t possibility now, but only to dwell upon the development of
understandings and common aims between France, Russia, and the
English-speaking States.

They have all shared one common experience during the last two years;
they have had an enormous loss of self-sufficiency. This has been
particularly the case with the United States of America. At the
beginning of this war, the United States were still possessed by the
glorious illusion that they were aloof from general international
politics, that they needed no allies and need fear no enemies, that they
constituted a sort of asylum from war and all the bitter stresses and
hostilities of the old world. Themselves secure, they could intervene
with grim resolution to protect their citizens all over the world. Had
they not bombarded Algiers?...

I remember that soon after the outbreak of the war I lunched at the
Savoy Hotel in London when it was crammed with Americans suddenly swept
out of Europe by the storm. My host happened to be a man of some
diplomatic standing, and several of them came and talked to him. They
were full of these old-world ideas of American immunity. Their
indignation was comical even at the time. Some of them had been hustled;
some had lost their luggage in Germany. When, they asked, was it to be
returned to them? Some seemed to be under the impression that, war or no
war, an American tourist had a perfect right to travel about in the
Vosges or up and down the Rhine just as he thought fit. They thought he
had just to wave a little American flag, and the referee would blow a
whistle and hold up the battle until he had got by safely. One family
had actually been careering about in a cart--their automobile
seized--between the closing lines of French and Germans, brightly
unaware of the disrespect of bursting shells for American
nationality.... Since those days the American nation has lived
politically a hundred years.

The people of the United States have shed their delusion that there is
an Eastern and a Western hemisphere, and that nothing can ever pass
between them but immigrants and tourists and trade, and realised that
this world is one round globe that gets smaller and smaller every decade
if you measure it by day's journeys. They are only going over the lesson
the British have learnt in the last score or so of years. This is one
world and bayonets are a crop that spreads. Let them gather and seed, it
matters not how far from you, and a time will c