Although the Treaty of Vienna definitely provided for religious and cultural freedom for the Poles that then came under Prussian dominion, the use of Polish at public meetings is prohibited. Since 1873 German alone may be taught in the national schools; teachers, under a decree of 1899, may not speak Polish in their own homes. Teaching the language and possessing Polish literature are crimes punishable with imprisonment. The Poles are unequal before the law, and the attitude of their rank and file (many of the "nobility" find themselves in a most congenial setting) toward Prussia expresses the inequality. As Plato points out in the first book of the "Republic," there must be honor even among thieves if thieves are to make common cause against honest men. How much the more amongst honest men if they are to live in freedom and safety! And that the system of exclusive sovereignties makes every nation think of every other nation as a thief, he who runs may read in history. Only if the common bases of the common life, only if the world's highways, harbors, raw materials, and undeveloped

lands are possessed and used in common, only if a violation of community can be swiftly and adequately punished, can peoples be free for the life and the pursuit of the happiness appropriate to each according to its kind. In a word we require no political nostrums to secure lasting peace. We need only shift our attention, and profit by our own example. We need only open the national windows.

How may this be done? Well, turn to the conduct of the war itself, particularly to its failures, for answer. In the past three years there have arisen occasions when complete military victory might perhaps have been attained by the armies of Democracy. Such victory is indispensable, and we must go on fighting until it is won; we must go on killing yet more and more of the most hopeful and bravest of our blood, and leaving more and more of the future in the hands of men too old for preoccupation with anything but the past, in the hands of backwardlooking men. Why? Because, in truth, though the democracies have been fighting a single enemy, they have not been fighting a single war. Between Russia and Ru

mania, between Italy and Serbia, even between France and Russia, between England and France, there have been conflicts of desire toward ownership. Each nation was fighting first for its own ends, then for the common end. Lacking a common end, there could not be a common front; lacking a common front, there could not be final victory. So our soldiers paid and our workers paid for the illusion of exclusive sovereignty. So they will continue to pay unless the precarious alliance of the democracies is turned into a real one, into a genuine international organization. It took the defeat of Rumania, the disintegration of Russia, the Italian débâcle to teach us this. And we have still much to learn. And if the whole truth were known, as it will be known, we have also much to teach. Never has a nation entered a war with more unselfish and high-minded purpose than the United States. Never, under such circumstances has one been more disillusioned by the greed, selfishness, political traditionalism and disingenuousness of the governments of some of its Allies. Our men and our means

have been begged for and commanded, our ideals have in effect been flouted and denied. We have been met by diplomacy instead of honesty, evasion instead of straightforward Yea and Nay. It is not merely to the peoples of the Central Empires that President Wilson addresses himself over the

heads of governments. This war is a people's war, and the peoples of the world will need to be their own saviors. The old men of the old school who govern them are incapable by habit and vocation of anything except betraying them into the hands of the old system of which this war is the noblest offspring. Yes, the democracies have still much to learn. As Norman Angell has pointed out again and again, military victory is indispensable, but not sufficient. Only the mobilization of the public opinion of the democracies in behalf of a democratic and lasting peace can actually establish such a peace. The needed mobilization requires common understanding and assent between the democratic powers, particularly between the powers of the West and Russia. The President's message of January 8 rec

ognized this necessity in clear and vigorous terms. It is a commentary on our other Allies as well as on Russia.* Prostrate in a military sense as Russia seems to be, she has been so far the foremost saving and constructive factor for democracy in the whole international situation.

To those who have been following the political history of Europe since the German assault upon civilization began, it must be clear that the Russian revolution has not merely overturned Czardom and its bureaucracy; it has seriously shaken the whole war-breeding structure of secret diplomacy among the Allies. It upset the arrangements of the misguided Paris Conference; it strengthened liberalism in England, France, and Germany; the Bolshevik pub

*"The conception of what is right, of what it is humane and honorable for them to accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness of view, a generosity of spirit and a universal human sympathy which must challenge the admiration of every friend of mankind; and they have refused to compound their ideals or desert others that they themselves may be safe. They call to us to say what it is that we desire, and I believe that the people of the United States would wish me to respond with utter simplicity and frankness. The treatment accorded to Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her need as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy."