The British Government (which now issues marine insurance) will not insure a British boat to carry food to Holland en route to the starving Belgians; and I hear that no government and no insurance company will write insurance for anything going across the North Sea.

I wonder if the extent and ferocity and danger of this war are fully realized in the United States?
"There is no chance yet effectively to talk of peace[99].

The British believe that their civilization and their Empire are in grave danger.
They are drilling an army of a million men here for next spring; more and more troops come from all the Colonies, where additional enlistments are going on.

They feel that to stop before a decisive result is reached would simply be provoking another war, after a period of dread such as they have lived through the last ten years; a large and increasing proportion of the letters you see are on black-bordered paper and this whole island is becoming a vast hospital and prisoners' camp--all which, so far from bringing them to think of peace, urges them to renewed effort; and all the while the bitterness grows.
"The Straus incident' produced the impression here that it was a German trick to try to shift the responsibility of continuing the war, to the British shoulders.

Mr.Sharp's bare mention of peace in Paris caused the French censor to forbid the transmission of a harmless interview; and our insistence on the Declaration left, for the time being at least, a distinct distrust of our judgment and perhaps even of our good-will.