People of Destiny Part 2

The character of the people responded to this independence of the Republic. The average American citizen, as far as I knew him, in Europe before the war, had an amused contempt for many inst.i.tutions and social ideas which he observed in a continental tour. He was able to regard the hotch-potch of European nationalities and traditions from an aloof and judicial viewpoint. They seemed to him on the whole very silly. He could not understand why an invisible line on a road should make people on each side of the line hate each other desperately. He watched the march past of troops in France or Germany, the saluting of generals, the clicking of heels, the brilliant uniforms of officers, as a pageant which was utterly out of date in its application to life, and as a degradation of individual dignity. He did not link up the thriftiness of the French peasant--the desperate h.o.a.rding of his _pet.i.t sou_--with the old fear of invasion by German legions across the frontier, when the peasant might see his little farm in flames and his harvest trampled down by soldiers' boots. The American visitor observed the fuss made when one king visited another, and read the false adulation of the royal visitor, the insincere speeches at royal banquets, the list of decorations conferred upon court flunkies, and laughed at the whole absurdity, not seeing that it was all part of a bid for a new alliance or a bribe for peace, or a mask of fear, until the time came when all bids and bribes should be of no more avail, and the only masks worn were to be gas-masks, when the rival nations should hack at one another in a frenzy of slaughter. The American in Europe who came to have a look 'round was astonished at the old-fas.h.i.+oned ways of people--their subservience to "caste" ideas, their allegiance to the divine right of kings, as to the "Little Father" of the Russian people, and the "s.h.i.+ning armor" of the German Kaiser, and their apparent contentment with the wide gulf between underpaid labor and privileged capital. He did not realize that his own liberty of ideas and high rate of wage-earning were due to citizens.h.i.+p in a country free from militarism and its crus.h.i.+ng taxation, and free also from hereditary customs upheld by the power of the sword used in civil strife as well as in international conflict, by the imperial governments of Russia, Germany, and other powers whose social philosophy was no different, though less tyrannical in expression. The American said, "I like Europe as a peep-show, and it's a good place to spend money in; but we can teach you a few things in the United States; one of them is equality, and another is opportunity." He was right, and it was his luck. Because of those privileges many pilgrims of fortune went to America from all the countries of Europe, in a great tide of emigration, adopting American citizens.h.i.+p in most cases soon after sighting the Statue of Liberty--"old Lib.," as I heard her called. The United States received these foreigners in hundreds of thousands and became "the melting-pot" of races. The melting process, however, was not so rapid as some people imagined, and it was something of a shock to the States to discover a few years before the war, and with a deeper realization at the outbreak of war, that they had within their boundaries enormous populations of foreign-born citizens, Germans, Poles, Slavs of all kinds, Italians, and Austrians, who had not a.s.similated American ideas, but kept their speech, customs, and national sentiment. It was the vast foreign element which had to be converted to the American outlook upon the world tragedy which opened in August, 1914. This ma.s.s of hostile or unwilling people had to be dragged into action when America found that her isolation was broken, that she could no longer stand aloof from the rest of mankind, nor be indifferent to the fate of friendly nations menaced with destruction, nor endure a series of outrages which flouted her own power, nor risk the world supremacy of a military autocracy which, if triumphant in Europe, would very soon dictate to the United States. It is the miracle of the Stars and Stripes that when the American government conscripted all able-bodied youth and raised a vast and well-trained army, and sent it into the battlefields of France and Flanders, there was no civil outbreak among those foreign-born citizens, and with absolute obedience they took their places in the ranks, Germans to fight against their own flesh and blood, because of allegiance to a state which had given them liberty, provided they defended the ideals which belonged to the state--in this case the hardest test of loyalty, not without tragedy and agony and fear.

For the first time there was no liberty in the United States--no liberty of private judgment, no liberty of action, no liberty of speech. The state ruled with complete despotism over the lives of its citizens, not tolerating any infringements of its orders, because the safety of the state would be endangered unless victory were a.s.sured. That was an enormous shock, I am sure, to the psychology of all Americans, even to those most loyal to the state authority, and it has caused an entire change in the mental att.i.tude of all American citizens toward the conditions and relations.h.i.+ps of life, because that sense of utter liberty they had before the war is limited now by the knowledge that at any time the Republic of which they are citizens may call upon them for life itself and for all service up to that of death, and that, whatever their ideas should be, they may not refuse. In that way they have no longer an advantage over Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or Italians, whom they pitied as men without liberty of souls or bodies.

That is to say, they have to make surrender to the state of all things in the last resort, which is war--a law which many European peoples learned to their cost, many times before, and which America learned once in her own Civil War, but thought she could forget with other painful old things in the lumber-room of history.

