Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and gifted men, but

mistaken, I believe, in their attitude toward nationality, are

summoning America to an artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces

in our arts may advance." They write: "The soldier falls under the

compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted by his passion to a

vision out of which destruction and death are wrought." To one who has

heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat scrannel. Art is not

something that exists in a vacuum beyond space and time, and good and

evil. Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that belief takes

varying forms, according to the place and age in which it falls. It may

be the expression of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music.

It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient beauty, as in the

Renaissance. It may be the quickening received from fresh discoveries

of territory and strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. In

America we have long tried by artificial stimulants to revive art. We

have omitted the one sure way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by

sacrifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of that soil will

spring worthy growths, which the thin surface of modern fashionable

cosmopolitanism can never nourish. The sense of the true America has

laid hold of these young men of ours in France. By living well they

create the conditions of art. The things they do underlie all great

expression. Already they are writing with a tone and accent which have

long gone unheard in our America.

My lot has cast me with young men at their heroic moment. For the first

months of the war it was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors,

finally with these young Americans. They have made me impatient of our

modern cosmopolitan American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be

carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by noble ideals,

but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him,

if they need not be paid for."

The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because it is an intellectual

theory, which does not build on instinct. A man's love of his home

and his nation is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values

and moving with the vital current of life itself. Our pacifists would

clear their thinking if they came under shell-fire. All that is sound

in modern radical thought has been strengthened by this war. The

democratic movement in England has become an overwhelming force. But

the unsound elements in radical thought, those elements introduced

by intellectual theorists who scheme a world distasteful to average

human nature, have been burned away in the fire. One of those unsound

elements was the theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many Americans

have no belief in the idea of our country. They are busy with the

mechanics of life. Any person who is not "getting results" is felt by

them to be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain, they have

laid hold of a doctrine which would justify them in their indifference

to profounder values. It is so that we have weakened our sense of

nationality.

The nation is a natural "biological group," whose members have an

"instinctive liking" for each other and "act with a common purpose."

The instinctive liking is created by common customs and a shared

experience. This experience, expressed in song and legislative

enactment and legend, becomes known as the national tradition, and

is passed on from generation to generation in household heroes, such

as Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government of the people."

That instinctive liking, created by the contacts of a common purpose

and rooted in a loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our

people by importations of aliens, who have not shared in a common

experience, and have not inherited our tradition. It is not possible

to blend diverse races into a nation, when members of one race plot

against our institutions in the interests of a European State, and

members of another race extract wealth from our industry and carry

it home to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so nourished.

A common purpose is not manifested in that way. We have not touched

the imagination of these newcomers. It requires something more than

"big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life of peasants. Our lax

nationalism never reaches the hidden elements of their emotion to make

them one in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and hustling and

easy money are excellent things, but not enough to call out loyalty and

allegiance.

These changing conditions of our growth have blotted out from memory

the old historic experience and substituted a fresher, more recent,

experience. Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have created

a new American tradition, breeding its own catch words and philosophy.

The change has come so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans

to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking and acting from

different motives, impulses and desires than those of the men who

created and established the nation. The types of our national heroes

have changed. We have substituted captains of industry for pioneers,

and smart men for creative men. Our popular phrases express the new

current of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch," "peace and

prosperity": these stir our emotional centers. We used to be shaken

and moved when the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us. But

to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal Mercier, and are unmoved. We

no longer know the great accent when we hear it.

So we must look to the young to save us. Henry Farnsworth was a Boston

man, twenty-five years old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France.

"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the French once fought

for us."

Our American workers are aiding France because she defends our

tradition, which is also hers, a tradition of freedom and justice,

practiced in equality. In her version of it, there are elements of

intellectual grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed with

a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flowing purple, which are

peculiar to the Latin temperament. But the ground plan is the same. Our

doctors and nurses of the American Hospital, our workers in the hostels

and the Clearing House, our boys in the American Field Service, are not

alone saving the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They are

restoring American nationality.

SECTION II

WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL

I

NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE MIDDLE WEST

"The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by

the British Dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the

line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets ... will have

fifty millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by any

political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the

country owned by the United States--certainly more than one million of

square miles. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking,

it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal

borders to it."

(_Lincoln's Message to Congress_, Dec. 1, 1862.)

