democratic Europe. In an analogous spirit Americans who are deeply troubled by the proposed treaty of peace are feeling for a way out which does not imply outspoken and uncompromising opposition. Just as four and one-half years ago they shrank from breaking down the traditional aloofness of this country from European political and military controversies, so now they shrink from parting company with their recent companions in arms. The bonds forged by their fight against a common enemy are hard to break. If they reject the treaty they are afraid of looking to themselves and to their European friends like quitters. They are longing for peace and are tempted to accept it at any price.

Yet if they connive at this treaty they will, as liberal and humane American democrats who seek by social experiment and education to render their country more worthy of its still unredeemed national promise, be delivering themselves into the hands of their enemies, the reactionaries and the revolutionists. The future of liberal Americanism depends upon a moral union between democracy and nationalism. Such a union is compromised so long as nationalism. remains competitive in policy, exclusive in spirit, and complacently capitalist in organization. Liberals all over the world have hoped that a war, which was so clearly the fruit of competition and imperialist and class-bound nationalism, would end in a peace which would moralize nationalism by releasing it from class bondage and exclusive ambitions. The treaty of Versailles does not even try to satisfy these aspirations. Instead of expressing a great recuperative effort of the conscience of a civilization, which for its own sins has sweated so much blood, it does much to intensify and nothing to heal the old and ugly dissensions between political nationalism and social democracy. In so far as its terms are actually carried out, it is bound to provoke the ultimate explosion of irreconcilable warfare. It weaves international animosities and the class conflict into the very fabric of the proposed new system of public law. The European politicians who with American complicity have hatched this inhuman monster have acted either cynically, hypocritically, or vindictively, and their handwork will breed cynicism, hypocrisy, or vindictiveness in the minds of future generations. The moral source of the political life of modern nations remains polluted.

**

The authors of the treaty of Versailles are the victims of the blind interests and the imperious determinism of an inhumane class economy. They admit in private conversation the diseased nature of their own offspring. "Even conservative opinion in Europe," says William Allen White, "is frankly cynical about Germany's fulfillment of the terms imposed. They are too severe for Germany to live under for a generation. * * They practically exterminate her as a nation." Why, then, did they do it? Why do they propose to terminate a war, fought in part to vindicate the sacredness of public treaties, by compelling the vanquished enemy to sign a bond which they know he can not fulfill? The answer is not pleasant. They do this thing because they themselves are the unconscious servants of the cupidity and the vindictiveness which infect the psychology of an inhumane and complacent capitalist society. They crave at any cost the emotional triumph of imposing on the German nation the ultimate humiliation of solemnly consenting to its own abdication as a

self-governing and self-respecting community. To satisfy this craving they are so far as possible depriving the German people by public law of the status of economic citizens with rights which other nations are bound to respect. Thus they are deliberately raising the question of working class solidarity. They are defying the community of interest and the feeling of brotherhood which unites the socially alert workers of all the European peoples. They are subsidizing the growth of class-conscious and class-bound proletarian internationalism dominated by the conviction of the incorrigible inhumanity of a capitalist national economy. They are demonstrating by example what a perfidious protectorate nationalism exercises over the common human interests of all peoples.

The Socialists are fully alive to this deeper and less obvious meaning of the treaty. They will flourish it as a complete vindication of the Marxian dogma that, as long as capitalism prevails, war necessarily operates as the instrument of class aggrandizement and popular exploitation. The treaty proposes the exploitation of the German people only, but an international organization whose chief object it is to profit by the exploitation of a subject people can survive only through the exploitation and deception of its own workers. The treaty is, consequently, greeted as a declaration of a class war by organized society against the proletariat of all nations. It is condemned as a final exposure of the hypocrisy and inhumanity of a national economy. Hitherto, in spite of all their propaganda and of the grievances of the wage-earning class, the Socialists have never persuaded the workers to believe in the need of a class war, or to undermine the popular confidence in nationalism. Now, as they believe, their class enemies have provided them with an unanswerable demonstration, and they are looking forward jubilantly to the inevitable revolution. The New York Nation announces confidently that all recent political and social convulsions are only "the preliminaries of the great revolution to whose support the friends of freedom must now rally everywhere."

