the military and political bearings of a breach between the United
States and Germany on our own fortunes are by no means clear to us. But
what we _do_ want, in any case, is the sympathy, the moral support and
co-operation of your people. We have to thank you for a thousand
generosities to our wounded; we bless you--as comrades with you in that
old Christendom which even this war shall not destroy--for what you have
done in Belgium--but we want you to understand the heart of England in
this war, and not to be led away by the superficial difficulties and
disputes that no great and free nation escapes in time of crisis. Sympathy
with France--France, the invaded, the heroic--is easy for America--for us
all. She is the great tragic figure of the war--the whole world does her
homage. We are not invaded--and so less tragic, less appealing. But we are
fighting the fight which is the fight of all freemen everywhere--against
the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up
treaties and makes peaceful agreement between nations impossible--against
a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. We
have a right to your sympathy--you who are the heirs of Washington and
Lincoln, the trustees of liberty in the New World as we, with France, are
in the Old. You are concerned--you must be concerned--in the triumph of
the ideals of ordered freedom and humane justice over the ideals of
unbridled force and ruthless cruelty, as they have been revealed in this
war, to the horror of mankind. The nation that can never, to all time,
wash from its hands the guilt of the Belgium crime, the blood of the
_Lusitania_ victims, of the massacres of Louvain and Dinant, of Aerschot
and Termonde, may some day deserve our pity. To-day it has to be met and
conquered by a will stronger than its own, in the interests of
civilisation itself.

This last week, at the close of which I am despatching this final letter,
has been a sombre week for England. It has seen the squalid Irish rising,
with its seven days' orgy of fire and bloodshed in Dublin; it has seen the
surrender at Kut of General Townshend and his starving men; it has seen
also a strong demonstration in Parliament of discontent with certain
phases of the conduct of the war. And yet, how shall I convey to you the
paradox that we in England--our soldiers at the front, and instructed
opinion at home--have never been so certain of ultimate victory as we now
are? It i