Pan-Anglican Influences.=--It is a well-established principle of
strategy as practiced by diplomatists to arouse public attention
to a supposed danger in order to divert it from a real one. Long
antedating our association with England, secret plans were laid by
far-seeing Englishmen, and sedulously fostered by their friends in
the United States, to reclaim “the lost colonies” as a part of the
United Kingdom. While the so-called German propaganda at best was
directed toward keeping the United States out of the war, a subtle
and deceptive propaganda was being conducted to enmesh us in European
entanglements to such extent that retreat from a closer political
union with England should become impossible.
In order to arrive at a clear understanding of the sources from which
such influences are proceeding, it is necessary to call the reader’s
attention to the secret will of Cecil Rhodes. This will is printed on
pp. 68 and 69, Vol. I, Chapter VI, of “The Life of the Rt. Hon. Cecil
Rhodes,” by Sir Lewis Mitchell, and reads as follows:
To and for the establishment, promotion and development of
a secret society, the true aim of which and object whereof
shall be the extension of British rule throughout the
world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the
United Kingdom and of colonization of British subjects of
all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by
energy, labor and enterprise, and especially the occupation
by British settlers of the entire continent of Africa,
the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands
of Cyprus and Canadia; the whole of South America and the
Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great
Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, =the ultimate
recovery of the United States of America as an integral
part of the British Empire=; the inauguration of a system
of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament,
=which may tend to weld together the disjointed members
of the Empire=, and finally =the foundation of so great a
power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote
the best interests of humanity=.
Fourteen years later, in a letter to William T. Stead, dated August
19 and September 3, 1891, Rhodes wrote as follows:
What an awful thought it is that if we had not lost
America, =or if even now we could arrange with the present
members of the United States Assembly and our own House
of Commons=, the peace of the world is secured for all
eternity. =We could hold your federal parliament five years
at Washington and five years at London.= (“The Pan-Angles,”
by Sinclair Kennedy; published by Longmans, Green and Co.,
London and New York.)
Mr. Kennedy writes further on this subject as follows:
Not alone the federation of the Britannic nations, but
the federation of the whole Pan-Angle people is the end
to be sought. Behind Rhodes’ “greater union in Imperial
matters” lay his vision of =a common government over
all English-speaking people=. If we are to preserve
our civilization and its benefits to an individual
civilization, we must avoid friction among ourselves and
take a united stand before the world. =Only a common
government will insure this.=
These words have a remarkable resemblance to a declaration made by
the late American Ambassador to Great Britain, the Hon. Whitelaw
Reid, in a speech delivered in London, July 17, 1902, when, speaking
of Anglo-American relations, he employed these significant words:
The time does visibly draw near when solidarity of race,
=if not of government, is to prevail=.
The similarity of sentiments expressed by two persons of different
race and speaking at an interval of twelve years must strike anyone
as deeply significant. We have here an agreement in that respect
between Cecil Rhodes, Sinclair Kennedy and Whitelaw Reid. All three
want a common government over the Britannic nations and the United
States.
It is known that the millions left by Cecil Rhodes for the express
object of the “ultimate recovery of the United States of America as
an integral part of the British Empire,” have been invested in such a
manner as to carry out as secretly as possible the purpose for which
they were designed. Men may well stand appalled at the working of the
Rhodes poison in the veins of American life.
To its fatal operation may be attributed the rise of societies to
promote Anglo-Saxon brotherhood, Pilgrim societies, movements to
celebrate the centenary of English and American friendship (farcical
as that pretension is), the formation of peace treaties nominally
most inclusive, but in reality designed to benefit Great Britain, and
the gradual elimination from our public school books of all reference
to the part played by England in our history, English designs against
this country and savagery against its citizens, as well as all
unpleasant diplomatic events between us and England that have been
of such frequent recurrence. To this influence may be attributed the
movement to ignore the Fourth of July and substitute the Signing
of the Magna Charta to be celebrated by American youths as the
true origin of our independence, as proposed by Andrew Carnegie in
placards which did, and possibly do yet adorn the walls of his free
libraries. In the June number of the “North American Review” for
1893, Mr. Carnegie employed the following significant words:
Let men say what they will; I say that as surely as the sun
in the heavens once shone upon Britain and America united,
so surely is it one morning to rise, shine upon and greet
again =the reunited States--the British-American Union=.
