last the United States recognizes that occasions may again arise which will demand that the United States appear again as gladiator in the arena of the world. Indeed, the accessibility of America to international forces is due. not only (and perhaps not fundamentally) to political movements, but also to economic and intellectual movements. There was hardly a big business unit in the United States in 1914 whose roots had not spread into foreign soil; and by 1919, that tendency had been accelerated many-fold. Capital is international. Big business is international. The mines of Chile, the quarries of South Africa, the looms of England, the wheat-fields of Argentina, the silk-worm farms of Japan, the forests of Canada, the factories of France, the ranches of Australia, from what quarter of the globe will the future American search for raw materials be absent? What large business centre in any of the Continents will be untouched by agencies of American banks? What large foreign loan will American investors disregard? As a matter of fact, what important event anywhere in the world will have no effect upon American industry? And if capital and big business have become international, how much more unqualifiedly international have ideas become! The feeling for higher wage-scales in a single country in Europe may upset American industry and all dependent upon American industry. A new idea in the smelting of precious metals more than a decade ago helps to determine today the cost of living all over the world. American psychologists sit at the feet of an Austrian physician, and American novelists and playwrights follow the trails blazed by Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy and Shaw; conversely, the movement in modern philosophic thought most stimulating to the entire philosophic world claims America as its cradle, and the whole world mourned ast its own loss the death of Theodore Roosevelt. At the close of the actual hostilities of the War, two of the greatest nations of modern times and some of their less powerful neighbors were in the inexorable grip of ideas developed less than seventy-five years ago by an exiled and penniless German journalist, and entrusted by him to pages repugnant both in dogmatism and in obscurity. In the framing of peace, certain political groups in Europe found their creeds most adequately personified by Woodrow Wilson; certain political groups in the United States found their aspirations most satisfactorily crystallized in the leadership of Georges Clemenceau, or of David Lloyd-George, or of the Russian cooperatives, or of the Confédération générale du travail, or of the British Labor Party. The United States. may exclude persons, may reject institutions, may ban commodities; but of the making of books there is no end. No Great Wall of China can prevent either the emigration or the immigration of an idea; and the entire future of America may be profoundly affected by a new theory launched by an obscure thinker in an obscure land and promulgated in an obscure way by obscure followers. But whatever the roads which the America of the future will travel, nothing is more imperative than American understanding of the problems she must meet on the way. Those problems will be the problems bequeathed by the most stupendous fact of modern times, the Great War. America will rise or fall in the future ordeal of nations by fire as she is alive or blind to the lessons of that holocaust. America's future foreign policy will be determined largely by America's future political leaders, and those future political leaders will be selected according to the convictions of the American people. Accordingly, for many years nothing will aid America better than a general public appreciation of at least the outstanding features of the experience through which she and the whole world have just staggered-the causes of the War, the conduct of the War, the conclusions of the War. To further such a general public appreciation, this history has been written. Its purpose is thus a broad rather than a specialized appeal. I have therefore ranged far and wide in the literature of the subjects I have treated, relying in large measure upon the investigations of specialists in their respective fields. A bibliography of works covering in greater detail the events chronicled in these pages will be found at the end of Volume II. New York City, April 1, 1919. B. B. |