science and fighting power, as to France's decadence and patriotic fervor and strength, and as to the filial loyalty of England's daughters!

And now, at the crisis of the war, when the victory must abide the weight of wealth, resources, food, equipment, and fighting men, the German military dynasty, contemptuous of a peace-loving people, brings into the contest a nation fresh in its strength, which can furnish more money, more food, and more fighting men, if need be, than any other nation in the world.

But we are at a danger-point. England and France and Russia since 1914 have been fighting the battle of the world and fighting for us of America. The three years or more of war have drained their vitality, strained their credit, exhausted their man-power, subjected many of their noncombatants to suffering and destruction and they have the war weariness which dulls the earlier eager enthusiasm for the principles at stake. Now specious proposals for peace are likely to be most alluring to the faint-hearted and most powerful in the hands of traitors. Russia, rid of the Czar, is torn with dissensions, and the extreme socialists and impractical theorists, blind to the ultimate destruction of their hopes that a loss of this war will entail, are many of them turning for a separate peace.

The intervention of the United States, by her financial aid, has helped much; but her armies are needed, and she, a republic unprepared, must have the time to prepare. The war is now to be determined by the active tenacity of purpose of the contestants. England showed that tenacity in the wars of Napoleon. Napoleon succumbed. General Grant, in his "Memoirs," says that the battle is won not in the first day, but by the commander and the army that is ready, even after apparent defeat, to begin the next day. It is the side that has the nerve that will win. The interven

tion of the United States has strengthened that nerve in England, France, and Italy. But delay and disappointment give full opportunity to the lethargic, the cowardly, the factious, to make the task of the patriot and the loyal men doubly heavy. This is the temper of the situation among our European allies.

With us at home the great body of our people are loyal and strong for the war. Of course, a people, however intelligent, when very prosperous and comfortable, and not well advised as to the vital concern they have in the issue of a war across a wide ocean and thousands of miles away, it takes time to convince. But we have, for the first time in the history of our Republic, begun a war right. We have begun with a conscription law which requires service from men of a certain age from every I walk of life. It is democratic in principle, and yet it offers to the Government the means of selection so that those who shall be sent to the front may be best fitted to represent the Nation there, and those best able to do the work in field and factory essential to our winning at the front may be retained. We have adopted a merit system of selecting from the intelligent and educated youth of the country the company officers of an army of a million and a half or two million that we are now preparing. The machinery of the draft naturally has creaked some because it had to be so hastily constructed, but on the whole it has worked well. Those who devised it and have carried it through are entitled to great credit.

The lessons of the three years of the war are being learned and applied in our war equipment and in neutralizing, by new construction, the submarine destruction of commercial transports. Adequate measures for the raising of the money needed to finance the war and finance our Allies, have been carried through Congress or are so near enactment as to be practically on the statute book. Food conservation is pro

vided for. But, of course, it takes time for a hundred million of peace-lovers and non-militarists to get ready, however apt, however patriotic, however determined. It is in the period of the year before the United States can begin to fight that the strain is to come in Europe. But Germany is stopped on the Western and Italian fronts. The winter coming will be harder on her than on the Allies.

"It is dogged that does it." Stamp on all proposals of peace as ill-advised or seditious, and then time will make for our certain victory.

While there has been pro-German sentiment in the United States, and while the paid emissaries of Germany have been busy trying to create as much opposition to the war as possible, and have found a number of weak dupes and unintelligent persons who don't understand the importance of the war, to aid them, our allies should know that the whole body of the American people will earnestly support the President and Congress in carrying out the measures which have been adopted by the United States to win this war.

When the war is won, the United States will wish to be heard and will have a right to be heard as to the terms of peace. The United States will insist on a just peace, not one of material conquest. It is a moral victory the world should win. I think I do not mistake the current of public sentiment throughout our entire country in saying that our people will favor an international agreement by which the peace brought about through such blood and suffering and destruction and enormous sacrifice shall be preserved by the joint power of the world. Whether the terms of the League to Enforce Peace as they are will be taken as a basis for agreement, or a modified form, something of the kind must be attempted.

Meantime, let us hope and pray that all the Allies will reject proposals for settlement and compromise of every

nature; that they will adhere rigidly and religiously to the principle that until a victorious result gives security that the world shall not again be drenched in blood through the insanely selfish policy of a military caste ruling a deluded people intoxicated with material success and power, there will be no peace.

THE DUTIES OF THE CITIZEN 1

ELIHU ROOT

THE declaration of war between the United States and Germany completely changed the relations of all the inhabitants of this country to the subject of peace and war.

Before the declaration everybody had a right to discuss in private and in public the question whether the United States should carry on war against Germany. Everybody had a right to argue that there was no sufficient cause for war, that the consequences of war would be worse than the consequences of continued peace, that it would be wiser to submit to the aggressions of Germany against American rights, that it would be better to have Germany succeed than to have the allies succeed in the great conflict.

Everybody holding these views had a right by expressing them to seek to influence public opinion and to affect the action of the President and the Congress, to whom the people of the country by their constitution have entrusted the power to determine whether the United States shall or shall not make war.

But the question of peace or war has now been decided by the President and Congress, the sole authorities which had the right to decide, the lawful authorities who rested under the duty to decide. The question no longer remains open. It has been determined and the United States is at war with Germany.

The power to make such a decision is the most essential, vital, and momentous of all the powers of government. No

1 An address delivered at Chicago, September 14, 1917.