To the President

     American Embassy, London. 
     October 25, 1913.

     Dear Mr. President: 

I am moved once in a while to write you privately, not about any specific piece of public business, but only, if I can, to transmit something of the atmosphere of the work here.  And, since this is meant quite as much for your amusement as for any information it may carry, don’t read it “in office hours.”

The future of the world belongs to us.  A man needs to live here, with two economic eyes in his head, a very little time to become very sure of this.  Everybody will see it presently.  These English are spending their capital, and it is their capital that continues to give them their vast power.  Now what are we going to do with the leadership of the world presently when it clearly falls into our hands[22]?  And how can we use the English for the highest uses of democracy?

You see their fear of an on-sweeping democracy in their social treatment of party opponents.  A Tory lady told me with tears that she could no longer invite her Liberal friends to her house:  “I have lost them—­they are robbing us, you know.”  I made the mistake of saying a word in praise of Sir Edward Grey to a duke.  “Yes, yes, no doubt an able man; but you must understand, sir, that I don’t train with that gang.”  A bishop explained to me at elaborate length why the very monarchy is doomed unless something befalls Lloyd George and his programme.  Every dinner party is made up with strict reference to the party politics of the guests.  Sometimes you imagine you see something like civil war; and money is flowing out of the Kingdom into Canada in the greatest volume ever known and I am told that a number of old families are investing their fortunes in African lands.

These and such things are, of course, mere chips which show the direction the slow stream runs.  The great economic tide of the century flows our way. We shall have the big world questions to decide presently.  Then we shall need world policies; and it will be these old-time world leaders that we shall then have to work with, more closely than now.

The English make a sharp distinction between the American people and the American Government—­a distinction that they are conscious of and that they themselves talk about.  They do not think of our people as foreigners.  I have a club book on my table wherein the members are classified as British, Colonial, American, and Foreign—­quite unconsciously.  But they do think of our Government as foreign, and as a frontier sort of thing without good manners or good faith.  This distinction presents the big task of implanting here a real respect for our Government.  People often think to compliment the American Ambassador by assuming that he is better than his Government and must at times be ashamed of it.  Of course the Government never does