wrote to Senator Stone, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate:

To forbid our people to exercise their rights for fear we might be called upon to vindicate them would be a deep humiliation indeed. It would be an implicit, all but explicit, acquiescence in the violation of the rights of mankind everywhere, and of whatever nation or allegiance.

He would not even suffer the resolution to be quietly shelved, but insisted that it should be brought before Congress and voted on. Everywhere his conduct was that of a strong, straightforward man-strong enough to pursue what he conceived to be the path of duty, even when he knew that in doing so he must incur grave misunderstanding and bitter misrepresentation.

Nor is it true that he brought America into the war because her material "interests were threatened. They were, as a matter of fact, in little more danger than they had been ever since early in 1915. At all events, any "material" loss that might have been caused by unrestricted piracy was infinitesimal in comparison with the inevitable costs of a war in which America, as he declared from the outset, sought no conquests

and no indemnities. He carried his country into the war because Germany had thrown to the winds that last semblance of regard for international law or humanity, and because he saw, and his countrymen saw, that a world dominated by the spirit of German autocracy was an impossible world for a self-respecting and self-governing people to live in. Until it was absolutely clear that the very existence of democracy was at stake, he did not think that he had the right, even if he had had the power, to involve his country in the gigantic evils of war. He had borne injury and covert insult while that seemed the lesser of two evils; but when open insult to the United States was combined with a no less cynical disavowal of all restraint in the pursuit of the interests of Germany's ruling caste, he saw that with that caste no free man or free

nation could live at peace. He declared for war, and the country rose at his summons. He had throughout played the part of a resolute, far-seeing, plain-speaking, democratic statesman; in the final moment of decision he proved himself a great leader of men.

VIII

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

It was a frequent, perhaps a constant, practice among the Greeks, after a victory, to review the battle and decide who had borne himself the most valiantly. But, if one may say so without irreverence, it was a very foolish practice. The decision could seldom be a just one, and it must always have led to futile and unnecessary heartburnings. It would ill become the Allies, who have won not only the greatest, but the noblest, victory the world ever saw, to decline into ungenerous bickerings over their respective contributions to the glorious result. It is especially impossible to find any common measure to apply to those who bore the burden and heat of the day and those who intervened at a late, though decisive, moment. All that can or that need be said is that the magnificent effort of America, inspired and guided by President Wilson, was

of literally incalculable value to the cause of freedom and humanity.

And now the great President, among so many other and minor tasks, can devote himself to what he has all along proclaimed as his ultimate ideal-that of securing the initiation of a Society of States, whereby collective reason shall be substituted for individual violence as the arbiter in all disputes between civilized peoples. The idea is no new one. Many wise men of old-including Erasmus, Hugo Grotius, the Duc de Sully, William Penn and Immanuel Kant-have conceived and propounded it. But the time was not ripe: the world was too large and too incompletely interrelated. It had to acquire the complex and highly sensitive nervous system of today before it could develop a collective brain. Now the war, which has wrought so many miracles, can place to its credit this greatest of all: it has transmuted the utopian dream of the past into the most pressing and practical necessity of the future. Even the Germans realized that the devilish ingenuities of science, combined with the development of means of communication, had led to such an extravagant and illimitable increase in the potentialities of destruction, that

PEACE AND THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS 111 if the conditions of the past half-century were to continue for another fifty years, civilization must inevitably stagger to ruin and collapse under the sheer weight of armaments and military preparations of every sort. There is no reason to doubt that the aspirations towards world-peace, freely expressed by leading men in Germany during the last years of the war, were sincere enough. If If Germany had won, she would have made her own League of Nations— but it would have been a league of forcibly disarmed nations under the heel of "Mitteleuropa," armed to the teeth. Fate has decided for a League of Free Peoples; and many of us see in President Wilson our chiefest guarantee for its wise and successful organization.

He has not given his adhesion to any one of the dozen or more cut-and-dried schemes that are before the world. Whether he has one up his sleeve" remains to be seen. He has emphatically stated the view that the League of Nations must be founded at the Peace Conference, neither sooner nor later. This may not mean, however, that it must actually have its constitution sanctioned and its mechanism devised in every detail. What is essential is that