The Powers at Play (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Incident of the British Ambassador 7 ITH certain aspects of the famous incident that brought England and the United States to the very verge of war in the closing year of the nineteenth century, the public is already familiar. The cooler heads, on both sides of the Atlantic, had long perceived that a crisis was approaching. Our new policy of territorial expansion, the attitude of the Administration toward Japan, the correspondence with Germany over her interference with South American republics, had all tended to inflame international jealousies. The discovery of gold in Alaska had aroused the old question of the Northwest Boundary, and our irritation against Great Britain was greatly increased by that unlucky after-dinner speech of Lord Rawlins, the British Ambassador,on the subject of seals. Americans were thoroughly angered, and, though it was shown the next day that his lordship had been misreported, there were newspapers from one end of the country to the other that openly talked war. England at first refused to believe that the United States was seriously bent upon hostilities, but day by day the outlook grew more ominous, until at last she was startled by the intelligence, cabled from New York early one October morning, that the British Ambassador had been subjected to gross personal indignity during a visit to one of the foremost American universities. What ensued is well known, but very few have known hitherto the real cause of that dangerous and almost fatal imbroglio. It began in the office of the New York Orbit. The managing editor, standing at a desk in his shirt-sleeves, and, dashing his pencil across some verbose " copy," had said, irritably, without looking up, " Did you get that story, Andrews ? " " No," replied dejectedly the tall young fellow at hi...