proposition. He went after the Dutch in great shape. Next to France he led the way and said, ‘Come on, Yanks; we need your help. We will put you in the first line of trenches where there will be good gunning. Yes, we will do all of that and at the same time we will borrow your money, raised by Liberty Loans, and use it for the purchase of American wheat, pork, and beef.’
“Mr. Bull kept his word. He never flinched or attempted to dodge the issue. He kept strictly in the middle of the road. His determination to down the Kaiser with American men, American money, and American food never abated for a single day during the conflict.”
This editorial has many twins throughout the country. I quote it for its value as a specimen of that sort of journalistic and political utterance amongst us, which is as seriously embarrassed by facts as a skunk by its tail. Had its author said: “The Declaration of Independence was signed by Christopher Columbus on Washington’s birthday during the siege of Vicksburg in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and Judas Iscariot,” his statement would have been equally veracious, and more striking.
As to Winston Churchill’s declaration that Great Britain will not surrender her control of the seas, I am as little shocked by that as I should be were our Secretary of the Navy to declare that in no circumstances would we give up control of the Panama Canal. The Panama Canal is our carotid artery, Great Britain’s navy is her jugular vein. It is her jugular vein in the mind of her people, regardless of that new apparition, the submarine. I was not shocked that Great Britain should decline Mr. Wilson’s invitation that she cut her jugular vein; it was the invitation which kindled my emotions; but these were of a less serious kind.
The last letter that I shall give is from an American citizen of English birth.
“As a boy at school in England, I was taught the history of the American Revolution as J. R. Green presents it in his Short History of the English People. The gist of this record, as you doubtless recollect, is that George III being engaged in the attempt to destroy what there then was of political freedom and representative government in England, used the American situation as a means to that end; that the English people, in so far as their voice could make itself heard, were solidly against both his English and American policy, and that the triumph of America contributed in no small measure to the salvation of those institutions by which the evolution of England towards complete democracy was made possible.
Washington was held up to us in England not merely as a great and good man, but as an heroic leader, to whose courage and wisdom the English as well as the American people were eternally indebted… .
“Pray forgive so long a letter from a stranger. It is prompted… by a sense of the illimitable importance, not only for America and Britain, but for the entire world, of these two great democratic peoples knowing each other as they really are and cooperating as only they can cooperate to establish and maintain peace on just and permanent foundations.”
Chapter III: In Front of a Bulletin Board There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was published in the American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read the other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the ten, but would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers either think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are to the point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to England and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are embarrassing—side-step them.
What best pleased me was to find that soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not “high-brows” only.
May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come into the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken us out of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those blighting words, “there is such a thing as being too proud to fight.” The British had been told by their General that they were fighting with their backs to the wall. Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French morale was burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they had been talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and again, indoors and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our country—oh, more than half!—in different or incredulous, nothing prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt’s and Leonard Wood’s almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes—would stop as you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces of our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions—do you remember? For our future’s sake may everybody remember, may nobody forget!
What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by-passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt, Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun, the bird of prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914, these Pan-German schemes had been leaking out for all who chose to understand them. A great many did not so choose.
The Hun had wanted us and planned to get us, and now more than ever before, because he intended that we should pay his war bills. Let him once get by England, and his sword would cut through our fat, defenseless carcass like a knife through cheese.
A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said, “Well, I like the French. But I’ll not cry much if England gets hers.
What’s England done in this war, anyway?”
“Her fleet’s keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing,”
retorted another voice.
With assurance slightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the first speaker protested, “Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as any Kaiser.”
