I

MPRESSIVE beyond any possibility of description has been the demeanor of the English under the strain of war. London, of course, is the place where this strain has been most tense. All along Fleet Street and the Strand, in the region about Charing Cross, Trafalgar Square, Pall Mall, Haymarket, Piccadilly Circus, and Piccadilly, down by Victoria Station and Westminster Abbey, the cry of the news-vender all day long, and in the residence districts late into the night, makes it impossible to forget the fact of war. Before the locked gates of Somerset House, ordinarily open, two armed sentries pace back and forth. Occasionally the bus on which one is riding suddenly stops to wait till a company of Territorials in khaki uniform pass by. Six or eight little ragamuffins bearing wooden swords and wearing paper caps march along the Strand with utmost seriousness in the midst of the traffic, bearing a banner with the device:

WE WILL FIGHT FOR
OUR COUNTRY AND
DEFEND THE

KING

and the passers-by look on them gravely without even an indulgent smile. Along Downing Street there is likely to be a crowd waiting to see some official or some member of the Cabinet drive to or from the Government offices. Along Whitehall there is another crowd, composed of men waiting their chance to reach the War Office in order to enlist. But London is not the only place where the signs of war keep pulling at one's nerves. One acquaintance has told me of playing, or trying to play, golf at North Berwick, and of the impossibility of keeping one's eye, even less one's mind, on the ball while in the waters near by, in full view, gunboats ply, and from over their decks rise war aeroplanes. Another acquaintance has reported his experience of living for a few days in a quiet place in rural England. During the day all seemed normal, he said, but after nightfall there began a procession of railway trains carrying troops -passing along one by one, at five-minute intervals, invisible in the darkness because all their lights were out. Then there are the rumors and stories that pass from mouth to mouth- Although not a word of

news, so far as I could find, appeared in the English daily papers concerning the British Expeditionary Force (consisting of troops sent to the Continent to help the Belgians and the French), persistent oral accounts of their going by night from Charing Cross Station, of their transportation in great steamships across the Channel, and even of the return of the wounded to hospitals in England, were from the beginning to be encountered everywhere. On all sides people talked of the war even before there was war; some of them with heartsick dread of its evils, not for themselves, but for the world, hoping that it might be averted; others consumed with anxiety lest England might be too late. One man, a Liberal, officially connected with a humane society, almost denounced the Government because they had not had English troops in Antwerp by the 3d of August. One who has not had the experience of being a passive spectator in a belligerent country at a time like this can scarcely imagine the mental and nervous strain of it all. It was as if we were all dreaming the same evil dream, and waking to find it true. And through it all the English, high and low, were imperturbable.

It was during the first few days that the strain was severest. Monday, the 3d of August, was Bank Holiday. The danger of war had come so suddenly that few were prepared for the financial stress. Very wisely the Government decided to extend the Bank Holiday until Friday. On Tuesday, therefore, the banks remained closed, but the shops were open. On one of these days I went with a friend into a shop in Westminster to buy a trifle. The shop was empty of customers. The shopkeeper tried to sell us some watches. He urged us to buy. He took off twenty per cent of the price. Finally he admitted that he had to have gold to meet his obligations, and offered us the watches for a ridiculously small sum. We did not know how long we should have to stay in England or how our money would hold out. When we left without buying, I felt as if I was turning my back on a drowning man. Before the Bank Holiday was ended, however, England had recovered her financial equilibrium. Ten-shilling and onepound bank notes were in circulation. They

did not look like money to an Englishman, but of course they were accepted.

Except for the orderly crowds that thronged Trafalgar Square and gathered about Buckingham Palace to cheer the King and Queen during the culmination of the crisis, there were no signs of anything approaching excitement. I read of some alleged cases of the rough handling of Germans, but I saw nothing of the kind and met no one who had seen anything of the kind. The people went about their business as usual. Newspapers urged their readers to continue their outings, and to keep life as normal as possible. On the Sunday after war was declared I went by steamboat down the Thames from Hampton Court to Kew. In the houseboats moored along the banks the people were taking their accustomed Sunday recreation. Young men in white flannels and young women in light dresses were rowing and punting in boats, as during the days of peace. Unquestionably many of these English families who seemed totally undisturbed had already seen sons and brothers go to join the Territorials; unquestionably many of the young men on the river would themselves soon be in camp or on the march; but that made no difference.

