tain of such a vessel to do all in his power to save the lives of those aboard his ship. The whole affair was merely another attempt on Germany's part to frighten the world, but the hardy sea captains of Great Britain were not to be intimidated by any such means, and refused to stand calmly by while German U-boats sank their ships and drowned or murdered their crews. Having no other means of defense, they tried to ram and sink the attacking submarines whenever possible. This Captain Fryatt had attempted on one occasion, with the result that he escaped with his vessel, but the Germans then and there marked him for death. Not long afterward his ship, the Brussels, leaving Rotterdam, was captured by German destroyers and taken to Zeebrugge, on the coast of Belgium, under an armed guard. Captain Fryatt was given a mock trial, in which he had no opportunity to defend himself, and was then placed before a firing-squad and shot.

When we remember that from the very beginning of the war the Germans had been guilty of the most unbelievable cruelties, that they had openly and repeatedly violated every rule of civilized warfare, this murder of a peaceful English sailor for trying to save the lives of those entrusted to his care will always stand out as one of the most amazing pieces of hypocrisy of which even the hypocritical government of Germany was guilty.

CHAPTER XX

THE BEGINNING OF THE YEAR 1917

HE two great outstanding events of the year

THE

1917 were the collapse of Russia and the entry of the United States of America into the war. These two occurrences, while radically different in their nature, had behind them the same cause: each represented an attack upon autocracy, a movement toward the preservation of the liberty, the democracy of the world.

In Russia the movement was directed against forces within-the czar and the corrupt imperial and military court which surrounded him. In America the movement was against autocracy without the autocracy of the kaiser and his party, which sought to enslave the world.

Whatever may have been the motives which actuated the rulers of the nations of Europe when the war broke out in 1914, it had become clear to people everywhere, by the beginning of the year 1917, that the great war was something more than a mere fight between Germany and England to control the trade of the world. It began to develop slowly, yet with ever-increasing force, that this huge conflict was in reality a revolution, that a world movement for the liberty of the people was in progress, similar in some respects to the

French Revolution. It was as though the latter, checked for a hundred years after the downfall of Napoleon by the manipulations of the crowned heads of Europe at the Peace of Vienna, had once more broken out, with every prospect of spreading to the ends of the earth. The bomb which killed an Austrian archduke in 1914 awoke not only the people of Serbia to resistance against their enslavement by the autocratic rulers of Austria, but also the public in many other parts of the world, whose resentment against oppression, whose desire for self-government began to take form, to seek expression.

In Poland, torn into three parts and held under Russian, German, and Austrian rule; in Lithuania; in Finland; in Bohemia and the other alien provinces of Austria-Hungary; in the Armenian and Arabian provinces of Turkey; in Russia; even in Germany itself, people began to say to one another: "What use have we for these puppet kings and emperors, with their ridiculous claims to divine right to rule us, their pretenses to alliance with God? That sort of thing may have been well enough in the dark ages, when the people were so ignorant that they knew only enough to till the soil, or fight for some king or ruler when they were commanded to do so. But in the twentieth century such ideas are absurd, mere relics of feudalism, of the period when the common people were regarded as so many cattle, to be used as beasts

of burden in times of peace, or as cannon fodder in times of war, in order that these self-elected rulers might live in luxury and idleness. We claim the right to elect our own rulers; to make them responsible to us for their acts; in other words, to rule ourselves. All this talk of a divine right to rule us, of an alliance with God, is only a sham, to make us believe that it is our religious duty to submit, to do as we are told, so as to make ruling that much easier for those who have placed themselves in power over us. They know that the people are in their hearts religious, and they are using that fact to take advantage of us. We refuse to submit to it any longer."

In England all such pretensions on the part of the king had long since been swept away. The barons of England when they forced King John to sign the Magna Charta, Cromwell when he fought the power of Charles I, had established the right of the people to rule, in England, just as Washington established it in America and the leaders of the French Revolution established it in France. Great Britain, it is true, exercised authority over vast populations in Egypt, in India; but her rule was a beneficent one, bringing justice and law to races not yet sufficiently educated to govern themselves. The United States governed under similar conditions in the Philippines, giving freedom and prosperity to a race which under the autocratic rule of Spain had known only wretchedness,

ignorance, and slavery. Only in Ireland, with rankling memories of past oppression, was there any great dissatisfaction with English rule; yet in Ireland the people not only had the same democratic government that Scotland and Wales enjoyed, but had even been offered a separate or home government of their own. In Italy, as in Belgium, a democratic king ruled under the constitutional authority of a parliament elected by the people. But in Russia, as in Germany and Austria-Hungary, the ruler had the sole power to declare war, and the people had virtually no voice in the government.

The Germans, when the Allied nations declared that they were fighting for the liberties of the people, laughed with scorn, and pointed to Russia, one of the most autocratic governments in the world. To this the Allies could make no reply, until the year 1917, and then, curiously enough, the autocratic rule of the czar was overthrown largely because of efforts made by Germany herself.

We have seen in a previous chapter that the German Government, through its efficient and wide-spread system of agents and spies, had for a long time been trying to corrupt the Russian military leaders, so as to render the Russian Army an easy victim to her own. At the same time tremendous efforts were made to spread dissatisfaction among the Russian soldiers and people by