Signs of the Times

[Editor Ellery Sedgwick in The Atlantic Monthly, December, 1918]

To an American, the adventure of going to England now is for the first time to discover Englishmen.... What is important is, that with Englishmen we should feel no constraint, nor they with us; that we should both recognize how small are our divergencies, and how immense our common aims. The attempts to bring us together in the past have common too self-conscious. There has been too much talk of hands across the sea and blood calling to blood; for if the blood of earth's peoples were to call to their blood in America, no towar of Babel could hold the tumult. And as for the hands across the sea, Briareus himself could not shake them. But our common literature,—a literature based on English forms alone,—common speech, and common institutins have created in us a kindred instinct which shall save us at the last.

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March 15, 1919
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