ital. They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her, and that, not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment and surprise whether there was any community in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much as we had desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice. This flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.

But that is only part of the story. We know now as clearly as we knew before we were ourselves engaged that we are not the enemies of the German people and that they are not our enemies. They did not originate or desire this hideous war or wish that we should be drawn into it; and we are vaguely conscious that we are fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, as well as our own. They are themselves in the grip of the same sinister power that has now at last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us. The whole world is at war because the whole world is in the grip of that power and is trying out the great battle which shall determine whether it is to be brought under its mastery or fling itself free.

The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men have never regarded nations as peoples, men, women, and children of like blood and frame as themselves, for whom governments existed and in whom governments had their life. They have regarded them merely as serviceable organizations which they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own purpose. They have regarded the smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools and instruments of domination. Their purpose has long been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to whom that purpose was incredible, paid little attention;

regarded what German professors expounded in their classrooms and German writers set forth to the world as the goal of German policy as rather the dream of minds detached from practical affairs, as preposterous private conceptions of German destiny, than as the actual plans of responsible rulers; but the rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while what concrete plans, what welladvanced intrigues lay back of what the professors and the writers were saying, and were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the thrones of Balkan states with German princes, putting German oflicers at the service of Turkey to drill her armies and make interest with her government, developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon Serbia were a mere single step in a plan which compassed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped those demands might not arouse Europe, but they meant to press them whether they did or not, for they thought themselves ready for the final issue of arms.

Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power and political control across the very center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. Austria-Hungary, indeed, was to become part of the central German Empire, absorbed and dominated by the same forces and influences that had originally cemented the German states themselves. The dream had its heart at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else! It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It contemplated binding together racial and political units which could be kept together only by force,-Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, Armenians,-the proud states of Bohemia and Hungary, the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, the indomitable Turks, the subtle peoples of the East. These peoples did not wish to be united. They ardently desired to direct their own affairs, would be satisfied only by undisputed independence. They could be kept quiet only by the presence or the constant threat of armed men. They would live under a common power only by sheer compulsion and await the day of revolution.

But the German military statesmen had

reckoned with all that and were ready to deal with it in their own way.

And they have actually carried the greater part of that amazing plan into execution! Look how things stand. Austria is at their mercy. It has acted, not upon its own initiative or upon the choice of its own people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the war began. Its people now desire peace, but cannot have it until leave is granted from Berlin. The so-called Central Powers are in fact but a single power. Serbia is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a moment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will, and Roumania is overrun. The Turkish armies, which Germans trained, are serving Germany, certainly not themselves, and the guns of German warships lying in the harbor at Constantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day that they have no choice but to take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian Gulf the net is spread.

Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace that has been manifested from Berlin ever since the snare was set and sprung? Peace, peace, peace has been the talk of her Foreign Office for now a year and more; not peace upon her own initiative, but upon the initiative of the nations over which she now deems herself to hold the advantage. A little of the talk has been public, but most of it has been private. Through all sorts of channels it has come to me, and in all sorts of guises, but never with the terms disclosed which the German Government would be willing to accept.

That government has other valuable pawns in its hands besides those I have mentioned. It still holds a valuable part of France, though with slowly relaxing grasp, and practically the whole of Belgium. Its armies press close upon Russia and overrun Poland at their will. It cannot go further; it dare not go back. It wishes to close its bargain before it is too late and it has little left to offer for the pound of flesh it will demand.

The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has brought them. If they fall back or are forced back an inch, their power both abroad and at home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power at home they are thinking about now more than their power abroad. It is that power which is trembling under their very feet; and deep fear has entered their hearts. They have

but one chance to perpetuate their military power or even their controlling political influence. If they can secure peace now with the immense advantages still in their hands which they have up to this point apparently gained, they will have justified themselves before the German people: they will have gained by force what they promised to gain by it: an immense expansion of German power, an immense enlargement of German industrial and commercial opportunities. Their prestige will be secure, and with their prestige their political power. If they fail, their people will thrust them aside; a government accountable to the people themselves will be set up in Germany as it has been in England, in the United States, in France, and in all the great countries of the modern time except Germany. If they sueceed, they are safe and Germany and the world are undone; if they fail, Germany is saved and the world will be at peace. If they succeed, America will fall within the menace. We and all the rest of the world must remain armed, as they will remain, and must make ready for the next step in their aggression; if they fail, the world may unite for peace and Germany may be of the union.

Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany do not hesitate to use any agency that promises to effect their purpose, the deceit of the nations? Their present particular aim is to deceive all those who throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self-government of nations; for they see what immense strength the forces of justice and of liberalism are gathering out of this war. They are er ploying liberals in their enterprise. They are using men, in Germany and without, as their spokesmen whom they have hitherto despised and oppressed, using them for their own destruction,-Socialists, the leaders of labor, the thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. Let them once succeed and these men, now their tools, will be ground to powder beneath the weight of the great military empire they will have set up; the revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all succor or coöperation in western Europe and a counter revolution fostered and supported; Germany herself will lose her chance of freedom; and all Europe will arm for the next, the final struggle.

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively conducted in this country than in

Russia and in every country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of the Imperial German Government can get access. That government has many spokesmen here, in places high and low. They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions; set England at the center of the stage and talk of her ambition to assert economic dominion throughout the world; appeal to our ancient tradition of isolation in the politics of the nations; and seek to undermine the government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.

But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in every accent. It is only friends and partisans of the German Government whom we have already identified who utter these thinly disguised disloyalties. The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a People's War, a war for freedom and justice and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the German people themselves included; and that with us rests the choice to break through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and the most irresistible armaments. -a power to which the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of which political freedom must wither and perish.

For us there is but one choice. We have made it. Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a new luster. Once more we shall make good with our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face of our people.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF AMERICA'S ENTRY

VISCOUNT GREY

[From the Preface to America and Freedom, 1917]

The entry of the United States is a tremendous fact even when considered only in the limited aspect of its direct effect upon the war... But there is another aspect of the entry of the United States into the war that is much greater, of deeper significance, and more far-reaching consequence. It is to be seen in the reasons and spirit of the decision taken by the president and the nation. The public utterances of President Wilson when announcing the decision and subsequently are full of it and are inspired by it. The United States have departed from the policy of isolation not from favor to one set of combatants against another, real and strong though the sympathy with some of the Allies has been in large sections of the American people since the outbreak of the

war.

This has not been the motive that forced the tremendous national decision, but a growing conviction which gradually became settled, deep, and paramount, that this terrible war is a desperate and critical struggle against something evil and intensely dangerous to moral law, to international faith, to everything that is essential if different nations are to live together in the world in equal freedom and friendship. The will to power-it is a German phrase has shown in the course of this war that it knows neither mercy, pity, nor limits. Militarism is one quality of it, and it stands for things that all democracies, if they wish to remain free and to be a part of a world that is free, must hate.

This conviction and a sense that the old barriers of the world are broken down by modern conditions, that the cause of humanity is one, and that no nation so great and free as the United States could stand aside in this crisis without sacrificing its honor and losing its soul, are so we believe the real motive and cause of the decision of the United States. Democracies are reluctant to take such decisions until they are attacked or until their own material interests are directly and deeply involved. and the United States did not take the decision till German action in the war made it imperative; but then they took it with a clearness, an emphasis, and a declaration of principle that will

be one of the landmarks and shining examples of all human history. Comparison may be made between the entry of the United States into the war and that of the British people. There is some resemblance, but there is a difference. The outrageous invasion of Belgium, involving special and separate treaty obligations, left Great Britain at the outset no alternative; her decision had to be sudden; the whole people felt at once that there was no honorable way of avoiding war. Articles have been written since to show that the interest of Great Britain was directly involved, that though Belgium and France were attacked, she, too, was threatened, and all that is true. Numerous public utterances in Germany since the War began have disclosed that the German purpose was to subject not only Belgium and France, but also Great Britain, to German predominance. But the British people had not time at the outset to consider where their interest lay; had it not been so they would have taken time to consider and to argue, but as things were, honor was so clearly and peremptorily challenged, and sympathy so deeply outraged by the initial action of Germany that there was no time for consideration and no place for argument. This it was that made the decision of the British people so practically unanimous, so quick, and so thorough. The decision of the United States was slow and deliberate; it is apparently not less unanimous and thorough, and each decision will have its own impressiveness in history.

On our first entry into the War we were, as the United States now is, free to decide our own part and our own terms of peace. When Japan entered the War the obligations of the Anglo-Japanese alliance to make war and peace in common came into effect; then the agreement of September, 1914, made mutual and binding agreements between ourselves and France and Russia, and our position now is that of the other nations who are parties to the agreement of September, 1914. The United States are independent of that agreement; this is a difference, important and definite, though, I believe, it will be small in practical effect compared with the deep underlying identity of view, principle, and feeling.

