declaration is declared to be under no circumstances contraband; then throws the whole theory of contraband to the winds by claiming the right to capture any vessel bound to enemy's ports, or cargoes ultimately destined to enemy's territory. This is not so much a "scrap of paper" as a scrap heap of papers.

The only way out of this mix-up is for the United States to insist, yesterday, today, and every day to the end of the war, that whatever mean or brutal thing the belligerents may do to each other, the United States stands unmoved upon its right to be a neutral and to act as a neutral. From that safe and sane position, steady efforts have been made to drive the United States. Both continental Eurus and insular Boreas have blown with all their might to deflect the United States from its steady middle course. Englishmen write with grief and disappointment of the unwillingness of the United States to realize that the allies are fighting the battles of America; and that we ought to come to their aid by land and sea. Their treatment of our neutral ships, however, is not prepossessing. It gives some color for the German charge that the purpose of Great Britain is to get control of all the seas and make the laws of trade for other nations. On the other side, the Germans, officially, unofficially and German-Americanally insist that the United States has made itself one of the allies by furnishing munitions to the enemies of Germany. We are told that the blood of German soldiers killed by shrapnel manufactured in America will cry out against us. Just what would be the legal status of the blood of British soldiers who were killed for the lack of our shrapnel does not distinctly appear! Nor is it plain how to classify the blood of the Servians, killed by German shrapnel fired from Turkish guns in 1912, and from Bulgarian guns in 1913.

Nevertheless, nothing is clearer than that there is a steady accumulation of anger and hostile feeling toward the United States. The English are not altogether displeased that the United States should remain neutral, because they are getting the goods. The United States shows no moral objection to furnishing superior shrapnel to shed the blood of soldiers in any uniform. The English have driven all but one of the German commerce destroyers off the seas; they are feeding and supplying themselves, notwithstanding the German submarine

campaign; and they are receiving supplies of food and ammunition from the United States in any desired quantity. It is true that they have accomplished this by their superior naval power, combined with a sublime indifference to their own principles of neutral trade.

The Germans, however, are in a very different case. Quite contrary to their expectations and to the probabilities as shown by the experience of the Southern Confederacy in our Civil War, they have been unable seriously to damage British merchant commerce. Great Britain is relentlessly uprooting neutral commerce, which means substantially the American commerce with Germany and her allies. The English have hoped to starve out the Germans, exactly as the Germans have hoped by battleships, aircraft or submarines, to starve out the British islands. The consequent frame of mind among thoughtful Germans seems to be not unlike that of thoughtful Northerners during our Civil War. We felt a sense of passionate resentment against the British people because they were akin to us in civilization, and were supposed to be a lofty and high-minded people who should sympathize with the aspirations of a great nation. The Americans insisted that the British government was bound to take precautions against commerce destroyers, such as it had never taken before. The United States rolled up, and once actually presented, a bill for a thousand million dollars for the prolongation of the war. That fierce feeling, which we now see to be not wholly reasonable, lasted for thirty-five years. It was extinguished only by an apology from Great Britain followed by a so-called arbitration in which Great Britain accepted a hand upon which she must inevitably lose the game. Fifteen and a half million dollars for the Alabama claims were paid in cash. Still it was not till the Spanish War of 1898 that John Bull again became the favorite cousin.

It looks now as though there would be a similar experience between Germany and the United States. From the first week of the war to the present time the point of view of the most intelligent German subjects in the United States has been that they were unwarrantably deprived of the natural sympathy of the American people. What they expect of the United States government is what we expected of the British governmentnot a cold impartiality, but a decided leaning in their favor. Without insisting on a direct violation of neutrality as a mark

of friendship, the Germans have expected that the United States would go to the extreme in their behalf. They would like a prohibition of export of military munition, or, failing that, an embargo like that of 1807 which cut off all exports. They want the American newspapers, universities and chambers of commerce to think that the Germans are in the right; and they feel that a failure so to think must have a malevolent motive. This is a serious state of things for America—one of the most troublesome results of the war; and it is likely to leave behind it a legacy of international irritation.

Nevertheless it is impossible for the United States to avoid this distressing state of things. First because it is not only a bad moral policy to rob Peter in order to pay Paul, but because Paul is likely to make himself heard on the subject in the future. Still more because it is not the duty of the people of the United States to give either physical or moral support to either side. The woe of Belgium has led the Americans to join in one of the most magnificent outbursts of practical charity ever known to mankind; but if the United States felt itself bound to go to war to defend the neutrality of every neutralized state and strait, it would be in the position of the gendarme in the play written by the boys in a French lycee. The culminating incident is the benevolent gendarme discovering a poor woman on the curbstone.

