“Now they say that—­quite openly and quite frankly.  Now if we keep ‘neutral’ to a highwayman—­what do we get for our pains?  That’s the mistake we are making.  If we had sent Bernstorff home the day after the Lusitania was sunk and recalled Gerard and begun to train an army we’d have had no more trouble with them.  But since they have found out that they can keep us discussing things forever and a day, they will keep us discussing things till they are ready.  We are very simple; and we’ll get shot for it yet....

“The prestige and fear of the United States has gone down, down, down-disappeared; and we are regarded as ‘discussors,’ incapable of action, scared to death of war.  That’s all the invitation that robbers, whose chief business is war, want—­all the invitation they need.  These devils are out for robbery—­and you don’t seem to believe it in the United States:  that’s the queer thing.  This neutrality business makes us an easy mark.  As soon as they took a town in Belgium, they asked for all the money in the town, all the food, all the movable property; and they’ve levied a tax every month since on every town and made the town government borrow the money to pay it.  If a child in a town makes a disrespectful remark, they fine the town an extra $1,000.  They haven’t got enough so far to keep them going flush; and they won’t unless they get Paris—­which they can’t do now.  If they got London, they’d be rich; they wouldn’t leave a shilling and they’d make all the rich English get all the money they own abroad.  This is the reason that Frenchmen and Englishmen prefer to be killed by the 100,000.  In the country over which their army has passed a crow would die of starvation and no human being has ten cents of real money.  The Belgian Commission is spending more than 100 million dollars a year to keep the Belgians alive—­only because they are robbed every day.  They have a rich country and could support themselves but for these robbers.  That’s the meaning of the whole thing.  And yet we treat them as if they were honourable people.  It’s only a question of time and of power when they will attack us, or the Canal, or South America.  Everybody on this side the world knows that.  And they are ‘yielding’ to keep us out of this war so that England will not help us when they (the Germans) get ready to attack America.

“There is the strangest infatuation in the United States with Peace—­the strangest illusion about our safety without preparation.”

Several letters to Colonel House show the state of the British mind on the subject of the President’s peace proposals: 

     To Edward M. House

     Royal Bath and East Cliff Hotel,
     Bournemouth,
     23 May, 1916.

     DEAR HOUSE: