ONE ANGLO-AMERICAN NATION

From One Anglo-American Nation (published in 1941 and dedicated to FDR) by George Catlin (father of Shirley Williams):

For seventeen years I have urged at intervals, in articles and books, that the United States and the British Commonwealth should reunite, along with other nations, on grounds economic, cultural, and of common defence – and not least in order that the Anglo-Saxon peoples should assume that role of responsibility which they owed to their neighbours and themselves and for which their divisions provided a fatal alibi. They held the major position of power in the world and declined to consolidate it, when crying demand in the world was for the Consolidation of Power.

At that time no one was interested. The plan was in accordance with the idea of Cecil Rhodes. However, it pleased British imperialists no more than it pleased American isolationists or enthusiasts for a universal League – which League however, for the most part did not include the United States, Russia, or Germany, and which had to begin by asking the Ambassadors' Conference to placate Italy. There was no focus of power until Germany provided one against the Anglo-Saxon powers and against the League. France made an attempt at the expense of the League, which was used as the instrument, but had not the necessary breadth of basis to carry through the work.

What I have written is, then, no eleventh-hour discovery. As long ago as 1925 I wrote on the thesis of Anglo-Saxon union for the American Press. Later, in my Principles of Politics (1931), I developed the theme that the concentration of power was the guarantee of the effective organization of peace, while pointing out that a cloud was rising in the skies, “the size of a man's hand.” The organization of “AngloSaxony” or “AngloSaxondom” was advocated in my Preface To Action (1934) and, again, in my contribution to the symposium Challenge to Death (1934). In 1939 I was invited to deliver in Washington, during the spring, a series of lectures on this theme, subsequently published as AngloSaxony and its Traditions (1939). While in Washington I had the good fortune to come across and review, for The Washington Post, Mr Clarence Streit's Union Now, advocating the union of fifteen democracies, and, later, to meet Mr Streit and his associates. The previous autumn a British Federalist movement had begun, which however was - and is – almost exclusively preoccupied with European Federal Union, despite the broader views of Mr Lionel Curtis and of Lord Lothian, with whom I had the opportunity of frequent discussions. The present book is the fruit of reflections due to a lecture tour across Canada, speaking on Federal Union, in January, 1940, to members of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs, Canadian Clubs and Chambers of Commerce, and was in part delivered in a Convocation address and in lecture-form by courtesy of the University of Kansas City in the same year.

I first drafted these pages six months before Mr Churchill's offer of Federal Union to France and as long before Mr Streit started his campaign for Anglo-American Union; seven months before Dr Schacht started to talk of regional blocks; and eight months before Mr Churchill talked of “Anglo-Saxondom” and before the Ogdensburg meeting of President Roosevelt and Mr Mackenzie King , Premier of Canada. However, ten years ago Mr Winston Churchill, in his If it had Happened Otherwise, wrote of the possible signing of a Covenant between the British Empire and the United States, “the most beneficent covenant of which human records are witness.”