“Of course, since you ask me, my many years of exhibited attachment to the conditions of French and of English life, with whatever fond play of reflection and reaction may have been involved in it, make it inevitable that these countries should peculiarly appeal to me at the hour of their peril, their need and their heroism, and I am glad to declare that, though I had supposed I knew what that attachment was, I find I have any number of things more to learn about it.  English life, wound up to the heroic pitch, is at present most immediately before me, and I can scarcely tell you what a privilege I feel it to share the inspiration and see further revealed the character of this decent and dauntless people.

“However, I am indeed as far as you may suppose from assuming that what you speak to me of as the ‘political’ bias is the only ground on which the work of our corps for the Allies should appeal to the American public.  Political, I confess, has become for me in all this a loose and question-begging term, but if we must resign ourselves to it as explaining some people’s indifference, let us use a much better one for inviting their confidence.  It will do beautifully well if givers and workers and helpers are moved by intelligent human pity, and they are with us abundantly enough if they feel themselves simply roused by, and respond to, the most awful exhibition of physical and moral anguish the world has ever faced, and which it is the strange fate of our actual generations to see unrolled before them.  We welcome any lapse of logic that may connect inward vagueness with outward zeal, if it be the zeal of subscribers, presenters or drivers of cars, or both at once, stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in short, after whatever fashion.  We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is inspiring and the honest, educated man a match for it.

“If I seem to cast doubt on any very driving intelligence of the great issue as a source of sympathy with us, I think this is because I have been struck, whenever I have returned to my native land, by the indifference of Americans at large to the concerns and preoccupations of Europe.  This indifference has again and again seemed to me quite beyond measure or description, though it may be in a degree suggested by the absence throughout the many-paged American newspaper of the least mention of a European circumstance unless some not-to-be-blinked war or revolution, or earthquake or other cataclysm has happened to apply the lash to curiosity.  The most comprehensive journalistic formula that I have found myself, under that observation, reading into the general case is the principle that the first duty of the truly appealing sheet in a given community is to teach every individual reached by it—­every man, woman and child—­to count on appearing there, in their habit as they live, if they will only wait for their turn.