Within a month President Wilson, in his first public utterance since election day, made his "peace-without-victory" address to the Senate. This cryptic deliverance was interpreted in Allied Europe as not only obliterating all possibility of America’s entering the war against Germany, but as actually promoting Germany’s efforts, launched about the same time, to secure a premature, or "German," peace. There was probably no time during the entire war when feeling against the president and the United States in general ran higher in England and France than during the ensuing weeks. It was not so much what one read in the public prints, for press utterances were restrained if not unqualifiedly friendly, that impelled many an American in London and Paris to seek cover from the withering blast of criticism and impatience to which he now found his country subjected. It was rather the sentiments encountered among Englishmen and Frenchmen in private that supplied the real index to, and revealed the full intensity of, the disappointment and indignation now aroused in Allied lands. Indelibly impressed upon my memory is the passionate outburst of a dear--and, of course, temperamental--French friend in London. He is a gentleman, a scholar and sincere lover of America, where he found the charming lady who is now his wife. He had retired to a bed of illness in consequence of the climatic iniquities which will forever make it impossible for a Frenchman ever really to like England, and I was paying him a neighborly visit of inquiry. Though I had hoped and intended that the acrimonious topic of America would for once be eliminated from our conversation, I was not to be spared what turned out to be almost the most violent castigation of the United States and all its works under which I could ever remember to have winced. I was left in no doubt that his outpouring of righteous Gallic wrath, though it sprang to a certain degree from temperature as well as temperament, was the voice of France crying out in holy anger with the great but recreant sister republic. Wilson had "surrendered to the Germans and pro-Germans." They were now getting their reward. The president was "playing the Kaiser’s peace game." He may not have meant to do so, but that is what his Senate manifesto amounted to, in French estimation. "The Americans care only for their money." So be it. France would not forget. _Jamais_! Americans would rue the day they had sent back to the White House the man who was now stabbing crucified democracy in the back!