arbitration, but it was refused by both Germany and Austria. I understand your idealism and I share it, but where we differ is that I am under no illusion regarding the reality of facts. I do not believe that a League of Nations is the necessary outcome of the present war. Why? Because if the entry of Germany into the League of Nations were proposed tomorrow I would not consent. You might offer me as a guarantee a signature. Well, go and ask the Belgians what that is worth.

Peoples must be capable of freeing themselves. You are compelled to begin by saying that Germany will smash up

Prussian militarism, but the terrible fact is that she does not break it. Hypothesis is always in the stage of hypothesis. We cannot commit ourselves to such a course without injuring the morale which enables us to persevere with the war. When we are thoroughly embarked in a course of action we should talk as little as possible. The argument of M. Forgeot is incontestable in theory, but it will not hold water in the face of realities. The men in the trenches are fighting for a peace which will give them life and honor.

You ask me my war aims. I reply that my aim is to be victorious.

I

WARN the nation to watch men who think there is a half-way house between victory and defeat. [This reference was to the Lansdowne proposal.] There is no such half-way house. These are the men who think the war can be ended now by some sort of peace-the setting up of a League of Nations, with conditions as to arbitration for disputes and provisions for disarmament, and with a covenant on the part of all nations to sign a treaty along these lines.

That is the right policy after victory. Without victory it would be a farce. Who would sign such a treaty? I presume, among others, the people who have so far successfully broken the last. Who would enforce the new treaty? I presume the nations that have so far not quite succeeded in enforcing the last. To end the war entered upon and to enforce a treaty without reparation for infringement of that treaty merely by entering into a more sweeping treaty would, indeed, be a farce in the setting of a tragedy.

We are not misled by mere words like

disarmament, arbitration, and similar terms. You cannot wage war or secure peace by mere words. We ought never to have started unless we meant, at all hazards, to complete our task.

Of course, our enemies are ready to accept a peace, leaving them with some of the richest provinces and the fairest cities of Russia in their pockets. It is idle to talk of security under such conditions. There is no protection for life or property in a State where the criminal is more powerful than the law. The law of nations is no exception. We are dealing with a criminal State now, and there will always be criminal States until the reward for international crime becomes too precarious to make it profitable, and the punishment of international crime becomes too sure to make it attractive.

We are confronted with the alternatives of abasing ourselves in terror before the lawlessness, which means ultimately a world intimidated by successful bandits, or going through with our task to establish a righteous and lasting peace

for ourselves and our children. Surely no nation with any regard for its selfrespect and any honor can hesitate a moment in its choice.

A Hopeful Prospect

If there were no prospects of things going better the longer we fought, it would be infamous to prolong the war, but because I am fully convinced, despite some untoward events and discouraging appearances, that we are making steady progress toward the desired goal, I would regard peace overtures to Prussia, at the very moment when the Prussian military spirit is drunk with boastfulness, as a betrayal of the great trust with which my colleagues and I have been charged.

The German victories have been emblazoned to the world, but her troubles did not appear in the bulletins. However, we know something of them. The deadly grip of the British Navy is having its effect, and the valor of the troops is making an impression which will tell in the end. * **

This is not the most propitious hour. Russia's threatened retirement from the war strengthens the Hohenzollerns and weakens the forces of democracy, but Russia's action will not lead, as she imagines, to universal peace. It will simply prolong the world's agony and inevitably put her in bondage to Prussian military dominance.

[If Russia persisted in her present policy, the Premier pointed out, the withdrawal by the enemy from the east of a third of his troops must release hundreds of thousands of men and masses of material to attack Great Britain, France, and Italy. He went on:]

It would be folly to underestimate the danger from the release of the enemy's eastern forces. It would equally be folly to exaggerate it. But the greatest folly of all would be not to face it. America Coming "With Both Arms"

If the Russian democracy has decided to abandon the struggle against military autocracy, the American democracy is taking it up. This is the most momentous fact of the year, which has transposed the whole situation. There is no more powerful country in the world than the United States, with their gigantic

resources and indomitable people, and if Russia is out, America is coming in with both arms.

If this is the worst moment, it is because Russia has stepped out and America is only preparing to come in. Her army is not yet ready and her tonnage is unbuilt, but with every hour that passes the gap formed by Russia's retirement will be filled by the valiant sons of the great American Republic.

Germany knows it and Austria knows it. Hence the desperate efforts to force the issue before America is ready.

They will not succeed, but we must be prepared for greater efforts and greater sacrifices. It is no time to cower or to

falter. Great Britain's will is as tempered steel and will bear all right to the end. There must be a further drain upon our man power in order to sustain the additional burden until the American Army arrives.

