t America should ultimately undertake
the responsibility of proposing a world peace settlement, I admit that
I run counter to a great deal of European feeling. Nowhere in Europe now
do people seem to be in love with the United States. But feeling is
a colour that passes. And the question is above matters of feeling.
Whether the belligerents dislike Americans or the Americans dislike the
belligerents is an incidental matter. The main question is of the duty
of a great and fortunate nation towards the rest of the world and the
future of mankind.

I do not know how far Americans are aware of the trend of feeling in
Europe at the present time. Both France and Great Britain have a sense
of righteousness in this war such as no nation, no people, has ever felt
in war before. We know we are fighting to save all the world from the
rule of force and the unquestioned supremacy of the military idea. Few
Frenchmen or Englishmen can imagine the war presenting itself to an
American intelligence under any other guise. At the invasion of Belgium
we were astonished that America did nothing. At the sinking of the
_Lusitania_ all Europe looked to America. The British mind contemplates
the spectacle of American destroyers acting as bottleholders to German
submarines with a dazzled astonishment. "Manila," we gasp. In England we
find excuses for America in our own past. In '64 we betrayed Denmark; in
'70 we deserted France. The French have not these memories. They do
not understand the damning temptations of those who feel they are
"_au-dessus de la melee._" They believe they had some share in the
independence of America, that there is a sacred cause in republicanism,
that there are grounds for a peculiar sympathy between France and the
United States in republican institutions. They do not realise that
Germany and America have a common experience in recent industrial
development, and a common belief in the "degeneracy" of all nations with
a lower rate of trade expansion. They do not realise how a political
campaign with the slogan of "Peace and a Full Dinner-Pail" looks in the
middle west, what an honest, simple, rational appeal it makes there.
Atmospheres alter values. In Europe, strung up to tragic and majestic
issues, to Europe gripping a gigantic evil in a death struggle, that
would seem an inscription worthy of a pigsty. A child in Europe would
know now that the context is, "until the bacon-buyer calls," and it is
difficult to realise th