20 
Land & Water 
June 13, igi8 
An Ambassador of Letters : By James Milne 
WE owe much to Mr. George Haven Putnam, 
the famous pubHsher, for the good friendship 
which exists between England and America— 
a friendship now being consecrated in the fires 
of Armageddon. He is here, as he has come 
here almost every summer for the past half-century; but 
this time he is with us under special circumstances. No 
plain American citizen did more than Mr. Putnam to carry 
America into her place in the war. Therefore the Allies owe 
him gratitude, though he would be the last man in the world 
to think of that. What he thinks of is how best to inform 
us about the fixed moral resolve of America to see the war 
through, and about her 
rising military power. 
She is late in the field 
— later by two years — • 
than he would have 
had her ; but she is 
going to fight the thing 
out even if, varying 
General Grant's famous 
saying, that should 
take many summers. 
Such is the message 
with which Mr.Putnam 
is charged, and, for its 
largeness, it should be 
proclaimed first ; but 
he carries it easily 
because, in London 
Town, he is on familiar 
ground. His sweet, 
gentle, scholarly, pur- 
poseful personality has 
been a real link be- 
tween our Common- 
wealth and his Re- 
pubUc, alike in life and 
in letters. He has been 
outside the brilhant 
group of literary men 
— Rus,sell Lowell, John 
Hay, and the others, 
who have been' the 
official spokesmen and 
orators of America in 
London. But he has 
gone on longer than 
any of. them, and at 
seventy- four he is still 
hale and well, and 
very much "not out." 
His three score and ten 
and more j'ears find 
him at work when 
most Londoners are 
only shaving, and this 
habit of catching the 
day on the hop always 
enables him to spare an hour for a talk with a friend. 
" My father," he will tell you in a voice given him for good 
conversation, "was the first American publisher to invade 
England. He came over in 1837— the year Queen Victoria 
ascended the throne — and in 1841 he definitely established 
his publishing house in London. He constantly did what he 
could to strengthen the relations between the two countries, 
and he had a considered scheme for a league of the whole 
English-speaking peoples. I found myself, at my father's 
death in 1872, an inheritor of his desire and of his dream, and 
my personal relationship with England began as early as it 
could — that is, with my birth here." 
Mr. Putnam still wonders, and humorously asks you to 
wonder, whether he is really an American citizen or a British 
subject. "You see," he puts the problem, "a child born in 
England of American parents — and it is the same, of course, 
with a child born in America of Enghsh parents — has the 
right, on reaching twenty-one, to become a national of one 
country or of the other. When my twenty- first birthday befell 
I was busy helping to fight the Confederate General Johnston 
in North Carolina, and so I forgot all about this matter of my 
own. In a sense, therefore, I can claim both America and 
England as my country— shall I say that they are twin 
mothers ? Certainly I hope that as a shuttle between them 
Major George Haven Putnam 
—not a shuttlecock blown by the wind hither and thither— 
I have done something to weave the ever-growing web of 
sympathy and kinship which unites the two nations." 
As a good publisher, he has enriched the golden chain of 
common literature winch has spanned the Atlantic, unhurt, 
in the wintriest of weather. As a publicist he has served 
that literature well by being chief hammerman in the making 
of the vessel called Anglo-American copyright. As a preacher 
on the true relationship of England and America, he has been 
tireless and eloquent, and always a master of the case. " We 
can realise to-day that George IIL, with his German theories 
of government, was attempting to apply to America, as he 
was applying it to 
Great Britain, a system 
Prussian in its purpose 
and methods. Nay, im 
his fight with the 
American colonists he 
even utilised the ser- 
vice of Prussian so^ 
diers. Thus the Ameri- 
can colonists were 
fighting not only for 
their own rights, but 
for the first principles 
of hberalism and repre- 
sentative government 
against autocracy." 
That matter, so put by 
Mr. Putnam, is his 
illustration of the pro- 
cession of EngUsh his- 
tory and American his- 
tory along roads where 
now they naturally, 
inevitably, forcefully, 
meet, to challenge the 
Kaiser's dominion of 
the world. "I have 
not," he will add, with 
flash of eye and sweep 
of hand, "many years 
left me on this earth ; 
but if I could fancy the 
triumph, for an hour, 
of the cause which the 
HohenzoUern Kaiser 
represents, I should 
wish to go straight 
underground." 
Mr. Putnam may be 
said to have begun life 
as a Federal soldier in 
the .\merican Civil 
War. He had a taste 
of Libby Prison, as 
part of his miUtary 
education, and did not 
like the place. When 
it went down, with the fall of the Confederacy, he had attained 
to the rank o{ major. This rank he again holds actively in 
the American Army which is pouring over the ocean to save 
civiHsation, for his friend, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, appointed 
him to the forces that he organised. Major Putnam, the 
man of war, has always, however, been a strenuous man of 
peace, an unwearying labourer in that vineyard. "What," 
he demands, "is the present war being waged for but for 
peace ? It is being waged by the Allies so that the royal and 
other cankers which beget war shall be destroyed for ever- 
more, so that peace may reign in the world for evermore. 
The Kaiser, like Herod of old, wants to destroy the child of 
liberty, but he shall not." 
You may gather that colour, movement, and the swift, 
sure phrase are all in the order of Mr. Putnam's talk and 
speech-making. His description of the well-meaning pacifists 
as "short-haired women and long-haired men" is likely to 
abide with them on both sides of the Atlantic. While he 
addresses you quietly, but always alertly, across his own 
writing-desk, he drops a phrase which, as events have proven, 
exactly renders the position of America in the war, from the 
moment it broke out — she was on "the skirmish line." 
Her ideals were at stake — Liberty, Freedom, the right of 
all men bom equal before God to be their own rulers. 
