All the old stock in America, or nearly all, millions of people in little American homes who read English books, whose minds were soaked in English history, whose ancestors had sprung from English and Scottish soil, panted for their deliverance from a neutrality which was a fraud and a shame in their hearts. They were not neutral. They never had been. They were all for England. Millions of others—remembering Lafayette, and filled with a deep sentiment for France, an enormous admiration for French heroism—enraged against Germany for the ruin she had made in France—loathed the policy of President Wilson, which seemed to them cowardly, selfish and unworthy. The pressure on Wilson became stronger and more insistent. Germany helped them in every possible way by deliberate insult, by methods of sea warfare outside the traditional code of common humanity; by plots, incendiarism, and sabotage within the United States itself in order to check the supplies of stores and ammunition addressed to England and France. When war was finally declared by the United States in the spring of 1917, the American people, apart from small minorities, were no longer neutral or indifferent, and a tidal wave of enthusiasm for service swept over all barriers and oppositions from coast to coast. It rose higher and higher as the months passed, reaching to a spiritual exaltation, unlike any emotion that had ever possessed that nation before. It had different motives, different manifestations from those which possessed the peoples of Europe engaged in the war. The Americans were not conscious of self-interest. There was no sense of menace against them such as Great Britain had partly felt. There was nothing they desired to gain for themselves. It was a crusade on behalf of civilisation. It was also unconsciously a desire in the American mind to prove that in spite of all their material wealth, their comfort of life, their peace and security, they were ready to suffer, to make sacrifice, to spend their energy, and their dollars, to give their manhood and their courage for a spiritual ideal. The United States would prove to the world that it had a national soul. It would prove to itself that all the different strains of race within its citizenship had been merged and moulded into a national unity, responsive to the call of patriotism, disciplined by a common code, obedient to the voice of the State speaking for the whole people.