PRIOR to the turn of the twentieth century, even prior to the first World War, the participation of the United States in European cultural and educational developments was not very significant. The number of students who came from Europe to study in our universities was negligible. On the other hand, the number of American students who studied in European universities especially those of Germany, was quite large. While it is true that a few exchange professorships existed between American and European universities, they carried little influence, and visiting professorships existed to an even less degree. Though the contributions of Americans to scholarly periodicals of an international character were increasing in number, they were relatively few compared with the number from Europeans. American contributions to art, music, and the drama were not impressive. Cooper and Poe had been widely read in Europe as had Emerson, Whitman and Mark Twain at a later time, but in general American writers exerted comparatively little influence on European literature. Recognition, however, was given to American accomplishment in science, especially applied science. Our democratic system of education generally was regarded with small favor as leading to mediocrity. In fact, it is but slight exaggeration to say that most cultured Europeans looked upon Americans in the days previous to World War I somewhat as Greeks looked upon Macedonians in the days previous to Alexander the Great. They were regarded as a strong and virile people but largely devoid of culture. The development of an American culture and its reaction upon the rest of the world provide a fascinating study.

The Anglo-Saxon civilization which developed in the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has in the course of time been modified in almost every respect. This has been due to a great variety of causes, but unquestionably one of the most influential has been the absorption into the body politic since 1790 of almost 40 millions of immigrants coming from almost every country of Europe. These immigrants brought with them their own attitudes toward life, and in the resulting conflict with the native attitude there took place a disintegration of some of the old American ideals of life, especially since the Spanish-American War. All foreign elements have contributed to the building up of the dynamic civilization which exists in the United States today and which is characterized by a perennial state of change so rapid that it is impossible to foresee the outcome. In general, culture and education in the United States before the first World War were subject to three great foreign influences: British, French, and German.

During the colonial period the culture of the United States was fundamentally British. Because of kinship in language, moreover, British culture has continued to exercise a great influence upon Americans. Few Americans read foreign works of literature other than British because few Americans are familiar with foreign languages. The classics of British literature are as much classics for Americans as for Britons, and new works in British literature are widely read in the United States and exert a large influence not only upon the thought of our people but upon the style and technique of our own writers. The British stage sends its best plays to the United States, and a playwright like George Bernard Shaw has a far greater clientele in the United States than in Britain. Unity of language is also responsible for a continuous exchange of teachers, clergymen, and scientists. British ideas on political, social, and economic subjects as published in British newspapers, magazines and books have wide currency in the United States. The legal system of the United States, moreover, is founded upon the common law of England, and the Puritan ideas inherited from the English Reformation still wield a potent influence.

The American Revolution was essentially a political, not an economic or a social revolution. After independence had been won the colonists resumed all their former relationships with England, save those of the political tie. England continued to be the well from which they drew most of their spiritual nourishment. It is true that some Englishmen were familiar with the works of the New England School. But in our own country Dickens was more popular than Hawthorne, Tennyson more highly appreciated than Whitman, and Herbert Spencer wielded almost as much influence upon our thinking as did Emerson. Despite the "Flowering of New England", the United States retained culturally somewhat of a colonial status almost down to the Civil War. After the Civil War our industrialists enthusiastically embraced the philosophy of laissez-faire, which had had such a profound influence in Britain. This helped in the enormous development of our industries but brought in its train social evils that resulted in the rise in the early years of the twentieth century of the radical school of literature which emphasized reforms in social conditions and relationships. The United States has slowly evolved its own civilization and culture which are different from those of Britain, but in its own civilization there are still many more elements derived from Britain than from any other foreign country.

Until after the Revolution, education in America was confined to the higher and middle classes. In the southern colonies organized on the plantation system, where schools were difficult of access, the English system of employing tutors in the family was followed. The middle colonies were settled by Dutch, Germans, Swedes, and French as well as by English. They all brought their evangelical beliefs with them and, while insisting that everybody be taught how to read the Bible, they also insisted upon the school's being an adjunct of the church; hence the parochial type of school flourished. This was also true wherever the Roman Catholics settled. Only in New England, settled by a homogeneous people holding Calvinistic beliefs, did the people establish town elementary schools, partly supported by tuition fees and partly by taxation. This system held true also in the establishment of the "academies" which in the late colonial period provided an excellent secondary education preparatory to entrance into college. The religious motive prevailed everywhere and indirect religious supervision continued well into the nineteenth century. But the unity of religious belief that characterized early New England gradually gave way to divergence of belief and toleration of other sects, and in 1827 publicly supported and controlled non-sectarian schools became a reality. This was at the height of the movement across the Alleghenies and at the beginning of the movement that put control of the federal government in the Jacksonian democracy. In the pioneer civilization that developed, there took root and flourished the fundamental idea of American life that had been latent in New England, equality of opportunity---wholly alien to the English way of life. Wherever New Englanders settled in the West, the "little red schoolhouse" was established to provide elementary education for all children. Except for Friday afternoon declamations and singing classes, in most cases there was not a great deal of education beyond that. The demands of a pioneer civilization consumed men's time and efforts and little attention could be given to the amenities and refinements of life embodied in literature, music, and the arts.

British influence remained longer in higher education. When the first institution of higher education, Harvard College, was founded in 1636, it was almost a replica of Emmanuel College in Cambridge University where many Dissenting clergymen had studied. The curriculum consisted of Latin, Greek, mathematics, and philosophy; the teachers were all clergymen; the discipline was rigid; and the chief objective was to provide leading pillars of the community, especially ministers, for the church. Other colleges founded during the colonial period were nearly always organized for the same purpose. The curriculum of the college, inherited from England, remained practically the same almost to the Civil War, though some institutions broadened it by introducing a foreign language and some natural science, and a few substituted English for Hebrew or Greek. The professions, as in England, were filled by means of the apprentice system. Almost to the twentieth century, moreover, the English system of testing ability exclusively by final examinations prevailed with us. English influence upon American higher education has recently been made manifest in the introduction of the preceptorial or tutorial system at a few Eastern colleges such as Harvard and Princeton and of the residential colleges at Harvard and Yale. Those systems will probably spread elsewhere.

The American college, though inherited from England, has had a peculiar development and is today a unique institution. The development of education in England has been similar to that of education in continental countries in its threefold division into elementary, secondary, and university education. With us the division is fourfold, the liberal arts college being interposed between the high school and the university. This evolution has been due to a number of causes, the chief of which was the late development of universities in our country. As already mentioned, the first institution to fulfill the pattern of a modern university was Johns Hopkins, opened to students less than seventy years ago, in 1876. By that time the liberal arts college, which had spread across the country as a companion movement of the religious denominations, had become a strongly entrenched part of our educational system.

While continental European countries had considerable influence on the organization and administration of the American university, they had practically none on the college whose raison d'être is not understood in those countries. But British influence has been very great. After the Renaissance the English adopted as their educational ideal the old Athenian objective of a "sound mind in a sound body" and we inherited it from them and carried it to excess in the football team. It is only in Oxford and Cambridge, moreover, that is found the combination of intellectual, extra-curricular, and social influences that characterize our colleges. They, too, believe that "a college is a place to grow up in" socially as well as academically. The result of this evolution has been to make the liberal arts college one of the most potent influences in shaping American life. As soon as the frontier became stabilized, the liberal arts college was established to provide the rudiments of higher education and to emphasize democracy as the form of political and social organization that was American. It is to be hoped that the reduced enrollment of students, interest on investments, and contributions to endowments, which characterize this war period, may not endanger the college's existence.

When the state universities began to be founded the influence of Scottish universities upon them was considerable. Democracy in education, so uncommon at Oxford and Cambridge, had always characterized Scottish institutions. One of our oldest state universities and one having a most enviable record is the University of Michigan. Many of the ideas concerning organization and curriculum which were developed in Michigan and several of the older institutions of higher education were the result of the infiltration of Scottish professors who, when they came to this country, found greater opportunity to develop their own theories at the state university rather than at the endowed university. The great President of the University of Michigan, James Burrill Angell, had received his education at Brown University and later became President of the University of Vermont, when it was the exemplar of the Transcendental movement in this country. Vermont Transcendentalism was a peculiar combination of English and German idealism, and the graduates of Vermont carried that philosophy to many of the older state universities of the Middle West. During President Angell's administration, Scottish influence at Michigan was quite pronounced.

