AS THE war continues its causes and significance unfold with freer action. Its actual psychology will, in some measure, fail of contemporary apprehension, and like similar struggles of the past will continue to invite interpretation long after the event. Quite naturally, wherever its illusions survive its close, to their extent the outcome will be disappointing. But it is certain that no previous war carried with it so great a volume of literature and discussion on the issues in conflict. Political

thought was never so serious and lucid as now, for never has public opinion been focussed with so great unanimity upon the two ideals of

*The Evolution of Prussia. By J. A. R. Marriott and C. Grant Robertson. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Survey of International Relations Between the United States and Germany. By James Brown Scott. New York: The Oxford University Press.

The Monarchy in Politics. By J. A. Farrer. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. America Among the Nations. By H. H. Powers. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Alsace-Lorraine Under German Rule. By C. D. Hazen. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Fighting for Peace. By Henry Van Dyke. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. France, England, and European Democracy. By Charles Cestre. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Democracy and the War. By J. F. Coar. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

Political Ideals. By Bertrand Russell. New York: The Century Company.

Our Democracy. By J. H. Tufts. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Great Problems of British Statesmanship. By J. Ellis Barker. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company.

government whose irreconcilement has deepened with the growth of civilisation. Democracy and autocracy are in eternal hostility; they can never be friends. In theory they are mutually exclusive and must be so in practice. As long as they exist together among populous and socially interdependent nations, the world will be a house divided against itself. Lincoln's interpretation of the triumph of the Union as the people's resolution that self-government should not perish from the earth, finds its complement in President Wilson's interpretation of the pending struggle as the resolution of democracies,-government by free debate and majority opinion, to be liberated from the predatory jealousy and assault of the despotic régime.

Causes reaching back through years are being subjected to impartial scrutiny. Fortunately we have ceased to cavil at religion and education, at socialism and the press, for fancied remissness or impotency to protect mankind from self-inflicted atrocity. We are revising our views of civilisation. True, there has long survived a strange disposition, whether in peace or in war, to endow institutions with an exaggerated superiority to those who create or maintain them. This tendency is giving way to the more rational testimony of history, or the proved motives of those who have held the reins of social and national fortune. We are still disposed to inculpate the weakness or the stratagems of diplomacy for the occurrence of war, and we shall look to it for a palpable

amendment of its ways. At the same time, our censure is conscious of the frailties or ambitions of the men who shape its effects. We shall probably come out of this great conflict with more willingness and ability to utilise the accumulated knowledge of historic and economic experience. Human reason and imagination, always groping for light, will then be better able to convert our body of knowledge into terms of practical justice and international welfare. Great crises like. that confronting the present slowly predispose the common judgment to believe that national wellbeing is inseparable from that of the community of nations. There is striking agreement among the more thoughtfully written of recent books which attempt to assess the conditions figuring in the genesis of this war, on the side of the Allies at least, in favour of creating some plan of future security against similar catastrophes.

How far its scheme of government may influence a professedly civilised nation's attitude in favour of or against war is an old question under fresh review. If autocracy furnishes the surest escape from public opinion and the safest outlet for personal and class aggrandisement, it likewise makes for swift and unchallenged national policy. If democracy affords the widest distribution of political benefits, it is likely to face national emergencies with less calculation and hence with less vigilant preparation. Is it true, as the President declares, that "Only free peoples can hold their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own?"

The realisation of magisterial

policy under dominant and ambitious personalities, concerned with political advantage through the instrumentality of force, fits the political history of Germany as presented with clearness and concision by Marriott and Robertson, of Oxford University, in The Evolution of Prussia. Although the book is the outgrowth of the war, its point of view gives it a justifiable place in historical literature. The authors have exhibited that an unbiassed study of competent sources and authorities, the German being liberally represented, discloses the development of a distinctly Hohenzollern policy after the ideas of Frederick the Great, who bequeathed to his successors the faith that war and its instrument, the army, are essential to the life of the state. The Prussianisation of Germany is shown to have expanded from humble beginnings under the triple stimuli of army organisation, the encouragement of science, and the favouring administrative machinery of an undemocratic constitution. This conclusion, inevitable to a strictly political study of Prussian history, conforms with the teaching of many German publicists, who have favoured the triumph of a dynastic function unaccountable to those who are governed and working through bureaucratic agencies indifferent to criticism. The policy has succeeded in moulding a docile people to the prefigured demands of autocratic organisation.