The war and the election together have revealed a growing separation

between the ideas of the East and those of the West. This separation

is largely the fault of the East, which prefers to do its thinking

in terms of its own industrial welfare. The life of the West is

a healthier life. There is better balance between industry and

agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more

open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into

practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership

of the newer country. It has greeted the men and their ideas with

caustic humor and sometimes with an almost malignant bitterness. This

has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, but it has lessened

good will. It has led the West to distrust a policy which has the

endorsement of the East.

The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman whom I know:

"America once divided between North and South. It would not be

impossible now to separate America, the East from the West."

It is time for the East to waken itself from its selfish sleep, and

bend its mind to an understanding of the American community. In the

matter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in

order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic

coöperation. It will have to prove that its notion of foreign policy

is not based on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American

nation.

I have shown that a section of America of the Civil War traditions

is intensely Pro-Ally, and has proved it in speech and action. The

new America, spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle West,

is neutral. It is neutral because it does not know the facts. I am

sometimes told in Europe that it is the chink of our money that has

made my country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest Middle

Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not

given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and

it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied

methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been

an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the

treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods

of a democracy in appealing to a democracy. A Government report, issued

by a belligerent power, has little effect on a community three thousand

miles away. But the first-hand accounts, sent by its own writers,

who are known to be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is

unfortunate that through the first two years of the war, more news was

given to American journalists by Germany than by England and France.

There is need that some one should speak the truth about the foreign

policy of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its

effect on neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves three

relationships:

(1) The enemy.

(2) The Allies.

(3) The Neutrals.

The first two relationships have long been realized. The third--that

of relationship toward neutrals--has never been realized. It is not

fully realized to-day. The failure to realize it led America and

England into the fight of 1812. It led to the Mason and Slidell case

between England and America in the Civil War. The importance of winning

neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to-day, included in

the forefront of the national effort. It is still spoken of as a minor

matter of giving "penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England

has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties with neutral

governments. But that is only one-half the actual problem of a foreign

policy. The other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral

people, because there is no such thing finally as neutrality.[2] Public

opinion turns either Pro or Anti, in the end. At present about thirty

per cent of American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent is

anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent Pro-German, and

forty per cent neutral. The final weight will rest in whichever cause

wins the forty per cent neutral element. That element is contained

in the Middle West. The failure in dealing with America has been the

failure to see that we needed facts, if we were to come to a decision.

Our only way of getting facts is through the representatives whom we

send over.

A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not touched America

except on the Atlantic Seaboard lies in the exact number of men

from the Eastern Universities who have come across to help France,

as compared with the number from the Middle Western institutions of

learning. For instance, in the American Field Ambulance Service Harvard

has 98 men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth 8. These are

Eastern institutions. From the Middle West, with the exception of the

University of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally

one man from a college. The official report up to the beginning of

1916 shows not a man from what many consider the leading University of

America, the State University of Wisconsin, and less than six from the

entire Middle West. There is no need of elaborating the point. The

Middle West has not been allowed to know the facts.

Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the facts of

the war, three men have come four thousand miles to help France. One

is Robert Toms, General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one is Dr.

Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne Marshall, Editor of the

_Cedar Rapids Gazette_. Each man of the three is a successful worker,

and gave up his job. These three men are as significant as the 98

college boys from Harvard.

What took place in that little Iowa group will take place throughout

the whole vast Middle Western territory, when the Allies are willing

to use the only methods that avail in a modern democracy--namely, the

use of public opinion, publicity, and the periodicals,--by granting

facilities for information to the representatives of a democracy

when they come desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met in

London and Paris when seeking information on German atrocities, German

frightfulness, German methods:

"But surely your people know all that."

How can they know it? Our newspaper men have rarely been permitted

access to the facts by the Allies. But to every phase of the war

they have been personally conducted by the German General Staff. It

has been as much as our liberty was worth, and once or twice almost

as much as our life was worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally

case, so constant have been the obstacles placed in our way. Much

of the interesting war news, most of the arresting interviews, have

come from the German side. The German General Staff has shown an

understanding of American psychology, a flexibility in handling public

opinion. The best "stories" have often come out of Germany, given to

American correspondents. Their public men and their officers, including

Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An American writer, going

to Germany, has received every aid in gathering his material. A writer,

with the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel experience to

any American journalist whose status at home is equal to that of the

public and professional men, whose work he makes known and aids. My own

belief for the first twenty-two months of work in obtaining information

and passing it on to my countrymen was that such effort in their

behalf was not desired by France and England, that their officials and

public men would be better pleased if we ceased to annoy them. I was

thoroughly discouraged by the experience, so slight was the official

interest over here in having America know the truth.

