of France we imported wines
and silks. In Paris we spent, some of us spent, millions on jewels and
clothes. In automobiles and on Cook's tours every summer Americans
scattered money from Brittany to Marseilles. They were the natural prey
of Parisian hotel-keepers, restaurants, milliners, and dressmakers. We
were a sister republic, the two countries swapped statues of their
great men--we had not forgotten Lafayette, France honored Paul Jones. A
year ago, in the comic papers, between John Bull and Uncle Sam, it was
not Uncle Sam who got the worst of it. Then the war came and with it,
in the feeling toward ourselves, a complete change. A year ago we were
almost one of the Allies, much more popular than Italians, more
sympathetic than the English. To-day we are regarded, not with
hostility, but with amazed contempt.

This most regrettable change was first brought about by President
Wilson's letter calling upon Americans to be neutral. The French could
not understand it. From their point of view it was an unnecessary
affront. It was as unexpected as the cut direct from a friend; as
unwarranted, as gratuitous, as a slap in the face. The millions that
poured in from America for the Red Cross, the services of Americans in
hospitals, were accepted as the offerings of individuals, not as
representing the sentiment of the American people. That sentiment, the
French still insist in believing, found expression in the letter that
called upon all Americans to be neutral, something which to a Frenchman
is neither fish, fowl, nor good red herring.

We lost caste in other ways. We supplied France with munitions, but,
as a purchasing agent for the government put it to me, we are not
losing much money by it, and, until the French Government protested,
and the protest was printed all over the United States, some of our
manufacturers supplied articles that were worthless. Doctor Charles W.
Cowan, an American who in winter lives in Paris and Nice and spends his
summers in America, showed me the half section of a shoe of which he
said sixty thousand pairs had been ordered, until it was found that part
of each shoe was made of brown paper. Certainly part of the shoe he
showed me was made of brown paper.

When an entire people, men, women, and children, are fighting for
their national existence, and their individual home and life, to have
such evidences of Yankee smartness foisted upon them does not make
for friendship. It inspired contempt.