d!" Each makes the
well-nigh universal--but none the less perfectly ridiculous--blunder of
damning a whole people because one of them has rubbed him the wrong way.
Nothing could show up more forcibly and vividly this human weakness for
generalizing from insufficient data, than the incident in London streets
which I promised to tell you in full when we should reach the time for
it. The time is now.

In a hospital at no great distance from San Francisco, a wounded
American soldier said to one who sat beside him, that never would he go
to Europe to fight anybody again--except the English. Them he would
like to fight; and to the astonished visitor he told his reason. He, it
appeared, was one of our Americans who marched through London streets
on that day when the eyes of London looked for the first time upon the
Yankees at last arrived to bear a hand to England and her Allies. From
the mob came a certain taunt: "You silly ass."

It was, as you will observe, an unflattering interpretation of our
national initials, U. S. A. Of course it was enough to make a proper
American doughboy entirely "hot under the collar." To this reading of
our national initials our national readiness retorted in kind at an
early date: A. E. F. meant After England Failed. But why, months and
months afterwards, when everything was over, did that foolish doughboy
in the hospital hug this lone thing to his memory? It was the act of an
unthinking few. Didn't he notice what the rest of London was doing that
day? Didn't he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and
Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government
that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky?
Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed
and stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? She's a
person who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that,
with a drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have
discovered a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him,
that they were not all England. With two drops of thought it might even
have ultimately struck him that here we came, late, very late, indeed,
only just in time, from a country untouched, unafflicted, unbombed,
safe, because of England's ships, to tired, broken, bleeding England;
and that the sight of us, so jaunty, so fresh, so innocent of suffering
and bereavement, should have been for a thoughtless m