Even

There is no ground for panic. now, after we have sent troops to Italy, the Allies have marked superiority in numbers in France and Flanders and considerable reserves at home.

Much greater progress has been made in man power in the last few months than either our friends or our foes realize, but it is not enough to enable us to face the new contingencies without anxiety. The problem of man power, however, does not end with the army.

Victory a Question of Tonnage

Victory now is a question of tonnage. Nothing can defeat us but the shortage of tonnage, and the advent of the United States has increased the tonnage problem enormously. Germany has gambled on America's failure to transport her army to Europe.

The Prussian claim is that autocracy alone can do things. The honor of democracy is at stake, and I do not doubt that the Prussians will be disillusioned, but both America and Great Britain will have to strain their resources to the utmost to increase their tonnage.

The fact that American tonnage will be absorbed in the transport of its own armies compels us to increase our responsibilities in assisting France and

Italy with the transportation of essential commodities to their shores.

In order to obtain the necessary men for this object we must interfere to even a greater extent than heretofore with the industries not absolutely essential to the prosecution of the war.

[Premier Lloyd George, in concluding, emphasized how the country could aid by further economizing and in the increase of home production. "We must strip even barer for the fight," he said. British food imports next year, he stated in this connection, must be reduced 3,000,000 tons by increased home production and economy. The Premier also spoke on aerial warfare, saying that the nations possibly would determine that this must be the last war in which air weapons were used, as they brought the perils and horrors of the battlefields to civilians at home, who previously had dwelt in security.]

Air Reprisals by Allies

Baron Rothermere, the British Air

Minister, made the following declarations in favor of air reprisals at the same meeting:

My advisers have asked me to make a precise statement of our air policy. The question of reprisals comes first and foremost. At the Air Board we are wholeheartedly in favor of reprisals. It is our duty to avenge the murder of innocent women and their children. As the enemy. elect, therefore, so be it-an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. And in this respect we shall strive for a complete and satisfying retaliation. Von Ludendorff proclaims this a War of the Nations, suggesting that the civil population is a mark for the bombs equally with the fighting men. We detest this doctrine, holding it to be grossly immoral, but, fighting for our lives and the lives of our women and children, we will not consent to its one-sided application. The enemy has to learn in this, as in the larger things, that outrages on the civilian population of this country do not pay.

T

HE year 1917 is writing a new date line in our history. It will take none of the glory from any of our memories; it will leave us as a priceless inheritance the great traditions of our race, out of which our institutions and our liberties have been fabricated, but from this year many things which are separated in sentence are all written under a new date, and the supremacy of common sacrifices in a common cause makes us more really a united people, more really a nation, than we have ever been in our entire history.

The family of the nation has become

continental in its extent. Many of these distinctions which once troubled us will be absorbed in the new glory of citizenship in the new nation. And this will be especially true because of the heroic character and the idealism of this enterprise. Every now and then somebody tells me that he has heard somebody say that America is fighting somebody else's war, and my instant reflection is, Well, suppose that were true? Is it not more heroic to save somebody else's life than your own? To whom do we build monuments, for whom do we cast hero medals -the men who save their own lives or

those who save the lives of others? What is the quality of heroism if it be not unselfish self-sacrifice?

And yet it is not necessary, nay, it would not be true, to admit that this is an unselfish expedition in that sense or to that extent, for in very truth our nation is engaged in fighting its own battles, its own material battles, if that mattered, but it does not. It is engaged in fighting its own spiritual battle; it is engaged in saving the soul of democracy.

And so all wars which have been waged for the prestige of Kings or the territorial extension of empires fail in their analogy. There is a quality in this war which evokes a spiritual response and that will be a new kind of cement for the making of a stronger and more triumphant people when it is over.

And there is another exceedingly happy quality in this. We are not fighting this battle alone. I am not even ambitious that the glory of the final conquest should come to us alone. I would far rather have the triumph of democracy the reward of the associated effort of democratic peoples everywhere, so that when this war is over neither we nor they can have any monopoly of that virtue, but will be partners in its glory, and so associates in the further progress which is to be made.

For we must never forget, when we speak of democracy, that it is not an accomplishment, it is not a thing that has been done, but it is a progress; it is a system of growth, and though today we might achieve what our limited vision proclaims to us as the democratic ideal, its quality is such that when we stand on what now seems to us the highest peak in that range, there will be greater heights to tempt and inspire us.

And so, when this war is over, and the crude mediaevalism which at last brings the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs to confront their fate in the young giant of the democratic spirit; when this contest is over and the David of democracy has dealt with the Goliath of mediaevalism and autocracy, there will still be work for David to do worthy of his best efforts, and in the accomplishment of it large benefits to the race will remain to be achieved.