The people of the United States have learned many other things during the last few years, when all the world has changed, and they stand now at the parting of the ways, looking back on the things they knew which they will never see again, and looking forward to the future, which is still doubtful to them in its destiny. I went to them on a visit during the period between armistice and peace, when mentally, I think, they were in a transition stage, very conscious of this place at the crossroads, and filled with grave anxiety, in spite of exultation at the power of their armies and the valor of their men who had helped to gain stupendous victory.

The things that had happened within the United States before and after its declaration of war had stirred them with pa.s.sionate and complicated emotions. From the very outset of the Great War, long before the United States was directly involved, large numbers of Americans of the old stock, born of English, Irish, Scottish, or Dutch ancestry, were neutral only by order and not at all in spirit. Their sentiment toward France, based on the Lafayette tradition and their love of Paris and of French literature and wit, made them hate the invasion of northern France and eager to act as champions of the French people. Their old ties with England, the bond of speech and of blood, made them put aside any minor antagonisms which they had felt on account of old prejudice, and they followed with deep sympathy and anxiety the progress of the heroic struggle of British armies in the slaughter-fields. They were impatient for America to get into the conflict against German aggression. As the Germans became more ruthless of humane laws, more desperate in their attacks upon non-combatant as well as military populations by sea and air and land, these Americans became sick and fevered at the thought of their own neutrality, and supported Colonel Roosevelt in his driving influence to get the United States into the war. They became more and more embittered with President Wilson, who adopted an academic view of the jungle scenes in Europe, dissociated the German people from the crimes of their war lords, and expounded a Christian philosophy of world politics which seemed like cowardice and humiliation of American pride to people stung to fury by German insults and outrages. These thoughts were beginning to seethe like yeast throughout ma.s.ses of American people, especially in the East, but took a long time to reach and stir the great West and were resisted by the mentality of foreign-born populations, including the Jewish communities and the Irish. They were averse to war, and took a detached view of the struggle in Europe, which seemed to them too far away to matter to America. The German populations had a natural sympathy for their own race, much as some of them detested its militaristic ideals. There were, I imagine, also many intellectual men, not dragged down by the apathy of the ma.s.ses, to whom "the war"

seemed of less importance to the United States than the condition of the crops or the local baseball match. They felt that President Wilson's hesitations, long-drawn-out notes, and exalted pacifism were on n.o.bler lines of thought than the loud-mouthed jingoism and bloodthirsty howlings of low-cla.s.s newspapers and speakers.

The _Lusitania_ was sunk, and a cry of agony and wrath went up from many hearts in the world at this new phase of war; but still the United States stayed out; and many Americans lowered their heads with shame and had a fire of indignation in their hearts because their President still temporized. They believed that the American people would have rallied to him as one man had he made that outrage the signal of war. They had no patience with his careful letter-writing, his anxiety to act as a moral mentor instead of as a leader of great armies in a fight against world criminals.... At last Wilson was forced to act, even his caution being overmastered by the urgent necessity of intervention on behalf of Great Britain and France and Belgium, panting and bleeding from every pore after three years of struggle; even his philosophy of aloofness being borne down by acts of war which wounded American interests and threatened American security. So the United States declared war, gathered its youth into great training-camps, and launched into the world struggle with slow but ever-increasing energy which swept the people with a mighty whirlwind of emotion.

The American people as a whole did truly enter into war in the spirit of crusaders. They sent out their sons as rescuers of stricken peoples fighting desperately against criminal powers. They had no selfish interests behind their sacrifice, and they did not understand that defeat of the nations allied against Germany would inevitably menace them with dire perils to their sovereign power, to their commercial prosperity, and to their ideals of civilization. Those things were true, but it was not because of them that the people of the United States were uplifted by a wonderful exaltation and that they put their full strength into preparing themselves for a long and b.l.o.o.d.y war. Every little home was turned into a Red Cross factory. Every young man of pluck and pride was eager to get the first call for active service in the field. Girls took on men's jobs, old ladies knitted until their eyes were dim. Hard business men gave away their dollars in bundles, denied themselves at meal-time so that Europe should be fed, tried by some little sacrifice to share the spirit of those who made offer of their lives. The materialism of which America had been accused, not unjustly, was broken through by a spiritual idealism which touched every cla.s.s, and Americans did not shrink from sacrifice, but asked for it as a privilege, and were regretful that as a people they suffered so little in comparison with those who had fought and agonized so long....