What bound Great Britain together in all this was the conviction that the cause of Great Britain was just. I had occasion to talk with various types of men-members of Parliament, waiters, business men, policemen, fellow-travelers in the train, shopkeepers; everywhere there was the one conviction that Great Britain was bound by duty to herself, and even more by her duty to Belgium and France, to take her part in the war. The only English people who showed signs of disturbance were those who had committed themselves in some prominent way to the cause of peace--and these were not disturbed by fear, but by the burial of their hopes.

The one exception to this universal approval of Englard's course was furnished by a member of the so-called "Peace Group " in Parliament. At first he was inclined to believe that England had been forced into war by the aggressiveness of the Kaiser and his clique. In a day or two, however, he had turned back to his original peace view. "England was under no obligation to take up arms," he said. England should have remained neutral, as Italy did.”

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"What of Germany's violation of Belgium's neutrality?" I asked. "Was not

England bound by moral obligation to help enforce the pledge that Germany had made to respect that neutrality?"

There were two answers that he made to that. One was that England would have been in a stronger position if she had stood aside, let Germany and France, with Russia, fight it out, then, when both combatants were exhausted, been ready to step in fresh and strong and dictate to Germany the terms of peace and the penalty for the violation of her word. The other answer that he made was that England had always pursued the policy of "splendid isolation," and in departing from that by joining in with Continental Powers in Continental quarrels she had opened the way for incalculable future perils. "What if Germany has broken her pledge?" he asked. "We have no right to fight her for that. England has in the past broken pledges too. No; we are committing a crime to enter this war. This is the work of the Liberal jingoes who have been preaching a big navy and have been entangling us with Continental alliances. It is an astounding thing that Parliament should have been kept ignorant of what is virtually a secret agreement with France that, if she sent her fleet to the Mediterranean, we should defend her from any attack upon her coasts. Mark my words. Public opinion will not support this war. The North of England is solidly against it."

He seemed to ignore the implications of his statement that England by remaining neutral would have left brave little Belgium in the lurch, would have given Germany a chance to get a foothold in the Low Countries where she could be a constant menace to England's shores, would have acquiesced in the German attempt to reduce France to a third-rate Power, and, so far from atoning for the former breach of pledges of which he accused his own country, would have given to England's enemies another occasion of charging her with perfidy.

In not a single other case did I find an Englishman who is not convinced of the righteousness of England's action; and even my good friend of the Parliamentary "Peace Group" admitted the force of the view that arms could be put to no better service than in enforcing treaty obligations and in withstanding a policy of conquest.

If Germany had been counting on aid for herself from the English advocates of peace, she was destined to be disappointed in this, as she certainly was disappointed in finding

that the Irish question had not disrupted Great Britain and that commercial prudence had not expelled or obscured British love of fair play. In the London " Times" for Saturday, August 8, there appeared two bits of evidence on this point. Mr. Andrew Carnegie, who is known in Great Britain as well as in America as one of the foremost "advocates of heavenly peace and foes of hellish war" (to use his own phrase), sent a telegram which was published in that issue which contains the following sentence: "Her Peace Conference having been rejected by Germany, I feel that Britain only did her duty when she promptly refused Germany's counter-proposal to be permitted to invade Belgium to attack France, and declared she would protect Belgium by land and sea."

The other bit of evidence was the publication of a two-column advertisement consisting of a message from the Religious Society of Friends which contains the following paragraph:

We recognize that our Government has made most strenuous efforts to preserve peace, and has entered into the war under a grave sense of duty to a smaller state towards which we had moral and treaty obligations. While, as a Society, we stand firmly to the belief that the method of force is no solution of any question, we hold that the present moment is not one for criticism, but for devoted service to our nation.

Of course the men who control the utterances of the Conservative press are upholders of the war with Germany; but I was especially interested in getting the opinions of Liberal journalists who are traditionally against all that savors of militarism as a hindrance to the expenditure of effort and money on behalf of social reform. To a man, the Liberal journalists with whom I talked recognized the necessity for the present war. Not one of them but said, when Germany violated Belgium's neutrality, that England must fight. One of them I met at his office.

It was before war was declared. He was still hoping for peace, hoping that Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister, and Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, would find some way of keeping Germany to her pledges without war; but he confessed that there was a price which England could not pay for peace-the price of her honor and safety. Another I met after war had broken out. He was a representative of one of the best-known Liberal journals in the United Kingdom. He declared the war was imperative.