The contrast between democratic and autocratic methods of administration, their differentiation in argument and conception of justice, as well as the vital contradiction inherent in the two levels of motives which mark their diplomacy, is con

veyed very definitely and irresistibly in James Brown Scott's Survey of International Relations Between the United States and Germany. This work of splendid scholarship is of permanent character, whose usefulness will grow with the years. It is a documentary history illustrative of the continuity of German political ideals from Frederick the Great to William II, followed by a documentary history of our controversy with Germany on the side of international law, and including the break with Austria-Hungary. The illuminating chapter on Germany's historic attitude toward arbitration goes far toward answering the question as to which of the two great ideals of government is the more predisposed to war. Doctor Scott concludes that "the day has long since passed, at least in democratic countries, where the head of the State, whether he be monarch or president, can go to war as the king went a-hunting. War is ordinarily declared in a moment of excitement . . . but we cannot to-day in democracies justify a declaration of war unless the cause be just." At least we cannot deceive posterity.

This conclusion is not in sympathy with that reached by J. A. Farrer, whose study of The Monarchy in Politics is a work embodying the results of an industrious investigation of a large body of memoirs and state papers from the time of George III to Queen Victoria. This English writer gives an admirable account of the oscillative nature of European politics and its nervous diplomacy during the later years of Victoria's reign, when the clouds of the present international confusion were lowering. He thinks that while the influence of English mon

...

archs has ordinarily been reactionary, it has often been on the side of weathering political crises. As an instance of this, he cites the Queen's strength in keeping England out of war with Germany in the Danish crisis of 1864, "when the people would have jumped at war." He concludes, very academically one cannot help thinking, that "democracies under modern conditions, sensitive to every gust of rumour . . are subject to no restraint from war like that which may operate on a peaceful monarch." He endorses Lord Salisbury's contention that "a thirst for empire and a readiness for aggressive war" is characteristic of a democracy. This view of the matter is also held by H. H. Powers in America Among the Nations. He regards it as "unhistoric thinking" to "assume that democracies are peaceful," and points to the expansion of the United States and Britain through war during the last one hundred years. He has little confidence. in an alliance of nations for the "perplexing purpose of maintaining the world's peace" for the reason that "Nations must grow together," as the United States and Britain have done, by reaching the point where they can settle their differences by arbitration. Whatever their government, nations, he thinks, do not war for commerce nor to "rally" their people as "slaves to serve the ambitions of an autocrat," but in mystic response to a "great common impulse," an "oversoul" unintelligible to them, which makes a rational equilibrium unattainable.

Historically viewed, it is certain that a republic may as properly build up an empire as a monarchy may, and that it may employ war in the process. Is this to say that

a self-governing nation is as predisposed to make war as a government independent of public opinion? We can dismiss at once the fallacy that war is mystically insuperable to rationalistic control or that public opinion is subject to "every gust of rumour." When a government responsive to intelligent public opinion goes to war the chances are many to one that it will have good reason to do so. Moreover, its belligerent practice is likely to have regard for human rights; its methods will be more humane than governments by irresponsible control usually betray. It would scarcely be possible for a modern self-governing people to despoil deliberately its unoffending neighbour for the motive frankly asserted by Bismarck for the annexation of Alsace. In his AlsaceLorraine Under German Rule, a book uniting simplicity and perspicacity with authenticity of statement, Professor Hazen quotes the iron chancellor's remark that "Alsace had not been annexed because of her beaux yeux, but simply and solely because she would furnish an excellent military defence of the Empire, an important first-line fortification, and Germany was equally indifferent to Alsatian lamentations and Alsatian wrath." The democratic feeling is disclosed by Henry Van Dyke on every page of his Fighting for Peace, a book delightfully representative of the civilisation practicable in a nation that would not turn its intellectual effort in the direction of material success per se. He asserts that "No one has ever accused the British or French or Italian sailors in this war of sinking merchantships without warning, leaving their crews and passengers to drown."