All this I heard when I went to America in the spring, between armistice and peace, and with my own eyes and ears I saw and heard the proof of it. Down Fifth Avenue I saw the march past of troops whom I had seen before marching along the roads of war to Ypres and Amiens, when the British army was hard pressed and glad to see these newcomers. In New York clubs I met young American officers who had been training with British staffs and battalions before they fought alongside British troops. And in American homes I met women who were still waiting for their men whom they had sent away with brave faces, hiding the fear in their hearts, and now knew, with thankfulness, that they were safe.

Victory had come quickly after the entry of the American troops, but it was only the low braggart who said, "We won the war--and taught the English how to fight." The main body of educated people whom I met in many American cities said, rather: "We were the last straw that broke the camel's back. We were glad to share the victory, but we did not suffer enough. We came in too late to take our full share of sacrifice."

At that time, after the armistice and when Mr. Wilson was in Europe at the Peace Conference, the people I met were not so much buoyed up with the sense of victory as perplexed and anxious about the new responsibilities which they would be asked to fulfill. A tremendous controversy raged round the President, who baffled them by his acts and speeches and silences. When in an article which I wrote soon after my landing I said I was "all for Wilson" I received an immense number of letters "putting me wise" as to the failure of the President to gain the confidence of the American people and their grievous apprehensions that he was, out of personal vanity and with a stubborn, autocratic spirit, bartering away the rights and liberties of the United States, without the knowledge or support of the people, and involving them in European entanglements which they were not prepared to accept. This antagonism to the President was summed up clearly enough in some such words as those that follow:

Taft and Roosevelt quarreled; Wilson was born of it. Wilson is all there is to the Democratic party. He has had to dominate it; the brain of America is in the Republican camp. He refused to use this material when offered for the war. He would not allow Roosevelt to go to France and fight; he would not use General Wood, who was the "Lord Bobs" of this country in regard to preparedness. For the winning of the war we put party aside and the Congress gave Wilson unlimited power. (Lincoln put party aside and used the best he could get.) Now Mr. Wilson asks and gets very little advice. When he has a difficult question he secludes himself, except for Colonel House--and we know nothing about Colonel House. Mr. Wilson dominated America and no one objected; the war was being won. In the fall he saw, of course, victory, and was planning his trip abroad. He boldly asked for a Democratic Senate, which would give him control of the treaty-making power. He said, practically: "Everybody shows himself bigger than party. I will, too. All together now! But you prove it and give me a party Senate, not a Senate picked from the best brains of this America, but a Democratic Senate, so that I can have full power in the Peace Conference." The laugh that went up must have hit the stars, and we almost forgot the war to watch the election. Can you imagine Roosevelt in New York in this crisis? He held a monster meeting and said what he thought, through his teeth. "Unconditional surrender for Germany, no matter what it costs" (not idle words--Quentin's death in France had cost Roosevelt his famous boyishness of spirit), "and a Senate that will curb autocratic power in America." Then he told his hearers that they would not need a key to understand his speech. Now, power goes to people's heads. Mr. Wilson had changed. Time and again opposition in Congress failed. You would hear, "Wilson always wins." Always a dominating figure, he grew defiant, a trifle ruthless, heady. The American answer to Wilson was a Republican Senate, and the Senators were put there to balance him. When he decided to go to Europe he simply said he was going. He did not ask our approval, nor find out our wishes, nor even tell us what he was going to say, but did take over the cables and put them under government control. He made himself so inaccessible at that time that no one could get his ear. On his flying visit to New York he said that he returned to France to tell them that we backed him. Is that true?

We don't know what we think yet. We haven't made up our minds. We will back him when he is frank and when we are convinced. We can't sign our souls away, all our wonderful heritages, without knowing all about it.... If we join a League of Nations, shall we prevent war? Or, if we join, shall we be absorbed and make the fight a bigger one?

This, I believe, is a fair statement of the views held by many educated people in the United States at the time between armistice and peace. I heard just such words in the City Club of New York, in the Union League Club, from people in Boston and Philadelphia and Was.h.i.+ngton, and at many dinner-tables where, after the preliminary courtesies of conversation, there was a quick clash of opinion among the guests, husbands differing from wives, brothers from sisters, and friends from friends, over the personality and purpose of the President, and the practical possibilities of a League of Nations. The defenders of the President waived aside all personal issues and supported him ardently because they believed that it was only by the application of his ideals, modified, no doubt, by contact with the actual problems of European states, that a new war more devastating to the world than the one just past could be prevented, and that his obstinacy and singleness of purpose on behalf of a League of Nations pointed him out as the Man of Destiny who would lead humanity out of the jungle to a higher plane of civilized philosophy.

