rievance, which dimmed your
contentment and soured the joy at your achievements?

Have you not estranged and affronted and antagonized other
nations--not by success in open competition with them, which I grant
was far from pleasing them, but to which in the end they had come to
accommodate themselves as to an unavoidable evil--but by the manner
and matter of your writing, speaking and acting? Have you not made
such nations your enemies by thrusting before them aims and visions of
the future, calculated to arouse in them most serious alarm and
apprehension, and thus eventually caused them to unite against
you--not, as you think, through envy or hate, but through the much
more powerful motives of self-preservation, and of fear of your aims
and intentions?

In this letter, which, I am sorry to say, has assumed formidable
proportions, I have tried, next to expressing my own convictions, to
represent to you, as I see them, what are at this time the predominant
and controlling views and sentiments among the American people. I have
met with much the same ideas among the great majority of neutrals with
whom I have discussed the subject--neutrals from many countries whom I
have met here in the last six months.

If I have expressed myself freely, in some respects even bluntly, I
hope you will make allowance for the honest and deep anger and grief
that move me when I see how, through a needless war wantonly started,
Germany and England-France, the three countries of Europe whom the
world most needs, the three races from whom humanity has most to
expect, are engaged in tearing one another to pieces in senseless
fury.

I have welcomed with hope certain signs in the last few weeks which
seem to indicate that more moderate, fairer and calmer sentiments, a
more correct understanding, and more far-sighted views are beginning
to get a foothold in certain circles in Germany.

You have so incontestably vindicated the prowess of your arms, and so
impressively demonstrated the power, courage, self-sacrificing
patriotism and high ability of your nation, that no possible suspicion
can attach to you of yielding under compulsion, should you rise to the
moral heroism of taking the first step towards dispelling the dreadful
misery which weighs upon Europe through this appalling war.

What is done, is done. The guilt will be adjudged by history. Eleven
months ago it was you who spoke the fateful word that meant war. Will
it now be you to fi