These celebrations in Paris and London and elsewhere are of importance to America, because they proved that the world was beginning to realize that the people of the United States were more than money seekers looking only for selfish gain, and therefore weak and unreliable. When America entered the war, a leading German paper said,
"We do not think that America's intervention will have an essential effect on the results of the war. The Allies are going to have a momentary advantage, but they will soon be aware that America is like a stick that breaks when one wants to lean on it."
Another great German daily gave the following as America's reasons for joining the Allies:--
"First, the desire to have a place at the peace conference; second, the wish to weaken or destroy the love of different peoples for their native lands; third, the hope thereby to be able to increase her military and naval equipment; and fourth, the desire to build up a great American merchant fleet."
Because Germany saw in the United States only the love of power and of the Almighty Dollar, she made the terrible mistake that brought about her downfall. With the declaration of war with Germany on April 6, 1917, at least England and France saw the people of America more nearly as they are, lovers and defenders of the highest ideals man has yet felt and spoken. The American soldiers showed a little later at Belleau Wood and in the Argonne forest, that they loved these ideals enough to die for them.
The English writer, Hall Caine, described the celebration in London in beautiful and graphic language:--
American Day in London was a great and memorable event. It was another sentinel on the hilltop of time, another beacon fire in the history of humanity. The two nations of Great Britain and America can never be divided again. There has been a national marriage between them, which only one judge can dissolve, and the name of that judge is Death. . . .
Two lessons, at least, must be learned from the service of Friday in St. Paul's Cathedral. The first is that the accepted idea of the American Nation as one that weighs and measures all conduct by material values in dollars and cents, must henceforth be banished forever. Thrice already in its short history has it put that hoary old slander to shame, and now once again has it given the lie to it. The history of nations has perhaps no parallel to the high humanity, the splendid self-sacrifice, the complete disinterestedness that brought America into this war, with nothing to gain and everything to lose. It has broken forever with the triple monarchies of murder. To live at peace with crime was to be the accomplice of the criminal. Therefore, in the name of justice, of mercy, of religion, of human dignity, of all that makes man's life worth living and distinguishes it from the life of the brute, America, for all she is or ever can be, has drawn the sword and thrown away the scabbard. God helping her, she could do no other.