The Guildhall meeting in support of Anglo-American Arbitration was held
yesterday week. The Prime Minister proposed the principal resolution. The situation, he pointed out, had not been organised or engineered by the apparatus of diplomacy ; the initiative, as they gladly and gratefully acknowledged, had been taken by the Chief Magistrate of the United States, but the seed had fallen on ground prepared to receive it. The history of the last few centuries showed that some of the bloodiest and most wasteful wars had been waged between re- lated peoples, and it was surely a lesson to those who despaired of mankind to see the two great English-speaking communities of the world led by a common instinct to recognise that war between them would be an unthinkable crime, and prepared to enter into a solemn compact which would make it for the future an impossible contingency. The compact now suggested, he insisted, had to ulterior political purpose. If this compact was ratified between the United Kingdom and the United States, a step would have been taken, im- measurable in extent, incomparable in significance in the onward progress of humanity.
