To the emancipation of Latin America Great Britain and the British contributed more than any other outside nation. In the subsequent development of those countries, Britain has had a large share. In the moral protection afforded to them by the attitude of the United States, the unostentatious and almost tacit support of Great Britain has counted for much. And those countries are now being drawn nearer to Great Britain and nearer to Europe than ever before. The question now arises:--In the closer grouping of American states now in process of formation, is Great Britain to stand aloof, a sympathetic but silent and inactive spectator? That this question has actually been raised in the United States, is shown by the following quotation from _The Times History of the War_ (chapter 222, page 9): "As the _Philadelphia Ledger_ put it 'it seemed an absurdity to talk of Pan-Americanism and in the same breath to ignore the fact that one of the greatest of the American Powers is not included in it.' The _New Republic_ went further ... 'Pan-Americanism,' it declared, 'is a tripod that cannot stand on two legs for ever. Only a combination of the Latin countries, the United States and Great Britain, that is to say a combination of all the American Powers, can make it a safe and useful organization in the world to-day.'" There is nothing new in this idea; for Bolívar, with singular magnanimity, invited Great Britain and the Kingdom of the Netherlands to send delegates to the Pan-American Congress which he attempted to assemble at Panamá in 1826: the circumstances of the time precluded an invitation to France. And now that Brazil and Cuba sit at the council-board of the Allies in Paris, a conception, which seemed feasible a century ago to a great imaginative mind, may perhaps not seem so very remote to a practical mind today. For the present epoch has brought home to all Americans of both continents a fact which has long been known to Canadians and Englishmen, namely that the ocean is no estranging gulf between nations. Today it is known that the geographical boundary which divides the peoples into two categories and separates the Old World of force from the New World of reason is not the Atlantic but the Rhine. Thus now, more than ever, does it seem a little incongruous that Washington should deny to Ottawa a community of American interests which is conceded to Caracas, Asunción and La Paz.