Vol. XXXI, No. 3 



WASHINGTON 



March, 1917 



THE 



ATEOMAL 

 13 APHIS 



WHAT GREAT BRITAIN IS DOING 



By Sydney Brooks 



THERE was a very striking pas- 

 sage in the speech which Mr. 

 Lloyd-George recently delivered at 

 the Guildhall soon after his return from 

 the Allied conference at Rome. "There 

 is one thing," he said, "that struck me 

 and that strikes me more and more each 

 time I attend these conferences and visit 

 the Continent — I mean the increasing ex- 

 tent to which the Allied peoples are look- 

 ing to Great Britain. They are trusting 

 her rugged strength and great resources 

 more and more. She is to them like a 

 great tower in the deep. She is becom- 

 ing more and more the hope of the op- 

 pressed and the despair of the oppressor, 

 and I feel confident that we shall not fail 

 the people who have put their trust in 

 us." 



It would be singularly unbecoming on 

 the part of any British subject to seek to 

 exalt the contribution that his own coun- 

 try is making to the common cause above 

 that of any of the Allies. We can never 

 forget our obligation to Belgium's heroic 

 stand in crucial days, to the impassable 

 wall of steel maintained by unselfish 

 France until we could raise, train, and 

 equip our armies, and to the brave and 

 effective efforts of Russia in the east and 

 united Italy to the south. 



If we are now in a position to do rather 

 more than any of them, it is because we 

 have suffered less, because we have been 

 spared the well-nigh mortal blow of an 

 invasion of our territory, and because 

 time has been vouchsafed to us in which 



to develop and organize our power. But 

 there need be nothing vainglorious — 

 nothing, indeed, but a sober recognition 

 of facts and their responsibilities — in -sub- 

 scribing to Mr. Lloyd-George's estimate 

 of the present situation. 



Those who looked at the war with dis- 

 cerning eyes knew from its very begin- 

 ning that Great Britain was, and could 

 not help being, the linch-pin of the whole 

 alliance. It has taken curiously long for 

 that elementary fact to sink into the gen- 

 eral consciousness. America, I should 

 say, is only just beginning to realize it. 

 No doubt it is largely our own fault. 



If we had even one-tenth of the Ger- 

 man genius for self-advertisement, the 

 world would long ago have understood 

 that without British power the Allies 

 could never have withstood the Prussian 

 onset, and that with British power an 

 Allied victory — complete, smashing, and 

 final — is as certain as the rising of to- 

 morrow's sun. 



As it is, Americans in general seem 

 even now to have but an imperfect idea 

 of what Great Britain has accomplished 

 in this war. It is not, in my judgment, 

 that they do not wish to know. It is 

 mainly, I think, that they have been de- 

 luded by our old and deceptive trick of 

 taking what we do well for granted and 

 saying nothing about it, while we shriek 

 our blunders from the housetops. 



We are by all odds the worst adver- 

 tisers in the world. We are the most in- 

 veterate self-detractors in the world. We 



