Britain and her Dominions. The British
were a race of shop-keepers; no matter how chivalrous the call,
nothing would persuade them to jeopardise their money-bags. If they
did for once leap across their counters to become Sir Galahads, then
the Dominions would seize that opportunity to secure their own base
safety and to fling the Mother Country out of doors. The British gave
these students of selfishness a surprise from which their military
machine has never recovered, when the "Old Contemptibles" held up the
advance of the Hun legions and won for Europe a breathing-space. The
Dominions gave them a second lesson in magnanimity when Canada's lads
built a wall with their bodies to block the drive at Ypres. America
refuted them for the third time, when she proved her love of
world-liberty greater than her affection for the dollar, bugling
across the Atlantic her shrill challenge to mailed bestiality. Germany
has made the grave mistake of estimating human nature at its lowest
worth as she sees it reflected in her own face. In every case, in
her judgment of the two great Anglo-Saxon races, she has been at
fault through over-emphasising their capacity for baseness and
under-estimating their capacity to respond to an ideal. It was an
ideal that led the Pilgrim Fathers westward; after more than two
hundred years it is an ideal which pilots their sons home again,
racing through danger zones in their steel-built greyhounds that they
may lay down their lives in France.

In view of the monumental stupidity of her diplomacy Germany has found
it necessary to invent explanations. The form these have taken as
regards America has been the attributing of fresh low motives. Her
object at first was to prove to the world at large how very little
difference America's participation in hostilities would make. When
America tacitly negatived this theory by the energy with which she
raised billions and mobilised her industries, Hun propagandists, by
an ingenious casuistry, spread abroad the opinion that these mighty
preparations were a colossal bluff which would redound to Germany's
advantage. They said that President Wilson had bided his time so that
his country might strut as a belligerent for only the last six months,
and so obtain a voice in the peace negotiations. He did not intend
that America should fight, and was only getting his armies ready that
they might enforce peace when the Allies were exhausted and already
counting on Americans m