Let us recall that it was Lord Bryce, the former British Ambassador
to the United States, who advocated:
“The recognition of a common citizenship, securing to the citizen
of each, in the country of the other, certain rights not enjoyed by
others.”
And that Lord Haldane, in a speech in Canada some years ago, broadly
hinted at an ultimate union of the two countries.
We find in “The Pan-Angles” of Mr. Kennedy =a map of the world in
which Great Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States are
represented in a uniform color, to illustrate their solidarity=. In
the minds of the Pan-Angles the vision of the great Cecil Rhodes,
backed by his countless millions, is approaching its realization.
Rhodes held that “divine ideals, on which the progress of mankind
depended, were for the most part the moving influence, =if not the
exclusive possession, of the Anglo-Saxon race, of which Great Britain
is the head=.” (“The Right Hon. Cecil Rhodes,” by Sir Thos. E.
Fuller, p. 243.)
Rhodes’ published will of July 1, 1899, has a broad provision
for his American propaganda in paragraph 16: “And whereas I also
desire to encourage and foster an appreciation of the advantages
which I implicitly believe =will result from the union of the
English-speaking people throughout the world, and to encourage in the
students from the United States of North America who will benefit
from the American Scholarships to be established at the University of
Oxford under my Will, an attachment to the country from which they
have sprung=,” etc.
The effect of the Rhodes American scholarship scheme was clearly set
forth in the “Saturday Evening Post” of July 13, 1912, wherein the
writer says:
“Twenty years hence and forever afterward there will be between
two and three thousand men (Rhodes graduates) in the prime of life
scattered over the English-speaking world, each of whom will have had
impressed upon his mind at the most susceptible period the dreams of
=a union of our people=.”
In the “North American Review” for June, 1893, Mr. Carnegie already
advocated the subordination of our fiscal policy to that of England.
He said:
“I do not shut my eyes to the fact that reunion, bringing free
entrance of British products, would cause serious disturbance to many
manufacturing interests near the Atlantic Coast which have been built
up under the protective tariff system. =Judging from my knowledge of
the American manufacturers, there are few who would not gladly make
the necessary pecuniary sacrifices to bring about a reunion of the
old home and the new.=”
In a like manner Mr. Carnegie spoke at Dundee, in 1890, and in the
“North American Review” he candidly stated: “National patriotism or
pride cannot prove a serious obstacle in the way of reunion.... The
new nation would dominate the world.”
The war has blinded us to many issues that affect our political
future. With Lord Northcliffe admittedly in control of many important
American papers, there has been printed only what was approved in
London, and suppressed whatever menaced the peaceful pursuit of
the policy of the proposed merger. It cropped out in the draft of
the League of Nations, rejected by the United States Senate, which
provided for six votes for Great Britain and her colonies and only
one vote for the United States on all questions to be decided. Only a
few Senators were alive to the danger, and the misguided public was
so reluctant to hear the truth that Senator Reed of Missouri, one
of the first to protest, was for a time repudiated by the leaders
of his party in his own State, and assailed on the platform when he
attempted to speak in Oklahoma.
The movement to anglicise the United States is making rapid progress.
It had its inception in London and is conducted in this country
under the auspices of pronounced Anglophiles in the name of the
“English-Speaking Union,” headed by former President Taft, with the
following persons as vice presidents: George Haven Putnam, chairman
of the organization committee; Albert Shaw, Ellery Sedgwick, George
Wharton Pepper, John A. Stewart, Otto H. Kahn, Charles C. Burlingham,
Charles P. Howland, R. Harold Paget, Edward Harding, the Rev. Lyman
P. Powell, E. H. Van Ingen, and Frank P. Glass. In London the
organization is called the Anglo-American Society. At a meeting
held in that city on June 26, 1919, presided over by Lord Bryce, an
elaborate programme was agreed upon to carry the propaganda into the
United States and England. To that end, Washington and the Puritan
fathers, though the former headed the rebellion against England and
the latter fled its shores to escape persecution, are to be employed
as symbols of Anglo-American unity, and a great number of festivities
and memorials are included in the program, which will develop in the
course of the year. Preparations are now being made for the 300th
anniversary celebration of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers.