That was my own view of his mission and character, though now I think he failed at the Peace Conference in carrying out the principles of his own Fourteen Points, and weakened under the pressure of the governing powers of France, Belgium, and England, who desired revenge as well as reparation, and the death of German militarism under the heel of an Allied militarism based on the old German philosophy of might. The President failed largely because he insisted upon playing "a lone hand,"

and did not have the confidence of his country behind him, nor its understanding of his purpose, while he himself wavered in his principles.

America, during the time of my visit, was afraid of taking too strong a lead in the resettlement of Europe. So far from wis.h.i.+ng to "boss the show," as some people suspected, most Americans had an unnatural timidity, and one count of their charge against Wilson was his obstinacy in his dealings with Lloyd George and Clemenceau. It was a consciousness of ignorance about European problems which made the Americans draw back from strong decisions, and above all it was the fear of being "dragged in" to new wars, not of their concern, which made them deeply suspicious of the League of Nations. In many conversations I found this fear the dominant thought. "If you people want to fight each other again, you will have to do without us," said American soldiers just back from the front. "No more crusades for us!" said others. "American isolation--and a plague on all your little nations!" said civilians as well as soldiers. Bitter memories of French "economy" spoiled for American soldiers the romance of the Lafayette tradition. "I lost my leg," said one man, "for a country which charged for the trenches where we fought, and for people who put up their prices three hundred per cent. when the American armies came to rescue them. France can go to h.e.l.l as far as I'm concerned."... Nevertheless, it became more clear to thinking minds in America that the days of "isolation" were gone, and that for good or evil the United States is linked up by unbreakable bonds of interest and responsibility with other great powers of the world. Never again can she be indifferent to their fate. If another great convulsion happens in Europe, American troops will again be there, quicker than before, because her action in the last war and her share of the terms of peace have made her responsible in honor for the safety of certain peoples and the upholding of certain agreements. The Atlantic has shrunk in size to a narrow strip of water and the sky is a corridor which will be quickly traversed by aircraft before the next great war. But these physical conditions which are changing by mechanical development, altering the time-tables of traffic, are of no account compared with the vast change that happened in the world when the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the fields of France and Flanders, when the bodies of America's heroic youth were laid to rest there under little white crosses, and when the United States of America entered into an intimate and enduring relations.h.i.+p with Great Britain and France.

The effect of this change is not yet apparent in its fullness. America is still in a state of transition, watching, studying, thinking, feeling, and talking herself into convictions which will alter the fate of the world. I believe with all my heart and soul that America's closer relations.h.i.+p with Europe will be all the better for Europe. I believe that the spirit of the American people is essentially and unalterably democratic, and that as far as their power goes it will be used against the tyranny of military castes and attempted oppression of peoples. I believe that the influence of this spirit, visible to me in many people I met, will be of enormous benefit to England and France, because it will be used as an arbitrating factor in the conflict which is bound to come in both those countries between the old regime and the new. The influence of America will be the determining power in the settlement of Ireland on a basis of common sense free from the silly old fetishes of historical enmities on both sides. It will intervene to give a chance of life to the German race after they have paid the forfeit for their guilt in the last war, and will, I am certain, react against the stupid philosophy of enduring vengeance with its desire to make a slave-state in Central Europe, which still animates b.l.o.o.d.y-minded men and women so pa.s.sionate of revenge that they are kindling the fires of another terrible and devastating war. The United States of America is bound up with the fate of Europe, but its people will still remain rather aloof in mentality from the pa.s.sions of European nations, and will be more judicial in their judgment because of that. Instinctively, rather than intellectually, Americans will act in behalf of democratic rights against autocratic plots. They will not allow the Russian people to be hounded back to the heels of grand dukes and under the lash of the knout. They will give their support to the League of Nations not as a machinery to stifle popular progress by a combination of governments, but as a court for the reform of international laws and the safeguarding of liberty. Europe will not be able to ignore the judgment of America.

That country is, as I said, the rich uncle whose temper they must consult because of grat.i.tude for favors to come--and because of wealth and power in the world's markets.

America is at the threshold of her supreme destiny in the world. By her action in the war, when for the first time her strength was revealed as a mighty nation, full grown and conscious of power, she has attained the highest place among the peoples, and her will shall prevail if it is based upon justice and liberty. I believe that America's destiny will be glorious for mankind, not because I think that the individual American is a better, n.o.bler, more spiritual being than the individual Englishman, Frenchman, or Russian, but because I see, or think I see, that this great country is inspired more than any other nation among the big powers by the united, organized qualities of simple, commonplace people, with kindness of heart, independence of spirit, and sincerity of ideas, free from the old heritage of caste, sn.o.bbishness, militarism, and fetish-wors.h.i.+p, which still lingers among the Junkers of Europe.

