For it will show us that if a British premier to-day can speak as Mr.Asquith did on December 16th, 1912, in his reference to the late American Ambassador as "a great American and a kinsman," one "sprung from a common race, speaking our own language, sharing with us by birth as by inheritance not a few of our most cherished traditions and participating when he comes here by what I may describe as _his natural right in our domestic interests and celebrations_," then this new-found kinship takes its birth not in a sense of common race, indeed, but in a very common fear of Germany.
In the year 1846, the British army was engaged in robbing the Irish people of their harvest in order that the work of the famine should be complete and that the then too great population of Ireland should be reduced within the limits "law and order" prescribed, either by starvation or flight to America.
Fleeing in hundreds and thousands from the rule of one who claimed to be their Sovereign, expelled in a multitude exceeding the Moors of Spain, whom a Spanish king shipped across the seas with equal pious intent, the fugitive Irish Nation found friendship, hope, and homes in the great Celtic Republic of the West.

All that was denied to them in their own ancient land they found in a new Ireland growing up across the Atlantic.
The hate of England pursued them here and those who dared to give help and shelter.

The United States were opening wide their arms to receive the stream of Irish fugitives and were saying very harsh things of England's infamous rule in Ireland.

This could not be brooked.

England in those days had not invented the Anglo-Saxon theory of mankind, and a united Germany had not then been born to vex the ineptitude of her statesmen or to profit from the shortcomings of her tradesmen.
So the greatest Ministers of Queen Victoria seriously contemplated war with America and naturally looked around for some one else to do the fighting.