A Sulgrave Institution has been organized--Sulgrave Manor being the
ancestral home of George Washington--which has raised $125,000 in
England and is raising a fund of $1,000,000 in this country. The use
of the fund was explained by John A. Stewart, chairman of the board
of governors, who said it was “to establish scholarships in English
universities and later in this country, and also to refit Sulgrave
Manor.” King George was one of the first contributors to the English
campaign, he said.
On June 28, 1919, the King of England sent by cable a message to the
President, in which he said:
Mr. President, it is on this day one of our happiest
thoughts that the American and British people, brothers in
arms, will continue forever to be brothers in peace. United
before by language, traditions, kinship and ideals, there
has been set upon our fellowship the sacred seal of common
sacrifice.
During the Paris peace conference the New York “Times” of February
13, 1919, in a Paris correspondence, declared that there was complete
Anglo-American concord, the program of the conference revealing
a fundamental identity of aims and the understanding between
English-speaking peoples being never so complete as today. Former
Attorney General Wickersham took the lead in proposing to remit
England’s enormous debt to us, explaining that we owe them that much
for “holding back the Huns,” and the proposition has been received
with great favor by many of the 18,000 additional millionaires
created by the war, meaning, of course, that England’s burden shall
be transferred to the shoulders of the American tax payers.
Among the advocates of the merger are General Pershing, Lord Balfour,
Chauncey M. Depew, James M. Beck, Lord Grey and the American
bankers and great industrials, like Charles M. Schwab. Surrounded
by distinguished men of England, General Pershing, in the Military
Committee room of the House of Commons, dwelt with special pathos on
the proposed Anglo-Saxon brotherhood. “I feel that the discharged
and demobilized soldiers will carry with them into private life,” he
said, “the necessity for closer and firmer union, =and that we may
be united as peoples likewise forever=.” Subsequently he was made a
Knight of the Bath by King George.
At a meeting of the Pilgrim Society in New York, January 22, 1919,
James M. Beck, recently made a “Bencher” in London, after reviewing
England’s achievements in the war, said:
=England’s triumphs are our triumphs, and our triumphs are
England’s triumphs.=
Lord Edward Grey, one of the principal figures in the events
preceding and throughout the war, was sent as ambassador to the
United States to foster the movement. Nominally, the movement is
for the preservation of peace, which is represented as seriously
imperiled from hour to hour unless the United States and England
unite. To this end there is to be “an exchange of journalists” as
well as scholars and professors.
“The Nation,” speaking of an address by Admiral Sims at the American
Luncheon Club, on March 14, 1919, says:
Admiral Sims referred to his remarks at the Guildhall
several years ago, when he declared that Great Britain and
the United States would be found together in the next war.
Further, he said that in 1910, while cruising in European
waters, he submitted a secret report that in his opinion
war could not be put off longer than four years. During
the war a German diplomatic official stated that there
was an understanding between Great Britain and the United
States whereby they would stand together if either went
to war with Germany. A similar statement recently came
to light in this country from a Dutch source. Professor
Roland G. Usher, in his “Pan-Germanism,” explicitly
declares that, probably before the summer of the year
1897, “an understanding was reached that in case of a war
begun by Germany or Austria for the purpose of executing
Pan-Germanism, the United States would promptly declare
in favor of England and France, and would do her utmost
to assist them.” We do not attach too great importance
to any of these statements; yet we should like to see
this matter ventilated. If such an understanding was in
force, did President Wilson know of it before Mr. Balfour
and M. Viviani made their visit? Until three days before
the war, the British Parliament knew nothing of a secret
engagement that bound them hand and foot to France, and
had been in force eight years; an engagement, moreover,
that not only eight weeks before, they had been assured
did not exist. Admiral Sims’s remark gains interest from
the fact that the regular diplomatic technique of such
engagements is by way of “conversations” between military
and naval attachés of the coquetting governments. In his
book called “How Diplomats Make War,” Mr. Francis Neilson,
a member of the war-Parliament, traces the course of
the military conversations authorized by the French and
English Governments, and shows their binding effect upon
foreign policy. We should be much interested in hearing
from Admiral Sims again; and we believe that a healthy and
vigorous public curiosity about this subject would by no
means come amiss. (“Nation.”)
