To their anger at becoming involved in the war must
be added their frustration at having suffered some initial defeats. American self-confidence has had a severe shaking, and it is but human for them to attribute some of the blame to us, and to point to our discomfiture in the Far East as evidence that either we do not wish to fight or that we are incapable of doing so. In this generally dis- satisfied, uneasy and highly critical frame of mind they remember all the stories they have been told of British arrogance, acquisitive- ness and perfidy ; they persuade themselves at one moment that the London bankers (a group of people for whom they have a perhaps exaggerated esteem) will manage somehow to diddle the simple soul of America and establish British capitalism as dominant throughout a world made safe for it by American effort ; and at the next moment that Great Britain is bound to go Communist after the war and that all this travail will end by America being faced by a Bolshevik State upon the Atlantic.
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