failures of the Dardanelles expedition, and most unjustly lost his political influence in consequence.

The professional causes can be stated quite summarily. Every soldier who is worth anything thinks the campaign in which he happens to be engaged to be far more important than any other. The campaign in France, even at the end of the first three months, was much the most serious that the British army had ever been engaged in. It was natural, therefore, that the professional interest and 'pull' (if that word is not misunderstood) of the Western campaign were vastly greater than those of any of its rivals.

And lastly, there were the political causes. Opinion in England was very slow to understand the real political causes that made the war; and no wonder, for Germany had done her best to obscure them by invading Belgium and concentrating on the West. Nine men out of ten interpreted Germany's strategy as proof of a deep design on this country. It is very arguable that the turn of England might have come next; but it is none the less true that Germany did not begin the invasion of Belgium and France in order to strike at England. If we can disentangle the political causes of the war from the moral and personal causes, they are to be found almost exclusively in the East. Germany wanted to have the reversion of Turkey. That was why Serbia, the bridge-head between the Central Allies and the East, mattered so much. British opinion, official as well as popular, was slow to understand that, or to realize that Germany's ambition to possess a great empire in the East threatened to alter the moorings of British foreign policy for the past hundred years. So far from opposing these German ambitions, at any rate in the form

in which they had been revealed before the war, England had been on the whole rather sympathetic. She had placed no obstacle in the way of the Bagdad railway scheme; on the contrary an agreement with regard to it between England and Germany had been initialed, though not signed, a few months before the war broke out. Further, English opinion was slower still to understand that there might be opposition between the Chancellor's politics and the strategy of the General Staff. With regard to Balkan politics England's part had been that of a mediator. She had certainly not been anti-German in the conferences that followed the Balkan wars, and for this among other reasons she had declined, in the earlier stages of the dispute, while it was still an issue between Russia and Germany, and before France and Belgium had become involved, to declare herself in regard to the Balkans.

To official England the determining cause of England's participation in the war was France and Belgium; to unofficial England it was Belgium alone. The entry of Turkey into the war later, struck English people rather as an eccentricity of politics than as a fact that might have been foreseen from the first. Similarly, official England fought desperately against the idea that Bulgaria would come in against us. With British attention fixed so firmly on the West it was not surprising that at the first a persistently false view of the real causes of the war was taken in England, and that not only by popular judgment. It took Englishmen a long time before they could be induced to turn their heads away from France and Belgium; and when they did turn round in good earnest, the time had almost gone by when they could take decisive action elsewhere.

THE war has brought America great prosperity. Some hundreds of our citizens have gained great fortunes, some thousands have two dollars to spend where once one sufficed. A hundred millions of us, it is true, have to pay half as much again for the necessities of life. But the sense of money is everywhere. The papers teem with the printed billions of the stock market, and editors flatter their readers with the massive figures of our export trade. This prosperity is neither our fault nor our merit. It arises from circumstances which give us, as a people, acute unhappiness. Not unnaturally, the contrast between the misery of Europe and the overflowing garners of America wins for us foreign envy and dislike. Not unnaturally, it rouses repugnance in the breasts of many onlookers at home. It is not nice to batten on suffering surpassing all the horror which the civilized world has known. It is not nice, and, though the situation is not of our own making, it is not comfortable.

But comfortable or not, the situation has been a test of character. England was driven to make her great decision within three days, while we for almost as many years have been left to find ourselves, swayed by fresh argument, now forward, now back. We have been confronted by a question as difficult to solve morally as intellectually. The steep and thorny way no longer seems to lead straight to certain right, nor the smooth and easy path to wrong. The needle points no longer to the pole. We have hesitated, perplexed. Our critics and the bitterest of all our critics are Americans like the rest of us—say we are complacent. - say we are complacent.

They go further. They say that money is our single goal. Some of them go further still. They say, God help them! that we are content to have the war go on so long as we are paid for it!

It is idle to refute such slander. These are times which heat the blood, and words say more than they mean. But the bitter things Americans have said of America have done more to hurt the understanding of this country by Europe than any single cause. I do not refer to the expression of opinion as to our duty. That is the right of every citizen. I do not refer to any argument of policy or of honor; but I do contemn the constant and virulent indictment of a nation by its own citizens on charges of cowardice and covetousness.