In our opinion the treaty of Versailles subjects all liberalism and particularly that kind of liberalism which breathes the Christian spirit to a decisive test. Its very life depends upon the ability of the modern national state to avoid the irreconcilable class conflict to which, as the Socialists claim, capitalism condemns the future of society. In the event of such a conflict, liberalism is ground, as it is being ground in Russia, between the upper and lower millstones of reaction and revolution. The treaty in so far as it commits the national democracies to a permanent policy of inhumane violence does weave this conflict into the fabric of international law. It is the most shameless and, we hope, the last of those treaties which, while they pretend to bring peace to a mortified world, merely write the specifications for future revolution and war. It presents liberalism with a perfect opportunity of proving whether or not it is actually founded in positive moral and religious conviction. If a war which was supposed to put an end to war culminates without strenuous protest by humane men and women in a treaty of peace which renders peace impossible, the liberalism which preached this meaning for the war will have committed suicide. That such a protest on the part of national liberals may not have much immediate success in defeating the ratification of the treaty is not essential. The treaty of

Versailles, no matter under what kind of compulsion it is ratified by the nations, is impossible of execution and will defeat itself. But it is essential that the ratification should not take place with the connivance of the sincerely liberal and Christian forces in public opinion. For in that event national liberalism in the allied countries will be following the example and inviting the fate of national liberalism in imperial Germany. It will become the dishonored accomplice of its own downfall. It will abandon society to an irresistible conflict between the immoral and intransigeant forces of Junkerism and revolutionary socialism.

The calamity of the war descended on the western nations because of the existence of one crying weakness in western civilization. The organized Christian nations could never agree upon an effective. method of subordinating the exercise of political and economic power to morai and humane purposes. Many liberals have hoped that at the end of the war the enlightened conscience of the western people would arise and exert itself to cure this weakness. The treaty of Versailles is damned because it does nothing to moralize the future exercise of political and economic power. On the contrary, it conceives the victors who exercise the power as possessing only rights and the vanquished who have lost the power as possessing only duties. The powerful are permitted to abuse it as much as they please, and, in their relations to the defeated Hungary, Austria, Russia, and Germany they are encouraged and licensed to abuse it. The past sins of the Hungarian and German ruling classes afford no justification for such a convenient and drastic system of future discrimination. Those who will not subordinate the exercise of power to rules of impartial justice sacrifice their moral right to inflict punishment. The treaty does not embody either the spirit or method even of punitive justice. What it does embody and strain to the breaking point is the pagan doctrine and spirit of retaliation. What it treats with utter ignorance is the Christian doctrine of atonement and redemption. At a crisis in the history of civilization, the rulers of the victorious Christian states conclusively demonstrate their own contemptuous disbelief in the practical value of Christian moral

economy.

Just as the acceptance of the treaty of Versailles without protest will undermine the moral foundation of nationalism and menace civilization with an uncontrollable class conflict, so its defeat or discredit will clearly and emphatically testify to a formative connection between religion and morals and economics and politics. It would begin the cure of the spiritual anarchy in western civilization which the recent war and the proposed peace both exemplify. It would constitute the first step in the moral preparation of the western democracies for a league of nations. For the possibility of any vital league of nations does not depend, as so many liberals seem to suppose, on the ratification of the treaty. It depends on the rejection of the treaty. The league is not powerful enough to redeem the treaty. But the treaty is vicious enough to incriminate the league. It would convert the league into the instrument of competitive imperialist nationalism whose more disinterested members would labor in vain to mold it into a cooperative society. Liberal democrats can not honestly consent to peace on the proposed terms. If it was wrong

when confronted by the imperialist aggression of Germany to tolerate peace by conniving at such an attack, it is equally wrong when confronted by a treaty which organizes competitive imperialism into an international system to pay so high a price for the ending of the war. This above all others is the time and the occasion to repudiate the idea of peace at any price, to reject immediate peace at the price of permanent moral and economic warfare.

FOR A FRESH START.

