I have sought to learn the objects Germany has in this war from the mouths of her own spokesmen, and to deal as frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me.

We have ourselves proposed no injustice, no aggression. We are ready, whenever the final reckoning is made, to be just to the German people, deal fairly with the German power, as with all others. There can be no difference between peoples in the final judgment, if it is indeed to be a righteous judgment. To propose anything but justice, even-handed and dispassionate justice, to Germany at any time, whatever the outcome of the war, would be to renounce and dishonor our own cause, for we ask nothing that we are not willing to accord.

He went further and reopened the door which the German commanders in Russia clanged shut "when we proposed such a peace:"

For myself, I am ready, ready still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just and honest peace at any time that it is sincerely purposed a peace in which the strong and the weak shall fare alike.

Here, then, were the main elements in President Wilson's moral and political offensive. Here, also, they became basic elements in his military offensive, the other edge of his blade. And in making this clear he once more spoke over the heads of the German general staff to the civilians of the Central Empires at the same time that he mustered the American civilian soldiers afresh to their task:

It has been with this thought that I have sought to learn from those who spoke for Germany whether it was justice or dominion and the execution of their own will upon the other nations of the world that the German leaders were seeking. They have answeredanswered in unmistakable terms. They have avowed that it was not justice, but dominion and the unhindered execution of their own will. The avowal has not come from Germany's statesmen. It has come from her military leaders, who are her real rulers.

How these "military masters" overrode the German civilian delegates at Brest-Litovsk, how in Russia, in Finland, in Ukraine and Rumania they sought to "impose their power and exploit everything for their own use and aggrandizement," how they would do the same thing on the western front if they had the chance, how they might be willing to promote a false peace in the West if they could have free hand in making the Slavic lands, the Baltic peninsula and Turkey "subject to their will and ambition, and build upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy that

they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy," were set forth by President Wilson as so many elements in a program in which "our ideals of justice and humanity and liberty, the principle of free self-determination of nations, upon which all the modern world insists, can play no part."

That program once carried out, America and all who care or dare to stand with her must arm and prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the world-a mastery in which the rights of common men, the rights of women and of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden under foot and disregarded and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right begin again at its beginning.

And in conclusion he said:

.. Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one response possible from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.

Operating in the workaday field, rather than in that of official statesmanship, British labor was employing a formula kindred to that of the American President. There has been a great deal of discussion of morale. Much of it has had that naïve ring to it with which some people discuss welfare work as a solution of the labor problem. British workers did not take stock in cigarettes or soupkitchens or hate as a method of building up morale either among soldiers or citizens. They were out for justice-justice first of all in their own war aims. Rightly or wrongly, they believed that if (in 1917) the war aims given out in December had been given out in May, there would have been a good chance that the provisional government under Kerensky would not have gone down or the cave-in on the Russian front resulted. They believed that the same type of mind which fell short there and which expressed itself in the secret treaties would never weaken the bonds which held the German working people in leash to their overlords. "How," they asked, "are you to counter the German imperialists at home if Allied labor does not make clear, by forcing a united unimperialistic statement of war aims from the Allies, that the German working-classes will not be opening the way to the destruction of Germany if they revolt, or threaten to do so; how if Allied labor does not make clear that it can and will hold its governments to this

course; how if it does not endeavor to get these things across to the German socialists?"

In his Washington's Birthday address on February 22, 1918, Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, was quoted as saying:

Shall we meet in council with these men [German labor], gaining from us our confidence, swerving us from the path of duty, trying to influence us that the governments of these democracies are, after all, only capitalistic? I have said, and I say in the name of the American labor movement: "You can't talk peace with us now. Either you smash your autocracy, or, by the gods, we will smash it for you. Before you talk peace terms, get back from France, get back from Belgium, into Germany, and then we will talk peace."

This left the British labor leaders cold. They believed themselves at work on a procedure which would do more than swashbuckling to achieve the very ends Gompers desired. They understood the American feeling, as they went through it what seemed to them ages before. They were scarcely of a temper to wait inactive while American labor should go through a similar tuition. Their own experience with the grapples of government control in war-time had given them a notion of the Prussian hold upon the German workers. British labor was freer-and proposed to use its fuller measure of freedom so that the less free might act in turn. You heard among them little of atrocities linked with the civilian common soldiers who now made up the bulk of the German armies. That motive, fanned too hard earlier in the war, had burned itself out. They thought the men the British were fighting against were much like themselves, caught in the grip of war, neither fiends nor made of other clay. So long as the German workers were held by powers greater than themselves to an assault upon democracy and were thrown at the western workers, so long would these shoot and be shot.

The British was the antithesis of the Russian method of bringing about a change. They did not propose to down tools or down arms at home as the method of bringing the German workers around. They believed that the German armies would be in Paris and in London quick enough if the French and English workers downed tools or arms. The Russian developments confirmed them in this belief. But, on the other hand, they were equally of the belief that the English and French armies would make for Berlin if the German workers revolted. So, therefore, they were engaged in the slow process of forcing the Allied governments to come out singly and unitedly in a statement for an unimperialistic settle

ment, in the process of showing that the Allied working classes had enough strength to hold them to it, and in the process of getting word of these things through to the German workers in a way which would carry conviction.

Their first objective was to get unanimity among the great British labor organizations. That was reached in December, 1917.

Their second objective was to get unanimity among the labor and socialist groups among the Allies. That was reached in February, 1918.

Their third objective was to promote the convincing espousal by the organized German workers of those principles of a people's peace they had made their own. On that hung their fourth objective to get unanimity among the workers of all Europe on a charter of democracy embodying those principles which they might press as the basis for an enduring settlement of the war; a war which, because of those principles, they supported.

That was the British labor sword-or ploughshare, as you will.

CHAPTER XI

ANOTHER ENGLISH ROUND TABLE

RAMSAY MACDONALD was speaking. Before him was a great well of pipe smoke through which you could see, row upon row, the upturned faces of broad-cheeked British labor men. Above them in a horseshoe was a gallery of cheering spectators. He stood on a drop-balcony at the end, which was like the frog of the horseshoe at a narrow table at which sat a dozen men facing the body of the hall. There was the Belgian minister of Intendence; there was a former member of the British War Cabinet; there was the unrecognized ambassador of the latest Russian government; there were two members of the French parliament; and several times that number of English commoners. They were all labor men or socialists.

"See us here," MacDonald was saying, and he brought down the house, "shoulder to shoulder; disagreeing; comrades in our disagreements. And when you think that the extension to this table by a few feet, the addition to these chairs by half a dozen, is all that it means to bring the International together, in the name of God, let us think of this."

In these phrases, at the first evening meeting at Nottingham, he gave delegates to the Labour Party convention a picture which stuck in their minds-which was referred to again and again in the discussions of the next three days. He had taken his fellow members in the executive of the British Labour Party and the fraternal delegates sitting at the speakers' table beside them, and turned them into what the exhibit experts call a three-dimension piece. He visualized in the chairs, the table, the men beside it, something undreamed of in the older philosophies of war, but something cherished and familiar to the gospel of working class brotherhood, as spoken in a score of tongues since the days of Karl Marx. He visualized an international labor conference in the midst of war, threshing out their differences either to agreement or to a final unbridged cleavage; an international labor conference at the time of the settlement of the war, whether it were near or far, standing out for a workers' peace.

"We do not want a peace celebrated by sobs," he went on,