How To Compare String In Binary Search Tree

I'm trying to implement a Binary Search Tree that accepts strings. I cannot figure out how to compare the string value in my add method against the node object. While I could make the node class data be the string type I am trying to make the code be as reusable as possible. So my question is this, is there a simple way I can compare the two that I am missing?

public class BTNode<E> {
private E data;
private BTNode<E> left, right;
//constructor
public BTNode(E initialData, BTNode<E> initialLeft, BTNode<E> initialRight) {
data = initialData;
left = initialLeft;
right = initialRight;

[Code] ....