Most Americans are unaware of the extent to which the French contributed to the racial make-up and cultural development of our country. By 1656 so many French and Walloon Protestants had settled in New Amsterdam that it was necessary to issue all government and town proclamations in French as well as Dutch. When the British seized New Amsterdam in 1664 one quarter of the population was made up of French Huguenots, who also formed a considerable part of the population of South Carolina. The first large and important French addition to the population of the colonies was made when the persecution of the Huguenots in France drove many of them to our shores, especially after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685. Wherever the Huguenots settled they taught the colonists how to live. They spread a knowledge of gentle manners and of the arts and accomplishments of a polished civilization. Their homes were usually attractive and they softened the hardships of existence with their good humor and gaiety. Although their influence was not widespread, their contribution to American life was important.

The next addition of French-speaking people to the population of the colonies was made up of the 10,000 Acadians whose unhappy story is given in Longfellow's Evangeline.

They were scattered among the colonies from New England to Georgia but especially large numbers went to Louisiana. They were followed by an even larger number of émigrés from Haiti and Santo Domingo when the slaves rose against their masters after the French Revolution. These émigrés were in turn joined by others from France itself, first by royalists including Louis Philippe, who remained throughout his life a staunch friend of the United States and greatly eased the difficulty over spoliation claims in the administration of Andrew Jackson. After the Restoration of Louis XVIII came the Bonapartist émigrés, including Joseph and Jerome Bonaparte, whose son remained to raise a family here. But the greatest addition to the population of French-speaking people was made by the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, when some 50,000 became citizens of the United States. It was not merely that it added to our territory the enormous area between the Mississippi and the Rockies, but in New Orleans it annexed a remarkable center of culture which led a life peculiarly its own. In the early nineteenth century, New or. leans---where music, literature, art, and manners held sway as well as business---was the most European city on this continent. Place names like St. Louis, Vincennes, Detroit and many others illustrate the widespread geography of early French influence. Small groups of French were added to the population annually thereafter, but it is impossible to say what proportion they bore to the entire population. A far more important question to consider is what kind of people they were and what influence they had upon the civilization and culture of the United States.

During the colonial period when the French were installed in Canada and in the country west of the Alleghenies, and when conflicts between them and the colonists were frequent, the attitude of the American colonists toward the French was distinctly hostile. When the French military menace on the frontier was removed after the Seven Years' War by the cession to Great Britain in 1763 of Canada and the western country, a different attitude toward things French began to prevail in the colonies. That was the period of the Enlightenment, the age of the philosophes and encyclopédistes whose teachings made a great appeal to the upper classes in American society. Their insistence upon intellectual freedom, their ridicule of religious dogmatism, their appeal for a more enlightened humanitarianism had a profound effect upon leaders of public opinion, especially Franklin and Jefferson. A skepticism as to the value of the prevailing ecclesiastical establishments which in France had led to the growth of deism prevailed among many of the intellectuals in the United States down to the outbreak of the American Revolution. During the long military struggle which ensued, the officers of the French army exerted a refining influence upon the social life of the upper class in America, an influence which was greatly strengthened later by the influx of émigrés after the French Revolution.

It has seldom been the fate of one book to influence the historical development of a people to the extent that Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois has influenced the historical development of the American people. Montesquieu, who greatly admired the British constitution, believed that the liberties of Great Britain resulted from the division of powers between the executive and the legislative. The Esprit des Lois was published in 1748 just at the time when the legislature of Great Britain was absorbing all the powers of government and developing the parliamentary system as it functioned in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. But the men of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 believed that the liberties of the colonies had been preserved during the colonial period by the division of powers between the British royal governors and the colonial legislatures and were glad to call upon the Esprit des Lois for arguments to support their views.

In fact, the book became a kind of political bible in which exponents of most unpopular views found justification for their positions.

When the French Revolution broke out in 1789 the similarity of ideas expressed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man to those expressed in our own Declaration of Independence won the hearty sympathy of Americans and that sympathy continued until the excesses of the Terror alienated the good will toward France which had been so pronounced a few years before. Moreover, the average American looked upon Napoleon as a tyrant, a view which was sedulously propagated by the many royalist émigrés who settled in our country. The reaction was greatly augmented by the remarkable renaissance of the Protestant spirit in the United States which characterized the latter half of the eighteenth century. The Great Revival, led by the Englishman, George Whitefield, burst forth almost simultaneously in all parts of the country and what is today called Fundamentalism became the generally accepted religious doctrine among the common people. It was in deadly antagonism to the deism which had appealed to many in the ranks of our upper classes. With the passing of the years, the influence of the adherents of the revivalists increased. The old suspicion of France revived and even after the restoration of Louis XVIII it was a question in the minds of the average American whether in exchanging Robespierre and the Goddess of Reason for the Pope and the Jesuits, the French had not gone from bad to worse. Nevertheless, it was to the French philosophes that the friends of freedom of thought turned to find weapons with which to fight the growing obscurantism. They were a tower of strength to the liberals during that period.

After the close of our War of 1812, the United States definitively turned its back upon Europe and entered a period of comparative isolation. It faced the West and gave its thought and energy to the upbuilding of the empire spread. before it, and to the development of its natural resources. The attention of the people was directed to domestic problems, such as state rights, internal improvements and, to a growing extent, slavery. There were few. controversies with European countries and the people were but slightly interested in what was taking place on the other side of the Atlantic. Yet foreign cultural influence, and at that time this meant primarily French influence, was not by any means extinguished. Chairs for the study of the French language were established in many of our colleges. French journals, magazines and books were found in our book stores and were quite widely read. The Positivism of Auguste Comte had a profound influence on historical thinking in our country as shown in its emphasis upon environmental and biological factors. American students of art studied in the ateliers of France.

During this period French science enjoyed a real hegemony. The French were supreme in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry, and they revolutionized the old ideas and introduced new methods in medicine. This influence on the scientific development of the United States lasted until it was superseded by the development of German science in the middle of the century. In our political life every president of the United States down to Andrew Jackson read French and some of them, notably Jefferson and Monroe, spoke it fluently. But with the triumph of Jacksonian democracy and the development of Whig nationalism under the leadership of Henry Clay, all foreign influence in the changing civilization of the United States waned. Relatively few people realized the extent of French collaboration during the two preceding generations in establishing the political doctrines of the sovereignty of the people, the liberty of the individual, and political and social equality.

As America entered into the frontier period of its cultural development, Germany was the spring from which it drew inspiration. When Edward Everett, afterward Governor of Massachusetts, Ambassador to Great Britain, President of Harvard College, United States Senator, and Secretary of State, matriculated at Göttingen in 1815, he became the precursor of several thousand Americans who studied at German universities during the nineteenth century and who upon their return made an indelible impression upon American education and culture. This movement was greatly needed in American life as a necessary correction in American values then current. Americans have been prone---and still are---to exalt the man of action, the man who does things, especially above all others the successful business man. The American students who went to Germany, particularly after the Civil War, lived for a while in a country where scholarship was highly prized and university teachers held in the greatest esteem. A large percentage of these students became teachers in our own colleges and universities and brought the reverence for true learning with them. Moreover, there has been a steady stream of German-born scholars to the United States, beginning with Francis Lieber, the great authority on political science who began his teaching career in the United States in 1827 in South Carolina College, and continuing down to Michelson, the great physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907 and who taught until his death at the University of Chicago. More than three hundred German scholars have been called to chairs in the institutions of higher education in the United States and they have done a great deal to enhance the position of the university teacher in public esteem. It would be hard to overestimate the influence at the present time of the 400 university teachers driven from Germany by the Nazi terror who have already been absorbed by our colleges and universities. The subject is discussed at length in Chapter II.

Upon the life and spirit of the university itself German influence has been enormous. Its greatest contribution is probably its insistence upon thoroughness in thinking and accuracy in research. Americans value more highly the discussion method in classroom work than the lecture system which prevails in German and French universities, but they regard the seminar system which they learned in the German universities as one of the most potent instruments of higher education. The seminar tests the patience of the student in following clues which may lead nowhere, his willingness to work hard to get the facts justifying a conclusion, and his ability to draw the correct conclusion from the premises he discovers. This thoroughness has been particularly valuable in a country like the United States where people are in a hurry to have things done. Associated with this research was the belief that the work of the advanced student should result in a real contribution to the sum of human knowledge. Though it is doubtful whether the great majority of the theses, turned out annually by the Doctors of Philosophy in American universities accomplish this, some do. Certainly it is the only justifiable ideal to hold.

