over us threateningly, with a bone in her
teeth.

Imagination sped across seas where a man had cruised into
harbours that he knew and across continents that he knew. He was
trying to visualize the whole globe--all of it except the Baltic seas and
a thumb-mark in the centre of Europe. Hong-Kong, Melbourne,
Sydney, Halifax, Cape Town, Bombay--yes, and Rio and Valparaiso,
Shanghai, San Francisco, New York, Boston, these and the lands
back of them, where countless millions dwell, were all safe behind the
barrier of that fleet.

Then back through the land where Shakespeare wrote to London,
with its glare of recruiting posters and the throbbing of that individual
freedom which is on trial in battle with the Prussian system--and as
one is going to bed the sound of guns in the heart of the city! From
the window one looked upward to see, under a searchlight's play, the
silken sheen of a cigar-shaped sort of aerial phantom which was
dropping bombs on women and children, while never a shot is fired at
those sturdy men behind armour.

When you have travelled far; when you think of Botha and his Boers
fighting for England; when you have found justice and fair play and
open markets under the British flag; when you compare the
vociferations of von Tirpitz, glorying in the torpedoing of a Lusitania,
with the quiet manner of Sir John Jellicoe, you need only a little spark
of conscience to prefer the way that the British have used their sea-
power to the way that the men who send out Zeppelins to war on
women and children would use that power if they had it.

XXXIV
British Problems

Throughout the summer of 1915 the world was asking, What about
the new British army? Why was it not attacking at the opportune
moment when Germany was throwing her weight against Russia? A
facile answer is easy; indeed, facile answers are always easy.
Unhappily, they are rarely correct. None that was given in this
instance was, to my mind. They sought to put a finger on one definite
cause; again, on an individual or a set of individuals.

The reasons were manifold; as old as Waterloo, as fresh as the last
speech in Parliament. They were inherent in the Anglo-Saxon race.
Whoever raised a voice and said, This, or that, or you, are
responsible! should first have looked into his own mind and into the
history of his race and then into a mirror. Least of all should any
American have been puzzled by the delay.

"Oh, we should have done better t