CHAPTER IX

THE EUROPEAN WAR

The people of the United States are drawn from many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy and desire among them with regard to the issues and circumstances of the conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the momentous struggle. It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy responsibility— responsibility for no less a thing than that the people of the United States, whose love of their country and whose loyalty to its Government should unite them as Americans all, bound in honour and affection to think first of her and of her interests, may be divided into camps of hostile opinions hot against each other, involved in the war itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action. Such divisions among us would be fatal to our peace of mind, and might seriously stand in the way of the proper performance of our duty as the one great nation at peace, the one people holding itself ready to play a part of impartial mediation and speak the counsels of peace and accommodation, not as a partisan but as a friend.-Address to the American People, August, 1914.

THE unlooked-for outbreak of the European War in August 1914 added immeasurably to Mr. Wilson's burdens. He was weighed down at the time by a great personal anxiety, his wife being in the first week of August laid on her deathbed at the White House. Mexican affairs were at a critical stage, for though Huerta had just taken ship for Europe the effects of his abdication were not yet revealed, and American troops were still in possession at Vera Cruz. The Presi

dent well knew, moreover, that though America might avoid actual participation in the war she could not fail to be directly and gravely affected by its reactions, and time and energies that should have been concentrated on programmes of domestic reform must of necessity be largely devoted to the negotiation of delicate problems of foreign policy.

There was at the outset no serious question of American intervention in the war. When England took the fateful decision on August 4th the meaning of the sudden breaking of the storm of conflict had hardly been grasped in the Western hemisphere. The documents published later in the official Blue Books and White Books and Red Books were not available; only Belgium's neutrality, and not her women, had as yet been violated; and though the direction of American sympathies might be clear, American judgment was at first held for the most part in suspense.

A tremendous responsibility was laid on President Wilson. Political tradition and the letter of the Constitution make the President of the United States both a leader and an interpreter of the people, and it rests with the individual to lay predominant emphasis on whichever he will of the two heads of his Presidential duty. Woodrow Wilson had for seventeen months played the rôle of leader, and the nation accordingly looked to him with the greater expectancy in the crisis of August 1914. In shaping his course at such a juncture he was bound to take cognizance of certain indisputable facts. Tem

peramentally and by tradition the the American people was essentially pacific. Its first President had warned it against foreign entanglements, and the Monroe Doctrine had served as a permanent proclamation of benevolent isolation. Apart from the tearless war with Spain in 1898, America had not for over a century fought an external campaign, and she had virtually no dependencies to draw her into controversy with any European Power. And while she had a serviceable Navy, her Army was organized on a scale which forbade all thought of early participation in a serious land campaign.

But there were more cogent reasons than these why America should in 1914 cling instinctively to her traditional policy of isolation. Though Washington had fought to make America independent and Lincoln had fought to keep her united, Mr. Wilson, fifty years after Lincoln's battles and a hundred and thirty after Washington's, found himself President of what was not yet a cohesive nation. The census of 1910 showed that the United States contained over four million Germans and Austro-Hungarians who were actually foreign-born, while there were close on nine millions of Germans alone returned as of foreign parentage. The danger that war against Germany would mean civil war needed no demonstration.

Of war with the Entente Powers there was

no serious prospect. There was not, it is true,

in America that enthusiasm for Great Britain that some exponents of the unity of the Anglo-Saxon

race too confidently assume. The large Irish section of the population was ill-disposed towards England, and throughout the war the strongest bond of transatlantic sympathy has been between America and France. Between Americans and Englishmen there had grown up that curious relationship sometimes established between two men who, knowing they will never go as far as a serious quarrel, can afford to be perpetually irritating one another. So far had that tendency been carried that it was possible recently for one of the most thoughtful of American reviews, in its anxiety for an Anglo-American understanding, to solicit help from "the two peoples who will find their security in such understanding, the two peoples most able to mediate, the people of Canada and the people of France." Another fact to be remembered is that prior to the war there was in America no feeling against Germany and considerable feeling against Russia.

Even now we are prone in this country, and in the later months of 1914 we were much more prone, to judge America by the Eastern States. For that our Press is largely to blame. Nine quotations out of ten cabled across from American journals are taken from New York papers, with an occasional reference to the Philadelphia Ledger, or the Boston Transcript, or the Springfield Republican. From west of the Alleghanies not a voice reaches us, unless it be a rare citation from the Chicago Daily News, or Herald, and the very names of powerful organs like the The New Republic, December 9, 1916.

Kansas City Star, or the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, or the Detroit Free Press are unknown outside Fleet Street. It is not surprising therefore, though it is on many grounds unfortunate, that Englishmen have failed throughout to realize that in the West and Middle West the European War has never yet become, as it has in New England, the first preoccupation in the public mind. The West is still an undeveloped country, and all it asks is to be left to its business of working out its own great destiny. That view is short-sighted and limited, no doubt. It takes no account, for example, of the function of the British Fleet as a shield of the Monroe Doctrine. But it is not wholly selfish. The West is not concerned merely with the accumulation of dollars. Mr. Henry Ford, the so-called pacifist fanatic, has built up at Detroit a business in which commercial prosperity is combined with some of the best industrial conditions in America. As a Chicago correspondent of The Times recently pointed out in an instructive article,2 the West has ideals, social, industrial, municipal, to the realization of which both the principle and the fact of war are essentially antagonistic. It fears and hates war for reasons that demand respect. These are considerations that must be reckoned with. If many of them were lost-and pardonably lost-on the average Englishman, none of them was lost on Mr. Wilson, who never allowed himself to forget that he was President of the West as well as of the East.

I Written in 1916.

The Times December 14, 1916.