LTO TIM EDITOR 0/ TR/ e stecernroas s ] SIR,—I like to feel
sure that you and your readers, and indeed all well-informed English men and women generally, have no doubts of the whole-hearted sympathy of the great majority of our people—let us say at least eight men and women out of every ten—with the cause of the civilized Allies. It is a sympathy based on a very well-informed and soundly founded conviction that the Allies are indeed fighting the battle of civilization—fighting to determine whether or not, to quote our own immortal Lincoln, government of the people by the people for the people shall perish from the earth—fighting to determine whether or not, alter all these centuries, the yoke of the Hun is again to be pressed down upon those nations who have fought their way into the light of individual liberty and of freedom for the least of us under law and justice.
But by very reason of the width and depth of that sym- pathy of ours for the cause of the Allies we feel an eager- ness—perhaps it is an unreasonable eagerness—that the man in the street in England shall show himself more alive to the peril of this situation. You will not, I know, yield to any temptation to retort : Why does not America cast in her lot with the Allies P For you know too well that the hour has not yet struck for us to do any good by active participation in the war, and that our standing aloof in that sense does not mean indifference. No one here—speaking, as before, of the majority of Americans, and that majority are all of English blood—fails to note the valour of the men of all ranks now fighting at the front in Flanders and on the Gallipoli Peninsula, ashore and also afloat. I for one know the splendid mettle of the British fighting man and know whet he can do, for I was with him in South Africa during a very busy period of the Boer War fifteen years ago. But over here we yearn to have those others give the lie, as if they will they so well can do, to those German sympathizers here, as well as in other lands now neutral,' who sneer at the lack of spirit as apparently testified to in the need of effort by your Govern- ment to arouse the nation as a whole.
Do not dismiss me as a mere fault-finder who writes of what he knows not of. I write only as one of a great multitude who wish our own people also would wake up to a full realization of what a menace to the whole civilized world is this dripping sword of Prussian militarism.—I am, Sir, &c., FREDERICK HOPPIN HOWLAND. Philadelphia, August 12th.
We are touched by the tone of our correspondent's letter, but we feel sure that if he were in England he would quickly realize how very much overdone, nay, how utterly ridiculous, is the talk of our supineness. No one called the Eastern States indifferent during the Civil War, but yet their efforts were not half as great in proportion to population as are ours. They acted far more on the principle of " business as usual" than we have over done.—En. Spectator.]
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