fraternity and equality against the foe that would crush these foundation principles of democracy. This consideration for France explains both (1) her course for maintenance of treaty obligations with her allies and, (2), her fear of Pan-Germanism as causes of war for her. Her democracy and existence were both at stake.

(3) Revenge for the exaction of Alsace-Lorraine from her by Prussia in 1871 was, naturally, a strong incentive for war on France's part. She has since that fatal year been the leading power in Europe to warn the world against the ambitions of Germany and the Hohenzollerns, and to counsel preparedness for the "inevitable day."

Third, Russia. Russia's desire for control of the Balkans and possession of Constantinople, with access to the Mediterranean sea was due chiefly to two causes, namely, (1) Growth of a national consciousness and pride among the most intelligent and influential elements in the State, and (2) the ambition of the Russian monarchs and privileged nobility to expand (east, south and southwest-and at an early time, west also, and north) to ice-free and unhampered ports on the seas. Constantinople as the capital of a new and greater Russia had been the dreams of her czars since the time of Peter the Great. In this, of course, the Russia of the Czar was equally guilty with Germany and Austria in stirring up strife and precipitating the greatest of all conflicts. Russia's aggressions in Manchuria, contrary to her solemn pledges to Japan, with Port Arthur as the terminus of her great Trans-Siberian railroad and coveted port on the Pacific, it is well known, was the chief cause of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05.

Russia's other causes are so similar to those of other countries of the allies that they may be passed over here. Fourth, Italy. Of all the allies so far considered-and perhaps of all of them, without exception-Italy has been most guilty. She is less democratic than the others-(except Russia at first), though far more so than either Ger

many or Austria-Hungary-and has allowed her strong spirit of nationality and Italian unity to lead her into two wars of conquest within a decade, i. e., her war with Turkey in 1911, and the present war. Yet, Italy at heart is democratic, her local government being patterned after that of France and her causes for war are most natural ones and emanate from the people themselves.

Fifth, the Balkan States. These have been sufficiently commented on in a former article, and need not be separately treated here. The above outline of their causes will suffice.

Sixth, Japan. Japan's motives are also sufficiently clearly given in the above outline of her causes, as are also those in the seventh (g), and eighth (h) groups of the outline, and to save space we omit further consideration of them at this point.

The above discussion of the allies' causes with the rather full outline of the causes for the Central Powers will perhaps give the situation as affecting the European nations in themselves as complete consideration as is needed. It remains for us to go somewhat more into detail concerning our own country's causes for entering the conflict, and finally, to make a brief summary of causes in general, so as to fix the great weight of responsibility for the world tragedy where it rightfully belongs.

Keeping in mind our classification of America's motives in this war, as a concise working basis, we could do no better in elaboration and in exposition of our case against Germany, than to consider thoughtfully the following paragraphs from President Wilson's noted Flag Day Speech of last year.

"It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial German government left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The military masters

of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. . . their agents diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance, and some of those agents were men connected with the official embassy of the German government itself here in our own capital. They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance with her, and that by direct suggestion from the foreign office in Berlin. . . . They repeatedly executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment and surprise whether there was any community in which hostile intrigue did not lurk. What great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much as we had desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice. flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.

This

"But this is only part of the story. . . . The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men have never regarded nations as peoples, men, women and children of like blood and frame as themselves. . . . They have regarded them merely as serviceable organizations which they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own purpose. They have regarded the smaller States in particular, and the people who could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools and instruments of domination. Their purpose has long been avowed. . . . The rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while what concrete plans, what well advanced intrigues lay back of what the professors and the

writers were saying, and were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the thrones of the Balkan States with German princes, putting German officers at the service of Turkey to drill her armies developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The demands made by Austria upon Servia were a mere single step in a plan that compassed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped that their demands might not arouse Europe, but they meant to press them whether they did or not, for they thought themselves ready for the final issue of arms.

"Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power and political control across the very center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into the heart of Asia. The dream had its heart at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else! . . . The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It contemplated binding together racial and political units which could be kept together only by force.

"And they have actually carried the greater part of that plan into execution! . . . The so-called Central Powers are in fact but a single power. The Turkish armies, which Germans trained, are serving Germany, certainly not themselves, and the guns of German warships lying in the harbor of Constantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day that they have no choice but to take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian gulf, the net is spread. "Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace that has been manifested from Berlin ever since the snare was set and sprung? . . . It wishes to close its bargain before it is too late.

"If they fail, their people will cast them aside; a government accountable to the people themselves will be set up in Germany as it has been in England, in the United States, in France, and in all the great countries of the modern time

except Germany. If they succeed, America will fall within the menace. We and all the rest of the world must remain armed, as they will remain, and must be ready for the next step of aggression.

"Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the intrigue for peace? . . . Their present particular aim is to deceive all those who throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self-government of nations; for they see what immense strength the forces of justice and liberalism are gathering out of this war. They are employing liberals in their enterprise. They are using men, in Germany and without, as their spokesmen for their own destruction, socialists, the leaders of laborers, the thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. . . .

"The sinister intrigue is being no less actively conducted in this country than in Russia and in every country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of the imperial German government each gets access. . . . .. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions; set England at the center of the stake and talk of her ambition to assert economic dominion throughout the world; appeal to our ancient tradition of isolation in the politics of the nations; and seek to undermine the government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.

"The great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a great people's war, a war for freedom and justice and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the German people themselves included; and with us rests the choice to break through all these hypocrisies and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated as long ago, by .. a power to which the world has afforded no parallel and in