This is a new fact in history. American business men are not looking for war profits, They have learned that in the long run there is no profit in war, but they are anxious to ce-operate with the Allies in every way possible. Of that there is no doubt, On the other hand, if the nation is almost a unit in taking sides in this war, it is also almost a unit in the desire to stay out of it. The average American feels that Europe is hopeless, that it will always go on üghting, whereas the Germans and other races whom I have listed above, can "live happily together here and work together. These Americans feel that they spent £4,000,000,000 and more in the last war to save democracy and end war, and what did they get? Europe has no idea of what, with the long American tradition of isolation, it meant for America to send 2,000,000 men over there to fight.
They went on a sort of holy crusade for freedom and democracy, and they say now: what came of it all? The long quarrel over war debts would require an article in itself to explain how a small shopkeeper, we will say, in the Mississippi Valley, who knows nothing of exchange. There are other complicating factors. Fundamentally, I think it is a war of freedom against dictators, yet although much is now made of Hitler having invited Stalin into Burope, the democracies were also trying to get Russia in on their side and were simply outmanceuvred by Germany. The average American thinks it is the strangest war he has ever seen, and the most mixed-up, and he wants, with all his heart and soul, to stay out of it this time if he can, in spite of the: act that, as I have said, America is 90 per cent, ior the Empire and France. This may be hard or those at the centre of the storm to understand, but it is a fact.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.