CHAPTER IV.

AMERICA AND THE NEW ORDER.

"You that have gathered together the sons of all races,
And welded them into one,

Lifting the torch of your Freedom on hungering faces
That sailed to the setting sun;

"You that have made mankind in your own proud regions
The music of man to be,

How should the old earth sing of you, now, as your legions
Rise to set all men free?"

W

ITHOUT America, European writers tell us, there can be no successful League of Nations. "What might have been too difficult without this unexpected aid may now be feasible," says H. N. Brailsford in his League of Nations. The idea of an association of power, as has been said, is not new. The freshness and vitality that is given the plan to-day, Mr. Brailsford asserts, come from the new fact in world politics: the discarding of the policy of American isolation; the declaration that "What affects mankind is inevitably our affair" and the entrance of the United States into a European war. Heretofore, this political writer states, the American mind was not content to disapprove of war; it barely understood it. Even able men, he

maintains, were unable to interpret Europe's international life, "dominated as it is by the idea of force and power." To-day, the new fact in the world's history is that "for the first time a Great Power with a formidable Navy, a population from which vast armies might be raised, and an economic and financial strength which might alone be decisive in any future conflict, is prepared to stake its own peace, not merely to guarantee its own interests, nor to further the partisan aim of its allies, but also to make an end in the world of prosperous aggression. Whatever may be its fate as a constructive proposal, this American offer marks an epoch on the world's moral evolution. We all know what a tragic failure we have made of the adventure of international life. Despairing of our own ability to surmount the accumulated hatred and distrust of our past, we look to the Republic to extricate us.. . . A policy of trust, with America to back it, ceases to be an idealistic folly."

Every American must feel a new pride of country, a new quickening of devotion to the ideals upon which America was founded, and a deeper determination not to fail in trustworthiness, as he reads such words. What are these ideals that America is asked to share? If Germany were upon the Western Hemisphere with America's man-power and resources, we know that the oppressed nationalities of Europe would not look

to her for liberation. It is not alone the fact that geographically this continent is three thousand miles distant from Europe; that America has no local European interest, no wish for territory, no embarrassing alliances to entangle or vise-like traditions to uncoil, that engenders a Western faith in us. America stimulates reliance among oppressed peoples because a century and a half ago she, herself, had the courage to break away from monarchial traditions to found a new government based upon the abstract ideal of human rights. American women should bear in mind that this country is appealed to because it, itself, is working out, with falterings and backslidings, but still with an unalterable purpose, the great effort of selfdetermination: the effort to replace the principle of dynasty with the principle of democracy; the effort to create a state in which the people, and not the officials, shall determine their destiny and the form of their institutions. This is the idea though no one claims that America is completely fulfilling it. "A man's reach must exceed his grasp," and the autocratic principle of the ages is not to be overcome in a century. The institutions of the United States, nevertheless, as Viscount Bryce points out in The American Commonwealth, "disclose and display the type of institution toward which, as by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move, some with swifter, others with slower, but all with

unresting feet." In the light of the war and the eminence of American influence in the settlement, these words, written many years ago, have a strangely prophetic ring.

What is the heritage of America toward which the civilized universe is moving and which the oppressed nationalities of Europe desire even as they desired our armament and our brave men? As we endeavored to visualize the old regime from which Europe is slowly emerging, that we might quicken the nature of our co-operation, so we must turn to our Colonial history and look into that Cradle of Liberty, the American Revolution, to glimpse more fully the new order of government to which these United States are committed, and to comprehend more clearly the character of American institutions which America is called upon to share.

If time were available to trace the outlines of the Balance of Power, we would see that the modern sovereign state system had been greatly stimulated, in its idea of Colonial expansion, by the discovery of America. Here were great virgin tracts of territory offering Europe unbounded dreams of Western Empire. Here the French and English conflict, surging in Europe, was reflected in a struggle between the French and English provinces for colonial predominance; and here the thirteen young Colonies, building a new life upon the Atlantic sea-board, far removed from courts

and intrigues, dared to think of themselves not as subjects, but as citizens, dared to dream new ideals of the national federation that is a forerunner of that world federation which ultimately must be.

In character and quality this new civilization discarded nearly every European tradition. It was a society, for instance, made up of "untitled humanity" a society that thought so little of worldly rank and station as an essential of human elevation that it incorporated in its Constitution the principle: "No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States; and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any king, prince, or foreign state." To the Colonists, courts could could not honor the man; character was the insignia of nobility, and

"There was but one society on earth,

The noble living and the noble dead."

It was a society also that deliberately rejected the tradition of militarism, maintaining but a small army and prizing above all its other advantages "the security which permits it to escape the barracks and the taxes of Europe."

Before the daring young provinces could put their individualistic, revolutionary doctrines into practise, it was necessary that they should first