Can anything be more maudlin than to suppose that international sensitiveness, that commercial rivalries, that tariff discriminations, that territorial misunderstandings, are to be soothed and smoothed away, by dissertations upon how much we owe to one another in matters of culture? Think what we owe to Goethe and Lessing, to Spinoza and Kant, to Heine and Mozart and Wagner and Beethoven, reiterates the Englishman; think what we owe to Shakespeare and Milton, to Byron and Shelley and Scott, to Lister and Newton, answers the German! Who can go to war with the countrymen of Racine and Moliere and Pascal and Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. This is phantom friendship, and we all know in our heart of hearts, that we would fight any or all of them at the drop of a handkerchief, if they hurt our feelings, ruffled our national pride, or maltreated in a foreign land the meanest of our racial brothers. Straining after such artificial bonds of union is as irritating as it is unreal. Germany has few heartier admirers of Bismarck than am I; England has few franker friends of her great gentlemen in peace and war than am I; I have read and profited by French literature far more than from anything America has produced; if I can write so that here and there a brother has profited therefrom, I owe it to the Frenchmen I have studied; but these are all nothing as compared with my heart's real allegiances. There is a gulp in my throat when I dream of that weary, misunderstood, but patient and humble peace-maker, who held the scales between the millions of my own countrymen, shooting and stabbing one another to death fifty years ago. No other man can be quite like him to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my nerves tingle as I recall the puppet politicians and fancy self-advertising warriors who crucified him slowly. The country and the people that Lincoln believed in, I must believe in and fight for too. Washington was an Englishman and baptized us, but Lincoln was an American who officiated at our first communion as a united people. I ask no Englishman, no German, no Frenchman to agree with me, but I ask them to leave me alone with my dead, to leave me in peace with my living problems, to force no artificial friendships upon me, and thus to let our respect for one another increase naturally.