A Straight Deal | Page 8

and beef.'
"Mr. Bull kept his word. He never flinched or attempted to dodge the
issue. He kept strictly in the middle of the road. His determination to
down the Kaiser with American men, American money, and American
food never abated for a single day during the conflict."
This editorial has many twins throughout the country. I quote it for its
value as a specimen of that sort of journalistic and political utterance
amongst us, which is as seriously embarrassed by facts as a skunk by
its tail. Had its author said: "The Declaration of Independence was
signed by Christopher Columbus on Washington's birthday during the
siege of Vicksburg in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and Judas
Iscariot," his statement would have been equally veracious, and more
striking.
As to Winston Churchill's declaration that Great Britain will not
surrender her control of the seas, I am as little shocked by that as I
should be were our Secretary of the Navy to declare that in no
circumstances would we give up control of the Panama Canal. The
Panama Canal is our carotid artery, Great Britain's navy is her jugular
vein. It is her jugular vein in the mind of her people, regardless of that
new apparition, the submarine. I was not shocked that Great Britain
should decline Mr. Wilson's invitation that she cut her jugular vein; it
was the invitation which kindled my emotions; but these were of a less
serious kind.
The last letter that I shall give is from an American citizen of English
birth.

"As a boy at school in England, I was taught the history of the
American Revolution as J. R. Green presents it in his Short History of
the English People. The gist of this record, as you doubtless recollect,
is that George III being engaged in the attempt to destroy what there
then was of political freedom and representative government in
England, used the American situation as a means to that end; that the
English people, in so far as their voice could make itself heard, were
solidly against both his English and American policy, and that the
triumph of America contributed in no small measure to the salvation of
those institutions by which the evolution of England towards complete
democracy was made possible. Washington was held up to us in
England not merely as a great and good man, but as an heroic leader, to
whose courage and wisdom the English as well as the American people
were eternally indebted... .
"Pray forgive so long a letter from a stranger. It is prompted... by a
sense of the illimitable importance, not only for America and Britain,
but for the entire world, of these two great democratic peoples knowing
each other as they really are and cooperating as only they can cooperate
to establish and maintain peace on just and permanent foundations."
Chapter III
: In Front of a Bulletin Board
There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in
consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was published in the
American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read
the other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the
ten, but would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers
either think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are
to the point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to
England and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are
embarrassing--side-step them. What best pleased me was to find that
soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not "high-brows" only.
May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come

into the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken us out
of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those
blighting words, "there is such a thing as being too proud to fight." The
British had been told by their General that they were fighting with their
backs to the wall. Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been
coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry
had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of
Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French morale was
burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently
American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our
ally. Then and thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they
had been talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and
again, indoors and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd
during the earlier years of the war, the miserable years before we
waked from our trance of