They are a middle-cla.s.s empire, untainted by imperial ambition or ancient traditions of overlords.h.i.+p. They are governed by middle-cla.s.s sentiment. They put all problems of life to the test of that simplicity which is found in middle-cla.s.s homes, where neither anarchy is welcome nor aristocratic privilege. America is the empire of the wage-earner, where even her plutocrats have but little power over the independence of the people. It is a nation of n.o.bodies great with the power of the common man and the plain sense that governs his way of life. Other nations are still ruled by their "somebodies"--by their pomposities and High Panjandrums. But it is the n.o.bodies whose turn is coming in history, and America is on their side. In that great federation of United States I saw, even in a brief visit, possible dangers that may spoil America's chance. I saw a luxury of wealth in New York and other cities which may be a vicious canker in the soul of the people. I saw a sullen discontent among wage-earners and home-coming soldiers because too many people had an unfair share of wealth. I met American Junkers who would use the military possibilities of the greatest army in the world for imperialistic adventures and world dominance. I heard of anarchy being whispered among foreign-born ma.s.ses in American cities and pa.s.sed over to other laborers not of foreign origin. In the censors.h.i.+p of news I saw the first and most ominous sign of government autocracy desiring to work its will upon the people by keeping them in ignorance and warping their opinions; and now and then I was conscious of an intolerance of free thought which happened to conflict with popular sentiment, as ruthless as in Russia during Czardom. I saw hatred based on ignorance and the brute spirit of men inflamed by war. But these were only accidental things, to be found wherever humanity is crowded, and after my visit to America I came away with memories, which are still strong in my heart, of a people filled with vital energy, kind in heart, sincere and simple in their ways of thought and speech, idealistic in emotion, practical in conduct, and democratic by faith and upbringing.

The soil of America is clean and strong and free; and the power that comes out of it will, I think and hope and pray, be used to gain the liberties of other nations, and to help forward the welfare of the human family.

V

WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA

The t.i.tle I have chosen for this chapter is indiscreet, and, as some readers may think, misleading. At least it needs this explanation--that there is no absolute point of view in England about the United States.

"England" does not think (a statement not intended to be humorous at the expense of my own people) any more than any nation may be said to think in a single unanimous way about any subject under the sun. England is a collection of individuals and groups of individuals, each with different points of view or shades of view, based upon certain ideals and knowledge, or upon pa.s.sion, ignorance, elementary common sense, or elementary stupidity, like the United States and every country on earth.

It would convey an utterly false impression to a.n.a.lyze and expound the opinions of one such cla.s.s, or to give as a general truth a few individual opinions. One can only get at something like the truth by following the drift of current thought, by contrasting national characteristics, and by striking a balance between extremes of thought.

It is that which I propose to do in this chapter, frankly, and without fear of giving offense, because to my mind insincerity on a subject like this does more harm than good.

I will not disguise, therefore, at the outset, that after the armistice which followed the Great War huge numbers of people in England became annoyed, bitter, and unfriendly to the United States. The causes of that unkindness of sentiment were to some extent natural and inevitable, owing to the state of mind in England at that time. They had their foundations in the patriotism and emotion of a people who had just emerged from the crudest ordeal which had ever called to their endurance in history. When American soldiers, sailors, politicians, and patriots said, "Well, boys, we won the war!" which, in their enthusiasm for great achievements, they could hardly avoid saying at public banquets or welcomes home, where every word is not measured to the sensibilities of other people or to the exact truth, English folk were hurt. They were not only hurt, but they were angry. Mothers of boys in mean streets, or rural villages, or great mansions, reading these words in newspapers which gave them irritating prominence, said, "So they think that we did nothing in the years before they came to France!" and some mothers thought of the boys who had died in 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and they hated the thought that Americans should claim the victory which so many English, Scottish, Irish, Canadians, Australians, New-Zealanders, South-Africans, and French had gained most of all by long-suffering, immense sacrifice, and hideous losses.

They did not know, though I for one tried to tell them, that all over the United States American people did not forget, even in their justified enthusiasm for the valor of their own men and the immense power they had prepared to hurl against the enemy, that France and England had borne the brunt of the war in the long years when Germany was at her strongest.

A friend of mine--an English officer--was in a New York hotel on Armistice Night, when emotion and patriotic enthusiasm were high--and hot. A young American mounted a chair, waving the Stars and Stripes. He used the good old phrase: "Well, boys, we won the war! The enemy fell to pieces as soon as the doughboys came along. England and France could not do the trick without us. We taught 'em how to fight and how to win!"

