ondary, and beyond this minimum program the United States has no direct interest in the territorial settlement. The objects for which we are at war will be attained if we can defeat absolutely the foreign policy of the present German government. For a ruling caste which has been humiliated abroad has lost its glamor at home. So we are at war to defeat the German government in the outer world, to destroy its prestige, to deny its conquests, and to throw it back at last into the arms of the German people marked and discredited as the author of their miseries. It is for them to make the final settlement with it.

If it is our privilege to exert the power which turns the scale, it is our duty to see that the end justifies the means. We can win nothing from this war unless it culminates in a union of liberal peoples pledged to coöperate in the settlement of all outstanding questions, sworn to turn against the aggressor, determined to erect a larger and more modern system of international law upon a federation of the world. That is what we are fighting for, at this moment, on the ocean, in the shipyard and in the factory, later perhaps in France and Belgium, ultimately at the council of peace.

If we are strong enough and wise enough to win this victory, to reject all the poison of hatred abroad and intolerance at home, we shall have made a nation to which free men will turn with love and gratitude. For ourselves we shall stand committed as never before to the realization of democracy in America. We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies-to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, our sweatshops and our slums. We shall call that man un-American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it at home. A force is loose in America as well. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it with their Billy Sundays or control through lawyers and politicians of the Old Guard.

AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS1

STUART PRATT SHERMAN

[Stuart Pratt Sherman (1881- -) was born at Anita, Iowa. After graduating at Williams College, he studied at Harvard, and became, in 1906, an instructor in English in the Northwestern University. In the following year he went to the University of Illinois where he is now professor of English. In his writings, especially in the field of literary criticism, he has shown himself one of the most brilliant of the younger men of letters in the United States.]

I have heard one of our prophets declaring that either Germany or America is destined to rule the world, and that on the whole he hopes it will be America. If I may speak out of my own convictions, there is one thing more abhorrent to my conscience than that Germany should dominate the world by force of arms. That one more abhorrent thing is that America should dominate the world by force of arms. When a man execrates on the part of a foreign nation a course which he praises on the part of his own nation; when a man curses Germany because it is militaristic and then rebukes America because it is not militaristic; when a man reviles the Germans for crying, "On to Calais" and then turns to his fellow countrymen crying, "On to Panama;” when a man ridicules the Germans for calling themselves God's chosen people, and then turns to the Americans and calls them God's chosen people; when a man upbraids the Germans for shouting right or wrong my country, and then turns to the Americans shouting right or wrong my countryconfronted by this bull-headed preposterous nationalism the experienced Muse of history bursts into scornful laughter; he that sitteth in the heavens turns away his face; and Americans in the midst of this horrible slaughter are properly admonished to prepare for the next war!

Nor can we escape from the derisive laughter of the Immortals by talking about the Anglo-Saxons. Only one degree removed from the preposterous nationalist is the preposterous Anglo

1From American and Allied Ideals. (No. 12, War Information Series, February, 1918, issued by the Committee on Public Information.) Reprinted by permission.

Saxon. I feel fairly intimate with the ideals of America; they are mine. I know something of the ideals of England; they are allied to America's. But what are the Anglo-Saxon ideals? Do they include Disraeli's, Mr. Lloyd-George's, or Mr. Wilson's? For that matter, who are the Anglo-Saxons-other than those Germanic tribes that drove back the Celtic and Pictish ancestors of our Scotch-Irish presidents? I do not see how the American scholar's sympathies can be strongly enlisted in a feud in behalf of the Anglo-Saxon blood. What stake have the countrymen of Lafayette in a blood feud of the Anglo-Saxons? Or the countrymen of Garibaldi? Or the countrymen of Kerensky? Or the Japanese? Or the Brazilians? Or the Portuguese? Or the people of China and Siam? The ties of blood and race count for next to nothing in this conflict. The English-speaking peoples have no monopoly in the ideals of the Allies. The American who now raises the flag of Anglo-Saxonism raises a meaningless symbol which insults the pride of millions of his fellow countrymen and most of the Allies, and may well challenge the Orient to muster and drill her millions for the next war.