This attitude of the more demo

cratic countries in war is very well supported upon historic grounds by Charles Cestre's France, England, and European Democracy, a book clear and trustworthy in its capable analysis of the English mind and character, of the conflicts and progress of the labour unions, and of the slow, if tragic, triumph of English moral forces "over historical fatalities" in the liberation of Ireland. England's contribution of liberty and the French contribution of equality, by their interchange, have, in Kipling's line, fused the two nations into a "linked and steadfast guard set for peace on earth." On the other hand, the German Sittichkeit, abjuring the "great thought of. Goethe," has nourished, within the limits of German science and militarism, a people submissive to the "arrogant idea of bending all men to this soulless discipline." England and France, organising and increasing their production in proportion to their needs, have shown that efficiency consists also "in judgment, self-possession, the sense of historical realities. . . . They make efficiency the servant of human values." This is the doctrine of Doctor J. F. Coar, whose Democracy and the War, while admitting that "Within a given time, democratic efficiency may not achieve results comparable to those effected by an autocratic government,” finds in "the unlimited possibilities of the democratic principle . . . its crowning glory. Because, according to this vigorous and intellectual writer, "democracy requires the abiding interest of every member of the community," its efficiency consists of individual human energies in action to maintain the equal and accumulative rights of all men. "Democracy's primary organ

isation is the State, autocracy's is the Government."

Germany's substitution of government initiative in economic and social development for popular initiative made it possible for her official class to mould her people to the autocratic will. State socialism satisfied the material aims behind the earlier socialistic movement among the people. Popular initiative, the fruit of liberty, rests upon the democratic principle. This is the philosophy of Bertrand Russell, in his readable little book, Political Ideals. "The more men learn to live creatively rather than possessively," he maintains, "the less their wishes lead them to thwart others or to attempt violent interference with their liberty." Similarly Dr. James H. Tufts, in Our Democracy, argues that liberty and progress depend upon co-operation; that "Nations that prefer other ends than power are looked down upon" by the military class, "which thinks itself the only class fit to govern." To him it is clear that some form of co-operation like the proposed League of Peace is necessary to protect humanity against great armies and constant preparation for war. Instead of such a League, J. Ellis Barker believes that "a British-American union" would be the "most powerful instrument imaginable not only for protecting the future peace of the Anglo-Saxons but also for protecting the peace of the world." In his Great Problems of British Statesmanship, one of the most profoundly interesting discussions of the issues provoked by the war, he argues in behalf of the efficacy of the American scheme of government as against that of the normal British Cabinet system. This efficacy lies in the

American constitutional system, whose founders "recognised that a government can act with energy, sagacity, foresight, secrecy, and despatch .. spatch. . . only if there is absolute unity of purpose, if the executive is in the hands of a single man who is assisted by eminent experts." He illustrates by a critical review of our Civil War, that a republic can successfully employ conscription, which he endorses for England; and shows that by their earlier adoption of conscription, as well as by their unqualified system of the same, the Southern States were able to prolong the war. Mr. Barker, so far as he discusses the question in relation to Austria-Hungary, is in substantial agreement with exPresident Roosevelt, who contends in National Strength and International Duty, that "We should not have any negotiations with those who committed and who glory in . . . the conquered countries," and that "we are fighting for the liberty of every well-behaved nation, great or small, to have whatever government it desires and to live unharming others and unharmed by others."

The ideals of democracy are becoming more and more clearly differentiated in the public mind from those of autocracy. This result is indispensable to their success and to the loyalty necessary to their perpetuity. It is a result that marks a great advance in the world. As President Wilson has divined and happily phrased it, "We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrongs done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilised states."