to hope for in the past. In fact if those forces are not to grow cold and frittered they must be turned to a great end and offered a great hope.

IV

That great end and that great hope is nothing less than the Federation of the World. I know it sounds a little old-fashioned to use that phrase because we have abused it so long in empty rhetoric. But no other idea is big enough to describe the Alliance. It is no longer an offensive-defensive military agreement among diplomats. That is how it started to be sure. But it has grown, and is growing, into a union of peoples determined to end forever that intriguing, adventurous nationalism which has torn the world for three centuries. Good democrats have always believed that the common interests of men were greater than their special interests, that ruling classes can be enemies, but that the nations must be partners. Well, this war is being fought by nations. It is the nations who were called to arms, and it is the force of nations that is now stirring the world to its foundations.

The war is dissolving into a stupendous revolution. A few months ago we still argued about the Bagdad corridor, strategic frontiers, colonies. Those were the stakes of the diplomat's war. The whole perspective is changed today by the revolution in Russia and the intervention of America. The scale of values is transformed, for the democracies are unloosed. Those democracies have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the old competitive nationalism, the old apparatus of diplomacy, with its criminal rivalries in the backward places of the earth. The democracies, if they are to be safe, must coöperate. For the old rivalries mean friction and armament and a distortion of all the hopes of free government. They mean that nations are organized to exploit each other and to exploit themselves. That is the life of what we call autocracy. It establishes its power at home by pointing to enemies abroad. It fights its enemies abroad by dragooning the population at home.

That is why practically the whole world is at war with the greatest of the autocracies. That is why the whole world is turning so passionately towards democracy as the only principle on which peace can be secured. Many have feared, I know, that the war against Prussian militarism would result the other way, that instead of

liberalizing Prussia the outcome would be a prussianization of the democracies. That would be the outcome if Prusso-Germany won. That would be the result of a German victory. And that is why we who are the most peaceful of democracies are at war. The success

of the submarine would give Germany victory. It was and is her one great chance. To have stood aside when Germany made this terrible bid for victory would have been to betray the hope of free government and international union.

V

There are two ways now in which peace can be made. The first is by political revolution in Germany and Austria-Hungary. It is not for us to define the nature of that revolution. We cannot dictate liberty to the German people. It is for them to decide what political institutions they will adopt, but if peace is to come through revolution we shall know that it has come when new voices are heard in Germany, new policies are proclaimed, when there is good evidence that there has, indeed, been a new orientation. If that is done the war can be ended by negotiation.

The other path to peace is by the definite defeat of every item in the program of aggression. This will mean, at a minimum, a demonstration on the field that the German army is not invincible; a renunciation by Germany of all the territory she has conquered; a special compensation to Belgium; and an acknowledgment of the fallacy of exclusive nationalism by an application for membership in the League of Nations.

Frontier questions, colonial questions, are now entirely secondary, and beyond this minimum program the United States has no direct interest in the territorial settlement. The objects for which we are at war will be attained if we can defeat absolutely the foreign policy of the present German government. For a ruling caste which has been humiliated abroad has lost its glamor at home. So we are at war to defeat the German government in the outer world, to destroy its prestige, to deny its conquests, and to throw it back at last into the arms of the German people marked and discredited as the author of their miseries. It is for them to make the final settlement with it.

If it is our privilege to exert the power which turns the scale, it is our duty to see that the end justifies the means. We can win

nothing from this war unless it culminates in a union of liberal peoples pledged to coöperate in the settlement of all outstanding questions, sworn to turn against the aggressor, determined to erect a larger and more modern system of international law upon a federation of the world. That is what we are fighting for, at this moment, on the ocean, in the shipyard and in the factory, later perhaps in France and Belgium, ultimately at the council of peace.

If we are strong enough and wise enough to win this victory, to reject all the poison of hatred abroad and intolerance at home, we shall have made a nation to which free men will turn with love and gratitude. For ourselves we shall stand committed as never before to the realization of democracy in America. We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies-to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, our sweatshops and our slums. We shall call that man un-American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it at home. A force is loose in America as well. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it with their Billy Sundays or control through lawyers and politicians of the Old Guard.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OUR MISSION IN THIS WAR

BY MILES M. DAWSON, LL.D.,
New York.