Another characteristic of German higher education in the nineteenth century which has had much influence in the United States was its emphasis upon Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit. It must never be forgotten that the American college originated during the colonial period partly in the need to provide clergy for the churches. Clerical influence has, therefore, been pronounced and has often been used to try to muzzle professors. In recent years legislatures in some of the more backward states have also attempted to control the opinions of teachers in the domain of biology. All these attempts have met with the determined opposition of the German-trained teachers in our colleges and universities; they have insisted upon the right of the scholar freely to seek the truth and fearlessly to announce it when he has found it. In the midst of the movement of American students to German universities another movement having influence upon American life was the advent of the German liberals led by such men as Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel after the Revolution of 1848 in Germany. This splendid group of Germans were unlike the ordinary immigrants who came to the United States to better their economic status. The German liberals were people of education and culture who brought with them not only high ideals of life but a practice of its amenities and refinements, especially a love of music and literature. Fortunately, the majority moved to the Middle West, the newer region of our country, where their influence was particularly valuable.

Another influence of Germany upon our higher education was in the organization of our universities. Up to the establishment of Johns Hopkins, American higher education seldom extended beyond the college, which was essentially devoted to teaching. German influence upon our institutions of higher learning was not unknown before that time but its. influence on the organization of Johns Hopkins was profound. For many years Johns Hopkins had no undergraduate college. It was devoted primarily to work of a research character and college graduation was a pre-requisite for admission. In addition it incorporated schools for training in the professions of law, medicine, and engineering, which hitherto had usually maintained independent existences.

The founding of Johns Hopkins spelled the doom of the predominant influence of Germany and in fact the influence of all foreign countries in American higher education. The number of American students in German universities reached its maximum in the decade 1890-1900. After that it steadily declined. This decline was due primarily to the fact that all the great privately endowed and large state universities were reorganized so as to provide the training for which students had formerly felt they had to go to Germany. Eminent scholars were appointed as professors, magnificent libraries founded, splendidly equipped laboratories erected for advanced research, and liberal fellowships provided for the maintenance of mature students. American students continued to go to Germany to study in certain fields in which it was believed Germany had pre-eminence, but it was increasingly felt that American institutions could provide sound training just as well in most fields and better in some.

Then came the first World War, during which American-German cultural relations ceased entirely. But the war had a more significant influence than the cessation of American-German relations. The tide of students going abroad for purposes of study was reversed. Foreign students came from practically every country of Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Moreover, as already mentioned, France and Great Britain had learned how great had been the influence of Germany upon the United States as the result of the study of American students in German universities. Those countries had not shown before the first World War the same degree of cordiality toward American students that had characterized the German universities. After, the war they adopted a very different attitude.

German influence has been even greater in our elementary school system than in our institutions of higher education. In the early nineteenth century a new spirit was brought into our schools by the introduction of Pestalozzian methods from Germany. Most important of all was the inspiration Horace Mann received, as the result of a visit to Germany in 1843, for the establishment of institutions for the training of teachers, none of which existed at the time in the United States. The Normal School became a distinctive element in our system of education. Later through the initiative of one of our great educators, the Federal Commissioner of Education, Dr. William T. Harris, the Froebel kindergarten spread throughout the United States. Finally, in the last decade of the nineteenth century the theory of Hebart became the prevailing one in American elementary education, producing most important changes in its purposes and methods and maintaining influence almost until today. This is an astonishing record. Probably never again will another country have so great an influence on our schools. The United States has itself become the greatest locus for experiments in education. From the Spanish American War of 1898 dates the rapid decline of German influence on American life and culture. In addition to the fact that the American universities after 1900 took care of the great majority of American research students, the people of the United States resented the militaristic attitude of Germany at that time. After World War I more American students studied in France and England than in Germany.

Although England, France, and Germany contributed most substantially to the development of American culture and education in our formative years, other foreign influences have played an increasingly important part. Irish influence has been felt ever since our government was founded but became pronounced after the great Irish immigration commencing in the mid-eighteen-forties. The Irish are devout Roman Catholics and throughout the nineteenth century formed the great bulk of the adherents of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The priesthood and hierarchy were recruited chiefly from their ranks and they have exerted an influence upon American life out of all proportion to their numbers. They were very patriotic Americans and successfully opposed the movement toward segregation of foreign Catholic groups under imported national priests holding religious services in foreign tongues. It is a question, however, whether they did not encourage a divisive influence in our social life by their insistence upon attendance of Catholic children at parochial schools only. The public school has been throughout our history the chief amalgam in our national life. Though the Irish influence on the Catholic Church has remained predominant, it has been shared during the twentieth century by Italians, Poles, Czechs, and Germans chiefly as the result of the enlarging recruitment of the clergy from their ranks.

Another significant force in American cultural life has been the Mediterranean influence stemming from Italy and Spain. In its early days this influence was not a personal factor resulting from the migration of people from those countries to the United States. It was a deep-streamed cultural force transmitted from Italy into our literature by such leading American writers as Hawthorne and Crawford, and through the medium of Italian sculpture by Story and Powers. Of greater importance in our early history was the influence exerted by Spanish culture on the part of a succession of eminent American writers: Irving, Prescott, Motley, Bryant, Longfellow, and Lowell. Moreover, the Spanish influence was much reinforced by Latin American influence coming via our Southwest, which had a great effect upon American art conceptions by adding what was indigenous in New World art.

Indeed, foreign influences have come into the United States from almost all regions since the turn of the century. The plays of Ibsen startled Americans into new ways of thinking about human relations. The writings of Proust and the French symbolists made a deep impression upon our young writers in the decades after 1910 and influenced our new school of novelists. The power of keen analysis which characterizes the Jewish mind was applied with devastating effect to outworn beliefs and institutions in the fields of politics and economics in the years following the heavy Jewish immigration of 1890. The Russian Revolution resulted in a re-evaluation of our concept of "the general welfare", a loss of faith in laissez-faire, and a more responsive attitude toward state regulation and control. The increased power and importance of the United States in international affairs after World War I stimulated propaganda from other countries that were anxious to influence American thinking. This was at first of a "cultural" character such as that conducted by the Alliance Française or the English Speaking Union, but it was later devoted to a blatant attempt at influencing our immigrant groups politically by Italian Fascists and German Nazis.

If the transformation of the individual into what he finally becomes is primarily the result of the forces of environment upon him, it can readily be understood why the process in the United States has been one not simply of education but of re-education. In almost every other country it has been expected that the individual would pass his life in the social class into which he is born. In the great majority of cases he has, and his education---when any was provided---was intended to realize that objective. Not so in the United States.

When in the beginning of our national career John Adams said that the government should be in the control of "the rich, the well born and the able" he forgot that many thousands of the people who arrived on our shores between the settlement at Jamestown in 1607 and the Declaration of Independence almost 170 years later were indentured servants--- poor, illiterate and not well born. They spent years working to pay off the price of their indenture. But they worked in a different atmosphere and within a different environment. An untouched empire of land in which they might share lay before them. Their future depended upon themselves, not upon a master. They went into the wilderness, carved out their own homesteads, built schools and churches and organized local governments. They were poor but free and on their way to security. They were independent and equal because they brought no privileges of birth and wealth with them. The indentured servants became re-educated by the changed environment. Throughout the nineteenth century each generation of their descendants in our western expansion passed through a similar experience. That experience has made of them a practical, hard-headed race, devoid of many of the amenities and refinements of life, but generally upright and God-fearing and generous to a fault.

That generosity prompted the United States to welcome the 36,000,000 immigrants who came to our shores between the founding of our government in 1789 and the Immigration law of 1924. They came inspired with the hope that they might lead a happier life than they had in the old country.

They came where peace reigned and the arts of peace flourished, where militarism was unknown, where caste did not exist, where national hatreds were forgotten, where everyone hoped to give his children a better chance in life than he had enjoyed. Generally speaking, they came as poor, anxious, distressed immigrants; the new environment transformed them into energetic citizens, standing on their own feet, looking the world in the face, bowing down to no man. Their reeducation had been completed.

Immigration and the resulting foreign influences generally made for a freer life in the United States, a greater willingness to tolerate individual differences, a more widely spread enjoyment of leisure. But they necessarily had a disintegrating influence upon the old American ideals of life that prevailed in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The result is that American civilization is characterized by rapid change. Today it is a dynamic force which has expanded from inner pressure and made its influence felt throughout the world. American automobiles, American movies and American jazz penetrate to the most remote corners of the earth. No one would maintain that they give a true view of American life. That they unfavorably impress the foreign mind with American standards of life is unquestionable. Were they the only influence by means of which the rest of the world could judge America, the judgment would probably be as harsh as it would be inaccurate. Foreigners sometimes assert that American ideas are now conquering the world. This is a questionable generalization, but while American victories in the domain of material things have been dramatic, no less real have been American contributions to the life of the spirit.