My friend smiled, sat tight, and said nothing. He remembered a million dead in British ranks, untold and unrecorded heroism, the first French victory of the Marne, the years of epic fighting when French and British troops had hurled themselves against the German lines and strained his war-machine. But it was Armistice Night, and in New York, and the "Yanks" had done jolly well, and they had a right to jubilation for their share in victory. Let the boy shout, and good luck to him. But an American rose from his chair and pushed his way toward my friend.

"I'm ashamed to hear such rant before British and French officers," he said, holding out his hand. "We know that our share is not as great as yours, within a thousand miles."

Those were chivalrous words. They represented the conviction, I am sure, of millions of Americans of the more thoughtful type, who would not allow themselves to be swept away beyond the just merits of their national achievements, even by the fervor of the moment.

But in England people only knew the boast and not the modesty. Because some Americans claimed too much, the English of the lower and less intelligent cla.s.ses belittled the real share of victory which belonged to America, and became resentful. It was so in France as in England. It was lamentable, but almost unavoidable, and when this resentment and this sullen denial of American victory became known in the United States, pa.s.sed over the wires by newspaper correspondents, it naturally aroused counter-action, equal bitterness, and then we were in a vicious circle, abominable in its effect upon mutual understanding and liking.

All that, however, was limited to the ma.s.ses, for the most part certainly, and was only used as poison propaganda by the gutter press on both sides of the Atlantic. Educated people in both countries understood the folly and squalor of that stuff, and discounted it accordingly.

What was more serious in its effect upon the intelligent cla.s.ses was the refusal of the Senate to ratify the Peace Treaty and its repudiation of President Wilson's authority. I have already dealt in previous writings with that aspect of affairs, and have tried to prove my understanding of the American view. But there is also an English view, which Americans should know and understand.

At the time I am writing this chapter, and for some months previously, England has been irritated with the United States because of a sense of having been "let down" over the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations by American action. I think that irritation has been to some extent justified. When President Wilson came to London he received, as I have told elsewhere, the most enthusiastic and triumphant ovation that has ever been given to a foreign visitor by the population of that great old city. The cheers that rose in storms about him were shouted not only because his personality seemed to us then to have the biggest and most hopeful qualities of leaders.h.i.+p in the world, but because he was, as we thought, the authorized representative of the United States, to whom, through him, we gave homage. It was only months afterward, when the Peace Treaty had been signed and when the League of Nations (Wilson's child) had been established, that we were told that Wilson was not the authorized representative of the United States, that the American Senate did not recognize his authority to pledge the country to the terms of the treaty, and that the signature to the doc.u.ment was not worth ten cents. That made us look pretty foolish. It made France and Italy and other powers, who had yielded in many of their demands in order to satisfy President Wilson's principles, feel pretty mad. It made a laughingstock of the new-born League of Nations. It was the most severe blow to the prospects of world peace and reconstruction. In England, as I know, there were vast numbers of people who regarded the Peace Treaty as one of the most clumsy, illogical, and dangerous doc.u.ments ever drawn up by a body of diplomats. I am one of those who think so. But that has nothing to do with the refusal of the Senate to acknowledge Wilson's signature.

The character of the clauses which created a series of international blunders leading inevitably to new wars unless they are altered during the next decade was not the cause of the Senate's "reservations." The American Senators did not seem to be worried about that aspect of the treaty. Their only worry was to safeguard the United States from any responsibility in Europe, and to protect their own traditional powers against an autocratic President. However right they may have been, it must at least be acknowledged by every broad-minded American that we in Europe were put completely "into the cart" by this action, and had some excuse for annoyance. All this is now past history, and no doubt before this book is published many other things will have happened as a consequence of the events which followed so rapidly upon the Peace of Versailles, so that what I am now writing will read like historical reminiscence. But it will always remain a painful chapter, and it will only be by mutual forbearance and the most determined efforts of people of good will on both sides of the Atlantic that the growth of a most lamentable misunderstanding between our two peoples in consequence of those unfortunate episodes will be prevented.

Another cause of popular discontent with the United States was the rather abrupt statement of Mr. Carter Gla.s.s, Secretary of the Treasury, that the United States would not grant any more loans to Europe so long as she failed to readjust her financial situation by necessary taxation, economy, and production.

The general (and in my opinion unjustified) anger aroused by this statement was expressed by a cartoon in _Punch_ called "Another Reservation." It was a picture of a very sinister-looking Uncle Sam turning his back upon a starving woman and child who appeal to his charity, and he says: "Very sad case. But I'm afraid she ain't trying."