· Englishmen do not hate the Germans," he explained; "indeed, they like them very well. There is much we have in common with the German-much more than we have in common with our Russian allies. The hideous thing about this war is that, as far as England is concerned, it is a war without hatred."

This feeling I found expressed again and again. Not only journalists, but all sorts of men, have said to me repeatedly: "We are not fighting the German people; we are fighting the Prussian war party. It is the Kaiser, not the German people, that must be held responsible for this war."

Sooner or later almost every Englishman with whom I talked expressed the opinion that the Kaiser was insane. 'He's a stark, staring lunatic," was the way the proprietor of a little news shop put it. Mad," Crazy," "Off his head "-these are the terms in which Englishmen of various stations offered the only explanation they could think of for the Kaiser's course.

Another common opinion, shared by a waiter in a restaurant, a London "bobby,” and a writer of serials for the lighter London weeklies, is that before the war ends there will be revolution in Germany. Most of them expect to see a republic emerge from this war of the nations. This is not merely an opinion of ignorance. One man who had spent several years in Germany took this view. He could not see that the existence of a number of monarchies within the Federal Empire formed necessarily any obstacle to such a result.

Not the least impressive factor in public sentiment in England is the lack of enthusiasm for one of England's allies-Russia. Unbounded admiration for the Belgians and warm-hearted friendship for the French were everywhere evident; but no interest in the Russians. The boys who were selling penny flags on the street had the French tricolor in almost as large quantities as the Union Jack, and after the fighting at Liège displayed a goodly stock of Belgian flags; but so far as I remember they had no Russian flags for sale. Again and again when I mentioned Russia there was a shaking of the head, and whenever I ventured an opinion that after this war was over England would have to be ready to reckon with the great Slav Empire, there was immediate assent. Frankly, the English do not like to be in the position of fighting on Russia's side. They all admit the necessity, but they deplore it.

This scarcely veiled distrust of the Slav ally is, however, but a very small element in English feeling. The one supreme factor is the common Englishman's determination to resist what he believes to be the ambition to gain dominion at the expense of others which has obsessed the Prussian military clique, and has at last set Europe aflame with the most terrible war in history. Not the least of Sir Edward Grey's achievements as a statesman has been his success in so conducting the negotiations prior to the war as to convince his fellow-subjects of the King that Germany has had but one reason for going to war-the determination to dominate Europe. At times in past years there has been a sort of nervous apprehension among the English people about Germany's plans. One day when I was in London there was a single loud crash of thunder. One thought seemed to spring up in everybody's mind-a bomb. from a Zeppelin air-ship. That, however, was but a heritage from the period of vague fantastic fears. Now that war has come, all those fears seem to have been suddenly banished. In their place there are a calm confidence and a ready determination to deal with the Prussian King and his group of war lords as they deserve. There was no sign of panic. Some people, it is true, started to stock up with tinned food and groceries as if they expected British coasts to be at once blockaded; but they were not typical. They were laughed at, and some of them, I know, felt very foolish when they found themselves stocked up as for an Arctic expedition while their neighbors were living on fresh food just as usual. Of course this does not mean that the ordinary Englishman is taking this war lightly. Far from it. He is taking it with grim seriousness. He knows very well something of what it means already. The lady who, while driving to the village from her country house, has her favorite pair of horses seized and commandeered for the army, faces a fact of war, even though she does not hear a shot. And there are many people over England who have had to face that fact. Some English families are pulling up their flower beds and planting vegetables instead. There is, however, very little complaint. I heard not a word of it. Instead there is pride in what England has proved herself ready to do.

Along the coast woods and houses in the line of gun fire were razed. More than one Englishman told me of friends whose

homes had been demolished in that way. Even when compensated, the owners of such property must suffer great loss; but the spirit of the Englishman at this time was of pride that he could offer a sacrifice.

A few days after war was declared I happened to be in a printing office in London. One of the partners in the firm told me of his experiences that day. He had been on the coast for his holiday, and had received a message from the other members of his firm calling him to London. He came up on his motor cycle-seventy miles in just over two hours.

"The constables along the road would have stopped me," he said, "except that they thought I was on the King's business. All along the road were Boy Scouts. They were watching the telegraph posts to see that the wires were not cut; at every post or two there was a Scout, and they meant business."

This testimony about the Scouts was confirmed by what a Boy Scout himself told me. He himself had been on duty watching the telegraph lines, had been in the squad that had discovered a wire tapped, and after report was made to the military authorities had learned that the tapping had been done by the military, but that somehow a record had not been made. As can be seen, the Boy Scouts are doing real service to their country.

