When Mr. Wilson risked speaking directly to the Italian people, he paved the way for misunderstanding. To a government, words are words. It deals with them itself, and it makes allowance for the difficulty of translating them into action. But a proletariat is apt, not merely to attach significance to words, but to read an intensive meaning into them. We have not done badly by Italy. We spent a great deal of money upon her cold and hungry children. She is sending us shiploads of immigrants. Her resentment at our counsel has seemed to us unwise and ungrateful, seeing that we must naturally know what is best for her. We cannot accept ill-will with the unconcern of Great Britain, which has been used to it, and has survived it, for centuries. We feel that we deserve well of the world, because we are immaculately free from coveting what we do not want or need. And yet one wonders now and then whether, if there had been four years of glorious and desolating war on this Western continent, and the United States had emerged triumphant, but spent, broken and bankrupt, we should be so sure of our mission to regenerate. Would we then be so high-handed with England, so critical of France? No people in the world resent strictures more than we do. No people in the world are less keen for admonishment. The sixty-six members of the Yale Faculty who in 1920 sent a remonstrance to Congress, protesting against any interference in the domestic policies of Great Britain, based their protest upon our unalterable determination to preserve our own independence unviolated, and to manage our own affairs. They felt, and said, that we should be scrupulous to observe the propriety we exacted of others. The ingenious device of appointing an American committee, which in its turn appointed an American commission to sit as a court of appeal, and receive evidence touching the relations of Great Britain and Ireland, was the most original and comprehensive measure for counselling the doubtful that this country has ever seen. The informality of the scheme made it a pure delight. Governors of Wyoming and North Dakota, mayors of Milwaukee and Anaconda, clergymen and college professors, ladies and gentlemen of unimpeachable respectability and unascertainable information, all responded to the “Nation’s” call, and placed their diplomacy at its disposal.