The Lord High Chancellor, Viscount Finlay, after saying
that “a wholly new era has opened between England and
America,” remarked that he was now at liberty to tell
Ambassador Davis that it was he, as Attorney General, who
had drafted all the British notes exchanged with the United
States, and went on with a smile:
“Ambassador Page used to say to me, ‘My dear friend, don’t
hurry with the notes; they are not pressing.’”--New York
“Globe.”
How far has this alliance actually been realized by secret
understandings? In an article in the “Revue des Deux Mondes,” in
1907, M. Andre Tardieu, the foreign editor of the Paris “Temps,”
accusing President Roosevelt of partisanship for the German Emperor
in the Algeciras conference, distinctly charged him with bad faith in
this direction in view of the secret understanding between the United
States and England.
A formal treaty has not so far been arranged, but we may ask: In
how far are we involved in a policy looking to the abdication of
our sovereignty as an independent republic in view of statements
such as were made unchallenged by Prof. Roland G. Usher in his book,
“Pan-Germanism:”
First, that in 1897 there was a secret understanding
between this country, England, France, and Russia, that in
case of war brought on by Germany the =United States would
do its best to assist its three allies=.
Second, (page 151) that “certain events lead to the
probability that the Spanish-American war was created in
order to permit the United States to take possession of
Spain’s colonial possessions.”
Third, that =England possesses three immensely powerful
allies=--France, Russia, =and the United States=. These he
constantly speaks of as the “Coalition.”
Fourth, that the United States was not permitted by England
and France to build the Panama Canal until they were
persuaded of the dangers of Pan-Germanism.
In an interview published in the St. Louis “Star” of May 2, 1915,
Prof. Usher confirmed these statements by saying that a verbal
alliance is in existence between this country and the Allies.
Material support of the charge is furnished by the late British
Secretary of the Colonies, the Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, who, in a
statement in Parliament during the Boer war, referred to the treaty
of alliance as “an agreement, an understanding, a compact, if you
please.” On November 30, 1899, Chamberlain delivered an epochal
speech at Leicester against France for some unseemly cartooning of
Queen Victoria. In his speech he threatened France with war and
distinctly spoke of an Anglo-American union: “The =union between
England and America= is a powerful factor for peace.” (N. Murrel
Morris, “Joseph Chamberlain, The Rt. Hon.,” London, 1900, Hutchinson
& Co., publishers.) Chamberlain further supported Prof. Usher in the
latter’s assertion that the treaty was verbal, as a written treaty
must have the official sanction of the Senate. In this same Leicester
speech, Mr. Chamberlain declared:
To me it seems to matter little whether you have an
alliance which is committed to paper, or whether you have
an understanding which exists in the minds of the statesmen
of the respective countries. An understanding perhaps is
better than an alliance, which may stereotype arrangements,
which cannot be accepted as permanent, in view of the
changing circumstances from day to day. (Morris.)
Cornelia Steketee Hulst, in her pamphlet, “Our Secret Alliance,”
quotes from a speech of Chamberlain as follows:
I can go as far as to say that, terrible as war may be,
even war itself would be cheaply purchased if in a great
and noble cause the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack
should wave together in an Anglo-Saxon alliance.
Already the thought of a merger and the loss of our identity as
a republic is coursing in a dangerous form through the minds of
the people. It has been said that if a question is harped upon
continuously for a sufficient period that people will go to war for
the mere sake of putting the question out of their minds, and even
now among the high and the low there is manifest a supine, an ominous
spirit of submission to the surrender of their political independence
rather than fight it as a form of open sedition.
