A special relationship

From ‘The United States and Britain’, The Spectator, 10 February 1917: It would be easy to write down a hundred reasons why unclouded friendship and moral co-operation between the United States and Britain are a benefit to the world, and why an interruption of such relations is a detriment to progress and a disease world-wide in its effects. But when we had written down all those reasons we should not have expressed the instinctive sentiments which go below and beyond them all. To our way of feeling, quarrelling and misunderstanding between the British and American peoples are like a thing contrary to Nature. They are so contrary to Nature that the times of misunderstanding have always seemed to us abnormal, and a return to friendship not an achievement of wise diplomacy (as one might feel such a result to be in our relations with other countries) but merely a resumption of the normal.