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side of France succeeded in overthrowing the republic. Perhaps the plan is not yet abandoned. Certainly King Albert has a stronger hold upon the affection of the French people than before for his courage and devotion in adversity, and if the French should again be seized with a desire for a king as they have twice before, he would make a much stronger candidate than the Bourbon or Napoleonic pretenders.

If this had been a war between Germany and France alone, in which one of the two was not notoriously the aggressor, there would have been no question where American sympathy inclined. America always tends to favor any republic against any monarchy regardless of the cause of the quarrel. But when the great European republic, to whom we owe undying gratitude for rescuing us from a king, unites with five monarchies and among them the most autocratic, our sympathies are divided and we can only hope that the outcome will not be the crushing out of all republicanism in Europe.

It has been said that the Monroe Doctrine is the only thing that Americans would fight for. However that may be, it certainly represents a principle dear to the hearts of the

American people, for we believe as firmly as in 1823 that
any attempt on the part of European powers "to extend
their system to any portion of this hemisphere is dangerous
to our peace and safety." The Monroe Doctrine has been
amplified and interpreted to mean many things, the hege-
mony of the United States, America for the Americans, the
cultivation of Pan-American trade, etc. But its primary and
fundamental purpose was simply the maintenance of repub-
licanism. "Their system" meant the monarchical system and
the United States opposes that now as it always has. The
Monroe Doctrine means that one continent out of the five
shall be kept forever free from the curse of kings. As for
the rest of the world, it is not so much our concern. We re-
joice whenever a people like the Portuguese or Chinese rises
and overthrows its tyrants. We will give them what en-
couragement we can and we hope so to conduct ourselves that
this republic of ours may become an example of the benefits
of republicanism instead of a reproach. For we know we are
right and we look forward with perfect confidence to the
day when it may be there shall be no more kings in all the
earth.
March 22, 1915

Kings

By G. Bernard Shaw

We sent G. B. S. a copy of the editorial entitled, "And There Shall Be No More Kings," in
The Independent of March 22, 1915, and the following, penned on the margin of the clipping.
in his careful handwriting, is his comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article"

This war raises in an acute form the whole question of Republicanism versus German dynasticism. After the mischief done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world has the right-indeed the duty to demand that monarchies shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to constitutional limitation.

All recent historical research has shown that the position of a King, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the British, makes him so strong that George III, who was childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of statesmen the eighteenth century produced. It is undoubtedly inconvenient that the head of the State should be selected at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she) should be an unqualified person to hold office for life or be a member of a dynasty.

I may add that if the policy of dismembering the Central Empires by making separate national States of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, and making Serbia include Bosnia and Herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve making them Republics; for if they were Kingdoms their thrones would be occupied by cousins of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, strengthening the German hegemony instead of restraining it. LONDON

T

THE DOOM OF THE DYNASTIES

HE Romanoff autocracy has fallen. The doom of the Hapsburgs and of the Hohenzollerns is at hand. The kings must go; and go they will.

On August 10, 1914, in its first editorial reaction to the war, The Independent said: “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Mad with the lust of power, drunk with their own egotism, the head devils have signed their own doom. Their days are numbered. The monarchs must go and they will." Our prediction is verified sooner than we dared then to expect. Complete fulfilment may take a longer time than we now are willing to contemplate, or it may be accomplished swiftly. Royalty may be abolished altogether; or, stripped of all real power, it may be permitted to survive, as in England, on condition that it shall function democratically, useful chiefly, like the flag, as a symbol of political unity. Whichever of these possibilities comes true, monarchy as absolutism is a fact of ancient history, and ancient history, as we said ten days after the event, closed at midnight of July 31, 1914.

The Head Devils began this war. This also we said in our first reaction to the Demon Dance. None of the other alleged causes by itself, we contended, "nor all of them in combination, would have made war if the consuming vanity, the monstrous egotism and the medieval-mindedness of the absolute monarchs had not been thrown into the scale." Today all the world knows that this assertion, like our prediction, was true. The war was begun because the dynasties saw their thrones endangered by the rising tide of democracy.

The Czar goes first, because he tried to play the traitor's game. He has been the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde of the war. Professedly organizing and leading the forces of his empire against the Hohenzollern, he and his minions have been paralyzing the arm of the fighting force, disorganizing communication, scattering and confounding munitions and supplies, starving the people, and preparing, if at any moment the attempt should seem safe, to make a separate peace.

The house of Romanoff, partly Teuton in blood, largely Teuton in sympathy, and wholly Teuton in interests, has met the inevitable fate of the traitor, and it is one that satisfies the world's profoundest sense of justice.

