Though I tarried in the East but forty-eight hours, I was conscious of breathing almost exclusively pro-Ally air. President Wilson’s neutrality proclamation was being respected in letter, as far as restraining our people from actual breaches in favor of either belligerent group was concerned, but every minute of the day, everywhere, it was being vociferously violated in spirit. Before the war was a month old, Americans already were confessing freely that they were so "neutral" that they didn’t care who won as long as Germany was "licked." They resigned themselves to the Chief Magistrate’s dictum that the country as such must be guilty of no "un-neutral" acts, but it failed lamentably to still the natural instincts of American hearts which were beating fervently, irresistibly, for the Allies. Bernstorff’s hour-by-hour interviews, apologies and explanations, Münsterberg’s homilies, _The Fatherland’s_ vituperations, the _New-Yorker Staatszeitung’s_ editorials in English signed by Ridder and "boiler-plated" to any newspapers which would give them space, "fair play" appeals from obsequious ex-Berlin exchange-professors like Dean Burgess of Columbia--all these things fell on deaf ears. None of them could obliterate the crime of Germany, which loomed ineradicable on the war horizon as Americans scanned it--Belgium. All the instincts of American justice, liberty, humanity and regard for treaty obligations rebelled against "Necessity-knows-no-law" and "scrap of paper" ethics. We had gone to war ourselves, in 1898, to defend the rights of a small nation. The spectacle of Military Germany trampling little Belgium under foot, causelessly, mercilessly, was enough, had there been no other single issue to enlist our sympathy, to vouchsafe it, whole-heartedly, to the nations which were leagued in support of the old-fashioned principle that Right is nobler than Might. Thus was America’s mind attuned in August, 1914, and at least in the opinion-molding area of the country which lies between the seaboard and the line where the Middle West begins, that mind was, with American predilection for reaching right conclusions spontaneously, irrevocably made up. The attempts of the Propaganda Steam-Roller to flatten out the anti-German prejudices provoked by the rape of Belgium were frantic, but fruitless. The pre-digested baby food which pedagogues and demagogues, ambassadors, brewers and rabbis now began to ladle out for American consumption did not temper those prejudices. Indeed, it was manifest that it was but aggravating them. Our own General Brooke, attending the German army maneuvers in Silesia eight or nine years ago, was asked by the Kaiser if he had ever been in Germany before. "Never in this part," remarked Brooke. "Where, then?" persisted William II. "In Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee," replied the general. I was about to enter "that part" of Germany now. I was not there long before realizing that pro-Ally