This foreign policy, which dickers with the State Department, but

neglects the people, is a survival of the Tory tradition. One of the

ablest interpreters of that tradition calls such a foreign policy--"the

preference for negotiating with governments rather than with peoples."

But the foreign policy of the United States is created by public

opinion. Negotiation with the State Department leaves the people, who

are the creators of policy, cold and neutral, or heated and hostile,

because uninformed. If the Allied Governments had released facts to the

representatives of American public opinion, our foreign policy of the

last two years might have been more firm and enlightened, instead of

hesitant and cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution to

the present struggle, because in part we did not have the fact-basis

and the intellectual material on which to work.

If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a

sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. If it

gives as excuse (and this is the excuse which officials give) that

the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more

dominated by their military than Germany. Of course the real reason

is neither of these. The real reason is that England and France are

unaware of the situation in our Middle West.

The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, "uncommercialized" body

of citizens, who create our national policy. It has some of the best

universities in America--places of democratic education, reaching

every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly influential on

State policy. Such Universities as the State Universities of Wisconsin

and Michigan are closely related to the life of their community,

whereas Yale University could not carry a local election in New Haven.

What the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was of little weight

at the Capitol House at Hartford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor

at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law.

The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over

200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal

graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our

sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western

movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to

praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories,

and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country,

is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of

their chemical compounding will come the America of the future. The

leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock, Bryan, La Follette,

Herbert Quick, Henry Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R.

Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville Wright. Not all

of them are of first-rate mentality. But they are honest, and their

mistakes are the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it is.

The best of them have a vision for our country that is not faintly

perceived by the East. Their political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt

Whitman expressed what they are trying to make of our people. The

stories of O. Henry describe this type of new American.

A clear analysis of our Middle West is contained in the second of

Monsieur Emile Hovelaque's articles in recent issues of the Revue de

Paris. In that he shows how distance and isolation have operated to

give our country, particularly the land-bound heart of it, a feeling of

security, a sense of being unrelated to human events elsewhere on the

planet. He shows how the break of the immigrant with his Old World has

left his inner life emptied of the old retrospects, cut off from the

ancestral roots. That vacancy the new man in the new world filled with

formula, with vague pieces of idealism about brotherhood. He believed

his experiment had cleared human nature of its hates. He believed that

ideals no longer had to be fought for. Phrases became a substitute

for the ancient warfare against the enemies of the race. And all the

time he was busy with his new continent. Results, action, machinery,

became his entire outer life. The Puritan strain in him, a religion of

dealing very directly with life immediately at hand, drove him yet the

harder to tackle his own patch of soil, and then on to a fresh field in

another town in another State: work, but work unrelated to a national

life--least of all was it related to an international ideal.

And he let Europe go its own gait, till finally it has become a dim

dream, and just now a very evil dream. But of concern in its bickerings

he feels none. So to-day he refuses to see a right and a wrong in the

European War. He confuses the criminal and the victim. He regards the

Uhlan and the Gerbéviller peasant as brothers. Why don't they cease

their quarrel, and live as we live?

That, in brief, is a digest of Hovelaque's searching analysis of our

national soul at this crisis. We have not understood the war. We are

not going to see it unless we are aided. If we do not see it, the

future of the democratic experiment on this earth is imperiled. The

friends of France and England lie out yonder on the prairies. The

Allies have much to teach them, and much to learn from them. But to

effect the exchange, England and France must be willing to speak to

them through the voices they know--not alone through "Voix Americaines"

of James Beck, and Elihu Root and Whitney Warren and President Lowell

and Mr. Choate. England must speak to them through _Collier's Weekly_

and the _Saturday Evening Post_ and the newspaper syndicates. There

is only one way of reaching American public opinion--the newspapers

and periodicals. No other agency avails. England must recognize the

function of the correspondent in the modern democracy. Through him come

the facts and impressions on which the people make up its mind. He

supplies public opinion with the material out of which to build policy.

