Article February 9, 1899 Issue

Friendship for America

The Right Hon. Arthur James Balfour, First Lord of the Treasury and leader of the Ministerialists in the House of Commons, delivered his annual address to his constituents at Manchester, January 30, 1899. After speaking of the "intrinsic difficulty which Continental nations find in understanding Great Britain's aims," he continued as follows:—

"But there is surely one great country which, by community of language, religions, blood, origin, and even institutions, is well fitted to understand us, and a country which we should be well fitted to understand. Need I say that the country to which I refer is the United States? Some foreign critics, cynical by profession and training, hold the view that the friendship now happily subsisting between the English-speaking peoples on both sides of the Atlantic is but the growth of the moment and depends upon a transitory community of interests. They affect to believe that when this disappears friendship also will disappear. They hold that, if British trade should feel injured by some inconvenient tariff, immediately the sentiments so generally felt at this moment in Great Britain toward America would vanish like the leaves in autumn.

"According to my observations," said Mr. Balfour, "the world of cynics is always wrong. I believe the cynics wrong in this case. If our good relations really depended upon those fortuitous circumstances, while the latter might be the foundation of an alliance, they could not be the foundation of what is infinitely more important—of that species of friendship which, in season and out of season, through good report or ill, is not to be shaken by mere circumstances. It was in this hall in 1896 that I first spoke of the international relations between the United states and England—in those dark days of the Venezuelan controversy, when public feeling in America had been aroused by the wholly unfounded suspicion that we had some designs of empire in South America, and when, by a natural re–action, we felt that our brethren on the other side of the water had neither judged nor treated us with knowledge and fairness. I then expressed my firm faith that the time would come when all speaking the English language and sharing the Anglo-Saxon civilization would be united with a sympathy which no mere political divergencies could permanently disturb.

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