I have not been to New York since the war began.  I made one trip across the continent speaking for the Liberty Loan, day and night.  And this life is pretty much the life of all of us here.  The President keeps up his spirits by going to the theatre three or four times a week.  There are no official functions at the White House, and everybody’s teeth are set.  The Allies need not doubt our resolution.  England and France will break before we will, and I do not doubt their steadfast purpose.  It is, as you said long ago, their fault that this war has come, for they did not realize the kind of an enemy they had, either in spirit, purpose, or strength.  But we will increasingly strengthen that western gate so that the Huns will not break through.

We do things fast here, but I never realized before how slow we are in getting started.  It takes a long time for us to get a new stride.  I did not think that this was true industrially.  I have known that it was true politically for a long time, because this was the most backward and most conservative of all the democracies.  We take up new machinery of government so slowly.  But industrially it is also true.  When told to change step we shift and stumble and halt and hesitate and go through all kinds of awkward misses.  This has been true as to ships and aeroplanes and guns, big and little, and uniforms.  Whatever the government has done itself has been tied by endless red tape.  It is hard for an army officer to get out of the desk habit, and caution, conservatism, sureness, seem even in time of crisis to be more important than a bit of daring.  In my Department, I figure that it takes about seven years for the nerve of initiative and the nerve of imagination to atrophy, and so, perhaps, it is in other departments.  It took five months for one of our war bureaus to get out a contract for a building that we were to build for them.  Fifteen men had to sign the contract.  And of course we have been impatient.  But things are bettering every day.  The men in the camps are very impatient to get away.  But where are the ships to do all the work?  The Republicans cannot chide us with all of the unpreparedness, for they stood in the way of our getting ships three years ago.  The gods have been against us in the way of weather so we have not brought down our supplies to the seaboard, but we have not had the ships to take away that which was there; or coal, sometimes, for the ships.

From now, however, you will see a steadier, surer movement of men, munitions, food, and ships.  The whole country is solidly, strongly with the President.  There are men in Congress bitterly against him but they do not dare to raise their voices, because he has the people so resolutely with him.  The Russian overthrow has been a good thing for us in one way.  It will cost us perhaps a million lives, but it will prove to us the value of law and order.  We are to have our troubles, and must change our system of life in the next few years.