"PROFESSOR MURRAY," I said to Gilbert Murray upon my visit to England in July 1919, shortly after the signing of the Versailles Treaty, "I have been visiting your institutions of higher education and I am amazed to find not a single course on American history in any of them." "My dear Dr. Duggan," he answered, "had you carried your investigation farther, you would probably have discovered that we have no courses on the history and institutions of our own Dominions."

As far as courses relating to United States history are concerned, there was only slight change between 1919 and 1941, when the United States and Britain became belligerent allies in World War II. There is more news about the United States in British newspapers today and the American movies have been exercising an influence, such as it is. But there has been little change in the amount of attention to American history in educational institutions. There is now the Harmsworth professorship of American history at Oxford and the Eastman professorship; the one filled in 1922-1925 by Professor Morison and the other in 1933-1934 by Professor Frankfurter, both of Harvard. The Eastman professorship was filled in 1930-1931 by Professor Wesley Mitchell, and in 1939-1940 by Professor Joseph Chamberlain, both of Columbia. All these scholars made a strong impression upon teachers and students. The Commonwealth Fund established a professorship of American history at the University of London. The Woodrow Wilson professorship of international relations at the University of Wales is also a help. When conducting courses in the political and social sciences today, moreover, British professors make more frequent references to American experience. But the comparatively small progress made in the matter has led some Americans to believe that the former British attitude of treating us as colonials still exists despite the experience of World War I.

This is only partly a mistake. The United States certainly did not win World War I, alone, as some bombastic Americans sometimes assert, but it is probably accurate to say that except for our aid the Allies would not have won it. If that is true, many Americans consider it anomalous that twenty-five years should have passed and Britain still remain ignorant of our country and its history. The British have always been far more ignorant of us than we are of them. In practically all our high schools the history of Great Britain is given either in a special course or as part of the history of; Europe. This is because of our historical association with Great Britain. We must know something about the source of many of our institutions and ways of life. The British of necessity have studied the historical relationships with their immediate neighbors who have been at times their enemies; but recent events have proved that their security depends more on the United States than on any other country. It was knowledge of this fact which last year led the British Board of Education at long last to promote the study of American history and institutions amongst all elementary and secondary school teachers and to introduce in the schools short courses on American history and current problems. Another reason for delay in the study of American affairs is that British education is much restricted in its liberty of action by its adhesion to examinations as a test of educational progress. This restriction does not make it easy to add courses in an entirely new field like American history. The situation up to the present, however, has been primarily determined by the forces of geography and history, and it is worth while to consider for a moment their interaction.

During the entire seventeenth century, the attention of Englishmen was taken up with the struggle for supremacy between King and Parliament. That struggle had hardly ended in 1688 in the supremacy of Parliament before the Second Hundred Years' War broke out between Great Britain and France. During those two centuries the American colonies were of necessity left largely to themselves. They learned to control their own internal affairs and to tax themselves for objectives which they themselves decided upon. When the great struggle between France and England ended in the defeat of France in 1763, the British government insisted that the colonies ought to bear a share of the cost of the war that relieved them of the French menace in Canada and it began to impose taxes upon the colonies. The British government was ignorant of the political evolution that had taken place in the American colonies in the two preceding centuries. It did not realize that the colonies had grown to manhood or it would not have attempted to impose taxes upon them. It would have appealed to the colonists' sense of fairness and would only have asked that they share the burden of debt. Admittedly that would have not been in accordance with the practice of the time in the relations between colonies and mother countries, but far-seeing statesmen like the elder Pitt, Edmund Burke, and Charles James Fox were aware of its importance. The controversy precipitated the Revolution and resulted in the independence of the United States. That is one of the greatest events in our history, but the Revolution became in the course of time an almost forgotten incident for the British. H. G. Wells in his Outline of History neglects it in typically British fashion. However, they eventually learned from the experience the wisdom of better treatment for their remaining colonies.

The wars of independence of the English and Spanish colonies in America had one very dissimilar result. The Spanish colonies turned their backs upon the mother country and thereafter had few relationships with her. As already mentioned, the English colonies at once resumed all relationships with the mother country save that of political dependence and they remained spiritually colonies of Great Britain almost throughout the nineteenth century. Very few Britons visited our country and some of them returned home to spread contempt for what they had seen and heard. It was as late as 1869 that Lowell wrote "On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners", and his shafts were aimed chiefly at Englishmen. The British remained unaware that the experience of "The Winning of the West" and the coming of millions of non-British peoples with different ideas of life effected a subtle spiritual revolution in the United States, resulting in a new civilization founded upon the British yet different from it. The turn of the century brought to the attention of the most thoughtful British the new American literature and art and philosophy that gradually had been developed, but it was not until after World War I that knowledge of its significant character became general even among the intellectual classes.

In Disraeli's novel Sybil he explains the existence of "two nations" within the general body of the English people: the "respectable classes" and the "laboring poor". That distinction remained practically true throughout the nineteenth century and the system of education that prevailed in England during that century also partly explains the situation that existed there in 1919. The egalitarian philosophy of life that was held in the United States after the time of Andrew Jackson placed emphasis primarily upon the elementary school in order that the foundation for equal opportunity for all should be realized. An egalitarian philosophy had no place in Great Britain. Until the passage of the Forster Education Act of 1870, there was no publicly-supported elementary school system as we understand it. A free secondary school system waited for its establishment until 1902. The Provincial universities are almost all either late nineteenth or twentieth century products. The result was that university education was heavily concentrated in Oxford and Cambridge, whose students came largely from the "Public Schools", which in fact are aristocratic private schools. The Fisher Act of 1918 was a milestone in British education in the improvement of the elementary school system. The Hadow Report of 1926 and the Spens Report of 1938 made clear that British educators were determined to secure real equality of opportunity at the secondary school level. The Reports also indicated the existence of a strong popular movement in the direction of a national system of democratic education in which the Public Schools must find their place. That place as yet has not been established.

The aim of the education at the Public Schools and the two old universities was to make an "English gentleman". The classics and mathematics provided the chief intellectual pabulum but scholarship was not the primary goal. Sports, teaching cooperation and bringing out leadership all played a most important role. English education is largely responsible for the fact that the Englishman is essentially a man of will rather than a man of intellect, thoroughly practical and not speculative. That is what is meant by the saying that the Englishman "muddles through". He wants to see clearly the next step and how to attain it, not the theoretical final goal.

The British Empire was not built up as the result of careful thinking and planning. For a large part of the nineteenth century, the Dominions were regarded by many Englishmen with considerable indifference and by some as a positive nuisance. It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century ---when Joseph Chamberlain, Cecil Rhodes, Rudyard Kipling and their associates expounded the philosophy of imperialism---that the conviction grew among some imperialists in England that the British Empire is the nearest approach to the Kingdom of God that exists upon this mundane sphere.

It has always been a delight for me to visit Oxford and Cambridge, to observe the "backs" along the Cam behind the venerable college buildings which make up the University of Cambridge, and the quiet within the quadrangles of the Oxford Colleges. I particularly recall my first experience with "High Table" at Oxford. The dons sat at a table at one end of the dining room, elevated above the student tables. Grace was offered in Latin so rapidly as to be entirely unintelligible to me. It did not seem to inspire the students with holy reflections, and I understand that if the grace is too prolonged the students rattle their forks as a hint to bring it to an end. After dinner, several of the dons adjourned to one of their rooms and there ensued over the port a most stimulating conversation upon a variety of subjects. Some of those men were very much alive to the political and economic problems that confronted the post-war world, and I came away convinced that if it had ever been true in past times that Oxford was "the home of lost causes", it was no longer a fact. One had only to attend the forthright debates of the students at the Oxford Union on the most controversial problems of the day, domestic and international, to realize that he was in an unusually stimulating environment where he would hear many constructive suggestions. Incidentally, the so-called "Oxford Oath" of the early 1930's, urging students to refuse to support "King and country" in case of war, was a passing phenomenon. Nearly all the students who took the oath in those days are now enrolled in the fighting forces.

During a later visit, in 1934, I was invited to occupy the rooms of a don who was then away from college to carry on some research in Egypt. By that time some of the winter hardships of residence formerly existing in an Oxford college had been overcome. It is true that one had to get into a bathrobe, go down stairs and across the quadrangle to a basement in another building in order to take his shower, but he no longer took a sponge bath in his room in a tin tub. Each student had his servitor or "scout" who made a fire and brought breakfast. It is a long established custom to invite fellow students to breakfast and to bear the expense for parties of other kinds. These expenses made the cost of a typical education at Oxford or Cambridge beyond the means of many who therefore lose some of the fine social aspects of education at one of the older universities. The entire scholastic year at Oxford and Cambridge covered only twenty-four weeks, divided into three terms. In the intervals between terms students usually left the universities with their books, tramped or bicycled about Great Britain or a foreign country and had time for real study and reflection, and professors had time for research. It is easily understandable why some of the older men look back to the early days with nostalgia.

