I wonder whether it has occurred to many Americans to ask why all the belligerents in this present war are showing such remarkable deference to American public opinion.  Some Americans may, of course, believe that it is the sheer personal fascination of individual Americans or simple tenderness of moral feeling that makes Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria take definitely so much trouble at a time when they have sufficient already, to demonstrate that they have taken the right course, that they are obeying all the laws of war, that they are not responsible for the war in any way, and so forth.  Is it simply that our condemnation would hurt their feelings?  This hardly agrees with certain other ideas which we hold as to the belligerents.

There is something beyond this order of motive at the bottom of the immense respect which all the combatants alike are paying to American opinion.  It happened to the writer recently to meet a considerable number of Belgian refugees from Brussels, all of them full of stories (which I must admit were second or third or three-hundredth hand) of German barbarity and ferocity.  Yet all were obliged to admit that German behavior in Brussels had on the whole been very good.  But that, they explained, was “merely because the American Consul put his foot down.”  Yet one is not aware that President Wilson had authorized the American Consul so much as to hint at the possible military intervention of America in this war.  Nevertheless there can be no doubt that these “Huns,” so little susceptible in our view for the most part to moral considerations, were greatly influenced by the opinion of America; and we know also that the other belligerents have shown the same respect for the attitude of the United States.

I think we have here what so frequently happens in the development of the attitude of men toward large general questions:  the intuitive recognition of a truth which those who recognize it are quite unable to put into words.  It is a self-protective instinct, a movement that is made without its being necessary to think it out. (In the way that the untaught person is able instantly to detect the false note in a tune without knowing that such things as notes or crotchets and quavers exist.)

It is quite true that the Germans feared the bad opinion of the world because the bad opinion of the world may be translated into an element of resistance to the very ends which it is the object of the war to achieve for Germany.

Those ends include the extension of German influence, material and moral, of German commerce and culture.  But a world very hostile to Germany might quite conceivably check both.  We say, rightly enough, probably, that pride of place and power had its part—­many declare the prominent part—­in the motives that led Germany into this war.  But it is quite conceivable that a universal revulsion of feeling against a power like Germany might neutralize the influence she would gain in the world by a mere extension of her territorial conquests.