"What is the matter, my unfortunate one?" he inquires. "Alas, I am so wretched. I have lost my husband, my brothers and sisters, my children. I am homeless, I am starving. I have nowhere to go." "Poor woman, what can I do for you?" says the gendarme. Thereupon a happy thought comes to him. He draws his hanger and stabs himself—you understand, to show his sympathy! A cooler-headed gendarme might have taken the poor woman into the nearest restaurant and revived her with nourishing food and drink, and then he could have rescued another unfortunate on some other day.

The United States has troubles of its own-present and impending and may thank God that it is outside of the realm of trenches and bombs and poisonous gases. It is the duty of this country to stand solidly and continuously by the great principle that it has a sovereign, national right to stay out of a war just as much as to go into it. We cannot command the great belligerents to lay down their arms, nor can they compel

us to take up arms. The United States has an unrivalled opportunity to show that personal sympathies with either side cannot push the government from its consistent duty of preventing military expeditions, or the building of warships or the enlistment of troops, within our boundaries; that it will allow no foreign ships of war to make the United States their base of operation. When the war is over-for that date also is written in the books of the fates-the United States will have an honorable record in this respect. The difficulties of the Washington government during the Civil War, and its insistence at that time on more than common neutrality on the part of other powers, are the best examples for the present.

THE

MEANING OF NEUTRALITY1

The subject of American neutrality and the European war is one intimately and vitally connected with the history and policy of the United States. One hundred and twenty-two years ago, or less than five years after the federal constitution was established, the government of the United States was required to make a momentous decision. The wars growing out of the French Revolution were well under way and the circle of conflict had just been rounded out by the entrance of the power which then held and has since continued to hold the world's naval supremacy.

Those who speak in awe-struck whispers of the problems, grave though they be, that confront us today, perhaps are not always acquainted with the appalling uncertainties and awful responsibilities that rested upon the statesmen of an earlier day, who furnished us with the chart and compass by which we have since sailed. Regarding Europe as having a set of primary interests in which the United States, with its geographical and political detachment, had no direct concern, the administration of Washington announced to the world that the United States would pursue a neutral course. The history of American diplomacy during the twenty-two years that followed, down to the close of the Napoleonic wars, is chiefly concerned with the efforts of the United States to perform the duties and maintain

1 Remarks of John Bassett Moore as presiding officer at the third session of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Philadelphia, April 30 and May 1, 1915.

the rights appertaining to it as an independent and neutral nation. This period of storm and stress has well been denominated the struggle for neutrality, and in it were formulated the fundamental principles on which the modern system of neutrality is based. In the task of formulation, the chief part was borne by Thomas Jefferson, whose philosophic discernment, keen intelligence, and extended learning enabled him to give to his work a peculiar logical and original character. What we call neutrality is a system of conduct regulated, not by the emotions nor by individual conceptions of propriety, but by certain well defined rules, and it is synonymous with impartiality only in the sense that those rules are to be enforced with impartial rigor upon all belligerents.

It is proper to advert to the fact that, during the war that is now going on in Europe, various neutral nations have issued embargoes under which the exportation of various articles is forbidden. These are commonly interpreted, I think erroneously, as "neutrality proclamations." In reality they are essentially regulations of a domestic nature, employed for the purpose of preserving a proper supply of articles, including even arms and munitions of war, in the countries concerned.

SCOPE AND OBJECTS OF THE WAR1

The American people without distinction of party are highly content with the action of their national administration on all the grave problems presented to the government by the sudden outbreak of the long-prepared war in Europe-a war which already involves five great states and two small ones. They heartly approve of the action of the administration on mediation, neutrality, aid to Americans in Europe, discouragement of speculation in foods, and, with the exception of the extreme protectionists, admission to American registry of foreign-built ships; although the legislation on the last subject, which has already passed Congress, is manifestly inadequate.

Our people cannot see that the war will necessarily be short, and they cannot imagine how it can last long. They

1 From "The Road toward Peace," by Charles W. Eliot. Copyright, 1915, by Charles W. Eliot and published by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted here by special permission of the author.