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The anxiety is over, now that war has begun," continued the Englishman in the printing office. "Perhaps the Germans are better men, but we are ready. And the French will fight. The man who has had sorrow in his soul for forty years is bound to fight. The Germans-the poor beggars !— they don't want to fight. It's the Kaiser's doing. He expected to be in Paris by August 6, and now it's the 12th. I'm too old for the army; but I can be useful. I can do police work. With my motor cycle I can be very useful. Yes, yes, every Englishman would take a musket if needed." And I believed him.

Never, I suppose, have Englishmen been prouder of their country. They are proud of its patience, its unwearying effort to avoid war, its restraint when Germany proposed to bribe it into neutrality at the cost of France and Belgium; proud of its unhesitating acceptance of war when the time came; proud of the silence of the press when news of military movements was suppressed, not by exercise of authority, but by co-operation

of newspaper men with the Government; proud of the efficiency with which the Cabinet silently in a day took over the railways, and, with the help of a committee consisting of all the general managers of the British railway lines, is now operating them as if they formed a department of the Government; proud of the sinking of political differences in the face of common danger; and, what is most striking, Englishmen are proud of the Irish, and the Irish are proud of the Empire.

The Home Rule question is settled-at least so thought every Englishman with whom I talked of the subject—and the settlement of that question is due to an Irishman-the Parliamentary leader, Mr. Redmond. When he made his speech bidding the British Government to withdraw all troops from Ireland if they needed them, and promising the Empire that the soil of Ireland would be defended by Nationalists and Ulsterites together, he swept away the one obstacle that had been standing in the way of a peaceful settlement of the Home Rule questionConservative doubt of Irish loyalty. By that one speech Irish loyalty (which ought not to have been questioned) was proved-and all England was ready to yield anything to Ireland. It is true that one man who had relatives in the North of Ireland told me he thought that after the war was over there would be bloodshed in Ireland-as there had been bloodshed scarcely more than a week before the war started-but his was the only opinion I heard on that side, and it was based on his conviction that among the Ulster Protestants there were some bigots who would never be reconciled, On the other side I heard that the people of Ireland, South as well as North, were really well content with the present state of affairs, and that the only dissatisfied element consisted of politicians. Of one fact, however, there could be no difference of opinion-Ireland is with the rest of the Empire in this war.

The one uncertain factor in Great Britain, so far as I could learn, was the extreme labor element. Before war was declared there was a controversy between employers and employees in the building trades, and apparently that controversy continued in spite of war. One day, for instance, while I was walking along Bridge Street by the Clock Tower and New Palace Yard, thinking only of the war, I passed a young woman collecting money to aid the workingmen who had lost their jobs through the building trades

lockout. The fact that a labor conflict could continue at a time like this seems to me one of the most damning indictments against the prevailing industrial system. But of course

that controversy was lost in the great world war; and I did not think of it again till I started to write this. Certainly, if there are labor leaders in England who are irreconcilable, if the resignation of John Burns from the Cabinet is an indication of an anti-war spirit in the United Kingdom, there was during the first two weeks of the war no outward sign of it of sufficient prominence to attract my notice, and there was no reflection of it in the talk of the man in the street. England's internal problems were forgotten in the presence of the common enemy. One Liberal went so far as to say that the war, he believed, would mean the end of the Liberal party, at least as it had been known heretofore; because war would consume all the money that had been devoted to the operation of such Liberal policies as old age pensions, land reform, and the like. On the other hand, it seemed to me that the war might well mean the strengthening of the real Liberal party, for not only had the Liberal Government shown extraordinary statesmanship in the international crisis, but it had shown courage and efficiency in meeting the national energency by the enactment and enforcement of measures of great social significance—such as the governmental operation of railways and governmental building of houses.

England has been doing unprecedented things because the emergency is unprecedented. The effect of the war upon the common life of the English people was pictured one evening in the House of Commons when I had the good fortune to be present. One member after another rose and laid before the Government the needs of his constituency. A member from a coast region told of the privation of many of his constituents who were dependent upon letting lodgings to summer visitors, and who now found their lodgings empty. Another told of those among his constituents whose livelihood depended upon the use of horses-carters, milkmen, tradesmen who delivered their goods in wagons—and who now found themselves shut off from self-support because their horses had been commandeered. A ripple of amusement passed over the House when it was pointed out that the owner of a single horse need not be apprehensive, as the Government was taking only fifty per cent