the Archbishop’s (who delivered in the course of his remarks a benediction on me) and Bryce’s (almost the best of all).  It wasn’t “oratory,” but it was well said and well meant.  They know how badly they need help and they do mean to be as good to us as their benignant insularity will permit.  They are changing.  I can’t describe the great difference that the war has made in them.  They’ll almost become docile in a little more time.

And we came in in the nick of time for them—­in very truth.  If we hadn’t, their exchange would have gone down soon and they know it.  I shall never forget the afternoon I spent with Mr. Balfour and Mr. Bonar Law on that subject.  They saw blue ruin without our financial help.  And now, if we can save them from submarines, those that know will know how vital our help was.  Again, the submarine is the great and grave and perhaps the only danger now.  If that can be scotched, I believe the whole Teutonic military structure would soon tumble.  If not, the Germans may go on as long as they can feed their army, allowing their people to starve.

Of course, you know, we’re on rations now—­yet we suffer no inconvenience on that score.  But these queer people (they are the most amusing and confusing and contradictory of all God’s creatures, these English, whose possibilities are infinite and whose actualities, in many ways, are pitiful)—­these queer people are fiercely pursuing food-economy by discussing in the newspapers whether a hen consumes more food than she produces, and whether what dogs eat contains enough human food to justify the shooting of every one in the Kingdom.  That’s the way we are coming down to humble fare.  But nothing can quite starve a people who all live near the sea which yields fish enough near shore to feed them wastefully.

All along this South shore, where I am to-day[60], I see the Stars and Stripes; and everywhere there is a demand for the words and music of the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the Star Spangled Banner.

This our-new-Ally business is bringing me a lot of amusing troubles.  Theatres offer me boxes, universities offer me degrees, hospitals solicit visits from me, clubs offer me dinners—­I’ll have to get a new private secretary or two well-trained to say “No” politely, else I shall not have my work done.  But all that will presently wear away as everything wears away (quickly, too) in the grim face of this bloody monster of war which is consuming men as a prairie fire consumes blades of grass.  There’s a family that lives around the corner from this hotel.  One son is in the trenches, another is in a madhouse from shell-shock, a third coming home wounded the other day was barely rescued when a torpedo sunk a hospital ship and may lose his reason.  I suppose I saw one hundred men this afternoon on a single mile of beach who had lost both legs.  Through the wall from my house in London is a hospital.