This does not quite correspond with what the President told me—­that the State Department asked for this retaliatory resolution.

I made specific suggestions in my statement to the President and to Lansing.  They have (yet) said nothing about them.  I fancy they will not.  I have found nowhere any policy—­only “cases.”

I proposed to Baker and Daniels that they send a General and an Admiral as attaches to London.  They both agreed.  Daniels later told me that Baker mentioned it to the President and he “stepped on the suggestion with both feet.”  I did not bring it up.  In the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, both General McClellan (or Sheridan[46]?) and General Forsythe were sent to the German Army.  Our military ideas have shrunk since then!

I find at this date (a month before the Presidential election), the greatest tangle and uncertainty of political opinion that I have ever observed in our country.  The President, in spite of his unparalleled leadership and authority in domestic policy, is by no means certain of election.  He has the open hostility of the Germans—­all very well, if he had got the fruits of a real hostility to them; but they have, in many ways, directed his foreign policy.  He has lost the silent confidence of many men upon whose conscience this great question weighs heavily.  If he be defeated he will owe his defeat to the loss of confidence in his leadership on this great subject.  His opponent has put forth no clear-cut opinion.  He plays a silent game on the German “issue.”  Yet he will command the support of many patriotic men merely as a lack of confidence in the President.

Nor do I see any end of the results of this fundamental error.  In the economic and political readjustment of the world we shall be “out of the game,” in any event—­unless we are yet forced into the war by Hughes’s election or by the renewal of the indiscriminate use of submarines by the Germans.

There is a great lesson in this lamentable failure of the President really to lead the Nation.  The United States stands for democracy and free opinion as it stands for nothing else and as no other nation stands for it.  Now when democracy and free opinion are at stake as they have not before been, we take a “neutral” stand—­we throw away our very birthright.  We may talk of “humanity” all we like:  we have missed the largest chance that ever came to help the large cause that brought us into being as a Nation....

And the people, sitting on the comfortable seats of neutrality upon which the President has pushed them back, are grateful for Peace, not having taken the trouble to think out what Peace has cost us and cost the world—­except so many as have felt the uncomfortable stirrings of the national conscience.

There is not a man in our State Department or in our Government who has ever met any prominent statesmen in any European Government—­except the third Assistant Secretary of State, who has no authority in forming policies; there is not a man who knows the atmosphere of Europe.  Yet when I proposed that one of the under Secretaries should go to England on a visit of a few weeks for observation, the objection arose that such a visit would not be “neutral.”