Because the French people are inspired with the grandeur and the moral significance of their cause, they cannot understand a certain cynical attitude of mind, well illustrated by a former Senator of the United States, who has been high in the councils of the defunct Progressive Party. After spending ten days in Paris last spring, he remarked at a luncheon given him by some distinguished Frenchmen,--"Don't tell me about the justice of your cause or about the atrocities. I am not interested in that. What I want to know is, who is going to win!" Who is going to win! There spoke the barbarian mind. The barbarian mind cannot comprehend that the winning itself in a world cause is inextricably involved in the justice and worth of the cause.
For the same reason the French people have been puzzled by the sort of neutrality preached and practiced at Washington since the outbreak of the war. It is plain enough that neither France nor England desires to have the United States go to war with Germany. We can help them better as a huge supply house than as an ally, much as that might offend our vanity. The French appreciate also our President's desire to keep his country at peace. They are a peace-loving people and know the frightful costs of war. But they cannot understand a neutrality that avoids committing itself upon a moral issue such as was presented to the world in Belgium, in the sinking of the Lusitania. And in spite of the strict censorship, which for obvious reasons has muzzled the French press in its comment upon our diplomacy with Germany, occasionally flashes of a biting scorn of the Wilson neutrality have appeared in print, as the following from Hanotaux: "We should be wanting truly in frankness toward our great sister republic if we left her in the belief that this series of documents, of a tone particularly friendly and affectionate, addressed to the German Government after such acts as theirs, had not occasioned in France a certain surprise.... Up to this time the Allies, who have not, God be praised, compromised or even menaced the life of any neutral, of any American, have not received the twentieth part of these friendly terms that the German Government has brought forth by its implacable acts.... What the world awaits from President Wilson is not merely a note, it is a verdict. What do neutral peoples, what does the American Government, what does President Wilson think of the German doctrine,--'Necessity knows no law--the end justifies the means'?... Every Government that acts or speaks at the present hour decides the nature of the real peace, whether it will be an affirmation of those eternal principles that are alone capable of directing humanity toward its sacred end."