As for myself, I had a go at British acquaintances from two entirely different standpoints. In the first place, fresh from America, where the war had burnt into people’s minds as deeply almost as if it were their own destiny which was at stake, I was still filled with the energizing atmosphere omnipresent there. I remembered how even our puny war with Spain had gripped the nation’s thought and concentrated it to the exclusion of all else. I could not, for the life of me, understand how Englishmen, with the history of the preceding eight weeks before them, could still look upon "business as usual" as the desideratum for which the moment insistently called. I knew, I thought, how Americans would feel and act at such an hour; and as I had in my time dozed through many after-dinner speeches about the "kindred ideals" and "identical habits of thought" which so indissolubly bound the English-speaking nations, I ventured to marvel, and even at times to swear, at the spectacle of national nonchalance which Britain at the beginning of October, 1914, so resolutely presented. It was magnificent, but it was not war. In the second place, I was conscious, with the knowledge and conviction of a long-time eye-witness, of both the visible and the dormant strength of Germany. I had written literally reams, during the preceding eight years, about Teuton preparations on land, in the air and on the sea. I had discussed the German War Party, its leaders and its literature, its aspirations and its plans, till I often grew weary of the task, not so much because pacifist critics in England pilloried me as a war-monger and an alarmist, but because there was a monotony in that sort of news about Germany which strained even the patience of those whose duty it was to report it. When Englishmen now told me, as so many of them did, that they would "muddle through this show," as they had "muddled through" in South Africa and on all the other occasions in Britain’s martial past, I grew sick at heart. I knew, as everybody who had lived in Germany between 1904 and 1914 and kept his ears and eyes open knew, that "muddling through" would never beat the Germans, even if it had finally overcome the Boers. I knew, and anybody really acquainted with the Germans knew, that they would not be vanquished so long as there was a man or a mark with which to fight. I knew that nothing short of the supreme effort which the British Empire and its Allies could put forth would suffice to overcome the most highly-organized and efficiently patriotic people which had ever gone to war. I knew that the German General Staff and the other war-makers of the Fatherland had long reckoned, in the emergency of a struggle with England, on the very thing of which my eyes were now witness--British reluctance to shake off the shackles of ease and comfort and buckle down, a nation in arms, to the inconvenient and grim realities of war. Of these things I thought, and