And there is one thing more I should have said, viz.:--All your life and all my life, we have cultivated the opinion at home that we had nothing to do with the rest of the world, nothing to do with Europe in particular--and in our political life our hayseed spokesmen have said this over and over again till many people, perhaps most people, came really to believe that it was true.

Now this aloofness, this utterly detached attitude, was a pure invention of the shirt-sleeve statesman at home.

I have long concluded, for other reasons as well as for this, that these men are the most ignorant men in the whole world; more ignorant--because they are viciously ignorant--than the Negro boys who act as caddies at Pinehurst; more ignorant than the inmates of the Morganton Asylum; more ignorant than sheep or rabbits or idiots.

They have been the chief hindrances of our country--worse than traitors, in effect.

It is they, in fact, who kept our people ignorant of the Germans, ignorant of the English, ignorant of our own history, ignorant of ourselves.