we in the war to pull the chestnuts of the Allies 1 out of the fire? Are we fighting to help them recover lost territory or to acquire new possessions? Why do we fight at all? Why not employ peaceful means? Why not negotiate?

The main answer to these questions is simple. We are at war with Germany primarily to assert and to defend our rights, to make good our claim that we are a free nation, entitled to exercise rights long recognized by all the nations of the world, to exercise these rights without restraint or dictation from the Prussian autocracy and militarists, to have the kind of institutions we wish, and to live the kind of life we have determined to live. We are at war with Germany because Germany made war on us, sank our ships, and killed our citizens who were going about their proper business in places where they had a right to be, traveling as they had a right to travel. We either had to fight or to keep our citizens and ships from the seas around England, France, and Italy, or to have our ships sunk and our people killed.

If we had not accepted the challenge of the warmad, desperate, dictatorial, contemptuous, hypocritical and mediæval Prussian militarists, we would have had to admit that we were not a free nation, that we preferred peace at any price and were interested only in the fleshpots. This country either had to swallow its own words, abdicate its position as a free sovereign power, concede that it had no rights except those which Germany accorded it, hold its citizens and ships away from Europe, or to rec

ognize the plain fact that Germany was acting in a hostile manner against it, fight to defend its rights, joining its power with the other free nations of the world to put an end to autocratic and brute force. There was one choice we could not make we were incapable of making. We could not "choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated."

The Meaning of the War

From a speech delivered in New York City by the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, Head of the Allied Mission to the United States, and some time Prime Minister of Great Britain.

SURELY it is a significant fact that the representatives of three great democracies - France, Great Britain, and America - are met to-day in the very heart of New York to plead a common cause. What has brought us all together? It is a shallow view to suppose that each of these great nations has had a separate and different cause of controversy with the enemy that Russia was dragged in because of Serbia, that France was dragged in because of Russia, that Great Britain was dragged in because of the violation of Belgian territory, and that the United States has been dragged in because of the piratical warfare of the German submarines.

All those causes are, each of them, and separately, no doubt a sufficient reason, but for a moment to consider this war carried on by the Allies as that of separate interests, separate causes of controversy,

is an utterly inadequate and false view of the situation. These are but symptoms of the absolute necessity in which a civilized world finds itself, to deal with an imminent and overmastering peril. What is that peril? What is it we feel that we have got to stop? I will tell you my view of it. It is the calculated and remorseless use of every civilized weapon to carry out the ends of pure barbarism. To us of English speech it seems impossible, incredible, that a nation should clearly set itself to work and coördinate every means of science, every means that knowledge, that industry can provide, not for the bettering of its own people, but for the demolition of other peoples.

The history of the world is too full of the adventures of unscrupulous ambition. We know, all through history, of men who have endeavored, at the cost of others, to expand their own State. Within the last century, or a little more, we have seen men of genius trying to coerce the world. But this is not a case of a new Napoleon arising to carry out a new adventure. This is not a case of adventure, of a genius seeking to satisfy his ambition within the limits of his own country.

It is something far different and far more dangerous for mankind. It is the settled determination to use every means to put the whole world at her feet. We all know it is a commonplace that science has enormously expanded the means by which men can kill each other. Modern destruction is carried out as much in the laboratory of your universities as it is on the field of battle, but we have always

believed, we have always hoped, that this increased power of destruction would be limited and controlled by the growing forces of humanity and civilization. We have been taught, not by Germany, but by those who rule Germany, by the military caste which controls Germany - we have been taught a different lesson, and we now know not merely that every scientific weapon will be put in force to make war more horrible than it was in barbarous times, but that even the rights of civilization, of trade, of commerce, even the intercommunication between different peoples, will be used for the same sinister object.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is the danger we have to meet and if at this moment the world is bathed in blood and tears from the highlands of distant Armenia down to the very fields of France, almost within sight of the Straits of Dover-if we have seen a reckless destruction of life, not merely of soldiers but of civilians; if we have seen peaceful communities dragged through the mire, ruined, outraged; if horror has been heaped upon horror, until really we almost get callous in reading our newspapers in the morning—if all these things are true, shall we not rise up and resist them?

Shall we who know what freedom is become the humble and obsequious servants of those who only know what power is? That will never be tolerated. The free nations of the earth are not thus to be crushed out of existence, and if any proof is required that that consummation is impossible, it is a gathering like this where the three great democra

cies of the West are joined together under circumstances unique in the whole history of the world.

And that fact should also give strength and consolation to those who, feeling the magnitude of the issue at stake, are inclined to doubt how the contest will end. But we will fail unless all here who love liberty are prepared to labor together, to fight together, to make our sacrifices in common unless that happens we may be destroyed piecemeal and the civilization of the world may receive a wound from which it will not easily recover.

Who Began the War?

By Dr. William H. Hobbs, Professor of Geology in the University of Michigan.

WITH varying degrees of impatience and irritation, we have listened to the most vociferous and persistent German denials, both official and unofficial, that she had any part either in planning or in beginning this war. Standing upon the balcony of the Royal Palace in Berlin just after he had launched his armies upon Belgium, the German Kaiser declared to the immense throng assembled below, "Envious nations on all sides are forcing us to justified defense. They are forcing the sword into my hand. . . . And now I bid you go to church, bow down before God and ask His help for our brave army." In the earlier German denials, it was rehearsed in chorus that France had begun the war, that French officers had flown over Belgium and that bombs had been thrown upon the Nuremberg