Western European seaboard America can find no outlet for its products except by our favour.  Her finance is in German hands, her commercial capitals, New York and Chicago, are in reality German cities.  It is some years since my father and I were in New York.  But my opinion is not very different from that of the forceful men who have planned this war—­that with Britain as a base the control of the American continent is under existing conditions the task of a couple of months.

I remember a conversation with Doctor Dohrn, the head of the great biological station at Naples, some four or five years ago.  He was complaining of want of adequate subventions from Berlin.  “Everything is wanted for the Navy,” he said.  “And what really does Germany want with such a navy?” I asked.  “She is always saying that she certainly does not regard it as a weapon against England.”  At that Doctor Dohrn raised his eyebrows.  “But you, gnaedige Frau, are a German?” “Of course.”  “Well, then, you will understand me when I say with all the seriousness I can command that this fleet of ours is intended to deal with smugglers on the shores of the Island of Ruegen.”  I laughed.  He became graver still.  “The ultimate enemy of our country is America[85]; and I pray that I may see the day of an alliance between a beaten England and a victorious Fatherland against the bully of the Americas.”  Well, Germany and Austria were never friends until Sadowa had shown the way.  Oh! if your country, which in spite of all I love so much, would but “see things clearly and see them whole.”

Bremen, September 25, 1914.

     To Ralph W. Page[86]
     London, Sunday, November 15, 1914.

     DEAR RALPH: 

You were very good to sit down in Greensboro’, or anywhere else, and to write me a fine letter.  Do that often.  You say there’s nothing to do now in the Sandhills.  Write us letters:  that’s a fair job!

God save us, we need ’em.  We need anything from the sane part of the world to enable us to keep our balance.  One of the commonest things you hear about now is the insanity of a good number of the poor fellows who come back from the trenches as well as of a good many Belgians.  The sights and sounds they’ve experienced unhinge their reason.  If this war keep up long enough—­and it isn’t going to end soon—­people who have had no sight of it will go crazy, too—­the continuous thought of it, the inability to get away from it by any device whatever—­all this tells on us all.  Letters, then, plenty of them—­let ’em come.

You are in a peaceful land.  The war is a long, long way off.  You suffer nothing worse than a little idleness and a little poverty.  They are nothing.  I hope (and believe) that you get enough to eat.  Be content, then.  Read the poets, improve a piece of land, play with the baby, learn golf.  That’s the happy and philosophic and fortunate life in these times