There is evidence of a real search for American affinities among the other peoples of the world; it is a new war-made feature of the thoughtful literature and journalists of America.  And it is interesting to note how partial and divided these affinities must necessarily be.  Historically and politically, the citizen of the United States must be drawn most closely to France.  France is the one other successful modern republic; she was the instigator and friend of American liberation.  With Great Britain the tie of language, the tradition of personal freedom, and the strain in the blood are powerful links.  But both France and Britain are old countries, thickly populated, with a great and ancient finish and completeness, full of implicit relationships; America is by comparison crude, uninformed, explicit, a new country, still turning fresh soil, still turning over but half-explored natural resources.

The United States constitute a modern country, a country on an unprecedented scale, being organised from the very beginning on modern lines.  There is only one other such country upon the planet, and that curiously enough is parallel in climate, size, and position—­Russia in Asia.  Even Russia in Europe belongs rather to the newness that is American than to the tradition that is European; Harvard was founded more than half a century before Petrograd.  And when I looked out of the train window on my way to Petrograd from Germany, the little towns I saw were like no European towns I had ever seen.  The wooden houses, the broad unmade roads, the traffic, the winter-bitten scenery, a sort of untidy spaciousness, took my mind instantly to the country one sees in the back part of New York State as one goes from Boston to Niagara.  And the reality follows the appearance.

The United States and Russia are the west and the east of the same thing; they are great modern States, developing from the beginning upon a scale that only railways make possible.  France and Britain may perish in the next two centuries or they may persist, but there can be no doubt that two centuries ahead Russia and the United States will be two of the greatest masses of fairly homogeneous population on the globe.

There are no countries with whom the people of the United States are so likely to develop sympathy and a sense of common values and common interests as with these three, unless it be with the Scandinavian peoples.  The Scandinavian peoples have developed a tendency to an extra-European outlook, to look west and east rather than southwardly, to be pacifist and progressive in a manner essentially American.  From any close sympathy with Germany the Americans are cut off at present by the Hohenzollerns and the system of ideas that the Hohenzollerns have imposed upon German thought.  So long as the Germans cling to the tawdry tradition of the Empire, so long as they profess militarism, so long as they keep up their ridiculous belief in some strange racial superiority to the rest of mankind, it is absurd to expect any co-operative feeling between them and any other great people.