Consul-General, Lieut.-Commander McCrary of our Navy, Kent of the
Bankers Trust Company, New York, and one other man yet to be
chosen--to advise, after investigation, about every proposed
expenditure. Anderson has been at work all day to-day drawing up
proper forms, etc., to fit the Department's very excellent
instructions. I have the feeling that more of that money may be
wisely spent in helping to get people off the continent (except in
France, where they seem admirably to be managing it, under Herrick)
than is immediately needed in England. All this merely to show you
the diversity and multiplicity of the job.

I am having a card catalogue, each containing a sort of who's who,
of all Americans in Europe of whom we hear. This will be ready by
the time the _Tennessee_[62] comes. Fifty or more stranded
Americans--men and women--are doing this work free.

I have a member of Congress[63] in the general reception room of
the Embassy answering people's questions--three other volunteers as
well.

We had a world of confusion for two or three days. But all this
work is now well organized and it can be continued without
confusion or cross purposes. I meet committees and lay plans and
read and write telegrams from the time I wake till I go to bed.
But, since it is now all in order, it is easy. Of course I am
running up the expenses of the Embassy--there is no help for that;
but the bill will be really exceedingly small because of the
volunteer work--for awhile. I have not and shall not consider the
expense of whatever it seems absolutely necessary to do--of other
things I shall always consider the expense most critically.
Everybody is working with everybody else in the finest possible
spirit. I have made out a sort of military order to the Embassy
staff, detailing one man with clerks for each night and forbidding
the others to stay there till midnight. None of us slept more than
a few hours last week. It was not the work that kept them after the
first night or two, but the sheer excitement of this awful
cataclysm. All London has been awake for a week. Soldiers are
marching day and night; immense throngs block the streets about the
government offices. But they are all very orderly. Every day
Germans are arrested on suspicion; and several of them ha