The part which the United States should play in the war, and in making the treaty of peace, should be determined by the things upon which this government rests, for which it stands and the practicability of which it has demonstrated.

These fundamental things, as is recognized throughout the world, with dread by beneficiaries of autocracy, with tears and thanksgiving by friends of freedom, are few, but most important to mankind. Our triumphant justification of them brought together, out of all the nations of Europe, this great people, enabled France to find her way to a stable republic, made all American states republican, liberalized all governments the world over and, as a lode

star, drew the half-wakened peoples of China and of Russia along the road to freedom under institutions modelled on our own.

These fundamentals may be epitomized into five:

1. The inalienable right of every man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness-not as a mere dead saying, but as a living reality.

2. The right of local self-government, within territories possessing or entitled to claim such right, embracing every power of government not expressly granted to the union.

3. The guaranty to each state of a forum for the redress of grievances of one state against another with full power to enforce the verdict of that forum.

4. The guaranty of a republican form of government to each constituent state.

5. The right and duty to maintain the union.

The United States, though by tradition and on principle neutral as regards quarrels between European nations, is forced into this war to defend the lives of its own citizens, engaged in peaceful pursuits and protected by international law and solemn treaties. The crucial issue which has driven our republic into the arena is to champion what the fathers of the republic rightly termed the inalienable rights of man. It would be quite impossible for this nation to retrace the step which it has taken, were the central powers merely to offer to respect the rights of our citizens and to make amends; the issue now is that, as regards all neutrals peaceably attending to their own business, these inalienable rights must be respected. The other things for which this nation stands are not involved so openly; they are not directly at issue. But are they not likely, even almost certain, to be determined at the same time and by the same arbitrament and thus the principles which our nation has established by demonstrating their practicability, to be incorporated into the treaty of peace?

For instance, what else does the proposition signify that small and weak nations shall be protected and be preserved, but that states and their peoples shall enjoy the right of self-government? And that this is to be protected implies, in turn, that the union of states which is to protect it, shall, acting together, be granted authority to adjust interstate issues and to enforce the verdict. Is not recognition of this essential, if situations like that which arose regarding Serbia are to be dealt with otherwise than by war? Or if

violation of neutrality and destruction of small nations, such as in the case of Belgium, are to be avoided?

It is a long step toward the realization of the fourth principle, that each such state should be guaranteed a republican form of government; but it seems not unlikely that it will be taken. Casting off their shackles, the peoples of China and of Russia have shown not only that Germans, Austrians and Turks might do likewise, but also that, in order to avoid the loss of honor and a remnant of power, monarchs may be inclined to yield the real reins of government to representative assemblies. This may, and probably will, be as far as this principle will be realized at present in some of the countries; but even so, it could not be expected that the peace of nations would be preserved if each were to be exposed to the peril of overthrow of its constitution by a tyrant. No union of nations, whether formally so organized or not, could maintain itself, without defending each nation in the enjoyment of republican institutions. The guaranty must, in the nature of things, be given; whether openly or impliedly, while important, is not all-important.

The United States has found it unavoidable to accept the burden of this guaranty even as regards states with which it has no express or binding union. Thus it has had to protect Mexico. against the overturn of its republican government by Huerta, and Cuba against a like overturn by Gomez, not to speak of intervention in San Domingo and Costa Rica. It will also be impossible to avoid such guaranty, when, through some sort of joint agency, the nations undertake to protect the sovereignty of individual states, viz., a guaranty that the peoples are really represented-even though in some cases misrepresented-in the government of the states that compose the union of nations.

The fifth fundamental principle, that such union of nations must be maintained and that no nation will be permitted to withdraw, may seem yet further from realization. Indeed it is not probable that it will be included in any treaty. But one must remember it was not in the federal constitution; yet it was enforced when secession was attempted. Secession from the union of states, composing this nation, is thinkable, however; but is it even thinkable that, once a world union is established, any nation would be permitted to retire?

Consider that, if the other nations remained united and were