government.  The public opinion of the nation as well as the Government accepts their blockade as justified as well as necessary.  They will not yield on that point, and they will regard our protests as really inspired by German influence—­thus far at least:  that the German propaganda has organized and encouraged the commercial objection in the United States, and that this propaganda and the peace-at-any-price sentiment demand a stiff controversy with England to offset the stiff controversy with Germany; and, after all, they ask, what does a stiff controversy with the United States amount to?  I had no idea that English opinion could so quickly become practically indifferent as to what the United States thinks or does.  And as nearly as I can make it out, there is not a general wish that we should go to war.  The prevalent feeling is not a selfish wish for military help.  In fact they think that, by the making of munitions, by the taking of loans, and by the sale of food we can help them more than by military and naval action.  Their feeling is based on their disappointment at our submitting to what they regard as German dallying with us and to German insults.  They believe that, if we had sent Bernstorff home when his government made its unsatisfactory reply to our first Lusitania note, Germany would at once have “come down”; opportunist Balkan States would have come to the help of the Allies; Holland and perhaps the Scandinavian States would have got some consideration at Berlin for their losses by torpedoes; that more attention would have been paid by Turkey to our protest against the wholesale massacre of the Armenians; and that a better settlement with Japan about Pacific islands and Pacific influence would have been possible for the English at the end of the war.  Since, they argue, nobody is now afraid of the United States, her moral influence is impaired at every capital; and I now frequently hear the opinion that, if the war lasts another year and the Germans get less and less use of the United States as a base of general propaganda in all neutral countries, especially all American countries, they are likely themselves to declare war on us as a mere defiance of the whole world and with the hope of stirring up internal trouble for our government by the activity of the Germans and the Irish in the United States, which may hinder munitions and food and loans to the Allies.

I need not remark that the English judgment of the Germans is hardly judicial.  But they reply to this that every nation has to learn the real, incredible character of the Prussian by its own unhappy experience.  France had so to learn it, and England, Russia, and Belgium; and we (the United States), they say, fail to profit in time by the experience of these.  After the Germans have used us to the utmost in peace, they will force us into war—­or even flatly declare war on us when they think they can thus cause more embarrassment to the Allies, and when they conclude