CHAPTER XLIV NEUTRALITY AND PREPAREDNESS War THE murder of the Austrian Archduke was interpreted as an episode in the Pan-Slav struggle in the Balkans to obstruct the Pan-German pressure toward Con- The World stantinople and the East, with its accompanying idea of a Central Europe under German influence. By annexing Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 the Dual Monarchy had added fuel to the Slavic grievances in general and those of Serbia in particular. The suspicion that the murder was due to a Serbian plot gave pretext for an Austrian attack to remove forever the obstacles to Teutonic advance in the region of the Bosphorus. Great Britain was on the verge of civil war, with Ulster armed and angry. Russia appeared to be in the throes of revolutionary movements, the outgrowth of the partial revolution of 1905. France gave superficial evidence of decay within her government and army. The United States, far removed from European concerns, was on the verge of war with Mexico and perhaps Japan. An overbearing ultimatum addressed by Austria to Serbia on July 23, 1914, was expected to produce not satisfaction, but a cause for war. Five days later the bombardment of Belgrade began and within the next few days the World War became a fact. One by one the European powers were drawn in. Russia mobilized in defense of Serbia and France followed to be prepared for contingencies in the event of a Russian war. The German Empire, which had approved the ultimatum in advance and underwritten its consequences, mobilized against Russia and France, and exerted all its diplomatic powers to persuade England to stand aloof. The British fleet, assembled for a great review off Spithead on July 20, was held together after the review in control of the English Channel. The great powers went to war beginning August 1. On the following day the German forces crossed the Belgian frontier en route to France. The invasion of Belgium, a neutralized state, whose status Germany like the other European powers was under contract to respect, aroused the world as no other fact since the Crusades had done. It shifted the issue at once from the immediate merits of the controversy between Teutons and Slavs to the larger issue of world peace, and shifted the original combatants in the struggle, Austria and Serbia, to an inferior rank, as the German Empire assumed the position of aggressor against a peaceful world for the carrying out of her military ambitions. The Belgian forts, Liège and the rest, retarded Germany's advance enough to spoil the scheme for a surprise blow upon France and the seizure of Paris before Russia could complete her mobilization. Five weeks later Joffre checked the German armies at the Marne and Europe settled down to a war of exhaustion that involved the world. American neutrality The course for the United States to take in this war had long been established by precedent and theory. The modern doctrine of neutrality was an American idea that Washington had conceived and Jefferson phrased in 1793. The American Neutrality Act of 1794 was the foundation of all such acts wherever they existed, and the progress of international law thereafter was due largely to the insistence of neutral states, generally under American leadership and demanding that belligerents respect their rights and property, and leave them alone. American insistence upon the rights of neutrals included also an acceptance of the duties of neutrals to belligerents. Proclamations of neutrality were issued by the United States as succeeding powers entered the war, and on August 18 the President addressed the nation upon its attitude to the struggle. It was too early to form any clear view of the general drift of the war, and authentic stories of its conduct were hardly yet available. It still appeared to be a war of Europe which Americans might interpret as the normal outcome of the competitive military prepara tions of the combatants. From the information at hand the President could say that "it is entirely within our own choice what its effects upon us will be"; and he went on to urge American citizens, drawn most of them from the nations at war, to keep down their passions, restrain their partisanship, and think first of the United States, "a nation that neither sits in judgment upon others, nor is disturbed in her own councils, and which keeps herself fit and free to do what is honest and disinterested, and truly serviceable for the peace of the world." services The first acts of neutrality comprised friendly services to the belligerents. The American Ambassadors at London, Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, and Rome Friendly were accepted as custodians of the deserted embassies of the various belligerents, and were at once engaged in relief work for the benefit of distressed non-combatants who found themselves in enemy country when the war broke out. As the German troops overran Belgium and the National Government retreated from Brussels, Brand Whitlock and the Spanish Ambassador remained at their posts as