merican policy, and that the triumph of America
contributed in no small measure to the salvation of those institutions
by which the evolution of England towards complete democracy was made
possible. Washington was held up to us in England not merely as a great
and good man, but as an heroic leader, to whose courage and wisdom the
English as well as the American people were eternally indebted....

"Pray forgive so long a letter from a stranger. It is prompted... by a
sense of the illimitable importance, not only for America and Britain,
but for the entire world, of these two great democratic peoples knowing
each other as they really are and cooperating as only they can cooperate
to establish and maintain peace on just and permanent foundations."

Chapter III: In Front of a Bulletin Board

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 ear