The “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” began forthwith. Scores of English upper-class families opened their hearts and their hearths to their “cousins across the sea.” The more American friends one accumulated the more likely was one to find an American multi-millionaire or so among them, or at least to be by way of getting into touch with American multi-millionaires or within “touching” distance of them. To realize to what an extent the “Anglo-Saxon Alliance” was and is based upon this notion, one must realize how all-powerful the upper class is in England, and how inarticulate, how socially, politically and in every public way insignificant, are the English masses, including the bulk of the middle classes. When you speak of English public sentiment you mean the sentiment of the London drawing-rooms. They are filled with the governing class, which constitutes parliaments and ministries; they dominate the journalists, who are either of the upper class or desperately struggling to get into it; they also dominate the masses who have been trained by centuries of unbroken custom to bow before rank and title. There were excellent reasons in international politics for England’s turning favorable, friendly, even enthusiastic eyes upon America. But there could not have been this present passionate, personal love, this daily and hourly working of that toothless old saw, “blood is thicker than water,” had there not existed a reason which appealed directly to the personal and family self-interest of every member of nearly every upper-class family in England. And soon the German Emperor and those about him, all of a high and impoverishing nobility, began to work the same trusty, but never now-a-days rusty, old saw about the thickness of blood and water--are we not “Germanic,” we Americans? But the motive which is the less with the King and the upper classes of England is the stronger with our tempestuous German suitor--the motive of political, or, rather, industrial friendship. He feels that in dining and wining and treating, “just as if they were equals,” American owners of yachts and multi-millionaires, he is endearing himself to the American people. For, like practically the whole of Europe to-day, he thinks America is no longer a Democracy, but a thinly disguised plutocracy. And the more he reads and hears of the power and prestige of American multi-millionaires at home, the more firmly is he convinced that when he is tickling the vanity of these “dollar-swollen upstarts,” he is sending delicious thrills up and down the spine of the American eagle.