Mr. Punch is a formidable person in England, and by his barbed wit may destroy any public man or writing man who lays himself open to ridicule, but I ventured to risk that by denouncing the cartoon as unjust and unfair in spirit and fact. I pointed out that since the beginning of the war the United States had shown an immense, untiring, and inexhaustible generosity toward the suffering peoples of Europe, and reminded England how under Mr. Hoover's organization the American Relief Committee had fed the Belgian and French populations behind the German lines, and how afterward they had poured food into Poland, Serbia, Austria, and other starving countries. That challenge I made against Mr. Punch was supported by large numbers of English people who wrote to me expressing their agreement and their grat.i.tude to America. They deplored the spirit of the cartoon and the evil nature of so many attacks in low-cla.s.s journals of England against the United States, whose own gutter press was at the same time publis.h.i.+ng most scurrilous abuse of us. But among the letters I received was one from an American lady which I will quote now, because it startled me at the time, and provides, in spite of its bitterness, some slight excuse for the criticism which was aroused in England at the time. If an American could feel like that, scourging her own people too much (as I think), it is more pardonable that English sentiment should have been a little ruffled by America's threat to abandon Europe.

I only wish with all my heart [she wrote] that the _Punch_ cartoon is wholly undeserved, or that your kind "apologia" is wholly deserved. I have never been "too proud to fight," but a great deal too proud to wear laurels I haven't earned. Personally, I think the drubbing we are getting is wholesome and likely to do good. We have been given praise _ad nauseam_, and, to be honest, you can never compete with us on that ground. We can praise ourselves in terms that would silence any compet.i.tors....

I wish, too, that I could believe that the "beggars from Europe"

had either their hats or their bags stuffed with dollars. I'm afraid you have spoken to the Americans, not to the beggars. I was one myself. I went home in April, prouder of my country than I had ever been, jealous of its good repute, and painfully anxious that it should live up to its reputation. I fear I found that people were not only tired of generosity, but wholly indifferent to the impressions being so widely circulated in the press--that France had been guilty of every form of petty ingrat.i.tude, that the atrocities of Great Britain in Ireland outdid the Germans in Belgium and France. A minority everywhere was struggling against the tide, with dignity, and the generosity I had so securely counted on from my own people. But the collections being made for the Serbians, for instance, were despairingly small. Belgian Relief had been turned into Serbian Relief groups, and from New York to California I heard the same tale--and, alas, experienced it--people were tired of giving, tired of the war. In New York I was invited to speak before a well-known Women's Club--I was "a guest of honor." I accepted, and spoke for ten minutes, and a woman at a table near by begged me to take up an immediate contribution. I was not at all anxious to do so, for it seemed a very base advantage to take of a luncheon invitation, so I referred her to the president. A contribution was taken up by a small group of women, all fas.h.i.+onably dressed, with pearl or "near-pearl," and the result was exactly $19.40. As there were between 200 and 300 women present in the ballroom, I was inexpressibly shocked, and sternly suggested that the president should announce the sum for which I should have to account, and her speech was mildly applauded. All through my trip I felt bewilderment. I had just come from Belgium and France, and the contrast oppressed me. I had the saddest kind of disillusionment, relieved by the most beautiful instances of charity and unselfishness.

Even in regard to the Relief of Belgium too much stress is laid on our generosity and a false impression has gone abroad--an impression nothing can ever eradicate. The organization of the B. R. F. was American, but Mr. Hoover never failed to underline how much of the fund came from Great Britain and Canada. In fact, the Belgian women embroidered their touching little phrases of grat.i.tude to the Americans, as I myself saw, on _Canadian_ flour sacks. During the first year or so the contributions of Americans were wholly incommensurate with our wealth and prosperity, and a letter from Gertrude Atherton a year after the war scourged us for our indifference even then.

Mr. Balfour's revelation that Great Britain had contributed 35,000,000 toward the relief of Austria, etc., made my heart go down still farther. I have tried to believe that my experience was due to something lacking in myself. People were so enchantingly kind, so ready to give me large and expensive lunches, dinners, teas--but they would not be induced to refrain from the lunches and contribute the cost of them toward my cause....

I hope you will pardon this long effusion. Like most Americans who have served abroad I feel we came in too late, we failed to stay on the ground to clear up afterward, and now we are indulging in the most wicked propaganda against our late allies--France as well as England. Personally, I realize that if we had contributed twenty times as much I should still not feel we had done enough.

