ago, one of the great New England writers of that time — was it Lowell? — wrote a stinging paper on “a certain air of patronage in foreigners.” It was an excellent reproof to visiting Europeans and particularly to Englishmen who came over to see America as a new young country, betrayed a sort of upper-form attitude to the new boys, and were quite unable to realise that a man of forty in America is just as old as a man of forty in England, has seen just as much of life and counts as many ancestors between himself and Adam. The political association of Britain and America lasted hardly a couple of centuries. But it set a perennial stamp upon their destinies. From the beginning of their separation there has been a peculiar mutual irritation between Britain and America. It has in it something of the vexation of a divorced couple who still resentfully care for things they had in common. “Think what the Empire would have been if you had stuck to us,” is the unspoken accusation of the ordinary Britisher. “Why did you make things so that we had to break?” says the American. “It was your fault,” say both of them, “and my side was in the right.” Maybe you will think that is now ancient history. It is not. It is as alive today as it was a century ago. The mighty growth of America makes the British none the less regretful for the loss of a common world outlook. They paid too much for clear old George the Third. It was the Hanoverian monarchy, the hungry exploitation of America by the British governing class and the narrow traditions of the Foreign Office that caused that breach. Plebeian Britain was on the side of the colonies i............