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100 years ago: United States or Europe?

by
17 January 2025

January 16th, 1925.

MR. H. A. L. FISHER, who has recently returned from a visit to America, is impressed with the increasing power of the bond of language between Great Britain and the United States. We are afraid, however, that it is all too easy to exaggerate the importance of a common language as a means towards sympathy and understanding, and we are convinced that rueful disappointment will be the inevitable result of regarding American good will towards England as a permanent factor in international affairs. A common language is something. A common point of view is much more. Only to know New York and Boston and Philadelphia is to know practically nothing of American mentality, and the searcher after the America that really matters may be recommended to read Mr. Sinclair Lewis’s novel, “Babbitt”, with its revelation of the soul, or it may be truer to say the soullessness, of the Middle West, that part of the United States that turns elections and decides policy. There is, as it seems to us, a world of difference between the point of view of the typical Englishman and the typical American, between their mentalities and their ideas of values. For good or ill, Great Britain is European. Her past was European, her future must be European, her interests are European. These incontrovertible facts carry with them far-reaching consequences. The “English-speaking” enthusiast who urges that Great Britain should clear out of Europe is talking sheer rubbish. The Almighty has made her part of Europe, and European she must remain, with her destinies ever intimately connected with the destinies of her neighbours.

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