You’re amazing.  Yourselves devilishly greedy for profits, yet you scoff at us because we go chasing after business.  You fetch heaps of money across the sea, and then turn up your sublimely snuffing noses as if it stinks.

To reach an understanding would have been difficult even in times of peace.  The American is unwilling to be either stiff or subservient.  He does not wish to be accounted of less value as a merchant than the officer or official; wishes to do what he likes and to call the President an ox outright if he pleases.  Leave him as he is; and do not continually hurt the empire and its swarms of emigrant children by the attempt to force strangers into the shell of your will and your opinion.

Is it not possible that the American is analyzing the origin of the war in his own way?  That he looks upon Belgium’s fate with other eyes than the German?  That he groans over “the army as an end in itself” and over “militarism”?  That he does not understand us any quicker than the German Michel understands him?  And that he puffs furiously when, after a long period of drought, the war, a European one, now spoils his trade?

Only for months at the worst, Sam; then it will spring up again in splendor such as has never been seen before.  No matter how the dice fall for us, the chief winnings are going to you.  The cost of the war (expense without increment, devastation, loss of business) amounts to a hundred thousand million marks or more for old Europa; she will be loaded down with loans and taxes.  Even to the gaze of the victor, customers will sink away that were yesterday capable of buying and paying.  Extraordinary risks cannot be undertaken for many a year on our soil.  But everybody will drift over to you—­Ministers of Finance, artists, inventors, and those who scent profits.  You will merely have to free yourselves from dross (and from the trust thought that cannot be stifled) and to weed out the tares of demagogy; then you will be the effective lords of the world and will travel to Europe like a great Nuernberg that teaches people subsequently to feel how once upon a time it felt to operate in the Narrows.

The scope of your planning and of your accomplishment, the very rank luxuriance of your life, will be marveled at as a fairy wonder.  We, victors and conquered and neutrals, will alike be confined by duty to austere simplicity of living.  Your complaint is unfounded; only gird yourselves for a wee short time in patience.  Whether the business deals which you grab in the wartime smell good or bad, we shall not now publicly investigate.  If law and custom permit them, what do you care for alien heartache?  If the statutes of international law prohibit them, the Governments must insure the effectiveness thereof.  Scolding does not help.  Until the battle has been fought out to the finish, until the book of its genesis has been exalted above every doubt, your opinion weighs as heavy as a little chicken’s feather to us.  Let writer and talker rave till they are exhausted—­not a syllable yet in defense.