If English respect be worth preserving at all, it can be preserved only by immediate action.

Any other course than immediate severing of diplomatic relations with both Germany and Austria will deepen the English opinion into a conviction that the Administration was insincere when it sent the _Lusitania_ notes and that its notes and protests need not be taken seriously on any subject.

And English opinion is allied opinion.

The Italian Ambassador[12] said to me, 'What has happened?
The United States of to-day is not the United States I knew fifteen years ago, when I lived in Washington.' French officers and members of the Government who come here express themselves even more strongly than do the British.

The British newspapers to-day publish translations of ridicule of the United States from German papers." _To the President_ London, January 5, 1916.
DEAR MR.