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FOREWORD

O my dear friend, Mr. George Bernard Donlin, editor of the Dial, of Chicago, this little essay owes its inception and completion. Early in the fall of 1917 he urged me to set down for the Dial these opinions of a pragmatist on the meaning of the state, its bearing on the nature and hopes of man, and on the possible future of international relations. I have done so, as well as I knew how, amid the stress and confusion of many other enterprises, each with an insistent claim on my attention. What here appears is reprinted substantially as was given to the public in the columns of the Dial. There is much that I should have liked, had circumstances been favorable, to have formulated otherwise, much that needs elaboration and expansion, not a little that since the essay was completed has been invalidated by events.

Its main thesis, however, stands, confirmed and strengthened. It is this: The

propitious future of mankind is in the hands of the armies of the democracies and the radical and labor organizations of the world. The débâcle in Russia has denuded the present German government of the last shred of its hypocrisy. Its peace terms to the Bolsheviki, its nefarious installation and reënforcement of reaction in Finland, in Poland, in the Ukraine and in Rumania, show it set with all its power of arm and head and heart against democracy. It fears the propaganda of the Revolution more than the guns of armies, and all its peaceprovisos have had in view the insurance of reaction quite as much as its own territorial and commercial aggrandizement. Its aim, in these peace agreements, has been to make the world safe for autocracy, or at least, for the existing economic and social order, with the perpetuity of exclusive national sovereignties, economic rivalries and vested interests that this implies.

This aim has its sympathizers among large and very influential classes amid the democratic powers. It has its protagonists in the governments of those powers.

Some of them, the officials of course, are inexorably dedicated to winning war, and to making the world safe for democracy, but the democracy they want to make the world safe for is that of the status quo ante - a democracy which differs in no very significant respect from the sort of thing the Junker and commercial classes of Germany themselves want. They see a redistribution of the territory of Europe and Asia and Africa on the basis of military advantage and economic privilege. Such a redistribution was in fact planned at a meeting of international capitalists in Switzerland at which a representative of Lloyd's was said to have participated. They see an economic war after the war by means of which their strangle-hold on the masses of mankind may be intensified. They are afraid of this new thing and terrible thing that has shown its head in Russia and that ventures so far in a programme of fundamental reform in England. They want peace soon and on any "honorable " terms, so that they may be free to guard their class-interests against the assault from underneath, an assault which

the war renders swifter and more powerful with every day of its prolongation. That is said by many to be the real burden of Lord Lansdowne's now historic letter, so admirable in its demand for a pourparler, so significant of the unsettled and anxious mind of the more reflective among the possessing classes.

Against these class interests, which are the same among the Central Powers and the Allies, is the interest of the great masses of men, represented by the Labor and Socialist parties of the Entente countries in Europe. They see in the war the end of an old, disastrous and unjust system. They see in the war the beginning of a new national and international order, in which a genuine national democracy shall replace the capitalist establishment, and a commonwealth of nations the old system of exclusive national sovereignties. They look for initiative and leadership, over the heads of their own governments, to President Wilson. At a conference, held in London from February 19 to February 23 of the current year, they defined the war aims for democratic