"The British navy, you mean? Where'd we be now but for the British navy?"
"Well, thank God, the note writing is over!"
There was determination enough; but the older men were right—there was none of the flame and ardour of secession days. The war was realized vaguely as a principle rather than as a fact. It was the difference between fighting for abstract justice and knocking down a man in hot blood because he has affronted one's wife. The will to strike was all there, only one did not see red when one delivered the blow. Righteous indignation, not personal rage, was in the mind of America.
"We aren't mad yet," remarked an old Confederate soldier to Blackburn. "Just wait till they get us as mad as we were at Manassas, and we'll show the Germans!"
"You mean wait until they drop bombs on New York instead of London?"
"Good Lord, no. Just wait until our boys have seen, not read, about the things they are doing."
So there were a few who expected an American army to reach France before the end of the war.
"Never mind about taxes. We must whip the Huns, and we can afford to pay the bills!"
For here as elsewhere the one question never asked was, "What are we going to get out of it?"
Prosperity was after all a secondary interest. Underneath was the permanent idealism of the American mind.