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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: unstrung average person, who had not long before read that remark of our
President's made on the morrow of the Lusitania: that there is such a
thing as being too proud to fight; had read during the ensuing weeks
those notes wherein we stood committed by our Chief Magistrate to a
verbal slinking away and sitting down under it. Can you wonder? If the
mere memory of those days of our humiliation stabs me even now, I need no
one to tell me (though I have been told) what England, what France, felt
about us then, what it must have been like for Americans who were in
England and France at that time. No: the average person in great trouble
cannot rise above the trouble and survey the truth and be just. In
English eyes our Government--and therefore all of us--failed in 1914--
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