President Wilson said the other day that this is a conflict for "human liberty." That is what the Allies have been made by German action in the War to feel more and more deeply, and this feeling is a greater

bond of union than anything else. There is one more thing to be added. I was talking the other day to a man who had been some two years at the front and was home for a ten days' leave. Of all feelings, those that have the most right to be considered with attention and deference are the feelings of the men who are risking their lives and undergoing the awful trial and suffering of trench warfare. In this man's feeling there was no hatred and no passion; there was great weariness and great longing for the end of the War, but an intense desire to see the War end in such a way that, if he survived, the rest of his life-he is a young man-should be free from war and the threats of war. That, too, as I understand, is President Wilson's policy and purpose— human liberty and secure peace.

There is but one other point on which I would touch; it is the prospective relations between Great Britain and the United States. Mr. Balfour's mission has, we hope, done something to make it felt in the United States that there is real community of ideas, sentiments, and sympathy. This country was fortunate in having Mr. Balfour to represent it on such a mission at such a time, and he very likely did more to promote understanding of us in America than any one else could have done in the time. And the more closely the two peoples come into contact, the better they get to know each other, the more I believe it will be apparent to each not only that they speak the same language, but that they use it to mean the same things, that they both have the same idea of freedom and liberty, and desire the same sort of world in which to live.

There is no reason in the forms of a constitutional Monarchy why the British people should not be as free, as truly and thoroughly a democracy, as any republic can be. The American colonies of the eighteenth century by the War of Independence established not only independence but democracy. The states of Europe, whose internal conditions were then different from those in America, were not yet ready for the same measure of democracy. Russia is only just beginning to establish it, but the change there promises to be thorough. All the other great States of Europe, except Germany (I omit Austria-Hungary because it is more impossible than ever to define the internal conditions of that mixed Empire), are now in form and in spirit and in fact democratic. Great Britain has attained it not less surely

and thoroughly than others by the process of political evolution.

In all dealings I have had with Americans, official and unofficial, I have felt that the outlook upon national and individual life was the same. No written agreement is necessary to draw the two nations together or to keep them in friendship; what is needed is that each should continually see in the utterances of representative men, and in the writings of the press, not the eccentricities and the fringe, not the froth and eddies, but the main deep current of public opinion in both countries.

That is what we feel about President Wilson's recent announcements. They satisfy, they carry conviction, that make us feel that we really know what he thinks and why he thinks it and how firmly he grasps it; and we hope that the response from public men and from the press on this side is making the President and the people of the United

States feel that we really do respond earnestly and truly; that the sentiments and principies expressed by him are ours also; and that in what he has said of this war and of his hopes for the future he has spoken what is also in our minds and hearts.

If the millions of dear lives that have been given in this war are to have been given not in vain, if there is to be any lasting compensation for the appalling suffering of the last three years, the defeat of the Prussian will to power, however it is brought about, will not by itself be enough.

Out of this defeat must come something constructive, some moral change in international relations; and the entry of the United States of America into the War, in the spirit and with the principles that have inspired their action, is an invaluable and, I trust, a sure and unconquerable guarantee that in the peace and after the peace these hopes will be realized.

A NEW FORCE IN POLITICS

CARLETON HAYES

[From British Social Politics, 1913]

Two historical factors have conspired to bring about in our own day a fundamental change in the convictions of many thoughtful persons as to the proper scope and functions of government. In the first place the French Revolution not only abolished legal class privilege and defined civil "rights" uniform for all citizens, but it sounded the death knell of absolutism; and its great dreams of individual liberty and social equality and political brotherhood provided a powerful stimulus, throughout the nineteenth century, to ever-recurring and increasingly successful movements throughout Europe for the extension of the suffrage and the removal of legal disabilities in society. In France, political democracy was gradually evolved through kaleidoscopic changes of Legitimate Monarchy, July Monarchy, Republic, Empire, and Republic. In England, a like process was painfully in evidence during Peterloo Massacres, and Chartist riots, and Reform agitations. In

both countries, before the close of the century, the electorate had supposedly attained a democratic mastery over one great institution-the government.

Of greater importance to us than the more or less theoretical principles proclaimed and exemplified by the French Revolution are the very practical problems created by that series of marvelous mechanical inventions and adaptations which has passed under the name of the Industrial Revolution. Within the last hundred years the whole social fabric has undergone a complete transformation, until it has brought forth present day capitalism and the factory system and a wage earning proletariat huddled in great towns; and novel facts have presented themselves which could not be faced in the manner of the eighteenth century nor run away from as the laissezfaire economists of the last century would have done. So long as highly developed industrial states-countries directly affected by the Industrial Revolution-pursued a frank policy of non-intervention, the capitalist class seemed to grow wealthier and more powerful, while the mass of wage earners seemed to grow relatively poorer and