herein narrated.

It was about at this time, the end of 1916, that an American colleague, Edward Price Bell, of The Chicago Daily News, set forth in the columns of The Times upon a bold adventure--an attempt to persuade captious Britons that, far from desiring to "play the Kaiser's game," President Wilson was actually anxious to make war on Germany, and, indeed, was deliberately, as was his way, proceeding in that direction. It was a risky throw for the doyen of the American press in London, who enjoyed a reputation for sanity and sagacity and who had good reason for desiring to preserve the respect of a community in which his professional lot had been cast for sixteen years. I purpose summarizing the course of Bell's effort to scale the walls of British prejudice because of its immensely symptomatic and psychological interest.

"I believe that Wilson wants to go to war," Bell wrote to The Times on December 23. "I believe that he wants to fight Germany. I believe that he wants Germany to commit herself to a program that would warrant him in asking the American people to enter the conflict." In every allied quarter in Europe, practically without exception, Bell's letter produced a prodigious and contemptuous guffaw. Americans in Europe, any number of them, joined in the gibes. Undismayed, Bell returned to the attack within three days. "America can not keep out of this war unless Germany gives way," he wrote on December 26. "The time may come very soon when President Wilson will be under the necessity of making his appeal to the American nation." The thunderer did not consign Bell's letters to the editorial waste-basket, where most Englishmen believed they belonged, yet it declined, in its scrupulously courteous way, to associate itself with its correspondent's manifestly fantastic and fanatical sophistry. In an editorial comment The Times expressed its reluctance to place any trust in Bell's exposition of the policy "which Mr. Wilson so carefully wraps up." Bell had by this time become a laughing-stock far beyond the confines of the metropolitan area of London. Paris, Petrograd and Rome read his letters and shook with incredulous mirth. The feelings of fellow-Americans toward him began to be tinged with pity.

Yet Bell broke forth afresh on New Year's Day with his third letter to Printing House Square, asserting, roundly, that "America will and can support no peace but an Entente peace." On January 25 The Times printed Bell's fourth letter within five weeks, in which he this time declared unequivocally that "Mr. Wilson's purpose is solely to inform the world what America stands for and what he is willing to ask America, if need be, to fight for."

Germany now proclaimed her new policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Mr. Gerard was recalled from Berlin and Count Bernstorff received his passports in Washington. Yet Allied faith in America, momentarily revived by these events, took wings once more when it became known that Mr. Wilson's next "step" would be armed neutrality. The editor of The Times, who had been exceptionally tolerant of the pestiferous Bell, imagined now, I fancy, that events had at length put a timely end to the letter-writing energies of the Chicago scribe; for Englishmen, with notably few exceptions, had by this time pretty well "eliminated" America from their calculations. But on February 22, inspired perhaps by the rugged traditions clinging to that date, Bell cleared for action for the fifth time and next day The Times printed him for the fifth time. He wrote: "I will risk the view that we are on the edge of great things in America--things worthy of the country of Washington and Lincoln. America, I feel, is about to fructify internationally--about to make her real contribution to humanity and history." The Times now went so far as to suggest, with characteristic prudence, that Bell's "sagacious and racy letter deserves careful consideration by all who are trying to understand the situation in Washington." Unhappily, there was little evidence in the continued British mistrust of America that The Times' counsel was being taken widely to heart.

On February 27 Bell craved the indulgence of The Times for his sixth, and final, epistle to the skeptics. With what was destined to turn out to be rare prescience and penetration, he now said that Mr. Wilson's delay in coming to grips with Hohenzollernism meant only that "the president wants the public temper so hot throughout America that it will instantly burn to ash any revolutionary unrest or any opposition by the pacifist diehards." Five weeks later the United States and Germany were at war, with the American nation united in fervent support of the president's pronunciamento that the task which demanded the renunciation of our neutrality was one to which "we can dedicate our lives, our fortunes, everything we are and everything we have." The hour of Europe's awakening from its scornful dreams had come.

For several days after Congress, at the president's instigation, voted to "accept the gage of battle," there lay neatly folded up in a certain front room of the American Embassy in London a fine, new American flag. It had been put there for a special purpose--to be hoisted at a psychological moment believed to be imminent. Our people in Grosvenor Gardens, in their hearty, imaginative American way, considered that there might possibly be a "demonstration" in welcome of Britain's latest comrade-in-arms. There were visions of a procession, brass bands and cheering crowds; and the spick and span stars and stripes were to be flung to the glad breeze when the "demonstrators" reached the scene and called for a speech from Ambassador Page on the Embassy balcony. Such things happened when Italy and Roumania "came in." Surely history would not fail to repeat itself in the case of "daughter America." But neither procession, bands, cheers nor crowds ever materialized. After all, we could not expect Englishmen to celebrate in honor of the greatest mistake they had ever made in their lives. That would be something more than un-English. It would be a violation of all the laws of human nature.

Yet I suppose there was not an American in Great Britain who was not keenly disappointed at the conspicuously undemonstrative character of our welcome into the Allied fold. I must not be understood as minimizing the warmth of either governmental or press utterances evoked by President Wilson's Lincolnesque speech to Congress and the action which so promptly ensued. The sentiments expressed by Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Asquith, Mr. Bonar Law, Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Bryce, in and out of Parliament, and the thoughts which found vivid expression in the columns of the newspapers of London and the provinces left little to be desired; but eloquent and hearty as they were, their effect upon that all-powerful molder of British public opinion known as the Man in the Street was strangely negligible. I am sure I am not the only American in England who, waiting for words of greeting from British friends and not getting them, was irresistibly constrained to search for the reason. Our chagrin was not lessened by assurances from Paris that "France was going wild with joy"; that the president's speech was being read aloud in the schools and officially placarded on all the hoardings of the republic; that the government buildings were flying the tricolor and "Old Glory" side by side; and that American men were being publicly embraced in the boulevards.