"In the first place, what you call 'America' is only a small fraction of the American continent, not even as large as British North America. And in the second place what you call your 'nation'--well, some rude person once said of it that it isn't really a nation at all, but just a picnic. I won't go so far as that, but I hardly suppose you will be much better pleased if I call it a League of Nations. That is a phrase that you hate, because your President WILSON loves it. "By the way, I must be very careful how I speak of your President, because you're so sensitive on that subject. You allow yourselves to abuse him as the head of a political party, but if other nations so much as question his omniscience he suddenly becomes the Head of a Sovereign State. An English Cabinet Minister once told me how an American gave vent in conversation to the most violent language in regard to the policy of the President of the day, and when at the end the Englishman very quietly said, 'I am inclined to agree with you,' the American turned on him in a fury, saying: 'Sir, I didn't come here to have my country insulted!' "However, to return to your League of Nations. In England (where I come from) they are just now reviving a play by Mr. ISRAEL ZANGWILL, in which, if I recall it rightly, he makes out your country to be the Melting Pot into which every sort of fancy alien type is thrown, and turned out a pattern American citizen, a member of a United Family. I wish I could believe it. It seems to us that your German, even after passing through the Melting Pot, remains a German; that your Irishman, however much he Americanises himself for purposes of political power and graft, remains an Irishman. You never seem to get together as a nation, except when you go to war, and even then you don't keep it up, for you're not together now, although you're still at war with Germany. The rest of the time you seem to spend in having Elections and 'placating' (I think that's what you call it) the German interest, or the negro interest, or the Sinn Fein interest. "And this brings me to the point that makes me smile most of all--when it doesn't make me weep. Isn't it a pathetic thing that a really great and strong people like you should be so weak and little as to let your Press sympathise blatantly with the campaign of murder in Ireland; to suffer that campaign to be actively assisted by American gunmen; to look on while it is being financed by American money, here employed in conjunction with the resources of that very Bolshevism which you take care to treat as criminal in your own country? "Isn't it pitiful that you should regard reprisals (hateful though they may be) as worse than the hideous murders which provoked them; forgetting your own addiction to lynch law; forgetting too (as some of our own people forget) that the sanctity of the law depends as much upon the goodwill and assistance of the populace as it does upon the police, and cannot else be maintained?