...  The President has sent Admiral Mayo over to study the naval situation.  So far as I can learn the feeling at Washington is that the British Navy has done nothing.  Why, it hasn’t attacked the German naval bases and destroyed the German navy and ended the war!  Why not?  I have a feeling that Mayo will supplement and support Sims in his report.  Then gradually the naval men at Washington may begin to understand and they may get the important facts into the President’s head.  Meantime the submarine work of the Germans continues to win the war, although the government and the people here and in the United States appear not to believe it.  They are still destroying seventy-five British ships a month besides an additional (smaller) number of allied and neutral ships.  And all the world together is not turning out seventy-five ships a month; nor are we all destroying submarines as fast as the Germans are turning them out.  Yet all the politicians are putting on a cheerful countenance about it because the Germans are not starving England out and are not just now sinking passenger ships.  They may begin this again at any time.  They have come within a few feet of torpedoing two of our American liners.  The submarine is the war yet, but nobody seems disposed to believe it.  They’ll probably wake up with a great shock some day—­or the war may possibly end before the destruction of ships becomes positively fatal.

The President’s letter to the Pope gives him the moral and actual leadership now.  The Hohenzollerns must go.  Somehow the subjects and governments of these Old World kingdoms have not hitherto laid emphasis on this.  There’s still a divinity that doth hedge a king in most European minds.  To me this is the very queerest thing in the whole world.  What again if Germany, Austria, Spain should follow Russia?  Whether they do or not crowns will not henceforth be so popular.  There is an unbounded enthusiasm here for the President’s letter and for the President in general.

In spite of certain details which it seems impossible to make understood on the Potomac, the whole American preparation and enthusiasm seem from this distance to be very fine.  The people seem in earnest.  When I read about tax bills, about the food regulation and a thousand other such things, I am greatly gratified.  And it proves that we were right when we said that during the days of neutrality the people were held back.  It all looks exceedingly good from this distance, and it makes me homesick.

     To Frank N. Doubleday

     American Embassy.

     [Undated, but written about October I, 1917]

     DEAR EFFENDI: