all.  We don’t know how to try to be anything but what we naturally are.  I dare say we are laughed at here and there about this and that.  Sometimes I hear criticisms, now and then more or less serious ones.  Much of it comes of our greenness; some of it from the very nature of the situation.  Those who expect to find us brilliant are, of course, disappointed.  Nor are we smart, and the smart set (both American and English) find us uninteresting.  But we drive ahead and keep a philosophical temper and simply do the best we can, and, you may be sure, a good deal of it.  It is laborious.  For instance, I’ve made two trips lately to speak before important bodies, one at Leeds, the other at Newcastle, at both of which, in different ways, I have tried to explain the President’s principle in dealing with Central American turbulent states—­and, incidentally, the American ideals of government.  The audiences see it, approve it, applaud it.  The newspaper editorial writers never quite go the length—­it involves a denial of the divine right of the British Empire; at least they fear so.  The fewest possible Englishmen really understand our governmental aims and ideals.  I have delivered unnumbered and innumerable little speeches, directly or indirectly, about them; and they seem to like them.  But it would take an army of oratorical ambassadors a lifetime to get the idea into the heads of them all.  In some ways they are incredibly far back in mediaevalism—­incredibly.

If I have to leave in the fall or in December, it will be said and thought that I’ve failed, unless there be some reason that can be made public.  I should be perfectly willing to tell the reason—­the failure of the Government to make it financially possible.  I’ve nothing to conceal—­only definite amounts.  I’d never say what it has cost—­only that it costs more than I or anybody but a rich man can afford.  If then, or in the meantime, the President should wish me to serve elsewhere, that would, of course, be a sufficient reason for my going.

Now another matter, with which I shall not bother the President—­he has enough to bear on that score.  It was announced in one of the London papers the other day that Mr. Bryan would deliver a lecture here, and probably in each of the principal European capitals, on Peace.  Now, God restrain me from saying, much more from doing, anything rash.  But if I’ve got to go home at all, I’d rather go before he comes.  It’ll take years for the American Ambassadors to recover what they’ll lose if he carry out this plan.  They now laugh at him here.  Only the President’s great personality saves the situation in foreign relations.  Of course the public here doesn’t know how utterly unorganized the State Department is—­how we can’t get answers to important questions, and how they publish most secret despatches or allow them to leak out.  But “bad breaks” like this occur.  Mr. Z, of the 100-years’-Peace Committee[44], came here a week ago, with a letter