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together for the vindication of right, a war for the preservation of our nation and of all that it has held dear of principle and of purpose, that we feel ourselves doubly constrained propose for its outcome only that which is righteous and of irreproachable intention, for our foes as well as for our 5 friends. The cause being just and holy, the settlement must be of like motive and quality. For this we can fight, but for nothing less noble or less worthy of our traditions. For this cause we entered the war and for this cause will we battle until the last gun is fired.

ΙΟ

I have spoken plainly because this seems to me the time when it is most necessary to speak plainly, in order that all the world may know that even in the heat and ardor of the struggle and when our whole thought is of carrying the war through to its end we have not forgotten any ideal or 15 principle for which the name of America has been held in honor among the nations and for which it has been our glory to contend in the great generations that went before us. A supreme moment of history has come. The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of 20 God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.

PEACE

BY NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER. (1917)

PEACE is not an ideal at all; it is a state attendant upon the achievement of an ideal. The ideal itself is human 25 liberty, justice, and the honorable conduct of an orderly and humane society. Given this, a durable peace follows naturally as a matter of course. Without this, there is no peace, but only a rule of force until liberty and justice revolt against it in search of peace.

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TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE TO LIVE IN

By The World's Work. (JANUARY, 1918)

"LET there be no misunderstanding. Our present and immediate task is to win the war, and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is accomplished. Every power and resource we possess, whether of men, of money, or 5 of materials, is being devoted and will continue to be devoted to that purpose until it is achieved. Those who desire to bring peace about before that purpose is achieved, I counsel to carry their advice elsewhere. We will not entertain it."

This paragraph was the heart of the President's message. It is a simple fact and is told quickly, but its significance is not measured by its length. And the President's pledge of our determination to fight the war through is given added weight by the declaration of war against 15 Austria-Hungary.

In a large part of the message the President restated our aims in the war, our insistence that Germany "repair," as the President phrases it, the damage she has done, and on the other hand our denial of any intention of exacting 20 indemnities in a spirit of revenge. It is well to keep our motives clear before our Allies and ourselves. But it cannot very much affect what Germany will pay. If she repairs even part of the damage she has done wantonly, purposely, and contrary to the rules of war to Belgium, 25 to northern France, to Serbia, there will not be left the power to pay any indemnity, except of course in territory and people. But none of the Allies in their bitterest moments have ever wanted to incorporate territory peopled by Germans within their borders. The land and the 30 people of Germany must remain. Its ambitions and kultur must go, and the German people must expiate the

crimes which they have committed by restoring the countries which they have wrecked in so far as it is humanly possible. There is little likelihood that they will do this until they are forced to do so, and that is why we are faced with the necessity of gaining a military decision, 5 which is but a pleasanter way of saying that we must kill, capture, or disperse the German armies until they can no longer fight.

When this is done the Germans will all know that the Kaiser and his system have failed them. The legend of 10 German invincibility will be gone. The precedent of 1864, 1866, 1870–71 will be shattered. The German hold on Austria, the Balkans, and Turkey will be broken. There will be no opportunity for another attack on civilization. The world will, for the time anyway, be free from the 15 menace of the German ideal of blood and iron and have an opportunity to begin again, in peace, the effort to perfect social and political systems designed to give all men a chance for mental and material well-being and advancement to begin again the everlasting and all-important 20 task of trying to make the world a better place to live in.

NATIONAL UNITY°

BY NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER. (FEBRUARY 16, 1918)

As the result of nearly a century and a half of development and of a Civil War which absorbed the entire energies of the people through four long years, the governmental and the geographic unity of the United States are 25 secure. It is not by any means so clear that there is a corresponding unity of spirit, of purpose and of ideals among the American people themselves. Those differences among men which separate them into political parties, having different policies but a common point of 30 departure and a common goal, are merely incidental and

strengthen rather than weaken national unity. If on the other hand there are within the nation forces and tendencies making for conflicts and antagonisms as to the fundamental purposes for which the nation and its 5 government exist, then there is something to be done and that right away.

The war has brought clearly to view the fact that national unity is endangered, not only by illiteracy, which fact has long been recognized, but by diversity of language Io with its resulting lack of complete understanding and cooperation. No country can have a homogeneous or a safe basis for its public opinion and its institutions unless these rest upon the foundation of a single language. To protect the national unity and security, no American community should be permitted to substitute any other language for English as the basis or instrument of common school education. Wherever another language has been introduced into the common schools, whether for conscious propaganda or otherwise, it should be ruthlessly stamped out as a 20 wrong against our national unity and our national integrity.

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No time should be lost in making adequate provision to teach English to those adult immigrants who are beyond the reach of the elementary school and yet have cast in their lot with the people of the United States. A knowledge of the English language, and evidence of some real understanding of the history and meaning of our institutions, should be required before the privilege of suffrage is conferred upon one who has grown up in another civilization than ours and under another flag than the Stars and Stripes. Public safety is the supreme law, and public safety requires that the safeguarding and the improvement of our institutions be not committed to those who have had no opportunity to gain knowledge of them or to 35 gain sympathy with them.

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A still more subtle enemy of the American democracy

is the wide-spread teaching that there is and should be a class struggle between those who have little and those who have more, between those who work with their hands and those who work in other ways. The notion of fixed economic classes that are at war with each other is in flat con- 5 tradiction to the principles and ideals of democracy. The doctrine of a class conflict was made in Germany, and it represents a notion of social and political organization wholly at variance with the principles and conditions of our American life. In this country we have no fixed 10 economic classes and we desire none. The handworker for wages of today is the employer of tomorrow, and the door of opportunity is so wide open that he who begins in industrial, commercial, or financial service at the bottom of the ladder may by competence and character speedily climb to 15 its very top. Those who teach the justice and the necessity of a class struggle are not believers in democracy. They do not wish to lift all men up; they are bent upon pulling some men down. Their program is one of destruction not construction, of reaction not progress. They do 20 not believe in the equality of men before the law and in the equality of opportunity for all men and all women; they believe in a cruel, relentless, exploiting class. In other words, they believe in privilege and not in free government. Class consciousness and democracy are mutu- 25 ally exclusive. Its logical and necessary result would be to tear up the Declaration of Independence, to destroy the Constitution of the United States, and to put in their stead a Charter of Bedlam under whose provisions might, and might alone, would make right. Every movement 30 and every effort to this end should be challenged peremptorily in the name of the American people, their traditions, and their ideals. It is as vitally important to oppose autocracy in this form as when it comes clad in imperial robes and accompanied with all the instruments of mili- 35 tarism.