My visit to Cambridge in 1919 impressed upon me the strong spirit of independence found in each individual college, of which there were eighteen making up the University. Each college is headed by a Master (though King's has a Provost and Queens' a President) and all are under the general direction of a Vice Chancellor of the University, the Chancellor being nearly always a distinguished statesman. Sir Arthur Shipley, with whom I became acquainted when he visited the United States during World War I, was Vice Chancellor in 1919 and was gracious enough to invite me to spend a week with him. Sir Arthur was a fine old gentleman with delightful peccadillos. He led me to my bedroom the first night of my visit and proudly pointed to a four poster so high that I thought I would have to stand upon a chair to climb into it, and told me that Henry VII had once reposed there. I slept soundly, untroubled by Henry's ghost. I asked Sir Arthur whether it would be possible for him to suggest to the Masters of the various colleges the wisdom of entering into cooperative relations with some of our great universities. "My dear Dr. Duggan," he answered, "were I to do that you could rely upon its not being done. They would undoubtedly regard it as an interference." Perhaps he exaggerated somewhat for I afterward found several of the Masters happily disposed to the idea, but it gave me an inkling of the attitude of the individual college toward any central control. While at Cambridge I made the acquaintance of some fine scholars such as J. Holland Rose and Ernest Barker, as I did at Oxford. At the latter I came to know such eminent men as Lionel Curtis and Sir William Craigie. My repeated visits in later years to both universities were always among my chief pleasures.

The two old universities were left in a parlous state economically by World War I. The age-long endowments could no longer support them. The government followed the usual custom when confronted by a serious problem. It appointed a Royal Commission to consider the whole question of the support of higher education. The Commission reported in favor of making annual grants to all universities including the Provincial universities. Oxford and Cambridge at first viewed with hesitancy this system of subsidy as possibly forecasting an attempt at government control, which they had resisted for centuries. They were assured, however, that the government would not interfere with their independence or administration in any way, and that assurance has been faithfully observed. It is an attitude that some of our state governments, especially in the South, might imitate to the welfare of higher education in the United States.

Another point of comparison between higher education in Britain and the United States may be found in the splendid summer sessions maintained at Oxford and Cambridge. The summer schools in American universities are attended chiefly by teachers in our elementary and secondary schools who are primarily motivated by a desire to secure increases in salary or advancement in grade. The summer schools are also attended by students who wish to reduce the four-year period required to obtain a bachelor's degree and by other students who have flunked some course and must make up the lost "credits". There is no material interest served by attendance at a summer session at Oxford or Cambridge. The courses are of a purely cultural character and usually have to do with some aspect of British civilization. There might be a course on "The Elizabethan Drama", "The Lake School of Poetry" or "The Influence of the Industrial Revolution". After World War I, an increasing number of Americans who wanted no "credit" attended summer sessions at Oxford and Cambridge to such an extent that in 1937 they numbered at Oxford two hundred, half of all in attendance. This inspired the authorities at Cambridge in the following year to organize a summer session on the American plan, particularly for Americans. It was given up in 1939 because of the imminence of the war.

To an American one of the most interesting features of Oxford is the presence of the Rhodes Scholars. Their presence is due to the vision of Cecil Rhodes, the South African magnate who provided a sufficient endowment to enable two scholars from each of the American states and the British Dominions to spend the three-year period of study at Oxford. The aim in the education of the Rhodes Scholar was the same as that in the education of the young Englishman. Rhodes required each of his Scholars to be chosen from among those who exhibit moral character, leadership, and interest in their fellows, because "those latter attributes will be likely in after-life to guide him to esteem the performance of public duties as his highest aim." The Rhodes Scholars were distributed among the various colleges of the University. When the plan was first put into operation in 1904, the Scholars were selected by competitive examination from among juniors and seniors in American colleges. This method was not a success educationally or socially. Some of the students did not measure up to the scholastic standards of Oxford and some others came from a simpler, a less sophisticated, less sensitive way of life which made adjustment slow and hence retarded educational progress. The plan was fortunate in having Philip Kerr, who later became the Marquess of Lothian, as Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, and President Frank Aydelotte of Swarthmore as the American Secretary. They worked in complete harmony. As the result of twenty-five years of experience the plan was somewhat reorganized. The United States was divided into eight districts and four students were selected from each district. This permitted a choice from a larger number of candidates in a district. The reform resulted in a much better supply of Scholars and a happier relationship between the English and American students. In 1926 Rhodes House was built at Oxford as the headquarters of the Scholars. There the American students from the different states could meet one another as well as the English students who attended the various functions that were held at the House.

The objective of Cecil Rhodes, namely, the development of a better understanding between the American and British peoples has unquestionably been furthered by the establishment of the Rhodes Scholarships. Many of the Scholars have occupied positions of some importance upon their return to the United States, especially in the field of higher education. Their influence enabled them to further the cause from which they themselves benefited. This fact became so obvious that the Commonwealth Fund, with an endowment provided by Edward Harkness, an American millionaire, established in 1925 the Commonwealth Fellowships for English students. By 1931 there were seventy-three Fellows studying in the research institutions and universities of the United States with apparently as great success as in the case of the Rhodes Trust.

Another organization that has had a great influence in developing good relations between Britain and the United States is the American University Union, the representative of the Institute of International Education in France and Great Britain. The Union was founded during World War I by Dr. Anson Phelps Stokes and Professor George Nettleton of Yale University to serve the needs of our college graduates in the American armies fighting in France. Because many of our troops passed through England on their way to France, an office of the Union was also established in London. When the war was over the Union decided to maintain the offices in London and Paris for peacetime purposes. It would be hard to overemphasize the admirable work performed by the Union as a liaison between the institutions of higher, education of Great Britain and the United States. Research scholars and students from the United States were at once connected with the right institutions and organizations to enable them to undertake their special studies. They also had rooming and boarding houses recommended to them, places within the range of all incomes. British scholars and students going to the United States went armed with information and advice that usually proved invaluable to them after their arrival. The Director of the Union represented American higher education at all kinds of conferences of an educational and cultural character. The Union in the course of time came to be regarded as an American educational embassy to which our own diplomatic embassy and British government officials constantly turned for counsel in cultural affairs of an Anglo-American nature. In this work, Professor Dixon Ryan Fox, now President of Union College, who was Director in 1928-1929, and Mr. Willard Connely, who has been Director since, rendered outstanding service through their repeated visits to the institutions of higher education in Great Britain and through their splendid addresses at educational gatherings. During their administrations the American University Union became one of the principal agencies in developing understanding between the intellectual classes of Britain and the United States.

During my frequent visits to Europe in the period 1919-1939, I became much impressed by the excellent work carried on in the Provincial universities of England. These were nearly always established in municipalities and supported primarily by the municipal governments, though several received large---in some cases, princely---gifts from English millionaires. One objective of the Provincial universities is to serve the needs of their immediate environment, in addition to providing general academic education. Intensive research is undertaken in all aspects of the tobacco business at the University of Bristol, Bristol being the chief center of that trade; in low carbonization coal experiments at Sheffield; in oceanography at Liverpool; in brewing at Birmingham, and in cotton at Manchester. Most of the students in these and other Provincial universities come from what in England is called the middle class. These institutions are progressive in spirit and purposes grant degrees equally to men and women, are well adjusted to modern needs and are closely articulated with the municipal public schools.

The University of London was established in 1836 upon a foundation of two institutions, King's College under Anglican control, and University College under Dissenter control. But in the course of time the University of London has grown by accretion until today it includes some thirty-six institutions. Among them is the remarkable London School of Economics, for so many years under the supervision of its scholarly Director, Sir William Beveridge, now the Master of University College, Oxford. The School has had a great career and in its faculty have been numbered some of the most eminent British scholars in the social sciences. There is nothing comparable to it anywhere else, though the New School for Social Research in New York City may equal or surpass it as the result of the addition to its staff of many refugee scholars since the rise of Nazism and Fascism in Europe.

The Provincial universities have not the prestige of Oxford and Cambridge, and probably no professor at any of them would refuse a call to Oxford or Cambridge any more than a professor-at a French Provincial university would refuse a call to Paris. The story is told of one grande dame to whom mention was made by an American visitor of his indebtedness to an English scholar for assistance in research. "Indeed," said the lady, "was he an Oxford or a Cambridge man?" "Neither," answered the American, "he taught at Birmingham." "Is there a university at Birmingham?" inquired the lady.

