another King George is joining, on behalf of his people, in a celebration of to-day, which now records the extinction of all the bitterness that arose in the days of George III - a bitterness that could never have risen had the will of British people ruled in 1775 as it rules to-day? For the severance came because we had then a perverse Court, and a non-representative Parliament.

It is not merely blood relationship that has brought this happy consummation. Quarrels between relatives are often the most bitter. It is a sense of other and stronger ties that bind us together. You will remember the lines in "Lycidas":

For we were nursed upon the self-same hill,

Fed the same flock by fountain, shade, and rill.

Our greatest poets, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton,are the common glory of our race. Common to both people is the love of freedom and the faith in freedom, which, sown long ago in English hearts, came to full flower in the days of Milton and Hampden, and established civil and religious liberty, both here and in America, on foundations never thereafter to be shaken.

With the love of freedom, and as its proper accompaniment, Britain and America have both revered the moral law, have held to good faith between nations, have recognized their duties to the world. Their thoughts, their beliefs, their ideals sometimes differ in expression, but are substantially the same. The national heroes of both have been men who were great by their courage, and by their sense of right and duty, from King Alfred down to

Washington and Lincoln, whom Britain as well as America counts among the heroes of the race.

It is these things that have made each nation respect the other even at moments of tension. Deep down in the heart of each, almost too deep for expression, there has been the sense that the other possessed these essential virtues by which nations live; and each had a secret pride in seeing that the other retained what both felt to be the finest characteristics of the ancient stock. We saw another quality of that stock shine forth in the energy with which the people of the United States have overspread a vast continent, have planted everywhere selfgoverning institutions, are assimilating and turning into useful citizens the immigrants who came in a huge and turbid flood, and have built up a fabric of industrial prosperity such as has never been seen elsewhere.

For half a century, the sense of unity had been growing closer, when an event happened which revealed both nations to themselves and to one another. The German Government suddenly invaded neutral and peaceful Belgium. Britain sprang into the breach and within three years raised an Army of more than five millions, ten times as large as that she had when the war began, Germany followed up her first crime by perpetrating upon noncombatants and neutrals a succession of outrages unheard of before.

It was then the turn of America. We in England have scarcely yet realized the magnitude of the new departure which America took when she entered the war. oldest and best established of her traditions, dating from

The

the days of Washington, had been to stand aloof, secure in her splendid isolation, from all European entanglements. The Germans from the height of their intellectual arrogance had despised Americans as given up to the gross materialism of money-making, just as they despised the English as a decadent people, sunk in luxury and sloth. But when America saw every principle of right overridden, every sentiment of humanity cast to the winds, America strode forth in her strength. Duty called on her to help to save the world, and she blazed forth in the sky like that star which startled astronomers three weeks ago.

But this is a star whose light will know no fading. First came her Navy, helping the ships of Britain to hunt down these wild beasts of the sea, who rise from their green lairs beneath the waves to murder the innocent. Then, while in the American cities the elder men have been watching with breathless anxiety for every report brought hour by hour along the cables from the imperilled front in France, we see the young soldiers of America come swarming over the ocean in an ever-growing host which begins to be counted by millions. They come with the passion of crusaders, eager to bear the shock of battle in a sacred cause.

The New World — to use the famous phrase which Canning pronounced nearly a century ago "has come to redress the balance of the Old." Its fresh and fiery spirit has the promise of victory. This spirit, this zeal to serve the cause of right, this sense of a common duty and a common purpose, these perils which American and British soldiers (citizen armies drawn from the people)

are facing side by side upon the plains of France, all this has brought Britain and America closer than evercloser than they were under one Government before that far-off day of Independence, which we are celebrating now and here.

These things will be the surest pledge of affection and coöperation in a future stretching before us as far as human thought can reach. I have quoted a famous phrase of Canning's. Let me quote, and adapt to the present, the no less famous words of Pitt: "Britain and America have together led the world of Freedom by their example. Together they will save it - will save it for freedom - by their exertions."

THE SPIRES OF OXFORD

BY WINIFRED M. LETTS

I SAW the spires of Oxford
As I was passing by,
The gray spires of Oxford

Against the pearl-gray sky.

My heart was with the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.

The years go fast in Oxford,
The golden years and gay,
The hoary Colleges look down
On careless boys at play.
But when the bugles sounded war
They put their games away.