Washburne had done at Paris in 1870, not only to represent their nations, but to serve mankind. The American embassies, undermanned at best, organized emergency groups of assistants, picking up Americans who chanced to be in Europe and using them in the relief work. Thousands of Americans found themselves stranded in a world at war. To relieve these an American warship was immediately dispatched with a store of American gold that Congress appropriated at once. The relief of belligerent subjects was hardly started before there began to pour across the Belgian frontiers and across the Channel into England a stream of Belgian refugees. Dispossessed by a lawless invader, with their homes destroyed and lives needlessly lost, the condition of the Belgians helped to crystallize neutral opinion as to the merits of the war. The American relief committee in London was organized under the leadership of an American mining engineer, Herbert C. Hoover, and out of it there developed in October the C.R.B. — the Commission for the Relief of Belgium - into whose hands the life of the Belgian civil population was entrusted. American public opinion was stunned by the fact of war, and accepted with approval the statements of neutrality, which were harmonious at once with American Censorship policy and with the conditions of general igganda norance respecting European affairs that pre and propa vailed over most of the United States. It was some months before Colonel Roosevelt and his friends voiced the contrary doctrine, that "neutrality is at best a drab-colored, selfish, and insignificant virtue, even when it is a virtue; and it is often a particularly obnoxious vice." It became difficult to get authentic facts upon which to form a judgment. Newspaper correspondents were not welcome in the war zone, official censors colored the stories that were given out, and the British Government controlled the European cable terminals and mails. Propaganda took the place of news so far as the belligerents were concerned, and American opinion became skeptical as to the reliability of facts as printed. On August 10 a group of Americans of German ancestry brought out the first issue of the weekly, The Fatherland, in the interest of the Central Powers. poem directed to "William II, Prince of Peace," the editor himself cried out: "But thy great task will not be done Until thou vanquish utterly The Norman brother of the Hun, In a The German propaganda in America devoted itself to a blackening of the fame of England, and to a unification of the Germans in the United States. There were of these, in 1910, 8,712,149 either born in Germany or with one parent born there. Since the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia and the formation of the National German-American Alliance in 1902 the organization of this group had been tightened and extended. The Fatherland attempted to attach to it on the basis of anti-British feeling the Americans of Irish extraction, who, since the Fenian movement, had consist ently opposed acts of agreement with Great Britain and who were already partially organized in the American Truth Society to fight the rapprochement due to the termination of a hundred years of peace. On the other side of the debate centers of influence were soon visible, a few inspired by sympathy with England, but most of them judging the war from the basis of Pro-Allies the invasion of Belgium, the expulsion of non- opinion combatants, the reign of frightfulness at Louvain and elsewhere, and the deliberate bombardment of the cathedral at Rheims. For these the cause of the Central Powers was a wicked cause. When on September 5, 1914, Russia, Great Britain, and France signed an agreement that none of the three would "conclude peace separately during the present war" and became by this fact the Allies, the Americans who detested the acts of Germany became known as the "pro-Allies." The great body of Americans in 1914, however, stood aloof from the active controversy of propaganda, content with their traditional neutrality. The Great War, coming on top of the canal tolls dispute and the Mexican crisis, disturbed the tranquillity with which Congress applied itself to the legislative tasks before it. In spite of the distractions thus promoted, the antitrust legislation was advanced to a conclusion, and on October 24 Congress adjourned after the longest continuous session on record. The Clayton Anti-Trust Law was completed, and the Federal Trade Commission was immediately launched, while the federal reserve system authorized the year before was ready to open its reserve banks in November. The Tariff Act of 1913 was in operation, but called for unforeseen amendment because of the war in Europe. Imports from the Central Powers were immediately War restricted by the Allied blockades while Allied revenue shipping found itself speedily diverted from American traffic to troop transport and other national service. American imports fell away and the tariff revenue derived from them was lessened nearly ninety million dol legislation |