Liberalism lost the peace. That is triumphantly proclaimed by the reactionaries. There are no fantastic ideals, they point out, in the peace of Paris. It is the same kind of peace as the peace concluded after any war of older time, a peace of spoils to the victor, woe to the vanquished, and all the spoils and woe that the traffic will bear, or more. Nor do the liberals read any other meaning in the peace. The congenital optimists among them take some consolation in the thought that it is better than a German peace would have been. That is, better than the most horrible thing conceivable. They force themselves to believe that the league may operate to mitigate the brutalities of the treaty from which the league springs, as the virtuous daughter in melodrama reforms the manners and morals of her villainous father. This is said to be the refuge to which President Wilson has betaken himself. It is better than nothing.

But men who are willing to face the facts recognize that we are entering upon a new era under most ominous auspices. Where the treaty healed one sore it opened two. National minorities under alien dominion have been multiplied by it. The open door in the former German colonies under the mandatory system is more than counterbalanced by the closed door in Morocco and the door virtually closed in Shantung. The destruction of German militarism is offset by the intensified militarism imposed upon those of the Allies whose duty it is to hold Germany by the throat through a generation or more. The extinction of the German practice of " peaceful penetration" is attended by the launching of an even more invidious policy of international competition, the deliberate suppression of a rival's economic efficiency. We have put the economic future of Germany into the hands of a reparations commission which, as William Allen White expresses it, "is a legislative guardian of Germany in her interior affairs, in her foreign commercial relations, and in her industrial development." "Shall Germany be allowed enough coal to grow and develop industrially? If so, how far shall her development proceed, to a point where she shall invade the trade of England? Or, if to a lesser point, just where shall Germany's industrial development stop? These are questions for the reparations commission to decide as a legislature. Others of like nature suggest themselves, such as the rights of Germany to export in competition with the Allies."

This, we submit, is to inject a new and dangerous element into the rank brew of international commercial relations. Before the war the American and British exporters to Latin America naturally tried to make all the money they could. They had to sell at low prices partly because of German competition. That was embar

rassing, perhaps, to Anglo-Saxondom but good for Latin America. But now it lies in our power to exclude German competition altogether. How will Latin America relish that condition? Perhaps, however, America and England will fall into furious competition between themselves, and thus continue to offer cheap goods to Latin America. But would not the resultant friction between England and America be a proper subject for inquiry and recommendation by the council of the league? No doubt the council would decree a gentlemen's agreement. Or, to put another highly probable possibility, suppose that the reparations commission, in the interest of British trade, prevented Germany from competing in the American market. How would our consuming public feel about a monopoly granted by an international body to a foreign nation? The inevitable international suspicion would provide the league with work quite commensurate with its abilities.

The league may have sufficient strength to cope with the causes of strife in the peace treaty or it may not. What is plain is that no one who recognizes that the fate of western civilization depends upon a stable peace and a harmonious international order can rest for a moment content with the outcome of the transactions at Paris. It is time to prepare for a fresh start in international politics. And that involves a fresh start in domestic politics as well. It is impossible to achieve anything worth while internationally with such instruments as Lloyd-George, Clemenceau, Orlando, and Wilson. The first three are part of the old order that accepted war and conquest as natural, necessary, and, on the whole, salutary phenomena. Wilson, to be sure, did catch the spirit of the peoples demanding an end to a state of things in which the killing or maiming of half the manhood of a great nation was possible. But he preferred the lone hand to the effort of building up an informed and energetic public opinion in America to back him up. Perhaps he was temperamentally unfitted for any other rôle than that of mouthpiece for sentiments real enough but unorganized, and therefore politically impotent. There will be explanations cogent enough for Wilson's failure. The one secure conclusion that history will draw is that a liberal democrat at large. is not an adequate instrument of democracy.

But the forces that the statesmen at Paris flouted are alive and growing. The British Labor Party is steadily advancing toward power; the French Socialists are rapidly gaining in self-consciousness and self-control. We in America have no democratic forces in so advanced a condition of organization. Our political traditions have left us pretty much at the mercy of the two great parties, both visionless. But there is a stirring in the world of labor, and the farmers are acquiring political consciousness. We have in the miraculous growth of progressivism in 1912 proof that there is an abundance of democratic spirit latent in us. When it comes to be realized generally that our representatives in Paris have accomplished nothing toward the abatement of the risk of another world war more terrible than the last, we may have a political awakening that will bring us abreast of the British and French democracies.

And with labor actually sharing in the responsibilities of government, helping to direct the course of legislation, there will be a fair