with silences,

Ridge Way,

Not older seemed, nor calmer the long barrows

Of bones and memories of ancient day Than the tall shepherd with his craft of days

Older than Roman or the oldest caveman,

When, in the generation of all living, Sheep and kine flocked in the Aryan Valley and

The first herd with his voice and skill of water,

Fleetest of foot, led them into green pastures,

From perished pastures to new green.

I saw

The herdsmen everywhere about the world,

lonely, wise,

Herds of Arabia and Syria
And Thessaly, and longer-winter'd

chimes;

And this lone herd, ages before England was,

Pelt-clad, and armed with flint-tipped ashen sap,

Watching his flocks, and those far flocks of stars

Slow moving as the heavenly shepherd willed

And at dawn shut into the sunny fold.

Land and Water

HOUSES

BY WILFRED WILSON GIBSON

The house we built with hands

To shelter love's delight From the pitchy night Dark and empty stands. But from our house of drea.. s Everlasting light

Through the pitchy night Pours in golden streams.

The New Witness

It gives the ironical measure of these convulsive times that, so soon after a war which has brought Great Britain and America closer together than ever before in their separate histories, one should have to speak of Anglo-American relations as passing into an anxious phase. But the fact is too palpable to be ignored, and of too much moment to both lands not to be discussed with a grave candor.

There have been manifestations in the past few weeks in the United States of a kind to fill the ordinary Briton with a pained bewilderment. He has seen his country caught up, he knows not quite how or why, in the manœuvres of American party politics. He has seen an apparent revival of that muchtoo-flattering suspiciousness of British diplomacy and its far-sighted cunning which used to prevail in the United States of the nineties. After doing everything in his power, and more than any other nation has done, to meet the American point of view in the Peace Conference, he finds his representatives accused by a considerable section of American opinion of using President Wilson as a screen behind whose shelter they are alleged to be pursuing purely British policies of aggrandizement. Our very support of the League of Nations

VOL. 15-NO. 745

is turned against us. The stale and often refuted calumny that we are using the postal censorship to promote British at the expense of American trade has of late been resurrected anew. The irritants of commercial rivalry in a time of universal unsettlement are being sedulously intensified. The many and real surrenders we have made for the sake of Allied harmony and the prospect of a saner worldorder are either ignored, or belittled, or perverted into one more proof of our duplicity.

What we have gained from the war, on the other hand, in the form of territory or influence, is as constantly distorted to our detriment. Sober observers, experienced in the kaleidoscope of American affairs, report that the anti-British campaign was never more malevolently active than now. The Senate, by formal resolution, urges the Peace Conference to receive the Sinn Fein delegates and puts on record its support of the Irish Nationalist movement.

Small wonder that the average Englishman, unconscious of having given offense and anxious from the bottom of his heart to continue that full and friendly coöperation with the people and government of the United States

which is the outstanding compensation of the war, watches these developments with a mystified despair. Is the aftermath of Armageddon, he is tempted to ask himself, in this, as in so many other directions, to bring to futility the noble spirit in which it was fought and won? Are Great Britain and America, a year ago brothers in arms and hopes and deeds, to drift into the old wretched whirlpool of misunderstanding and ill-will?

We see no ground whatever for any such tragic sequel. It can and shall be averted. Those who know America best feel the least uneasiness as to the future of Anglo-American relations. They are able to distinguish between the nine tenths in the present situation, which is ephemeral and factitious, and the one tenth which is genuinely disquieting; and the same distinction will presently become apparent to the great mass of our people, if they will only exercise patience, good temper, and perspective.

The plain truth of the matter is that Great Britain, because of the support she has accorded him before and since the armistice, is suffering from President Wilson's failure to carry his own countrymen with him. It is not so much Great Britain that is being struck at as Great Britain that is being used as a weapon with which to strike at Mr. Wilson. One must remember that the war and the scheme of the League of Nations have propounded questions that probe the very foundations of American policy, that the President has not perhaps done all that was possible to prepare the atmosphere for their discussion, and that nothing like a unanimous answer can be expected to them. On the contrary, the debates that are now going on at Washington recall the passion and bitterness of the decade before the Civil War. That the United States

should throw overboard her traditional policies of aloofness and nonintervention, should entangle herself indefinitely in European affairs and run risks and shoulder responsibilities which are foreign to her whole history, seems to a great many Americans a programme of national suicide. They are out to defeat that proposal, to humiliate Mr. Wilson, to conserve what they sincerely believe to be the fundamentals of American security and happiness, by any means in their power. If they can persuade their fellow countrymen that the League of Nations is in reality a British plot. to secure an American guaranty for the integrity of the British Empire, and that Mr. Wilson from first to last has been overreached by British diplomacy, they will have gained a great point.

Nine tenths of what seems to be hostility toward Great Britain is thus, in reality, the repercussion of American party politics upon the international situation and of the international situation upon American party politics. It signifies nothing deep or permanent. But the remaining one tenth is serious. Ireland again blocks the way, and until the Irish question is settled, it will be hopeless to expect that completeness of association between Great Britain and the United States, whether in sentiment or in policy, which the great majority of the people in both countries desire. Unhesitatingly we assert that the chief bar to Anglo-American amity and coöperation is Ireland. We have paid already, and in other parts of the world besides the United States, a heavy price for our failure to conciliate the mass of the Irish people. But the debt is not yet wiped out; there are larger installments still to be met. If the argument for settling the Irish question is more urgent than