interval (I think of one year) for negotiation before war begins. This plan of the American League involves the assembling of a great council from many lands, the maintenance of huge and costly armaments on land and sea by all the associated countries and yet, when the decision of the council has been rendered and the disputants have waited the required time, if the stronger of the antagonists, disregarding the counsels of reason and justice, proceeds to crush the weaker opponent, there shall be no interference by the armed Powers.

It is essential for an effective league of peace that it shall include all the great nations and that the terms of settlement at the close of the war shall be such that all will be reconciled (I do not say satisfied) to the conditions imposed and that they shall unite in a sincere effort to succeed in their purpose. Only a tranquil Europe is a stable Europe, we have been reminded.

Are the peoples to be ready for this? It means real equality among nations, great and small. Some measure of acceptance of the golden

rule in their relations to each other. It means that self-interest shall be subordinated to justice; that weak nations shall not have their desire for nationality crushed, their territories contracted, their independence

taken away. Many troublesome

questions are pending now. Some races are struggling for independence. Such aspiration is proper, but in former times its realization could not be permitted because it

would disturb the peace of Europe. But the League of all nations cannot admit that plea. There are great peoples in Europe that have few or no ports. Do we not know that the demand for free access to the seas is just and should be granted? The welfare of countries depends on outlets to the lines of trade. Without this development of commerce is impossible. This would not necessarily mean cession of territory but must provide for uninterrupted intercourse guaranteed by the League. Attempts to prevent economic development have been fatal to peace and always will be.

Furthermore, an agreement for permanent peace must provide not only settlement of frontiers and lines. of communication for to-day, but such periodic adjustments as shall allow for national growth and satisfy demands for new opportunities. If the right of war is given up there must be other provision for necessary changes.

This will require change of heart, for wars have arisen most frequently from a wish to expand politically or economically, or else from attempts to prevent rivals from expanding.

Really the main obstacles to a permanent peace are trade and finance. Competition between nations seems fiercer than between individuals. To extend commerce or to destroy the commerce of others, lands have been conquered and ports seized, and this spirit is being shown in these days. Right in the midst of conflict and suffering jealousy of trade rivals is shown. The Entente peoples have

already planned a trade agreement by which they shall benefit at the cost of others. The German Chancellor said the other day: "I am thinking more of the economic future than of anything else." Senator Penrose never rises in our Senate that he does not advocate protection which means trade war. New Zealand is now stirred by fear of America's meat trust and within a few weeks the Finance Minister has offi

cially demanded that the Imperial

Government take control of the beef importation and, to use his words, "guard us against foreign competi

tion in the meat trade and make the empire self-sustaining." These two English-speaking countries, who have been embracing each other and exchanging eternal vows, before the war is over find a cause of disagreement in a cargo of meat.

Perhaps a still more prolific source of trouble has been finance. The great countries of Europe have been lending money to small countries and the pressure for loans has come more from lenders than from borrowers. China recently just escaped having a loan forced on her by European bankers. These loans have led uniformly to demands for concessions, and finally exploitation, and sometimes annexation, and the armies and navies of the Powers were used to enforce these demands. At present the classes which profit by these privileges are practically in control of European governments. The League of Nations must put an end to these economic conflicts, for there can be no world-at-peace till the

spirit of mutual aid and recognition of the rights of others shall be dominant.

Well, the change of heart may take place. We should all rejoice at it. It gives us hope that so many people and those from different lands are confidently looking for its coming. After this war, we are told, there shall be thrown into the scrap heap "the old policy of national expansion and colonial possession; old diplomacy of secrecy and intrigue; the thirst for military power and economic individualism." Henry P. Davison, after his visit to England and France, speaking of the effect of the war, tells us: "Perhaps the most striking change in the people is the change in their idea of values. Their ideals become exalted, their affection for mankind immeasurably increased. They seem to be without malice or envy or jealousy, to be living on a higher and better plane.” One writer called the year 1917 "the great nuptial year of the world."

In Donald Hankey's book, "The Student in Arms," is this passage:

"When the war is over and the men of the citizen army return to their homes will they, I wonder, remember the things they have learned? If so, there will be a new and better England for the children. No more petty strife between class and class, for all have learned that they are one nation. Men shall no longer pride themselves on their riches or material possessions, for they shall have learned that it is only qualities of heart which are of true value. Much depends on the women of England. If they too have seen a wider vision of national unity and a more catholic charity the future is radiant with hope."

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AEMAEKERS produces a cartoon showing a menacing Hun facing the militant figure of Uncle Sam. The one has a weapon, the other a tool. The challenge of the first is, "I destroy," of the other, "I create."

Nobody who knows Germany will say that its inner life is Hunnish or that the deliberate purpose of its culture is to destroy the rest of the world. Nevertheless, the great cartoonist has not exceeded the license of his art. His allegory is true. And the meaning that the war must have for Americans has nowhere been put in shorter compass.

Germany stands for the Old Testament view of life. It is all therethe holy fatherland, the chosen people, the blood bond, the spoiling of the Egyptians. Also we see the heavy hand upon the Canaanites, the Jebusites and the Amalekites.

And concerning this whole economy of things, this conception of an arbitrary but indulgent God who writes his streng-verbotens and his gorgeous promises on stone tables for the benefit of his favorites, it is written that they shall take by the sword and perish by it.

