Yet, as a matter of fact, the psychological phenomenon is true to type. It was not an accident that the internationalist America of 1915, of 'Peace without Victory,' should by 1918 have become more fiercely insistent upon absolute victory and unconditional surrender than any other of the belligerents, whose emotions had found some outlet during three years of war before America had begun. The complete reversal of the 'Peace without Victory' attitude was demanded--cultivated, deliberately produced--as a necessary part of war morale. But these emotions of coercion and domination cannot be intensively cultivated and then turned off as by a tap. They made America fiercely nationalist, with necessarily a temperamental distaste for the internationalism of Mr Wilson. And when a mere year of war left the emotional hungers unsatisfied, they turned unconsciously to other satisfactions. Twenty million Americans of Irish descent or association, among others, utilised the opportunity. One feature--perhaps the very largest feature of all--of war morale, had been the exploitation of the German atrocities. The burning of Louvain, and other reprisals upon the Belgian civilian population, meant necessarily a special wickedness on the part of a definite entity, known as 'Germany,' that had to be crushed, punished, beaten, wiped out. There were no distinctions. The plea that all were not equally guilty excited the fierce anger reserved for all such 'pacifist' and pro-German pleas. A German woman had laughed at a wounded American: all German women were monsters. 'No good German but a dead German.' It was in the German blood and grey matter. The elaborate stories--illustrated--of Germans sticking bayonets into Belgian children produced a thesis which was beyond and above reason or explanation: for that atrocity, 'Germany'--seventy million people, ignorant peasants, driven workmen, the babies, the invalids, the old women gathering sticks in the forest, the children trooping to school--all were guilty. To state the thing in black and white sounds like a monstrous travesty. But it is not a travesty. It is the thesis we, too, maintained; but in America it had, in the American way, an over simplification and an extra emphasis.