“You cured my eye,” he said to him, “and when I read of your loss I wept for you, Sir; I wept for you with that eye.”

“Sir James,” Brown explained, “is of a very sympathetic nature, and he wondered which eye it was that the Kaiser wept with.”

I asked Brown what his own views were about the war, and before replying he pulled a paper from his pocket and scanned it.  “We are strictly neutral,” he then replied.

“Is that what is written on the paper?” I asked.  He admitted that Sir James had written out for him the correct replies to possible questions.  “Why was he neutral?” I asked, and he again found the reply on the piece of paper:  “Because it is the President’s wish.”

Brown Must Be Neutral.

So anxious, I discovered, is Sir James to follow the President’s bidding that he has enjoined Brown to be neutral on all other subjects besides the war; to express no preference on matters of food, for instance, and always to eat oysters and clams alternately, so that there can be no ill-feeling.  Also to walk in the middle of the streets lest he should seem to be favoring either sidewalk, and to be very cautious about admitting that one building in New York is higher than another.  I assured him that the Woolworth Building was the highest, but he replied politely, “that he was sure the President would prefer him to remain neutral.”  I naturally asked if Sir James had given him any further instructions as to proper behavior in America, and it seems that he had done so.  They amount, I gather, to this, that Americans have a sense of humor which they employ, when they can, to the visitor’s undoing.

“When we reach New York,” Sir James seems to have told Brown in effect, “we shall be met by reporters who will pretend that America is eager to be instructed by us as to the causes and progress of the war; then, if we are fools enough to think that America cannot make up its mind for itself, we shall fall into the trap and preach to them, and all the time they are taking down our observations they will be saying to themselves, ‘Pompous asses.’

“It is a sort of game between us and the reporters.  Our aim is to make them think we are bigger than we are, and theirs is to make us smaller than we are; and any chance we have of succeeding is to hold our tongues, while they will probably succeed if they make us jabber.  Above all, oh, Brown, if you write to the papers giving your views of why we are at war—­and if you don’t you will be the only person who hasn’t—­don’t be lured into slinging vulgar abuse at our opponents, lest America takes you for another university professor.”

There is, I learned, only one person in America about whom it is impossible, even in Sir James’s opinion, to preserve a neutral attitude.  This is the German Ambassador, whose splendid work for England day by day and in every paper and to all reporters cannot, Sir James thinks, be too cordially recognized.  Brown has been told to look upon the German Ambasador as England’s greatest asset in America just now, and to hope heartily that he will be long spared to carry on his admirable work.