They do not know America. Slow to think, in spite of business training, half-educated in spite of public school, taught for a hundred years to look on Europe as another world, drawing our blood from a score of neutralizing strains, with a passion for peace half sentimental, deeply religious, we were dumbfounded at the first shock of arms. Germany we only vaguely understood. Intellectually, we distrusted her, because in the long warfare between religion and science she had become the stark exemplar of the ultimate and uncompromising faith in material power. Politically, we knew that she was the proximate cause of the war, but we knew that back of that cause were a hundred others; and that centuries of ambition, intrigue, and pillage had left no nation in Europe with a clean inheritance. But when the rape of Belgium came, our sympathies were fixed. The Lusitania massacre, the

butcheries of Armenia, and organized piracy on the high seas made our judgment certain. It was not the cause but the method of the war which made our assurance sure. To Americans, a Teuton victory could only mean in Europe the subversion of everlasting right.

And, as the nation felt, so felt the leader. Trained in English thought, with British blood flowing through him, his mind and spirit disciplined by Burke and Wordsworth, every consideration of birth and education urged him to sympathize with the Allies. But Mr. Wilson was President of the greatest neutral nation. He shared to the full the common American belief that the world can no longer progress except through peace. And the United States, a world in miniature where the nations have joined together as a single people in a supreme experiment in the art of living together, can alone provide a common clearing-house for the discussion of a world-wide pact. As spokesman for America, the President kept the peace and offered, in all sincerity, his offices to the belligerents.

The war dragged its intolerable length along. The President realized, though the public did not, that Germany would not keep permanently the pledges that she had made in regard to neutral lives. Private reports from Germany assured him that submarines were building in the yards of Hamburg and Kiel on a scale which dwarfed all precedent, while the declining morale of the German armies on the western front, and the increasing intensity of suffering among the civilian populations of the Central Powers alike indicated that her submarine campaign would in time be stripped of the last vestige of restriction. The President made an announcement which seemed to wake us from a century of sleep. "This is the last war,' he said in effect, 'in which the United States can remain

neutral.' Scarcely had the reverberation of that celebrated speech died down when we began to perceive, even the traditionalists among us, that the time when the United States must cease to be neutral was not in the next war, but now.

The realization came slowly. It was helped by the interchange of peace terms which the President secured from the belligerents -Berlin's windy words, and the set terms of the Allies. It gathered momentum as the flood of public opinion flowed silently between those who would fight from hate of Germany, and those who would not fight to save the future of the world. The Militarists reviled the Pacifists, and the Pacifists vilified the Militarists, while all the time the country was making up its mind aloof from both.

In a simpler world it once took two to make a quarrel, but at this juncture it cannot seriously be maintained that Germany desires to fight the United States. She has tried to hoodwink neutral nations with the panacea of peace in a world German-shaped and German-led, and she has failed. Her people are suffering acutely and losing confidence in the war. In times of crisis, an autocracy must be dramatic; and now that victories on land are no longer ripe for the harvest, Germany is obliged to continue her undersea warfare, or accept temporary stalemate and the inevitable end.

This compulsion the President appreciated. Sooner or later, the resumption of the unrestricted warfare upon commerce was bound to come, and with it the end of American neutrality. But, whether she fought or whether she kept the peace, America could have but one object the world must be made and kept a decent place to live in. She could not join the Allies in the unrestricted sense. After one hundred and forty years of blessed isolation, she

could not scrap the Great Experiment and snare herself in the web no nation of Europe has ever torn herself free from. It was the President's duty to interpret America to Americans, and to the world, and to make plain on what terms the nation would cast aside the remnants of its own security for the world's sake. Such was the message that the President brought to the Senate, outlining the League of Nations and stating succinctly and dramatically the things for which America was willing to fight. It was a peace message, for Germany had not yet committed herself irrevocably to the policy of destroying and destruction. But the President knew that the crisis was upon us, and only wished this nation and all the nations of the earth to realize that his speech was no expression of personal opinion, but that the deliberate conscience of the United States had spoken through his lips.

The time will come when that speech will be familiar in the mouths of boys, and when, on the last day of school, it will be volleyed through the serried ranks of parents, while the smiling superintendent waits for the wide-collared orator to shout with upraised hand the final phrase: "These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others, and yet they are the principles and policies of forwardlooking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.'

