“What Mr. Wilson did was to apply patience and brains to a complicated and difficult but developing political situation.  He was distinguished from his morally indignant pro-Allies fellow countrymen, who a few months ago were abusing him for seeking to make a specifically American contribution to the issues of the war, just as Lincoln was distinguished from the abolitionists, not so much by difference in purposes as by greater political wisdom and intelligence.  It is because of his Fabianism, because he insisted upon waiting until he had established a clear connection between American intervention and an attempt to create a community of nations, that he can command and secure for American intervention the full allegiance of the American national conscience.  His achievement is a great personal triumph, but it is more than that.  It is an illustration and a prophecy of the part which intelligence and in general the ‘intellectual’ class have an opportunity of playing in shaping American policy and in moulding American life.  The intimate association between action and ideas, characteristic of American political practice at its best, has been vindicated once more.  The association was started at the foundation of the Republic and was embodied in the work of the Fathers, but particularly in that of Hamilton.  It was carried on during the period of the Civil War and was embodied chiefly in the patient and penetrating intelligence which Abraham Lincoln brought to his task.  It has just been established in the region of foreign policy by Mr. Wilson’s discriminating effort to keep the United States out of the war until it could go in as the instrument of an exclusively international programme and with a fair prospect of getting its programme accepted.  In holding to this policy Mr. Wilson was interpreting with fidelity and imagination the ideas and the aspirations of the more thoughtful Americans.  His success should give them increasing confidence in the contribution which they as men of intelligence are capable of making to the fulfilment of the better American national purposes.”

During 1915 and 1916 our diplomatic relations with Germany have been expressed in one series of notes after another, and the burden of affairs has been as much on the shoulders of Ambassador Gerard as on those of any other one American, for he has been the official who has had to transmit, interpret and fight for our policies in Berlin.  Mr. Gerard had a difficult task because he, like President Wilson, was constantly heckled and ridiculed by those pro-German Americans who were more interested in discrediting the Administration than in maintaining peace.  Of all the problems with which the Ambassador had to contend, the German-American issue was the greatest, and those who believed that it was centred in the United States are mistaken, for the capital of German-America was Berlin.

“I have had a great deal of trouble in Germany from the American correspondents when they went there,” said Ambassador Gerard in an address to the American Newspapers Publishers Association in New York on April 26th.