It had not seemed advisable to have any general public discussion of it in England till the war should end: nobody had time now to give to it.
As he knew no precedent for belligerents to call in a third party when they met to end a war, so he knew no precedent for any outside government to protest against the invasion of a country by a Power that had signed a treaty to guarantee the integrity of the invaded country--no precedent, that is to say, for the United States to protest against the invasion of Belgium.

"That precedent," I said, "was found in Hysteria." Lord Bryce, who had just returned from a visit to the British headquarters in France, hardly dared hope for the end of the war till next year; and the intervening time between now and the end would be a time, he feared, of renewed atrocities and increasing hatred.

He cited the killing of Captain Fryatt of the _Brussels_ and the forcible deportation of young women from Lille and other towns in the provinces of France occupied by the Germans.
The most definite idea that he had touching American-British relations was the fear that the anti-British feeling in the United States would become stronger and would outlast the war.

"It is organized," he said.
"The disaffected Germans and the disaffected Irish are interested in keeping it up." He asked what effect I thought the Presidential campaign would have on this feeling.

He seemed to have a fear that somehow the campaign would give an occasion for stirring it up even more.
"Good-bye.