For our failure to understand the war, France and England must share

the blame with America. We should have been ready enough to alter our

indifference and ignorance into understanding, if only our writers had

been aided to gain information.

But the Western Allies have little knowledge of American public

opinion, and small desire to win it. They have sent some of our

best men over in disgust to the enemy lines. Any one, coming on

such a quest as I have been on, that of proving German methods from

first-hand witness, is regarded by the Allies as partly a nuisance

and partly misguided. If any public criticism is ever made of my

country's attitude by the French or English, we, that have sought

to serve the Allies, will be obliged to come forward and tell our

experience:--namely, that it has been most difficult to obtain facts

for America, as the Allies have seen fit to disregard her public

opinion, and scorn the methods and channels of reaching that public

opinion.

II

SOCIAL WORKERS AND THE WAR

I found in Belgium the evidences of a German spy system, carried out

systematically through a period of years. I saw widespread atrocities

committed on peasant non-combatants by order of German officers. I

saw German troops burn peasants' houses. I saw dying men, women and a

child, who had been bayonetted by German soldiers as they were being

used as a screen for advancing troops. What I had seen was reported to

Lord Bryce by the young man with me, and the testimony appears in the

Bryce report. I saw a ravaged city, 1,100 houses burned house by house,

and sprinkled among the gutted houses a hundred houses undamaged, with

German script on their door, saying, "Nicht verbrennen. Gute leute

wohnen hier."

With witnesses and with photographs I had reinforced my observation,

so that I should not overstate or alter in making my report at home.

Opposed to this machine of treachery and cruelty, I had seen an

uprising of the people of three nations, men hating war and therefore

enlisted in this righteous war to preserve values more precious than

the individual life. With a bitter and a costly experience, I had won

my conviction that there were two wars on the western front.

When I returned from a year in the war zone, five months of which

was spent at the front, I looked forward to finding a constructive

program, hammered out by the social work group, which would interpret

the struggle and give our nation a call to action. I looked to

social workers because I have long believed and continue to believe

that social workers are the finest group of persons in our American

community. They seem to me in our vanguard because of a sane

intelligence, touched with ethical purpose.

It was a disappointment to find them scattered and negative, many of

them anti-war, some of them members of the Woman's Peace Party, some

even opposing the sending of ammunition to the Allies.

Few elements in the war were more perplexing than the failure of our

idealists to make their thinking worthy of the sudden and immense

crisis which challenged them. Absence of moral leadership in America

was as conspicuous as the presence of inexhaustible stores of moral

heroism in Europe.

The very experts who have prepared accurate reports on social

conditions are failing to inform themselves of the facts of this war.

I have found social workers who have not studied the Bryce report, and

who are unaware of the German diaries and German letters, specifying

atrocities, citing "military necessity," and revealing a mental

condition that makes "continuous mediation" as grim a piece of futility

as it would be if applied to a maniac in the nursery about to brain a

child.

I heard the head of a famous institution, a member of the Woman's Peace

Party, tell what promise of the future it gave when a German woman

crossed the platform at The Hague and shook hands with a Belgian woman.

There is something unworthy in citing that incident as answering the

situation in Belgium, where at this hour that German woman's countrymen

are holding the little nation in subjection, and impoverishing it by

severe taxation, after betraying it for many years, and then burning

its homes and killing its peasants. An active unrepentant murderer is

not the same as a naughty child, whom you cajole into a conference of

good-will. A pleasant passage of social amenity does not obliterate the

destruction of a nation. Such haphazard treatment of a vast tragedy

reveals that our people are not living at the same deep level as

the young men I have known in Flanders, who are dying to defend the

helpless and to preserve justice.

I was asked by a secretary of the Woman's Peace Party to speak at

Carnegie Hall to a mass meeting of pacifists. When I told her I should

speak of the wrong done to Belgium which I had witnessed, and should

state that the war must go on to a righteous finish, she withdrew

her invitation, saying she was sorry the women couldn't listen to my

stories. She said that her experience as a lawyer had shown her that

punishment never accomplished anything, and the driving out of the

Germans by military measures was punishment.