The Rhodes trust fund and the Carnegie peace fund have their priests
and priestesses, witness the statement of Mrs. John Astor, chairman
of the American Red Cross in England, quoted in the New York “Times”
of March 5, 1915: “An alliance of the English-speaking nations would
be the greatest ideal toward which to work.” George Beer anticipated
Mrs. Astor in the “Forum” for May, 1915:
The only practical method is to embody the existing cordial
feeling between the United States and England in a more
or less formal alliance, so that the two countries can
bring their joint influence and pressure to bear whenever
their common interests and political principles may be
jeopardized.
In January, 1916, the late Joseph H. Choate, former ambassador to
Great Britain, drank his memorable toast at a banquet of the Pilgrim
Society: “I now ask you to all rise and drink =a good old loyal toast
to the President and the King=.”
The prevalence of such sentiments gives us something to ponder. The
war has been conducive to the propagation of seditious thought; we
were kept too busy hunting down pro-Germans and imaginary spies to
take heed of the intrigue being prosecuted under the Secret Will of
Cecil Rhodes. That great constructive statesman was too practical to
pursue an ignis fatuus; Mr. Carnegie was too much like him in that
respect to create an enormous fund nominally for the preservation
of peace, the interest on which, something like $500,000 annually,
is available to propagate the cause of Pan-Anglicism, while in the
meantime the Rhodes scholarships are filling American homes with the
apostles of his creed. Their tracks are easily found, and they will
become more frequent with the progress of time. Philipp Jourdan (John
Lane Company, New York, 1911) speaks of 100 scholarships for the
United States “to arouse love for England,” and “to encourage in the
students from the United States an attachment for the country from
which they sprung.” (pp. 75 and 328.)
What is good for Englishmen may seem good to Italians, French,
Germans and Russians. In 1914 many laughed at the thought that Uncle
Sam could be drawn into the European war and send several million
American boys over to fight in order to make the world safe for
democracy, but Colonial Secretary Chamberlain, had he lived his
normal span of years, would have seen the “Stars and Stripes and the
Union Jack” waving over something very near akin to his cherished
Anglo-Saxon alliance. (See “Propaganda.”)
Canada is being used to a great extent as a means of carrying out
insidious projects against the United States. For a number of years
special inducements have been offered Americans to settle in Canada,
and large areas of farm land are in the hands of American immigrants.
During the war many of these were compelled, in order to hold their
property, to forswear their American citizenship, and many more
served in the Canadian army as part of the British colonial forces.
They were treated as colonials subject to British jurisdiction.
A project of more far-reaching extent is embodied in the movement
to divert western traffic from New York to Montreal. The Canadian
government has shown a tenacious purpose in this enterprise and
is enthusiastically supported by the West and Northwest. It has
promised to make seaports of the cities of the Great Lakes, from
which vessels can go direct to Montreal and from there find an outlet
to the Atlantic without reloading their cargoes. The object is to
be accomplished by improving the Welland Canal and the cutting of a
30-foot channel in the St. Lawrence River. The Welland Canal connects
Lake Erie with Lake Ontario, and its locks are to be increased 800
feet in length, 80 feet in breadth and 30 in depth. Those of our own
barge canal are only 30 feet deep. The western chambers of commerce
are enthusiastically in favor of the Canadian project, in view of
the commercial advantage to be gained from this enterprise for a
large area of western territory. It is probable that it will go into
effect, and Americans will build up Canada at the expense of their
own country.
=Ringling, Al.=--One of the most successful of American circus
managers, who died at his home in Baraboo, Wis., in the early part of
1916, was the son of German immigrants, who started as a musician,
became a juggler and in 1888 organized the famous circus known by the
name of himself and four brothers, “The Ringling Brothers’ Circus.”
His circus far eclipsed any ever organized by P. T. Barnum and
his illness dated from superhuman efforts made by him to save his
property from destruction by fire. Before his death at the age of 63
he presented his native town, Baraboo, with a theatre.