“The Americans will get New York back, won’t they?”
“How? When? It is true you have a population of eighty millions west of the Allegheny Mountains, and somehow, some day, their American spirit and their American genius ought to conquer; but it’s going to be a job. Patriotism is not enough. Money is not enough. Potential resources are not enough. It is a question of doing the essential thing before it is too late. We found that out in England in 1916. If America could have used her potential resources when the Germans landed on Long Island, she would have driven her enemies into the sea within a week; but the thing was not possible. You might as well expect a gold mine in Alaska to stop a Wall Street panic.”
I found that Lord Kitchener had very definite ideas touching great social changes that must come in America following this long and exhausting war, assuming that we finally came out of it victorious.
“America will be a different land after this war,” he said. “You will have to reckon as never before with the lowly but enlightened millions who have done the actual fighting. The United States of the future must be regarded as a vast-co-operative estate to be managed for the benefit of all who dwell in it, not for the benefit of a privileged few. And America may well follow the example of Germany, as England has since the end of the great war in 1919, in using the full power of state to lessen her present iniquitous extremes of poverty and wealth, which weaken patriotism, and in compelling a division of the products of toil that is really fair.
“I warn you that America will escape the gravest labour trouble with the possibility of actual revolution only by admitting, as England has admitted, that from now on labour has the whip hand over capital and must be placated by immense concessions. You must either establish state control in many industries that are now privately owned and managed and establish state ownership in all public utilities or you must expect to see your whole system of government swing definitely toward a socialistic regime. The day of the multi-millionaire is over.”
I found another distinguished Englishman at General Wood’s headquarters, Lord Northcliffe, owner of the London Times, and I had the unusual experience of interviewing my own employer for his own newspaper. As usual, Lord Northcliffe took sharp issue with Lord Kitchener on several points. His hatred of the Germans was so intense that he could see no good in them.
“The idea that Germany will be able to carry this invasion of America to a successful conclusion is preposterous,” he declared. “Prussian supermen! What are they? Look at their square heads with no backs to them and their outstanding ears! Gluttons of food! Guzzlers of drink! A race of bullies who treat their women like squaws and drudges and then cringe to every policeman and strutting officer who makes them goose-step before him. Bismarck called them a nation of house-servants, and knew that in racial aptitude they are and always will be hopelessly inferior to Anglo-Saxons.
“Conquer America? They can no more do it than they could conquer England. They can make you suffer, yes, as they made us suffer; they can fill you with rage and shame to find yourselves utterly unprepared in this hour of peril, eaten up with commercialism and pacifism just as we were. But conquer this great nation with its infinite resources and its splendid racial inheritance—never!
“The Germans despise America just as they despised England. John Bull was an effete old plutocrat whose sons and daughters were given up to sport and amusement. The Kaiser, in his famous Aix-la-Chapelle order, referred scornfully to our ‘contemptible little army.’ He was right, it was a contemptible little army, but by the end of 1917 we had five million fully equipped men in the field and in the summer of 1918 the Kaiser saw his broken armies flung back to the Rhine by these same contemptible Englishmen and their brave allies. There will be the same marvellous change here when the tortured American giant stirs from his sleep of indifference and selfishness. Then the Prussian superman will learn another lesson!”