We’re getting a crowd of Yankee lecturers on the United States to go up and down this Kingdom.  There’s the greatest imaginable curiosity to hear about the United States in all kinds of society from munition workers to universities.  I got the British Government to write Buttrick[63] to come as its guest, and the Rockefeller Boards rose to the occasion.  He’ll probably be along presently.  If he hasn’t already sailed when you get this, see him and tell him to make arrangements to have pictures sent over to him to illustrate his lectures.  Who else could come to do this sort of a job?

I am myself busier than I have ever been.  The kind of work the Embassy now has to do is very different from the work of the days of neutrality.  It continues to increase—­especially the work that I have to do myself.  But it’s all pleasant now.  We are trying to help and no longer to hinder.  To save my life I don’t see how the Washington crowd can look at themselves in a mirror and keep their faces straight.  Yesterday they were bent on sending everything into European neutral states.  The foundations of civilization would give way if neutral trade were interfered with.  Now, nothing must go in except on a ration basis.  Yesterday it must be a peace without victory.  Now it must be a complete victory, every man and every dollar thrown in, else no peace is worth having.  I don’t complain.  I only rejoice.  But I’m glad that kind of a rapid change is not a part of my record.  The German was the same beast yesterday that he is to-day; and it makes a simple-minded, straight-minded man like me wonder which attitude was the (or is the) attitude of real conviction.  But this doesn’t bother me now as a real problem—­only as a speculation.  What we call History will, I presume, in time work this out.  But History is often a kind of lie.  But never mind that.  The only duty of mankind now is to win.  Other things can wait.

I walked over to Stonehenge and back (about six miles) with Lord Grey (Sir Edward, you know) and we, like everybody else, fell to talking about when the war may end.  We know as well as anybody and no better than anybody else.  I have very different moods about it—­no convictions.  It seems to me to depend, as things now are, more on the submarines than on anything else.  If we could effectually discourage them so that the Germans would have to withdraw them and could no more keep up the spirit of their people by stories of the imminent starvation of England, I have a feeling that the hunger and the war weariness of the German people would lead them to force an end.  But, the more they are called on to suffer the more patriotic do they think themselves and they may go on till they drop dead in their tracks.

What I am really afraid of is that the Germans may, before winter, offer all that the Western Allies most want—­the restoration