After Nicholas, the Kaiser and the Emperor of Austria: it matters little which goes first, they both must go, and go they will. What is more, they know that they must go. Since Bismarck saw and told them, they have perfectly understood that the three czars would stand or fall together. The impending doom was known in Berlin before the news of the Russian revolution reached this continent. Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg's speech to the Prussian Diet on Wednesday afternoon proclaimed it to the Empire. "Wo to the statesman who cannot read the signs of the times," he Isaid. Wo, indeed, for the Chancellor has spoken too late. Whether the flame of revolution shall sweep over the Carpathians and the Vistula to the Vosges and the Rhine, or the Chancellor shall be able to keep his promise to reward the loyalty of the German people by giving them the reality of popular government, will matter little in the end. Hapsburg and Hohenzollern, as absolutist powers, have had their day. And whether the war goes on for months or for another year, the victory of democracy over absolutism is assured. Peace without victory there never has been, there never can be. The forces that clash in war are the forces of reaction and of progress. In the titanic struggle for civilization and liberty peace is but an armistice until civilization and liberty are safe. By exertions and sufferings that have paralyzed imagination they have been saved. A necessary part of the cost has been the temporary sacrifice of much individual liberty and a temporary subordination of civil procedure to military authority in the freer nations, but the back swing of the pendulum has begun. This war, when it ends, will not have militarized the world, as the pacifist has feared. The returning tide of democratic liberty will run swift and deep, from this day on. The doom of the dynasties has fallen. March 26, 1917

Perhaps

The Great War is over; the peace-pact signed. The grimed and wearied veterans are coming home.

The flags fly. The bands play. The Monarch stands bareheaded on the palace balcony. Below the crowds cheer. They weep for joy. Glory to the Fatherland! God save the king!

The tumult and the shouting dies. The armies disband. The soldiers return to their loved ones. Every home is a house of mourning. They try to pick up again the broken threads of peaceful industry. All is ruin. They contemplate. Five million men killed. Ten million men crippled. Wives and daughters ravished. Children mutilated. Babies starved. Hundreds of cities burned. Thousands of farms laid waste. Thirty billion dollars of accumulated wealth consumed in smoke.

They council together. They cannot endure the desolation. They will not suffer the privation. Men fight harder to keep from sinking than to rise.

They go to the nobles and the rich. They ask for bread. They are given a stone. When in the annals of history has Privilege chosen to sacrifice itself for the common weal?

They turn to the governments. The governments listen. But what can the governments do? They have spent the substance of the living. They have spent the substance of those to come even to the third and fourth generation.

Then a thing epochal happens. First a murmur, then a rumble, then a roar, then-the Revolution, peaceful or bloody; and all the emperors and kings, all the autocrats and aristocrats, go.

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"The right is more precious than peace"-President Wilson's address to the Congress advising war with Germany

AT WAR WITH GERMANY

PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESS TO THE CONGRESS ON APRIL 2, 1917

I

HAVE called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious-very serious-choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.

On the third of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe, or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean.

That had seemed to be the object of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since April of last year the Imperial German Government had somewhat restrained the commanders

It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to destroy them before they have shown their own intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all.

The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has prohibited even in the defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned their right to defend.

The intimation is conveyed that the armed guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best. In such circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual. It is likely once to produce what it was meant to prevent. It is practically certain to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents.

of its under sea craft in conformity with its promise then given THERE is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of

to us that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to destroy, when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their lives in their open boats.

The precautions taken were meagre and haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree of restraint was observed.

The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents.

Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, tho the latter were provided with safe conduct thru the proscribed areas by the German Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.

International law had its origin in the attempt to set up some law, which would be respected and observed upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay the free highways of the world.

By painful stage after stage has that law been built up, with meagre enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view, at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded.

This minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of retaliation and necessity, and because it had no weapons which it could use at sea except these, which it is impossible to employ, as it is employing them, without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the intercourse of the world.

I am

am not now thinking of the loss of property involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants-men, women and children engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be.

The present German warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of; but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way.

There has been no discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right. of human right, of which we are only a single champion.

When I addrest the Congress on the twenty-sixth of February last I thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to keep our people safe against unlawful violence.

But armed neutrality, it now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines have been used against merchant shipping it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks, as the law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves against privateers or cruisers, visible craft, giving chase upon the open sea.

making: We will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are not common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life. With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States: that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thoro state of defense, but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable coöperation in counsel and action with the governments now at war with Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those governments of the most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources may, so far as possible, be added to theirs. It will involve the organization and mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant, and yet the most economical and efficient, way possible.

It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects, but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed forces of the United States, already provided for by law in case of war, of at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may be needed and can be handled in training.

It will involve also, of course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present generation, by well conceived taxation. I say sustained SO far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as little as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of our own military forces with the duty-for it will be a very practical duty--of supplying the nations already at war with Germany with the materials which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. They are in the field and we should help them in every way to be effective there.

I shall take the liberty of suggesting. thru the several executive departments of the Government for the consideration of your committees, measures for the accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned. I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as having been framed after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon which the responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the nation will most directly fall.

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our cbjects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or clouded by them.

I have exactly the same thing in mind now that I had in mind when I addrest the Senate on the 22d of January last; the same that I had in mind when I addrest the Congress on the 3d of

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