“Was that a violation of neutrality?” she asked in all seriousness.

I can see it in no other way but this:  the President suppressed free thought and free speech when he insisted upon personal neutrality.  He held back the deliberate and spontaneous thought and speech of the people except the pro-Germans, who saw their chance and improved it!  The mass of the American people found themselves forbidden to think or talk, and this forbidding had a sufficient effect to make them take refuge in indifference.  It’s the President’s job.  He’s our leader.  He’ll attend to this matter.  We must not embarrass him.  On this easy cushion of non-responsibility the great masses fell back at their intellectual and moral ease—­softened, isolated, lulled.

That wasn’t leadership in a democracy.  Right here is the President’s vast failure.  From it there is now no escape unless the Germans commit more submarine crimes.  They have kept the United States for their own exploiting after the war.  They have thus had a real triumph of us.

I have talked in Washington with few men who showed any clear conception of the difference between the Germans and the British.  To the minds of these people and high Government officials, German and English are alike foreign nations who are now foolishly engaged in war.  Two of the men who look upon the thing differently are Houston[42] and Logan Waller Page[43].  In fact, there is no realization of the war in Washington.  Secretary Houston has a proper perspective of the situation.  He would have done precisely what I recommended—­paved the way for claims and let the English take their course.  “International law” is no strict code and it’s all shot to pieces anyhow.

The Secretary [of State] betrayed not the slightest curiosity about our relations with Great Britain.  I saw him several times—­(1) in his office; (2) at his house; (3) at the French Ambassador’s; (4) at Wallace’s; (5) at his office; (6) at Crozier’s[44]—­this during my first stay in Washington.  The only remark he made was that I’d find a different atmosphere in Washington from the atmosphere in London.  Truly.  All the rest of his talk was about “cases.”  Would I see Senator Owen?  Would I see Congressman Sherley?  Would I take up this “case” and that?  His mind ran on “cases.”

Well, at Y’s, when I was almost in despair, I rammed down him a sort of general statement of the situation as I saw it; at least, I made a start.  But soon he stopped me and ran off at a tangent on some historical statement I had made, showing that his mind was not at all on the real subject, the large subject.  When I returned to Washington, and he had read my interviews with Grey, Asquith, and Bryce[45], and my own statement, he still said nothing, but he ceased to talk of “cases.”  At my final interview he said that he had had difficulty in preventing Congress from making the retaliatory resolution mandatory.  He had tried to keep it back till the very end of the session, etc.