England's social system is the result to a great extent of its organization of education, though history and tradition naturally play a large part. The social system is based upon class distinctions which exist to an extent unknown to the average American. The English aristocracy, however, has differed from the aristocracies of the Continent in having a remarkable assimilative power, so that even when a breach was made in 1832 in its monopoly of political power and even though that breach was widened by successive extensions of the suffrage, the influence of the aristocracy was not greatly lessened. It was saved by the absorption of the leaders of the new elements into its own ranks. A successful financier, industrialist or brewer might look forward to rounding out his career by elevation to the peerage. The result has been that though classes exist in England, the rigid caste system of a country like Germany has not prevailed. However liberal or even radical a new peer might have been as a Commoner, it was almost impossible to resist the seductive influences of old families and great houses. The new peer gradually became a conservative, a staunch upholder of throne and altar, and---if he had been a Dissenter---a member of the Anglican Church. If he did not become a conservative, his children usually did. With his wealth he could marry them into the old families, some of which were always impoverished. This system has resulted in a respect for aristocracy and a worship of titles that permeates almost every class of English society even today.

I experienced several times the charm of a week-end visit to one of the great estates. Before Sir Esme Howard retired as British Ambassador to the United States in 1930 and just previous to one of my visits on the other side of the Atlantic, he gave me a letter of introduction to one of his relatives, Vernon Watney. It is upon such an occasion that one admires the quiet efficiency of the English servant who looks after your clothes, your movements and yourself generally, with no apparent direction from anyone. The form of breakfasting, so different from our own, wherein each one takes from a sideboard such food as he desires and then seats himself with others at the table, was novel and interesting. Mr. Watney had invited a group of friends for the week-end and the discussion around the fireplace on Saturday evening concerned the future of the great estates in England. Mr. Watney stated his belief that upon his death there might be enough fortune left after the payment of the death duties, for his son to carry on the estate, but he did not believe it would be possible for his son's son to do so. I could understand the accuracy of the statement when I accompanied the son the next afternoon on a tour of the estate, Cornbury Park, which was in the neighborhood of Oxford. Though we tramped about it the whole afternoon we did not cover it by any means. Information from the taxgatherer in Great Britain in 1943 is to the effect that there are only eighty persons in the whole country that now enjoy an income of more than $25,000. There are as many as that on Park Avenue in New York City. It is probable, therefore, that the large part of the land still owned by persons who hold five thousand acres or more apiece will suffer much diminution after this war.

When Philip Kerr succeeded his cousin as Marquess of Lothian he was compelled to sell some of his library, art treasures, and other possessions to secure enough money to carry on the estate. It is a question, however, how typical his case was. His branch of the family never had much money anyhow and he probably grew up never dreaming that he would fall into a peerage. During one of my talks with him he told me that the estate had a large body of servitors most of whom had spent their lives upon it and who would have to be provided for, in some cases for the rest of their lives. Wealth in England carries with it a sense of obligation to individuals superior to that which exists in the United States, but probably less to society in general than in this country. Lord Lothian made an offer to the government to make over the estate as a public museum provided he might simply live in the house. The government rejected the offer. It did not want his estate; it wanted his taxes.

The cost of social legislation, when added to the interest on the enormous debt accumulated during World War I, caused a rise in taxation the like of which no other country had ever borne. It fell with particular severity upon the land, and some old families were compelled to sell estates that had been in their hands for centuries. The loss of their sons during the war and of their lands after it was a severe blow to England's ruling classes.

It was not only the landed interests that had to make a new orientation. The loss of markets and the burden of unemployment awakened the capitalists to the need of much reorganization in industry. Reliance upon old-fashioned methods and equipment that had sufficed in pre-war days meant failure in the face of the fierce competition of the post-war period. It even meant a reconsideration of the economic philosophy upon which England's industrial greatness had been built, namely, free trade. But it meant above all a demand for new men with broader outlook and more specialized knowledge. The Provincial universities which had always emphasized science and specialization assumed new importance and even Oxford and Cambridge undertook a revaluation of studies. Slowly but surely these old universities were being modified. Free scholarships for graduates of the new publicly-supported secondary schools have diluted the aristocratic character of the student personnel. During my last visit to Oxford in 1938, I was informed that more than one half of the student body were there on fellowships or stipends of various kinds. Many of the stipends, however, are small. Some of them are offered by municipalities as prizes for success in examinations like the $100 a year scholarships offered in New York State for success in the Regents examinations. Nevertheless, the change taking place at Oxford was obvious. Lionel Curtis introduced me to two brilliant students, one the son of a Welsh miner and the other the son of a London workingman. This was at All Souls, where the student body is wholly of a graduate character.

The changes described above have been coincident with the increase in power and influence of the British Labor Party. The growth of the Labor Party has been phenomenal. In 1906 it cast some 323,000 votes and secured 29 seats in the House of Commons. In 1929 it cast 8,383,000 votes and secured 288 seats. The gains of the Labor Party were almost wholly at the expense of the Liberal Party, which virtually passed out of existence. The Labor Party became "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" a phrase which indicates that the opposition is a regular part of the constitutional machinery of Great Britain. The element of greatest influence in the composition of the Labor Party is the trade-unions. Their leaders are the men who determine its policies. They have come up from the ranks and are not intellectuals like the leaders of labor parties on the Continent. As with Englishmen generally, they are cautious, more concerned with a practical solution of a problem confronting them than with one in conformity with doctrinaire principles.

The reasons for the Labor Party's remarkable growth, from a narrowly trade-unionist party to one which after World War I appealed for support to all who "live by working" as against those who "live by owning", were characteristically British. The Party appealed to the moderates in the nation because though adopting a socialist platform it was opposed to class war and in favor of changes by parliamentary means and progressive stages and it wholly repudiated Communism. Moreover, it accepted the monarchy behind which it considered that democracy could function as well as in a republic. The laboring people of Britain were everywhere made to feel that they had a stake in the welfare of their country and had a right to have their opinion on policies heard. The loyalty that this attitude engendered was universal. I saw an impressive demonstration of this loyalty one day when I was about to take a train to one of the suburbs of London. I noticed a slightly bigger crowd than usual about the station, many of whom were workers. I inquired the reason of a nearby person. He answered, "The King is going to take a train." I waited and the auto of King George V passed into the station, preceded by a single auto filled with relatives or friends, amid the smiles of the people who all raised their hats. It was apparently generally known that he was coming, yet there was no soldiery to guard him. Nor was there any fuss about his departure. It was an evidence not merely of loyalty but of affection. To me it was a demonstrated justification of British faith in the people.

The existence of the Labor Party has had a great influence upon the individual laborer. In 1998, I once stood outside of a big factory in Glasgow and watched the workmen as they filed out. It was a sad sight. They looked undersized, undernourished, and ignorant. The work of the Labor Party in the fields of health, social service and particularly education, which the leaders regarded as the way to social emancipation and freedom, has immensely improved the morale of the worker and made him a very different person from the abject creature that I saw at Glasgow forty-five years ago. Successive British governments deserve some of the credit for this transformation in not only allowing but even providing opportunity for the Laborites to attain their objectives. This judgment has been substantiated through talks with British leaders representing all shades of political belief. Most of my friendships in Britain have been with Liberals like Sir William Beveridge, Sir Frederick Whyte, Gilbert Murray, and his son-in-law, Arnold Toynbee, Professor William G. S. Adams, and Professor C. K. Webster. But I have received much information concerning conditions from contact with fine Conservatives like Lionel Curtis, and by delightful correspondence with others like Lord Eustace Percy. I have also learned a great deal as the result of friendships with Laborites such as Sir Norman Angell, Professor Evan F. M. Durbin, and farther to the left, Harold Laski.

Some of the credit for the progress of the Labor Party belongs to the fair and honest attitude of the British press. However much Labor policies might be denounced in the "leaders", i.e. the editorials, the news columns usually give honest information as to what takes place. The British press is free, uncensored, unpurchasable, and under comparatively little indirect influence by the government. All sides of a question are expressed in the newspapers from Tory reaction provided by the Morning Post (recently absorbed by the Conservative Daily Telegraph) through the Liberal News Chronicle, to the Laborite Daily Herald. And influential newspapers are not confined to London. The Liberal Manchester Guardian probably wields a greater influence upon independent thinking than does the mildly Conservative London Times. All parts of England have honest newspapers to voice their needs and desires such as the Birmingham Post, the Edinburgh Scotsman, and the Glasgow Herald.