If you were not so confirmed a friend of America, I could never write as I have done, but just because you reach such an enormous public, because your influence is so great, I am anxious that America should not be given undue praise--which she does not herself credit--and that the disastrous results of her policy (if we have one) should be printed clear for her to read and profit by.

That is a sincere, painful, and beautiful letter, and I think it ought to be read in the United States, not because I indorse its charge against America's lack of generosity--I cannot do that--but because it exculpates England and France of unreasoning disappointment, and is also the cry of a generous American soul, moved by the sufferings of Europe, and eager that her people should help more, and not less, in the reconstruction of the world. The English people did not take her view that the Americans had not done enough or were tired of generosity. It must be admitted by those who followed our press that, apart from two gutter journals, there was a full recognition of what the United States had done, and continual reminders that no policy would be tolerated which did not have as its basis Anglo-American friends.h.i.+p.

Upon quite another level of argument is the criticism of American psychology and political evolution expressed by various English writers upon their return from visits to the United States, and a fairly close acquaintance with the character of American democracy as it was revealed during the war, and afterward. The judgment of these writers does not affect public opinion, because it does not reach down to the ma.s.ses. It is confined rather to the student type of mind, and probably has remained unnoticed by the average man and woman in the United States. It is, however, very interesting because it seeks to forecast the future of America as a world power and as a democracy. The chief charge leveled against the intellectual tendency of the United States may be summed up in one word, "intolerance." Men like George Bernard Shaw, J. A. Hobson, and H. W. Ma.s.singham do not find in their study of the American temperament or in the American form of government the sense of liberty with which the people of the United States credit themselves, and with which all republican democracies are credited by the proletariat in European countries.

They seem inclined to believe, indeed, that America has less liberty in the way of free opinion and free speech than the English under their hereditary monarchy, and that the spirit of the people is harshly intolerant of minorities and nonconforming individuals, or of any idea contrary to the general popular opinion of the times. Some of these critics see in the "Statue of Liberty" in New York Harbor a figure of mockery behind which is individualism enchained by an autocratic oligarchy and trampled underfoot by the intolerance of the ma.s.ses. They produce in proof of this not only the position of an American President, with greater power over the legislature than any const.i.tutional king, but the ma.s.s violence of the majority in its refusal to admit any difference of opinion with regard to war aims during the time of war fever, and the tyrannical action of the Executive in its handling of labor disputes and industrial leaders, during and after the war.

It is, I think, true that as soon as America entered the war there was no liberty of opinion allowed in the United States. There was no tolerance of "conscientious objectors" nor mercy toward people who from religious motives, or intellectual crankiness, were antagonistic to the use of armed might. People who did not subscribe to the Red Cross funds were marked down, I am told, dismissed from their posts, and socially ruined. Many episodes of that kind were reported, and startled the advanced radicals in England who had regarded the United States as the land of liberty. Americans may retort that we did not give gentle treatment to our own "conscientious objectors," and that is true. Many of them were put into prison and roughly handled, but on the other hand there was a formal, though insincere, acknowledgment that even in time of war there should be liberty of conscience, and a clause to that effect was pa.s.sed by Parliament. In spite also of the severity of censors.h.i.+p, and the martial law that was enforced by the Defense of the Realm Act, there was, I believe, a greater freedom of criticism allowed to the press than would have been tolerated by the United States.

Periodicals like the _Nation_ and the _New Statesman_, even newspapers like the _Daily Mail_ and the _Morning Post_, indulged in violent criticism of the conduct of the war, the methods of the War Cabinet, the action and military policy of leaders like Lord Kitchener, and the failure of military campaigns in the Dardanelles and other places. No breath of criticism against American leaders.h.i.+p or generals.h.i.+p was admitted to the American press, and their war correspondents were censored with far greater severity than their English comrades, who were permitted to describe, very fully, reverses as well as successes in the fields of war.

What, however, has startled the advanced wing of English political thought more than all that is the ruthless way in which the United States government has dealt with labor disputes and labor leaders since the war. The wholesale arrests and deportations of men accused of revolutionary propaganda seem to these sympathizers with revolutionary ideals as gross in their violation of liberty as the British government's coercion of Ireland. These people believe that American democracy has failed in the essential principle which alone justifies democracy, a toleration of minorities of opinion and of the absolute liberty of the individual within the law. They say that even in England there is greater liberty, in spite of its mediaeval structure. In Hyde Park on Sunday morning one may hear speeches which would cause broken heads and long terms of imprisonment if uttered in New York. Labor, they say, would rise in instant and general revolt if any of their men were treated with the tyranny which befalls labor leaders in the United States.