Germany is the old world in arms. against the new. It marches with the fatality of an Aeschylean play to a stupendous tragedy.

should become the Great Destroyer -not because she set out to destroy, but because she set out to establish a perfect state and a superhuman law. Always there has been a world war, with immeasurable destruction coiled in the heart of that conception. Neither Bismarck nor Hegel invented it. It is Mohammedan and Mosaic, but it is older than Abraham.

THE GREAT BAD

In our time the Germans have no monopoly of the idea. They have simply taken it more seriously than the rest of us and have actually worked it out. It is the Monsterthe Great Bad. It will have to be rooted up before the march of the modern spirit can begin.

The United States is the antagonist of Germany by the drift of historic logic. Ours is the politics of the modern spirit-the spirit of the New World. This proceeds not from the Old Testament but from the New Testament.

You hear it said that Christianity -the gospel to the Gentiles-has failed because everybody is not kind. But being kind is not the root of the New Testament; it is only one of the fruits. The root is law, a new and modern kind of law, the law of creative life, creative business. This law does not merely consist with liberty; it cannot be executed otherwise than

The proclamation of this new order of the world-invincible because of its realism and its loyalty to conscience and science, an order disdainful of race and the blood-bond, born not of the flesh but of the spirit, and knowing neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor freehas not yet failed, because the people of the United States have not yet canceled their constitution or abandoned their historic purpose.

Of course it should be admitted that the idea of a civil society depending for its final sanction not upon the power of a God in the sky but of a God in flesh, can have no ghost of a chance against the heavensent autocrats if it is given to them alone to array the heavy battalions.

If democracy, standing in the flush of its freedom, with laughter and scorn upon its lips for all that autocracy imports, is not a thing that can fight-why then of course it is done for now, and should be given up. In that case those who do not "listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy or pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope" should turn their attention to something other than democracy, something that will really work.

What man with humor and veracity in him can really believe in a democracy that is good only for easy days and that needs to have the world made safe for it?

STRENGTH AN AMERICAN ATTRIBUTE

Now I venture to say that strength -stark, formidable strength, good for working and for fighting-is the peculiar qualification of a real Amer

icanism an Americanism boiled to its quintessence, with all the clouding vapors of Prussianism, socialism and plutocratism blown away. For the most characteristic thing about America is its faith in untrammeled enterprise, the letting loose of all the creative powers of all the people.

Undoubtedly we have failed to fulfill our faith in this matter. We have never so much as half done it. Nay, it is to be confessed that we have never mobilized a tenth part of the creative energy of the United States. Still, the faith remains, and it is the American characteristic.

Raemaekers truly interprets the heart of Uncle Sam-whatever the failure of our performances-when he puts in his hand an earth-conquering tool and in his mouth the legend, "I create."

The intellectual and moral confusion that now possesses the world seems to arise from a general failure to understand the gospel truth that the meekness of engineers, mechanics and the earth-subduers-the humbleheartedness that seeks not to master men but materials-is the sovereignty and royalty that shall inherit the earth.

There is somehow an amazing defect in our school culture, some blighting heredity of Platonism and the labor and science dread that infested the classic Mediterranean world, which blinds our eyes to the staring fact that business is stronger than politics, that tools are mightier than weapons and that the rule of the world is to be had for the taking, not by destructive and violent men,

but by those who can handle the machinery of production and control the elemental forces.

We are not yet modern in our intellectual outfit. We lie under the antique literary illusion-scholastic relic of the ages that knew no such thing as a grand-scale organization for work-that a man must be fierce in order to be formidable and that the industrial order cannot shift for itself, but must be guarded by a belligerent scholar with a big stick.

TOOLS TO RULE WORLD

To men of normal eyesight, freed from this astigmatism of the schools, it should be plain that the rule of the world has passed from arms to tools, that modern war is a wrestle between rival systems of industry, that the military organization has come to be merely ancillary, and that America can dictate the terms of peace not by militarizing its mind but by breathing a fuller breath of artistic and scientific freedom and enterprise and lifting up a fresh and shining standard of creative busi

ness.

The war was precipitated by the rise in all countries within the last 50 years of a new political organism operating in unexampled ways through the swift development of credit-capital and market control on a basis of free contract, corporate organization and a marvelous technology.

This new and universal order, the business system, was not called political; but it was and is in fact political. It has its own extra-legal centers of social control and is in

effect a very modern kind of govern

ment.

In every country there arose an irrepressible conflict between the old kind of government and the new kind. Everywhere the Everywhere the old government spoke in terms of repression and fear; the language of the new was enterprise and hope. But everywhere the conflict of the two powers corrupted both.

The result was moral and mental bewilderment beyond the record of any age since the sixteenth century-and a reduction of the social gains of the new technology almost to the vanishing point.

The new-born German empire was the first of the nations to deal firmly with the contradiction of the age. She answered the riddle squarely.

GERMANY'S ANSWER WRONG

But she gave the wrong answer.

Germany resolved the intolerable contradiction between the old and the new by falling resolutely back upon the old order of the world. She forced the business system to give up its wide and spontaneous freedom and to work under feudal guards for the glory and power of the sovereign and transcendental state.

The firmness of this wrong answer gave Germany the comparative strength that inheres in any, even the worst, decision.

England, France, Italy did not decide. They have not yet decided. They have followed the German method with their hands, while hating it in their hearts. They are still torn by the contradiction. That is why