Pride in War Preparations

People are sometimes disposed to adopt a complaining tone about our efforts, not many, but here and there one. There are two ways of looking at this war and our preparation in it. One is to look at what we have done, and one is to look at what we have not done. If we realize that practically every activity of the Government associated in this business has been required in a very short space of time to expand 3,000 per cent., if we take account of the things that actually have been achieved, not only will we find that we have won the admiring commendation of visitors from the Old World, who are familiar with what they have done and are still amazed at our progress, but we will find sound ground for pride in the strength, capacity, and greatness of our own people.

Now, I am perfectly aware that in any great enterprise where one starts in wishing to achieve everything and to accomplish all, in the mere rush of preparation there are things for which the industry of the country was not yet adequately prepared; things which time will right, and so if one goes about with a critical and fault-finding spirit, he can always find enough to satisfy that sort of spirit—it does not take much.

What the Nation Has Done

But when you think that a people who really love peace, who for 100 years had devoted themselves to its ideals and its practices, whose affections were engaged with the accomplishments of peace and civilization, who had learned to love justice and who had embodied it in their own political and social institutions, who had established among themselves a generous competition in industrial and scientific and commercial progress, who had spread abroad among themselves processes of universal education, so that almost year by year the general level of the material and intellectual and spiritual life of their people was visibly elevated-if you come to recognize in us that sort of people, devoting ourselves with an intense devotion to the working out of finer adjustments for human happiness and for the recognition of the

rights of the individual, and then see us suddenly summoned to go back 500 years and deal with a recrudescence of brute force, unilluminated by any sort of morality or humanitarian consideration, and then see what we have done in that space of time to readjust ourselves to this odious and unlovely thing that we are forced to do, I think it will be agreed, not only that we have done great things, but that we can be reassured about civilization.

It does not mean the enfeeblement of a people. Disinclination to fight does not mean inability to fight. We can with confidence, from now on, pursue those processes which have hitherto engaged us and seem to promise so much, always with the assured conviction that education does not destroy courage and that a civilized, peace-loving, God-fearing nation, if it has to protect itself against brute aggression, has the capacity, the concentration of purpose necessary; nay, that in democratic institutions there is that virtue which is perfectly sufficient to any contest it may be called upon to face.

Tribute to Our Soldiers

[After alluding to the nation's extraordinary response to the Selective Draft act and the orderly manner in which ten million Americans were registered in one day, as well as the universal desire of all classes to render aid in any manner, he continued:]

While we are in this war to make the world safe for democracy, democracy is making itself manifest here among us; for that is democracy-the co-operation, without distinction of fortune or opportunity, of all the men of the nation for the common good, and the good of each individual is democracy.

We are recognizing it, too, in our human relations. I have been traveling around over the country seeing these training camps, and I find that when 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 boys are camped near a city, large or small, the city adopts them. There is an instantaneous and widespread process of affectionate adoption going on, so that men have the feeling, men of my time of life, when they walk along the street and see

a man in khaki, there is an almost irresistible desire to say, "My son!"

How beautiful that is, and how true it is! For when, on some moonlight night on the fields of France, some American boy's face is upturned from having made the grand and final sacrifice in this cause, no passerby nor no imagination that reaches him will be able to discern whether he came from a blacksmith's forge or a merchant's counter or a banker's counting room. He will simply be an American, and our affection for him, our adoption of him, our pride in him, will be as undiscriminating.

Now, all this tends to afford some consolation. It is one of the by-products of this war that is going to be of immense value to mankind when it is

Alignment of Civilized Nations

It is a wonderful story, the alignment of the nations which can truly be called civilized, against the ancient mediaevalism which survives in the heart of Europe. The hope of mankind, so often frustrated, apparently is now to be accomplished. It could not be done in Napoleon's times, in spite of the French Revolution and its philosophy and its promise, because of what Danton called "the Allied Kings of Europe." It could not be done in 1849 because of the Metterniches and the Bismarcks. It could not be done in 1870 because they were still triumphant, but out of the West, out of this youngest and latest and most hopeful of the nations of the earth; out of this young giant, fashioned out of all the peoples, who originate in a new philosophy, little rivulets of it have gone over to other peoples in other parts of the world.

And now, in the fullness of time, this giant is full grown, and she joins hands with other peoples, who, though older, are yet the children of her spirit, and we are partners now with great men of great nations who have borne for three years heroically the brunt of this struggle, and at the end of it, out of the noise of battle and smoke of the battlefield, there arises the picture of a new federation of nations, of a new fraternity of mankindthe sons and daughters of civilization joining hands to protect the sacred prin