"I'm ashamed to hear such rant before British and French officers," he said, holding out his hand. "We know that our share is not as great as yours, within a thousand miles."
Those were chivalrous words. They represented the conviction, I am sure, of millions of Americans of the more thoughtful type, who would not allow themselves to be swept away beyond the just merits of their national achievements, even by the fervor of the moment.
But in England people only knew the boast and not the modesty. Because some Americans claimed too much, the English of the lower and less intelligent classes belittled the real share of victory which belonged to America, and became resentful. It was so in France as in England. It was lamentable, but almost unavoidable, and when this resentment and this sullen denial of American victory became known in the United States, passed over the wires by newspaper correspondents, it naturally aroused counter-action, equal bitterness, and then we were in a vicious circle, abominable in its effect upon mutual understanding and liking.
All that, however, was limited to the masses, for the most part certainly, and was only used as poison propaganda by the gutter press on both sides of the Atlantic. Educated people in both countries understood the folly and squalor of that stuff, and discounted it accordingly.
What was more serious in its effect upon the intelligent classes was the refusal of the Senate to ratify the Peace Treaty and its repudiation of President Wilson's authority. I have already dealt in previous writings with that aspect of affairs, and have tried to prove my understanding of the American view. But there is also an English view, which Americans should know and understand.
At the time I am writing this chapter, and for some months previously, England has been irritated with the United States because of a sense of having been "let down" over the Peace Treaty and the League of Nations by American action. I think that irritation has been to some extent justified. When President Wilson came to London he received, as I have told elsewhere, the most enthusiastic and triumphant ovation that has ever been given to a foreign visitor by the population of that great old city. The cheers that rose in storms about him were shouted not only because his personality seemed to us then to have the biggest and most hopeful qualities of leadership in the world, but because he was, as we thought, the authorized representative of the United States, to whom, through him, we gave homage. It was only months afterward, when the Peace Treaty had been signed and when the League of Nations (Wilson's child) had been established, that we were told that Wilson was not the authorized representative of the United States, that the American Senate did not recognize his authority to pledge the country to the terms of the treaty, and that the signature to the document was not worth ten cents. That made us look pretty foolish. It made France and Italy and other powers, who had yielded in many of their demands in order to satisfy President Wilson's principles, feel pretty mad. It made a laughingstock of the new-born League of Nations. It was the most severe blow to the prospects of world peace and reconstruction. In England, as I know, there were vast numbers of people who regarded the Peace Treaty as one of the most clumsy, illogical, and dangerous documents ever drawn up by a body of diplomats. I am one of those who think so. But that has nothing to do with the refusal of the Senate to acknowledge Wilson's signature.
The character of the clauses which created a series of international blunders leading inevitably to new wars unless they are altered during the next decade was not the cause of the Senate's "reservations." The American Senators did not seem to be worried about that aspect of the treaty. Their only worry was to safeguard the United States from any responsibility in Europe, and to protect their own traditional powers against an autocratic President. However right they may have been, it must at least be acknowledged by every broad-minded American that we in Europe were put completely "into the cart" by this action, and had some excuse for annoyance. All this is now past history, and no doubt before this book is published many other things will have happened as a consequence of the events which followed so rapidly upon the Peace of Versailles, so that what I am now writing will read like historical reminiscence. But it will always remain a painful chapter, and it will only be by mutual forbearance and the most determined efforts of people of good will on both sides of the Atlantic that the growth of a most lamentable misunderstanding between our two peoples in consequence of those unfortunate episodes will be prevented.
Another cause of popular discontent with the United States was the rather abrupt statement of Mr. Carter Glass, Secretary of the Treasury, that the United States would not grant any more loans to Europe so long as she failed to readjust her financial situation by necessary taxation, economy, and production.
The general (and in my opinion unjustified) anger aroused by this statement was expressed by a cartoon in Punch called "Another Reservation." It was a picture of a very sinister-looking Uncle Sam turning his back upon a starving woman and child who appeal to his charity, and he says: "Very sad case. But I'm afraid she ain't trying."
Mr. Punch is a formidable person in England, and by his barbed wit may destroy any public man or writing man who lays himself open to ridicule, but I ventured to risk that by denouncing the cartoon as unjust and unfair in spirit and fact. I pointed out that since the beginning of the war the United States had shown an immense, untiring, and inexhaustible generosity toward the suffering peoples of Europe, and reminded England how under Mr. Hoover's organization the American Relief Committee had fed the Belgian and French populations behind the German lines, and how afterward they had poured food into Poland, Serbia, Austria, and other starving countries. That challenge I made against Mr. Punch was supported by large numbers of English people who wrote to me expressing their agreement and their gratitude to America. They deplored the spirit of the cartoon and the evil nature of so many attacks in low-class journals of England against the United States, whose own gutter press was at the same time publishing most scurrilous abuse of us. But among the letters I received was one from an American lady which I will quote now, because it startled me at the time, and provides, in spite of its bitterness, some slight excuse for the criticism which was aroused in England at the time. If an American could feel like that, scourging her own people too much (as I think), it is more pardonable that English sentiment should have been a little ruffled by America's threat to abandon Europe.