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In throwing out the suggestion that America should ultimately undertake the responsibility of proposing a world peace settlement, I admit that I run counter to a great deal of European feeling.  Nowhere in Europe now do people seem to be in love with the United States.  But feeling is a colour that passes.  And the question is above matters of feeling.  Whether the belligerents dislike Americans or the Americans dislike the belligerents is an incidental matter.  The main question is of the duty of a great and fortunate nation towards the rest of the world and the future of mankind.

I do not know how far Americans are aware of the trend of feeling in Europe at the present time.  Both France and Great Britain have a sense of righteousness in this war such as no nation, no people, has ever felt in war before.  We know we are fighting to save all the world from the rule of force and the unquestioned supremacy of the military idea.  Few Frenchmen or Englishmen can imagine the war presenting itself to an American intelligence under any other guise.  At the invasion of Belgium we were astonished that America did nothing.  At the sinking of the Lusitania all Europe looked to America.  The British mind contemplates the spectacle of American destroyers acting as bottleholders to German submarines with a dazzled astonishment.  “Manila,” we gasp.  In England we find excuses for America in our own past.  In ’64 we betrayed Denmark; in ’70 we deserted France.  The French have not these memories.  They do not understand the damning temptations of those who feel they are “au-dessus de la melee.” They believe they had some share in the independence of America, that there is a sacred cause in republicanism, that there are grounds for a peculiar sympathy between France and the United States in republican institutions.  They do not realise that Germany and America have a common experience in recent industrial development, and a common belief in the “degeneracy” of all nations with a lower rate of trade expansion.  They do not realise how a political campaign with the slogan of “Peace and a Full Dinner-Pail” looks in the middle west, what an honest, simple, rational appeal it makes there.  Atmospheres alter values.  In Europe, strung up to tragic and majestic issues, to Europe gripping a gigantic evil in a death struggle, that would seem an inscription worthy of a pigsty.  A child in Europe would know now that the context is, “until the bacon-buyer calls,” and it is difficult to realise that adult citizens in America may be incapable of realising that obvious context.