The bare idea that the time is approaching when the United States must play her full part in the world, broke startlingly upon the great mass of Americans. Two years had brought the nation far on its journey, but till now the goal had not been in plain sight. The President's speech had the great advantage that it still, in the public

mind, was a discussion of theory. No act seemed contemplated, and the debate was unprejudiced by the responsibility of immediate decision. The country pondered, and began to understand.

Informed observers expected that the German onslaught would come in the spring; but it was on the first day of February that the Imperial government finally threw down the gage. America's part was already taken: the German ambassador was dismissed, and the final preparations begun.

Very, very slowly it has all come to pass. The breach in public opinion which, two years ago, cut to the heart of the nation, has narrowed steadily, till the chasm has become a crack. Even on the surface there is less of discord and more of purpose, for in the midst of noisy confusion of thought and speech, certain truths stand distinctly out. In the forefront is the conviction which comes to candid minds that nothing has been left undone to keep an honorable peace. For the first time a great nation has not allowed itself to consider insult a cause for war. The phrase which is a commonplace of democratic civilization, 'There are times when a nation is too proud to fight,' has been lent pith and meaning by resolute refusal to permit the impudence of an ambassador or the crass insolence of the government which accredited him, to make one hundred and seventy million people suffer the consequences of their brutal manners. And worse, infinitely, than any speech, was borne with only solemn warning. Long and harshly has Germany abused our patience, but that sufferance has not been lost. As we confront this conflict, every American knows that what could be borne has been borne, and patience (the spirit of history called by another name) has taken for us, as a people, a new significance. We feel its influence in the

righteousness of a cause which it has guided, and in the power of a nation which it has unified.

And another thing which stands forth in relief is this. In a war involving the nations of five continents, the United States alone fights without expectation, without desire for reward other than the common security of the seven seas. For herself alone she demands absolutely nothing. She enters the struggle purely for a world idea. France, most heroic of nations, fights for her life; Russia for power; Italy and Roumania for territory; unhappy Serbia and Belgium because their rights as nations are destroyed; England because her empire, even her existence, is at stake; the Central Powers, from a coarse mingling of fear and greed; but if we fight, we fight because a world ordered like this one is intolerable to all, remote and near. In such a world, security, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are forever impossible. Thus the isolation which has kept physical guard over us for a century still protects us morally on the threshold of war. Though the last barriers of space are broken down, our minds are insulated from the passion wrought by fear. Among us as a people there is no hatred of Germany, because there is no terror of Germany. With all our indignation at the monstrous crimes of the war, we are curiously dispassionate, ready in the extremest cases to make some allowance, still feeling, in Lincoln's phrase, charity for all.

What, then, is our plain duty? Militarily, on joining the Allies, we must join them wholeheartedly, completely. Our navy must be their navy, and our vast edifice of cash and credit must double their resources at a single stroke. This does not mean that we must sign their treaties, intrench ourselves within their new tariff walls, further their ambitions, and for a full generation beyond all lives now living, live at enmity

with the nations of middle Europe. Yet it might well mean a league between the great and sympathetic democracies of the modern world, Great Britain, France, and the United States - a league open in future to any nation which should subscribe to the covenant of peace and assume the responsibility of enforcing it. To such a treaty of universal promise the United States might indeed be party. By singular paradox, it seems given to us to fight Germany that her people may be saved; to help the Allies, not to Berlin and Vienna, but to peace and security. We Americans shall remember that a majority of Social Democrats in the Reichstag is worth more to civilization than a dozen victories on the Somme front. We shall not forget that it is the practical expression of American sympathy and the support of American conviction which will hearten the democratic masses of Britain to stand firm for a peace of moderation, whereby no nation shall be deprived of the essentials of national self-government and self-respect. We have not suffered the long agony of Europe; we are spared the fury born of hopelessness of heart. By every consideration of blessed fortune, of creed, of understanding of the past, of hope for the future, we must be wise, moderate, never ceasing to seek, at the opportune time, for a negotiated peace that will lead to Peace.

As these lines are written, the word is not yet spoken, the deed is not yet done. But the long, slow waiting, the wrestling of the spirit within us, has for many of us made the sense of physical ease, of immunity from the world's torture, almost intolerable. For such a war as this, there can be no moral equivalent.' In a dull and blunted sense, we feel that longing the disciples felt when they beheld the Master on the tree, and longed to hang there by his side. Our hearts and minds are sick with fever