Since World War I, events in Great Britain have been moving in the direction of the goal maintained by the Labor Party, namely, increased governmental regulation and control. The Britain of the future is having its outlines defined during the present war and this tendency is accentuated. If the war is continued much longer there will be few even moderately rich people left. This will mean increased leveling of class distinctions. The Foreign Service has been reconstructed since the war began by the merging of the diplomatic and consular services, and, at least theoretically, will be open to all irrespective of birth or wealth by making grants for study and travel to suitable candidates without private means. The Public Schools will probably have difficulty in maintaining themselves, and if they receive government grants they must necessarily be modified to admit talented young people regardless of their parents' means. The need for maintaining the health of the troops and of the workers in munition factories in order to secure victory in the war has resulted in an aroused attention to diet, which has influenced considerably the administration of the common schools. The removal of factories from congested cities to rural areas, with the accompanying housing problems, has made obvious the need of changes to provide local governments with adequate powers to meet the new situation. An aroused public conscience has introduced far-reaching reforms in the social services maintained by the government. Large-scale planning has become the order of the day during the war and may bring about a considerable alteration of the social and economic system. The Beveridge Report's insistence upon the necessity for legislation to secure freedom from want is really the latest step in the long continuous movement for the amelioration of the condition of Disraeli's "second nation."

From these changes it is hoped a finer Britain will emerge. But the British are an essentially conservative people, and admitting that the spirit of reform is much stronger during this war than during the last, one must not forget the failure to realize after 1919 many of the changes hoped for during World War I. The British Labor Party published toward the close of World War I what was probably the finest program organized for the peace conference, but it was ignored by the British delegation at Versailles. It was often stated that the landed gentry would be "done for" as the result of the war, but it survived. Though a good deal of resentment was aroused against the Public Schools during the war the strong ones still flourish. Some of the Public Schools were given government grants and had to accept elementary school pupils up to 25 per cent. Class-conscious parents simply withdrew their children and sent them to the schools which had declined such grants. Britain was the nineteenth century country, and it is questionable whether it will readily accept twentieth century ideas that will be a hindrance---from an Empire point of view---to its power, its prestige, and its world position. Mr. Churchill has already stated---and wisely---that he did not intend to preside at the liquidation of the British Empire at the close of the war and Colonel Oliver Stanley, Secretary of State for Colonies, recently informed the world that Britain had no intention of turning over her colonies to the supervision of an international commission. It must not be overlooked that the representatives of Britain at the peace conference will be products of the Public Schools.

In my drives in Britain I was always impressed with the small size of the country and its congested character compared with the United States. The United Kingdom and Ireland together could easily fit into half of Texas and there would be much space left over. Great Britain has 46,000,000 people and Texas somewhat more than 6,000,000. There is considerable unoccupied land in Great Britain to be found in the great estates, but one cannot drive far from one town in England or Southern Scotland without soon coming upon another. There are no large areas such as those in our great West where one might drive for hours hardly meeting anyone else. This is primarily the result of the introduction of the auto, for in 1898 I tramped with a friend in the Lake District all the way from Derwentwater to Wastdale Water, meeting but a few people. When I visited the Lake District in the summer of 1936, the experience was not a particularly happy one. On a great holiday, like a Bank holiday, the English roads are crowded with buses and touring is not much of a pleasure. One can hardly fail to be struck, however, by the law-abiding character of the English people. This is not only true in great matters such as the General Strike of 1926 when not a shot was fired, but in the small affairs of daily life as well. There is much less parking of cars in forbidden places and littering of parks with refuse by picnickers than in the United States. Forty years ago I considered a picnic by the average English workman's family a pretty sad affair compared with one in Central or Southern Europe, but they have become much more joyous in recent years. They seldom, I believe, degenerate into the boisterous and sometimes destructive character of some picnics in our own country.

One characteristic of the British people that impresses a foreigner is the part religion plays in their lives. The British are a conservative people and they take their religion seriously. This is true not only of the conservative classes but of the masses of the people. The British Labor Party has a socialistic program but it differs from continental socialist parties in that its members are predominantly sincere adherents of some church. Until comparatively recent times the Anglican Church was largely formal in its religious practices, but it now takes a very active interest in social problems. With the passage of time the Established Church became increasingly aware of the great loss it sustained in the rapid development of the Wesleyan Movement in the late eighteenth century, due to the lack of a vital spiritual attitude in its practices. The Dissenting churches carry on vigorously and I have attended services in their churches with crowded congregations. It is largely due to the seriousness of the Dissenters that Sunday in a British city or town is usually a pretty dismal day. There is little to do but to go to church and take the air, though the London Sunday newspapers have in recent years become fairly widely distributed. The movies, however, are rapidly causing a change in this respect. The Roman Catholic Church has a small minority of the British people but Catholics are numerous in Liverpool and Glasgow as the result of Irish immigration to those cities. The Catholic Church is influential among the upper classes and is strong in the diplomatic service.

I made an effort during my visits to find out as far as possible what were the faults Englishmen of different social grades discover in our people. English shopkeepers and hotel owners were glad to welcome the hordes of American tourists that invade England every summer. But they do not make up the majority of England's population. It could not be expected that the large number of Americans, who make their one visit to England and want to see everything they possibly can in that one visit, should not give offense to a great many Englishmen. It is apparently human nature to be more enduringly impressed by a few experiences of an unpleasant character than by a large number of the opposite kind. The quiet behavior of the great majority remains unrecorded---in memory and in writing. American tourists were often regarded as loud and pushing and vulgar. The arrivistes annoy with their condescending attitude and their evident belief that money commands everything. Among intellectually minded Englishmen our penchant for lecturing the rest of the world on its shortcomings caused amusement and sometimes resentment. Nearly all considered our attitude on the debt question as unfair. They weighed their expenditure of blood against our expenditure of money. With almost all classes there was a good deal of dislike at the embarrassing familiarity of some Americans which often amounted to an intrusion on privacy. By way of contrast, Englishmen are regarded by Americans in general as stiff and reserved and superior in manner, and the Oxford accent is anathema in the United States. With increasing contact between Britons and Americans there has unquestionably developed a greater tolerance for the peculiarities of each and a willingness to learn from each other. Both peoples are foremost among the nations of the world in their love of sport; the Americans with a greater buoyancy of spirit, the English with a love of sport per se. There is a kinship in smaller but equally significant things, such as dress and the resort to colloquialism and slang for the trenchant expression of ideas.

Beginning with the Tudors, the foreign policy of Great Britain has been based upon the principle of the Balance of Power. There have always been two potential enemies of Great Britain in Europe, one having the greater strength and therefore more to be feared. The British policy has always been to back the weaker even to the point of war, if necessary. Down to the Munich Conference of 1938 this policy has been consistently followed. There it was not followed. At the time of Munich, English public opinion believed that the two potential enemies of democratic Britain were Communist Russia and Nazi Germany. Of these two, Russia was regarded as the weaker. If tradition and precedent had been followed, Great Britain would have backed Russia as against Germany. It did not. It backed Germany and thereby enormously increased Germany's prestige and strength. This reversal of policy on the part of the greatest Power in the world really makes Munich a turning point in human affairs. What is the explanation?

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was regarded unfavorably by the mass of Englishmen, and with intense antagonism by the ruling classes. At the end of World War I the Coalition Government did all it could to destroy the Soviet system through military intervention. The English ruling classes have since watched the growth of Russia in economic and political strength with increasing dislike and fear. Politically they have regarded it as a potential enemy state; economically, as a destroyer of the capitalist system of which Great Britain is the greatest exponent; spiritually, as the assassin of Western culture because of its determination to destroy what they regard as the foundation of culture, namely, religion. This antagonism was strengthened among all Englishmen by the horrible treatment accorded to aristocrats, bourgeoisie, kulaks, and some intellectuals. Hence when Fascism arose in Germany and, taking its cue from Russia, also ruled by terror and brutality, English society was divided by its fears into opponents of Russia and of Germany. The ruling classes continued to fear Russia more. But necessity controls in international affairs as in most things. When Hitler attacked Russia in June 1941, Britain, though controlled chiefly by the Tory Party, gladly welcomed the Soviets as an ally. Since then, the agreement has become more complete and extends to cooperation in international affairs in the post-war period. If this cooperation is realized it augurs well for a durable peace in Europe.

What Britain's position will be in the post-war international world will depend upon the nature of the victory. But it is obvious that it cannot be what it has been up to the present time. Until World War I the British navy did "rule the waves" primarily to protect British commerce, but incidentally it maintained peace in far-removed corners of the earth. Britain until then was dominant but with a benign dominance that interfered little with the affairs of other nations. She lost that dominant position in World War I, a position since taken by the United States. Some publicists believe that even the burden of empire may be too great for Britain to carry after this war.

