We lost caste in other ways. We supplied France with munitions, but, as a purchasing agent for the government put it to me, we are not losing much money by it, and, until the French Government protested, and the protest was printed all over the United States, some of our manufacturers supplied articles that were worthless. Doctor Charles W. Cowan, an American who in winter lives in Paris and Nice and spends his summers in America, showed me the half section of a shoe of which he said sixty thousand pairs had been ordered, until it was found that part of each shoe was made of brown paper. Certainly part of the shoe he showed me was made of brown paper. When an entire people, men, women, and children, are fighting for their national existence, and their individual home and life, to have such evidences of Yankee smartness foisted upon them does not make for friendship. It inspired contempt. This unpleasant sentiment was strengthened by our failure to demand satisfaction for the lives lost on the _Lusitania_, while at the same time our losses in dollars seemed to distress us so deeply. But more harmful and more unfortunate than any other word or act was the statement of President Wilson that we might be "too proud to fight." This struck the French not only as proclaiming us a cowardly nation, but as assuming superiority over the man who not only would fight, but who was fighting. And as at that moment several million Frenchmen were fighting, it was natural that they should laugh. Every nation in Europe laughed. In an Italian cartoon Uncle Sam is shown, hat in hand, offering a "note" to the German Emperor and in another shooting Haitians. The legend reads: "He is too proud to fight the Kaiser, but not too proud to kill niggers." In London, "Too Proud to Fight" is in the music-halls the line surest of raising a laugh, and the recruiting-stations show pictures of fat men, effeminates, degenerates, and cripples labelled: "These Are Too Proud to Fight! Are You?" The change of sentiment toward us in France is shown in many ways. To retail them would not help matters. But as one hears of them from Americans who, since the war began, have been working in the hospitals, on distributing committees, in the banking-houses, and as diplomats and consuls, that our country is most unpopular is only too evident. It is the greater pity because the real feeling of our people toward France in this war is one of enthusiastic admiration. Of all the Allies, Americans probably hold for the French the most hearty good-feeling, affection, and good-will. Through the government at Washington this feeling has been ill-expressed, if not entirely concealed. It is unfortunate. Mr. Kipling, whose manners are his own, has given as a toast: "Damn all neutrals." The French are more polite. But when this war is over we may find that in twelve months we have lost friends of many years. That over all the world we have lost them.