I retorted (I'm sorry for it now) that I could
all the more 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?

We remembered Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston in the British
Government, and their fellow aristocrats in British society; we
remembered the aristocratic British press--The Times notably, because
the most powerful--these are what we saw, felt, and remembered, because
they were not with us