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.