If I have seemed to emphasize that the reconstruction of British life, after bitterly hard knocks on land and sea pounded some realization of their task’s magnitude into Englishmen’s heads, went on chiefly in the upper and upper-middle classes, it is precisely the impression I seek to convey. It is they alone, to date, who have taken the full measure of Britain’s terrible emergency and acted accordingly. Even that statement requires qualification, for the fools’ paradise is not even to-day inhabited exclusively by the benighted lower strata of the population. Neuve Chapelle, asphyxiating gas and the _Lusitania_ had passed into history a full month before, yet there lingers painfully in my memory the recollection of a country-house week-end party broken up because Englishwomen of "class" objected to hearing a fellow-guest venture the opinion that dear old England would better "wake up" to the fact that calm alone, mighty an asset as it was, could not "march to Berlin" against an enemy like the Germans. These ladies were interesting as types. Their name was legion, and many of them, as an Irishman might say, were men. Common sense, prized of Anglo-Saxon virtues, and tolerance, its twin sister, lost their old-time hold on many millions in these isles during the war. The "Anti-German Union," which was founded by well-meaning noblemen and noblewomen for the purpose of organizing hate of the Teuton and all his works, perhaps set itself an unethical goal, but the psychology at the bottom of the movement was wholesome; it was all to the good, because it was sharpening the bulldog’s teeth. It committed uncouth excesses like sending interrupters to the German Church service in Montpelier Place, forgetting that my esteemed friend, the Reverend Mr. Williams, the Anglican chaplain in Berlin, was never prevented from assembling his uninterned flock for worship at St. George’s in Montbijou-Platz. Far less excusable than the "Anti-German Union’s" super-patriotic eccentricities was the smug intolerance of enormous numbers of British toward elementary questions of the war. They would hear nothing of the Germans unless it was discreditable. I would write in my "Germany Day by Day" column in _The Daily Mail_ that there were growing indications (let us say) that the enemy was still at fighting zenith--his stock of men, materials and provisions still far from exhausted. The next day’s post would invariably bring me denunciatory letters from anonymous members of the public. I was "pro-German." I was "a German agent." I was "playing the enemy’s game." Englishmen didn’t "care to read the twaddle of a man who was still so enamored of the Hun capital where he so long lived." And when I wrote of American exasperation with British shipping practises in war, an English patriot induced my editor to print a letter in retort, "praying passionately for preservation from the candid friend." Other correspondents did not confine their observations to supplication.