nd me! But
I have some qualifications. Ever since--more than half a century ago--I
paid my first childish visit to the House of Commons, and heard Mr.
Roebuck, the "Tear 'em" of _Punch's_ cartoon, make his violent appeal to
the English Government to recognise the belligerency of the South, it
would be almost true to say that politics and affairs have been no less
interesting to me than literature; and next to English politics, American
politics and American opinion; partly because of my early association with
men like W.E. Forster, stanch believers, even when Gladstone and John
Russell wavered, in the greatness of the American future and the justice
of the Northern cause--and partly because of the warm and deep impression
left upon me and mine by your successive Ambassadors in London, by Mr.
Lowell above all, by Mr. and Mrs. Phelps, by the John Hays, the Choates
and the Bayards--no less than by the many intimate friendships with
Americans from different worlds which my books have brought me since 1888.
During the last thirty years, also, I have had many friends--and some
kinsmen--among the leaders of English politics, and in both political
parties. At the present moment my only son is a member of the English
House of Commons, and a soldier fighting in the war. All my younger
kinsfolk are fighting; the sons of all my friends are fighting; and their
daughters are nursing as members of Voluntary Aid Detachments--(marvellous
what the girl V.A.D.'s, as England affectionately calls them, have done
since the beginning of the war!)--or working week-end shifts to relieve
munition workers, or replacing men of military age in the public offices
and banks. I live in one of the Home Counties, within five miles of one of
the military camps. The small towns near us are crowded with soldiers;
the roads are full of marching infantry, of artillery-trains and
supply-wagons. Our village has sent practically all its able-bodied men of
military age to the front; the few that remain are "attested" and only
waiting to be called up. A great movement, in which this household is
engaged, is now beginning to put women on the land, and so replace the
agricultural labourers who have gone either into the armies or the
munition factories. And meanwhile all the elderly men and women of the
countryside are sitting on War Committees, or working for the Red Cross.
Our lives are penetrated by the war; our thoughts are never free from it.

But in trying to a