similar settlement of international controversies. Our ideal was a permanent world court. We had already signed arbitration treaties not only with great powers which might conceivably attack us, but even more freely with weaker neighbors in order to show our good faith in recognizing the equality of all nations both great and small. We had made plain to the nations our purpose to forestall by every means in our power the recurrence of wars in the world.

The outbreak of war in 1914 caught this Nation by surprise. The peoples of Europe had had at least some warnings of the coming storm, but to us such a blind, savage onslaught on the ideals of civilization had appeared impossible.

The war was incomprehensible. Either side was championed here by millions living among us who were of European birth. Their contradictory accusations threw our thoughts into disarray, and in the first chaotic days we could see no clear issue that affected our national policy. There was no direct assault on our rights. It seemed at first to most of us a purely European dispute, and our minds were not prepared to take sides in such a conflict. The President's proclamation of neutrality was received by us as natural and inevitable. It was quickly followed by his appeal to "the citizens of the Republic."

"Every man who really loves America will act and speak in the true spirit of neutrality," he said, "which is the spirit of impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all concerned. * * * It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it." He expressed the fear that our Nation might become divided in camps of hostile opinion. "Such divisions among us

**might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan, but as a friend."

This purpose-the preservation of a strict neutrality in order that later we might be of use in the great task of mediationdominated all the President's early speeches.

"We are the mediating Nation of the world," he declared in an address on April 20, 1915. "We are compounded of the nations of the world; we mediate their blood, we mediate their traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their passions; we are ourselves compounded of those things. We are, therefore, able to understand them in the compound, not separately as partisans, but unitedly as knowing and comprehending and embodying them all. It is in that sense that I mean that America is a mediating Nation."

American neutrality, in those first months of the great war, was beyond any question real.

But the spirit of neutrality was not easy to maintain. Public opinion was deeply stirred by the German invasion of Belgium and by reports of atrocities there. The Royal Belgian Commission, which came in September, 1914, to lay their country's cause for complaint before our National Government, was received with sympathy and respect. The President in his reply reserved our decision in the affair. It was the only course he could take without an abrupt departure from our most treasured traditions of noninterference in Old World disputes. But the sympathy of America went out to the Belgians in their heroic tragedy, and from every section of our land money contributions and supplies of food and clothing poured over to the Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was under the able management of our fellow countrymen abroad.

Still, the thought of taking an active part in this European war was very far from most of our minds. The Nation shared with the President the belief that by maintaining a strict neutrality we could best serve Europe at the end as impartial mediators.

But in the very first days of the war our Government foresaw that complications on the seas might put us in grave risk of being drawn into the conflict. No neutral nation could foretell what violations of its vital interests at sea might be attempted by the belligerents. And so, on August 6, 1914, our Secretary of State dispatched an identical note to all the powers then at war, calling attention to the risk of serious trouble arising out of this uncertainty of neutrals as to their maritime rights and proposing that the Declaration of London be accepted by all nations for the duration of the war.

But the British Government's response, while expressing sympathy with the purpose of our suggestion and declaring their "keen desire to consult so far as possible the interests of neutral countries," announced their decision "to adopt generally the rules of the Declaration in question, subject to certain modifications and additions which they judge indispensable to the efficient conduct of their naval operations." The Declaration had not been indorsed by any power in time of peace, and there was no legal obligation on Great Britain to accept it. Her reply, however, was disappointing, for it did nothing to clarify the situation. Great Britain recognized as binding certain long accepted principles of international law and sought now to apply them to the peculiar and unforeseen conditions of this war. But these principles were often vague and therefore full of dangerous possibilities of friction.

Controversies soon arose between Great Britain and this Nation. In practice their ruling sometimes seemed to our Government inconsistent with the spirit of international law, and especially with the established precedents which they invoked. But painful as this divergence of opinion sometimes was, it did not seriously threaten our position of neutrality, for the issues that arose involved only rights of property and were amply covered by the arbitration treaty signed only a short time before by Great Britain and the United States.

And this controversy led to a clearer understanding on our part of the British attitude toward our ideal of the freedom of the seas. They were not willing to accept our classification of the seas as being distinct from the Old World. We had confined our interest to matters affecting rights at sea and had kept carefully aloof from issues affecting the interests of European nations on land. The British were interested in both. They explained that they had participated in the London naval conference in the hope that it would lead to a sound and liberal entente in the interest of the rights of all nations on the sea and on the land as well, and that they had refused to ratify the London Declaration because no compensating accord on the Continent had resulted. They could not afford to decrease the striking power of their navy unless their powerful neighbors on land agreed to decrease their armies.

That this attitude of England deeply impressed our Government is shown by the increasing attention given by the United States to the search for ways and means of insuring at the end of the war, a lasting peace for all the world. The address of our President, on May 27, 1916, before the League to Enforce Peace was a milestone in our history. He outlined the main principles on which a stable peace must rest, principles plainly indicating that this Nation would have to give up its position of isolation and assume the responsibilities of a world power. The President said:

"So sincerely do we believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America when I say that the United States is willing to become a partner in any feasible association of nations formed in order to realize these objects and make them secure against violation.”

It was a new and significant note in our foreign policy. But the mind of America had learned much in the long bitter months of war. Future historians will make charts of this remarkable evolution in our public opinion: the gradual abandonment of the illusion of isolation; the slow growth of a realization that we could not win freedom on sea-for us a vital interest-unless we consented to do our share in maintaining freedom on land as well, and that we could not have peace in the world-the peace we loved and needed for the perfection of our democracy— unless we were willing and prepared to help to restrain any nation that willfully endangered the peace of the whole world family.

Had this address of the President come before the war, there would have arisen a storm of protest from all sections of the land. But in May, 1916, the Nation's response was emphatic approval.

In the meantime, although our neutral rights were not brought into question by Germany as early as by England, the German controversy was infinitely more serious.

For any dissensions that might arise, no arbitration treaty existed between the United States and the German Government. This was from no fault of ours. We had tried to establish with Germany the same treaty relations we had with Great

Britain and 19 other nations. But these overtures had been rejected. And this action on the part of the Imperial German Government was only one example of its whole system of diplomacy. In both conferences at The Hague it had been the German delegates who were the most active in blocking all projects for the pacific settlement of disputes between nations. They had preferred to limit international relations to the old modes of diplomacy and war. It was therefore obvious from the first that any controversy with the German Government would be exceedingly serious; for if it could not be solved by direct diplomatic conversations, there was no recourse except to

war.

From such conversations there is small hope of satisfactory results unless the good faith of both sides is profound. If either side lacks good faith, or reveals in all its actions an insidious hostility, diplomacy is of no avail. And so it has proved in the present case,

In the first year of the war the Government of Germany stirred up among its people a feeling of resentment against the United States on account of our insistence upon our right as a neutral nation to trade in munitions with the belligerent powers. Our legal right in the matter was not seriously questioned by Germany. She could not have done so consistently, for as recently as the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 both Germany and Austria sold munitions to the belligerents. Their appeals to us in the present war were not to observe international law, but to revise it in their interest. And these appeals they tried to make on moral and humanitarian grounds. But upon "the moral issue" involved, the stand taken by the United States was consistent with its traditional policy and with obvious common sense. For if, with all other neutrals, we refused to sell munitions to belligerents, we could never in time of a war of our own obtain munitions from neutrals, and the nation which had accumulated the largest reserves of war supplies in time of peace would be assured of victory. The militarist state that invested its money in arsenals would be at a fatal advantage over the free people who invested their wealth in schools. To write into international law that neutrals should not trade in munitions would be to hand over the world to the