big armies and yet I don’t know a family that had men of fighting age which hasn’t lost one or more members.  And the worst is to come.  But you never hear a complaint.  Poor Mr. Dent[29], for instance (two sons dead), says:  “It’s all right.  England must be saved.”

And this Kingdom alone, as you know, is spending twenty-five million dollars a day.  The big loan placed in the United States[30] would last but twenty days! if this pace of slaughter and of spending go on long enough, there won’t be any men or any money left on this side the world.  Yet there will be both left, of course; for somehow things never quite go to the ultimate smash that seems to come.  Read the history of the French Revolution.  How did the French nation survive?

It will go on, unless some unexpected dramatic military event end it, for something like another year at least—­many say for two years more, and some, three years more.  It’ll stop, of course, whenever Germany will propose terms that the Allies can consider—­or something near such terms; and it won’t stop before.  By blockade pressure and by fighting, the Allies are gradually wearing the Germans out.  We can see here the gradual pressure of events in that direction.  My guess is that they won’t go into a third winter.

Well, dear gentlemen, however you may feel about it, that’s enough for me.  My day—­every day—­is divided into these parts:  (1) two to three hours listening to Americans or their agents here whose cargoes are stopped, to sorrowing American parents whose boys have run away and gone into the English Army, to nurses and doctors and shell makers who wish to go to France, to bereaved English men and women whose sons are “missing”:  can I have them found in Germany? (2) to answering letters about these same cheerful subjects; (3) to going over cases and documents prepared about all these sorts of troubles and forty other sorts, by the eight or ten secretaries of the Embassy, and a conference with every one of them; (4) the reading of two books of telegrams, one incoming, the other outgoing, and the preparation of a lot of answers; (5) going to the Foreign Office, not every day but often, to discuss more troubles there; (6) home to dinner at 8 o’clock—­at home or somewhere else, and there is more talk about the war or about the political troubles.  That for a regular daily routine for pretty nearly a year and a half!  As I say, if anybody is keeping the war up for my entertainment, he now has my permission to stop.  No time to read, no time to write, little time to think, little or no time to see the people you most wish to see, I often don’t know the day of the week or of the month:  it’s a sort of life in the trenches, without the immediate physical danger.  Then I have my cabinet meetings, my financial reports (money we spend for four governments:  I had till recently about a million dollars subject to my check); then the commission for the relief of Belgium; then the Ambassadors and Ministers of the other neutral states—­our task is worse than war!

     Well, praise God for sleep.  I get from seven to nine hours a night,
     unbroken; and I don’t take Armageddon to bed with me.