readily comprehend English feeling about our neutrality, because I had
known what we had felt when Gladstone spoke at Newcastle and when England
let the Alabama loose upon us in 1862. Where was the good in replying at
all? Silence is almost always the best reply in these cases. Next came a
letter from another English stranger, in which the writer announced
having just read The Pentecost of Calamity. Not a word of friendliness
for what I had said about the righteousness of England's cause or my
expressed unhappiness over the course which our Government had taken--
nothing but scorn for us all and the hope that we should reap our deserts
when Germany defeated England and invaded us. Well? What of it? Here was
a stricken person, writing in stress, in a land of desolation, mourning
for the dead already, waiting for the next who should die, a poor,
unstrung average person, who had not long before read that remark of our
President's made on the morrow of the Lusitania: that there is such a
thing as being too proud to fight; had read during the ensuing weeks
those notes wherein we stood committed by our Chief Magistrate to a
verbal slinking away and sitting down under it. Can you wonder? If the
mere memory of those days of our humiliation stabs me even now, I need no
one to tell me (though I have been told) what England, what France, felt
about us then, what it must have been like for Americans who were in
England and France at that time. No: the average person in great trouble
cannot rise above the trouble and survey the truth and be just. In
English eyes our Government--and therefore all of us--failed in 1914--
1915--1916--failed again and again--insulted the cause of humanity when
we said through our President in 1916, the third summer of the war, that
we were not concerned with either the causes or the aims of that
conflict. How could they remember Hoover, or Robert Bacon, or Leonard
Wood, or Theodore Roosevelt then, any more than we could remember John
Bright, or Richard Cobden, or the Manchester men in the days when the
Alabama was sinking the merchant vessels of the Union?