The three most important elements in the recent foreign policy of Britain are these: 1) Britain is geographically part of Europe and cannot be isolated from the solution of Europe's problems. 2) The maintenance of the British Commonwealth of Nations is essential to the existence of Britain as a Great Power, but the Dominions will unquestionably in the future pay greater regard to their own interests, especially their security, and may orient themselves more in the direction of the United States. This would be true especially of Canada. And it is a question how much longer India can be held in the equivocal position of today and denied a greater degree of independence. ) British foreign policy must be so conducted as to maintain friendly and harmonious relations with the United States. Assuming victory for the Allies, there will be in post-war Europe three first-class Powers: Great Britain, Germany, and Russia. If the new World Order of the Allies as outlined in the last chapter of this book should include a European federation, Britain---with the continued support of the British Commonwealth of Nations and the moral support of the United States---should have an almost decisive influence in European affairs. And its importance in a world federation of regional federations would be very great. Though Britain will no longer occupy the dominant position of the past, it will exercise a strong influence on the future of mankind.

My own admiration for the British people during this war has been profound-especially when, after Dunquerque, they stood absolutely alone in a sea of gloom, apparently without a friend in Europe. But they were sustained by the remarkable leadership of Winston Churchill who assured them of eventual victory but only at the cost of much "blood, sweat, and tears". British civilization has its faults like all civilizations, but without forgetting the faults I prefer to admire the multitude of fine elements in that civilization. On Sunday, October 21, 1928, The New York Times published a jeu d'esprit called "Good-bye, England", which I wrote as an answer to the "Farewell to America" written by that splendid journalist of the Daily Chronicle, Henry W. Nevinson, when he was departing from our shores in March, 1922. The lapse of fifteen years has resulted in a few statements being outmoded. The "pub" and the snob exercise relatively less influence, but by and large the sentiments expressed are those I hold today, only with increased conviction.

GOOD-BYE, ENGLAND
October 21, 1928

The great liner weighs anchor, casts off her hawsers and noses toward America. Down Southampton Water, past fertile fields and lovely villages, through the Solent and around the Needles into the Channel she steams. My happy stay in Britain is ended.

Hospitable welcome, motor trips across park-like landscapes, generous exchange of opinions, sincere adieux are over. Good. bye, England. I'm going home!

Good-bye to the divorce between spelling and speech; good-bye to Cirencester, called Sisister; to Daventry, known as Daintry; to Brightlingsea, named Bricksley. Good-bye to rolling plains and gentle valleys that support sheep rather than men. Good-bye to attractive hamlets with streets of thatched houses in which live kindly people; to curving roads trimmed with fine hedges and dotted with Baby Austins, motorcycles and charabancs. Good-bye to the drab factory towns with their streets of monotonous houses guiltless of sanitation; to third-class compartments devoid of air or conversation, drear as the fog outside. Good-bye to newspapers whose front pages carry nothing but advertisements, but whose editorial sheets command admiration.

Good-bye to London, city of a thousand years and many more memories, where avenues are almost unknown, but where instead are found Tottenham Court Road, Oxford Circus and Cheyne Walk; city of narrow and historic streets and many parks, of stately, yet comfortable clubs, of the Underground, clean and bright, where one pays for a seat and gets it.

I'm going home! Home to a land where spelling has at least a tenuous connection with sound; where Prairie du Chien is Prairie doo Sheen, Joliet is Joliette, Vincennes is Vincenz; to a land of magnificent distances, with every variety of landscape; across which one can travel by rail for almost a week without meeting a customs officer; to a land covered with towns that differ only in name; towns connected by great cement ribbons garnished by "hot-dog" stands and enormous billboards.

I'm going home to New York, true Mandate of Israel, city of wonderful site, of beautiful architecture, of strenuous life, with its subway in which seats are paid for but not secured, in which a myriad faces suggest the melting pot and words and actions sometimes remind one that the cave man is not extinct.

Good-bye to heavy breakfasts-porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, strong tea(1) and cold toast; to dinners of meat and pudding, with no fruit and a choice of three vegetables---two of which are cabbage; dinners at which no one drinks water because all "prefer Bass". Good-bye to cold houses and miniature hearths which heat by suggestion, and where chilled energy is thawed by afternoon tea. Good-bye to the pubs where drunken men and sodden women squander more wealth than would support the dole. Good-bye, England! Land of political liberty and social snobbery, land of tradition and caste where each class apes the class above and only the Dukes live free.

I'm going home! Home to the land of bright sunshine and extreme temperatures, made bearable by houses with steam heat and Frigidaires; to the land where health is a religion and diet a science, to breakfasts of California fruits, cereals, strong coffee and hot toast made by electric percolators and toasters hooked up on the table. I'm going home where the saloon has been abolished and where bootleggers from Eastern and Southern Europe accumulate fortunes by selling in dialect English forbidden rum to law-breaking natives; to a land where "class" is anathema and where the variant from the general run is a freak; where love of liberty has been displaced by the craze for equality. I'm going home to the Women's Clubs, to forums and Chautauquas, where all sides of a question are discussed and the question itself remains unanswered.

* * *

Good-bye, Oxford and Cambridge, seats of traditional learning and teaching! Good-bye to venerable colleges, wonderful courts and beautiful "backs"; to comfortless quarters and attendant "scouts" to "high-table" where soup is preceded by an unintelligible prayer and meat is followed by adjournment with napkin to another room for dessert and wine and coffee and delightful conversation. Good-bye to the rational curriculum which provides for concentration in studies and intercourse with teachers and a final examination in the entire field of study. Good-bye to students who scorn to be passmen and to modest dons who fear to dogmatize in their own subjects and profess complete ignorance in all others. Good-bye to Isis and Cam, to cricket and delightful days in punts, to sport for the sake of sport and the fun one gets out of it.

I'm going home! Home to colleges with comfortable dormitories arranged into delightful suites, with lounging rooms for girl students who smoke; colleges with wonderful gymnasiums, hygienic showers and inviting pools; true models of efficient administration and quantity production. Where sport is a spectacle and a combat applauded by 100,000 gathered in a stadium that dwarfs the Roman Colosseum, applauded not spontaneously, for applause, like everything pertaining to sport, is "organized", and one claps and shouts at the signal of a cheer leader. I'm going home! Home where professors pontificate in all subjects and where the extra-curricular activities form the main interest of' student life; where degrees are obtained by accumulating "credits" attached to subjects diffused over unrelated fields and elected by students who regard the passing mark as that of a gentleman, and who recover from "conditions" by securing additional "credits" at summer sessions---at $10 each.

* * *

Good-bye, England, land of grinding taxes and falling wages and disappearing estates: good-bye to political parties which stand for definite principles and to political meetings, where orators dare not talk humbug but are heckled into honest admissions. Good-bye to the tolerance of views that one meets in private homes; good-bye to Hyde Park, where throne and altar are attacked and communism preached and yet no one is afraid. Good-bye, brave men and women who face a dark future with strong hearts and firm wills and who do not whine!

I'm going home! Home to a land that would have delighted Joshua's spies, whose infinite resources could supply its men and women according to their deserts and in conformity with their needs. I'm going home, where the difference between Democrats and Republicans is so tenuous that half the voters do not think it worth while to vote; where mediocrity flourishes under the aegis of 100 per cent Americanism, where teachers must exalt the untarnished virtue and infallible judgment of the Fathers, and where the mild critic of ancient abuses and outgrown institutions is denounced as Bolshevik. I'm going home to Chicago to be protected by the blacklists of the Key Men of America and the Daughters of the American Revolution; protected, not against gangsters and gunmen, but against "dangerous thoughts".

* * *

Good-bye, England, land of beautiful cathedrals, old-fashioned faiths and steady worshippers; land of queer people, burdened by the hardest problems of twentieth century materialist civilization, yet discussing the metaphysics of the Prayer Book with sixteenth century religious fervor. Good-bye to religious toleration and individual freedom. Thanks, England, for the spiritual heritage you bequeathed us, requited by the affection of our best.

I'm going home! Home to the land where sects are as the sands of the seashore and no belief is too queer to become a cult; to the land of sumptuary laws, where your neighbor is your moral censor and may denounce the vice you have possibly acquired of smoking a cigarette every other Wednesday night; I'm going to Boston, original site of the Puritan Commonwealth, where now a Cardinal decides what shall be read; and to Tennessee, native heath of the Fundamentalist, where the Klan determines what shall be taught. I'm going home to the land I love, where, despite luxury and plutocracy, plain men and women are struggling in the spirit of Jefferson and Lincoln to maintain a democracy, not yet with success but not without hope; a democracy wherein opportunity will be given to capacity to assume the place in society which its merits justify.