II

66 WHERE THERE IS NO VISION"

FEW, if any, aspects of this great world crisis should give the thoughtful American greater concern than the altered attitude of other nations

to his country. To provincial Americans the judgment of the world may be a matter of indifference, but its more thoughtful citizens cannot ignore the portentous possibilities involved in this changed attitude. Apart from the practical possibilities of the new situation, in which the United States so suddenly finds itself, is the sentimental consideration that the United States no longer enjoys the respect and goodwill of the world in the same ungrudging measure as heretofore.

Those who affect indifference in this matter may well be reminded that in the very foundation of the United States its great founders, who were assuredly men of vision, recognized in the very preamble to the Declaration of Independence that a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind”

imposed upon this, as any nation, moral responsibilities and practical obligations. A nation can say quite as truly as an individual:

"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,

Is the immediate jewel of their souls.

Who steals my purse steals trash. 'Tis something; nothing.

'Twas mine; 'tis his; and has been slave to thou

sands.

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed."

This altered attitude of foreign nations towards the United States can be discussed from three angles, namely, the respective attitudes of the central Powers, the Entente Powers, and the neutral States.

So far as the Teutonic powers are concerned, the friendship, which they once had for the United States, is wholly gone, and a feeling of intense hatred has taken its place. The peoples of those nations feel, and with some justification, that we prevented their early and complete triumph, with all its immeasurable consequences, by supplying to the Entente Powers the indispensable munitions of war. America thus helped to negative the enormous advantage which forty years of efficient

preparation had given Germany. It is possible that if the United States had not sent to England, France, and Russia more than a billion dollars' worth of war supplies, those nations might have failed in their great struggle through a fatal disparity in war equipment.

This possibility the Teutonic Empires have magnified into a certainty and have thus attributed the defeat of their aims and the colossal losses, which they have sustained, to the practical intervention of the United States through the utilization by the Allies of its vast industrial energies. In a purely technical sense, the United States has been neutral, but in a practical sense it has been a benevolent ally to England, France, and Russia in coming to their aid with its vast financial and industrial resources.

If this were not enough, our threat to sever diplomatic relations, if the Teutonic powers did not cease their unlawful submarine activities, would amply explain the unquestioned hostile attitude of the Central Powers to the United States, for while the saner German statesmen may have recognized, as has the German Chancellor, that the submarine campaign, owing to the efficiency of the British Navy, has not met expectations, yet the masses of the German people

believe that the economic strangulation of Germany, due to the British blockade, could be prevented, if Germany persisted in its submarine activities and succeeded in inflicting like suffering upon the civilian population of England.

"Gott straffe England-und Amerika" is now on the lips of thousands of Germans, and in the portentous years to come the United States will probably hear the echoes of a defeated and halfstarving nation's curses.

So far as the neutral nations are concerned, they looked at the beginning of this struggle to the United States, as the greatest of the neutral nations, to voice as a leader the moral authority of civilization, and to a considerable extent they looked in vain. As a result the United States has fallen in their estimation from the high place which it once occupied as the land of exalted idealism.

The attitude of the Entente nations towards the United States is one of disappointment and disillusion. They do not feel hostile to the United States, but, on the contrary, for practical and sentimental reasons sincerely desire its friendship. They are eager to learn the American point of view and are quite willing to take into consideration any circumstances which explain the negative

attitude of the United States in the greatest moral crisis of civilization. They partly understand the historical reasons which made inevitable the American policy of neutrality, but they fail to understand why, when the very foundations of civilization are crumbling, the United States, with its traditional devotion to the loftiest humanitarianism, should remain silent and inactive. Undoubtedly they do not take sufficiently into account the extraordinary difficulties of America's position in this world crisis, nor do they appreciate at their full value either the extraordinary services which the United States has rendered to the cause of the Allies or the unselfish motives which permitted the industrial energies of America to be harnessed in their behalf.

Deeply impressed with this fact, the author went to England in the summer of 1916 and made nine addresses in England and one in Paris, in which he endeavoured to show that the growing resentment in England and France towards the United States was not justified. The reader will find in a later portion of this volume the principal address which the author made in England. The very favourable reception which this and similar addresses received in England and France, widely circulated as the first address was by the