America’s is the case of The Terrible Meek; for two and a half years she lulled Germany and astonished the Allies by her abnormal patience.  The most terrifying warriors of history have been peace-loving nations hounded into hostility by outraged ideals.  Certainly no nation was ever more peace-loving than the American.  To the boy of the Middle West the fury of kings must have read like a fairy-tale.  The appeal to armed force was a method of compelling righteousness which his entire training had taught him to view with contempt as obsolete.  Yet never has any nation mobilised its resources more efficiently, on so titanic a scale, in so brief a space of time to re-establish justice with armed force.  The outraged ideal which achieved this miracle was the denial by the Hun of the right of every man to personal liberty and happiness.

Few people guessed that America would fling her weight so utterly into the winning of the Allied cause.  Those who knew her best thought it scarcely possible.  Germany, who believed she knew her, thought it least of all.  German statesmen argued that America had too much to lose by such a decision—­too little to gain; the task of transporting men and materials across three thousand miles of ocean seemed insuperable; the differing traditions of her population would make it impossible for her to concentrate her will in so unusual a direction.  Basing their arguments on a knowledge of the deep-seated selfishness of human nature, Hun statesmen were of the fixed opinion that no amount of insult would compel America to take up the sword.

Two and a half years before, those same statesmen made the same mistake with regard to Great Britain and her Dominions.  The British were a race of shop-keepers; no matter how chivalrous the call, nothing would persuade them to jeopardise their money-bags.  If they did for once leap across their counters to become Sir Galahads, then the Dominions would seize that opportunity to secure their own base safety and to fling the Mother Country out of doors.  The British gave these students of selfishness a surprise from which their military machine has never recovered, when the “Old Contemptibles” held up the advance of the Hun legions and won for Europe a breathing-space.  The Dominions gave them a second lesson in magnanimity when Canada’s lads built a wall with their bodies to block the drive at Ypres.  America refuted them for the third time, when she proved her love of world-liberty greater than her affection for the dollar, bugling across the Atlantic her shrill challenge to mailed bestiality.  Germany has made the grave mistake of estimating human nature at its lowest worth as she sees it reflected in her own face.  In every case, in her judgment of the two great Anglo-Saxon races, she has been at fault through over-emphasising their capacity for baseness and under-estimating their capacity to respond to an ideal.  It was an ideal that led the Pilgrim Fathers westward; after more than two hundred years it is an ideal which pilots their sons home again, racing through danger zones in their steel-built greyhounds that they may lay down their lives in France.