Appeals to race prejudice, to a purely self-regarding patriotism, to the old-fashioned nationalism, happily do not nowadays always carry conviction to the intellectual class to which educated men are alleged to belong. Many of them have banished race prejudice as a relic of tribal days. Many of them are convinced that national pride needs a schoolmaster; and are glad that it has one! They have studied the world upheaval in which the nations now quake; they have searchingly scrutinized their own consciences; and many of them have reached the conclusion that the master cause of this tragedy, of which all the world's the stage, is precisely the old self-regarding nationalism-the nationalism which glorifies power and has no principle of contraction to oppose to its principle of expansion. When they hear Germans shouting "Deutschland über Alles," and Americans shouting "America über Alles," their hearts refuse to rally to either call.

They say that the only way to avoid brutal and hideous clashes of international strife for national expansion is to stop

this barbaric shouting; and to set up and establish supernational ideals and principles which shall impose an effective check upon the indefinitely expansive principle of nationality. Some of our statesmen tell us that it cannot be done. They declare that they are too stupid to contrive the machinery of international government. We do not altogether believe them. We have a very great confidence in both the ingenuity and the power of statesmen; and it is based upon experience. We believe that statesmen can do anything that they have a mind to do. We believe in the ingenuity and power of statesmen, because we see them all around the world accomplishing much more difficult and incredible things, such, for example, as persuading great nations to pledge their last dollar and their last man and to walk through the valley of the shadow of hideous death to support a statesman's word, plighted perhaps without their knowledge or consent. From that spectacle we derive our belief that when statesmen heartily apply their ingenuity to contriving what the hearts of all the plain people of the world desire, they will be not a little surprised to discover the easiness of the task and the inexhaustible power behind them.

Where shall we find the supernational principles and powers which we wish our statesmen to establish, which we demand that they shall establish? We shall find them in the cause for which America and her associates are now fighting. Cynics may say that each of the Allies is fighting for its own special interest, its own peculiar culture, its trade, to recover this or that bit of territory, to annex this or that province or port. Doubtless selfish motives do enter to some extent into the practical considerations of most of the governments, just as brutal and selfish men enter into the armies. But unless the leading spokesmen of the Allies are black-hearted liars, they are about a nobler business than national buccaneering. And whatever the governments are about, we are profoundly convinced that the great mass of the people of the Allies are not cynics and do not intend to be dupes; that they are not fighting for ports and provinces and trade; that they are fighting for the common interests of the whole family of civilized nations-for nothing less than

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the cause of mankind. They can unite from the ends of the earth as one people, sinking their national peculiarities, because they are drawn by a bond deeper than language or nationality or race; they are drawn by the bond that unites the commonwealth of nations. They are not fighting for French or English or American law, justice, truth, and honor, but for international law, international truth, international justice, international honor.

The new national pride and patriotism developed by this conflict finds its basis in the service which each nation renders to the cause above all nations, the cause of civilized society, the cause of civilized man. The new type of patriot no longer cries, "my country against the world," but "my country for the world." The moment that he takes that attitude he finds no more hostility between the idea of nationalism and the idea of internationalism than between the idea of a company and the idea of a regiment, or the idea of a state and the idea of a nation. As each good citizen's loyalty to his state accepts a principle of control in his loyalty to his nation, so his loyalty to his nation accepts a principle of control in his loyalty to the general family of nations.

Here is the great fact which challenges the loyalty of every humane man. Propaganda for America and the Allies is not to be urged to the disadvantage of any nation whatsoever, provided only that each nation is willing to behave like a member of a family of nations, provided only that it will accept for its conduct outside its borders the fundamental principles of civilization. Our propaganda is not for separatism and exclusion. It is rather our profound conviction that there is no room left in the world for barbarians, for heathen tribes without the law. Humanity is not safe while any nation professes inhumanity. We are not fighting to put the Germans out but to get them in. Furthermore we have got to take the Orient in, frankly and fully; or in all probability we or our children, or our children's children, will have to fight the Orient. To some of us the influence upon the Orient of the German rebellion against the Family of Nations appears as not the least ominous and dreadful aspect of the present war.