is that he is not in the trenches.  Yet so long as the weight of America is not felt to be turning the balance dramatically in our favour, the earnestness of America will be open to challenge both by Americans and by the Allies.  What I saw in France in the early months of this year has filled me with unbounded optimism.  I feel the elated certainty, as never before even in the moment of the most successful attack, that the Hun’s fate is sealed.  What is more, I have grounds for believing that he knows it—­knows that the collapse of Russia will profit him nothing because he cannot withstand the avalanche of men from America.  Already he hears them, as I have seen them, training in their camps from the Pacific to the Atlantic, racing across the Ocean in their grey transports, marching along the dusty roads of two continents, a procession locust-like in multitude, stretching half about the world, marching and singing indomitably, “We’ve got four years to do this job.”  From behind the Rhine he has caught their singing; it grows ever nearer, stronger.  It will take time for that avalanche to pyramid on the Western Front; but when it has piled up, it will rush forward, fall on him and crush him.  He knows something else, which fills him with a still more dire sense of calamity—­that because America’s honour has been jeopardised, of all the nations now fighting she will be the last to lay down her arms.  She has given herself four years to do her job; when her job is ended, it will be with Prussianism as it was with Jezebel, “They that went to bury her found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands.  And her carcase was as dung upon the face of the field, so that men should not say, ‘This is Jezebel.’”

As an example of what America is accomplishing, I will take a sample port in France.  It was of tenth-rate importance, little more than a harbour for coastwise vessels and ocean-going tramps when the Americans took it over; by the time they have finished, it will be among the first ports of Europe.  It is only one of several that they are at present enlarging and constructing.  The work already completed has been done in the main under the direction of the engineers who marched through London in the July of last year.  I visited the port in January, so some idea can be gained of how much has been achieved in a handful of months.

The original French town still has the aspect of a prosperous fishing-village.  There are two main streets with shops on them; there is one out-of-date hotel; there are a few modern dwellings facing the sea.  For the rest, the town consists of cottages, alleys and open spaces where the nets were once spread to dry.  To-day in a vast circle, as far as eye can reach, a city of huts has grown up.  In those huts live men of many nations, Americans, French, German prisoners, negroes.  They are all engaged in the stupendous task of construction.  The capacity of the harbour basin is being multiplied fifty times,