Half your people look backward.
"Your leadership rests on your wealth and on the power that you've built on your wealth." When he asked me how we were to come closer together--"closer together, with your old-time distrust of us and with your remoteness ?"--I stopped him at "remoteness." "That's the reason," I said.

"Your idea of our 'remoteness.' 'Remoteness' from what?
From you?
Are you not betraying the only real difficulty of a closer sympathy by assuming that you are the centre of the world?
When you bring yourself to think of the British Empire as a part of the American Union--mind you, I am not saying that you would be formally admitted--but when you are yourselves in close enough sympathy with us to wish to be admitted, the chief difficulty of a real union of thought will be gone.

You recall Lord Rosebery's speech in which he pictured the capital of the British Empire being moved to Washington if the American Colonies had been retained under the Crown?
Well, it was the Crown that was the trouble, and the capital of English-speaking folk has been so moved and you still remain 'remote.' Drop 'remote' from your vocabulary and your thought and we'll actually be closer together." It's an enormous problem--just how to bring these countries closer together.

Perhaps nothing can do it but some great common danger or some great common adventure.

But this is one of the problems of your lifetime.