GREAT BRITAIN
Blood, Curtseys & Mrs. Courtney
When an English girl begins really to like a man from "the States," or when an English dowager designs to flatter one. she usually says: "You know, you don't really seem a bit like an American."
Foolish indeed would be any Englishwoman to try this out on Brig.-General Charles Gates Dawes. Just how foolish she would be, just how thoroughly American he is, Ambassador Dawes reminded the world in a speech last week at Cambridge.
The Ambassador was about to sail for a furlough in the U. S. Cambridge University had just made him an honorary Doctor of Laws and in the distinguished audience sat prim John Galsworthy, elfin Sir James Matthew Barrie, beefy Lords Beauchamp and Bridgeman, and His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, "Uncle Arthur" Henderson— honorary degree men all.
Banging the rostrum as though to smash it, barking his words in thin staccato, turning from side to side and gesticulating so vigorously that his glasses seemed about to fall off, General Dawes delivered one of his best speeches in quite his best, slashing, he-American style:
"The friendly attitude of the two English-speaking peoples exists because of a blood tie and thus rests upon a foundation as immovable as the rock of Gibraltar!
"I have the honor to represent in this country the government of a people of over 120,000,000 population, of whom half are of British descent. In my country, therefore, there are at least 10,000,000 more people of British descent than live in the island of Britain itself!"
To the English audience this was the proper time to cry "Hear, hear," in low, carefully modulated tone. With rising tone General Dawes continued: "As American Ambassador I come frequently into contact with certain traveled Britons and Americans who are continual purveyors of the trivial and the irritating in international relationship. They do not seem to have sensed the inevitable consequence of an existing tie of blood upon the permanent and fundamental attitude of the two peoples."
Gold Star Mothers. From racial ties the Ambassador passed with ever-increasing fervor and sincerity to the theme of Motherhood. "We have recently had in London," he cried, "a body of American travelers representing a cross section of the American people, representing the heart and soul of the American people, representing the bone and sinew of the American people and the proud attitude of the American people—a body of travelers not self-invited, with their minds occupied by thoughts of society reporters or fashionable dressmakers, but mothers invited by the Government of the United States to make their first and last visit to the graves of their sons in France who fell in the 27th and 30th divisions of the American Army, fighting under British command by the side of their comrades of the British Army.
"They brought no social introduction. The credentials which each carried were but the photograph of a son and a few withered flowers from a garden at home to lay on a grave in France. They needed no more.
"The heads of many of them were gray and the years had left them feeble, but the heartbeats of two great peoples were keeping time with their footsteps.