What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the WarWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
What is Coming? A Forecast of Things after the War
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World War, 1914-1918; World politics
So far as I can judge, the American mind is eminently free from any
sentimental leaning towards the British. Americans have a traditional
hatred of the Hanoverian monarchy, and a democratic disbelief in
autocracy. They are far more acutely aware of differences than
resemblances. They suspect every Englishman of being a bit of a
gentleman and a bit of a flunkey. I have never found in America anything
like that feeling common in the mass of English people that prevents the
use of the word "foreigner" for an American; there is nothing to
reciprocate the sympathy and pride that English and Irish republicans
and radicals feel for the States. Few Americans realise that there are
such beings as English republicans.
What has linked Americans with the British hitherto has been very
largely the common language and literature; it is only since the war
began that there seems to have been any appreciable development of
fraternal feeling. And that has been not so much discovery of a mutual
affection as the realisation of a far closer community of essential
thought and purpose than has hitherto been suspected. The Americans,
after thinking the matter out with great frankness and vigour, do
believe that Britain is on the whole fighting against aggression and not
for profit, that she is honestly backing France and Belgium against an
intolerable attack, and that the Hohenzollern Empire is a thing that
needs discrediting and, if possible, destroying in the interests of all
humanity, Germany included.
America has made the surprising discovery that, allowing for their
greater nearness, the British are thinking about these things almost
exactly as Americans think about them. They follow the phases of the war
in Great Britain, the strain, the blunderings, the tenacity, the onset
of conscription in an essentially non-military community, with the
complete understanding of a people similarly circumstanced, differing
only by scale and distance. They have been through something of the sort
already; they may have something of the sort happen again. It had not
occurred to them hitherto how parallel we were. They begin to have
inklings of how much more parallel we may presently become.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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