I have known social workers to aid girl strikers in making their

demands effective. Have the social workers as a unit denounced the

continuing injustice to Belgium? Protests, made by the Belgian

government to Washington, of cruelties, of undue taxation, of

systematic steam-roller crushing, were allowed to be filed in silence,

so that these protests that cover more than twelve months of outrage

are to-day unknown to the general public, and have not availed to

mitigate one item of the evil. One was astonished by the sudden hush

that had fallen on the altruistic group, so sensitive to corporate

wrong-doing, so alert in defense of exploited children and women. Why

the overnight change from sharp intolerance of successful injustice?

I find that our philanthropists are held by a theory. The theory is

in two parts. One is that war is the worst of all evils. The other is

that war can be willed out of existence. They believe that another

way out can be found, by some sort of mutual understanding, continuous

mediation, and overlooking of definite and hideous wrongs committed

by a combatant, wrongs that date back many years, so that out of

long-continued treachery the atrocity sprang, like flame out of dung.

They refuse to see a right and a wrong in this war. It is not to

them as other struggles in life, as the struggle between the forces

of decency and the vice trust with its army of owners, pimps, cadets

and disorderly hotel keepers. They have let their minds slip into a

confusion between right and wrong, a blurring of distinctions as sharp

and fundamental as the distinction between chastity and licentiousness,

between military necessity and human rights, between a living wage

and sweatshop labor. In their socialized pity, they have lost the

consciousness of sin.

I found a ready answer to the charges of hideous practice by the army

of invasion--the answer, that war is always like that. But it is too

easy to dismiss all these outrages as "war." That is akin to the easy

generalizations of prohibition fanatics, of pseudo-Marxian Socialists,

of Anarchists, of vegetarians, of Christian Scientists, and of many

other sincere persons who overstate, who like to focus what is complex

into a one-word statement. "Do away with drink at one stroke, and

you have abolished unhappy marriages." "All modern business is bad."

"Government is the worst of all evils." "Meat-eating leads to murder."

Just as men-of-the-world theories on the inevitability of prostitution,

with its "lost" girls, had to give way to the presence of facts on the

commercialized traffic, so the pacifist position on the present war is

untenable when confronted with the honeycombing of Belgium with spies

through long years and with the state of mind and the resultant acts

of infamy recorded by Germans in their letters and diaries. There is

an incurable romanticism in the literature of the pacifists that is

offensive to men in a tragic struggle. Let me quote two sentences from

a peace pamphlet issued by friends of mine who are among the best-known

social workers in the United States:

"It (war) has found a world of friends and neighbors, and substituted a

world of outlanders and aliens and enemies."

This is a quaint picture of the ante-bellum situation in Belgium,

when the country was undermined with German clerks, superintendents,

commercial travelers, summer residents, who were extracting information

and forwarding it to Berlin, buying up peasants for spies and

building villas with concrete foundations for big guns. "Friends and

neighbors" is a rhetorical flourish that hurts when applied to German

officers riding into towns as conquerors where for years they had been

entertained as social guests.

"In rape and cruelty and rage, ancient brutishness trails at the heels

of all armies."

That description is just when applied to the German army of invasion

which practiced widespread murder on non-combatants. It is inaccurate,

and therefore unjust, when applied to the Belgian, French and British

armies. I have lived and worked as a member of the allied army for five

months. It does not trail brutishness. It is fighting from high motive

with honorable methods. It is unfortunate to overlay the profound

reality of the war with a mental concept.

To summarize:

1. The social workers have failed to apply their high moral earnestness

to this war. They have not accepted the war as a revelation of the

human spirit in one of its supreme struggles between right and wrong.

As the result their words have offended, as light words will always

hurt men who are sacrificing property and ease and life itself for the

sake of an ideal.

2. They have neglected to inform themselves of the facts of the war.

As the result, they have made no positive program and taken no

constructive action.

Let them deal with such facts as the German villa in the Belgian town

where we lived--a villa that was a fortification with a deep concrete

foundation for a heavy gun. I want them to face, as I had to face, the

eighty-year-old peasant woman with a bayonet thrust through her thigh,

and the twelve-year-old girl with her back cut open to the backbone

by bayonets. Is it too much to ask that our social workers shall hold

their peace in the presence of universal suffering and not mock noble

sacrifice with tales of drugged soldiers? It was not the vinegar on

hyssop that explains the deed on the cross. Is it too much to ask them

to abstain from their peace parties and their anti-munitions campaigns?

We should listen to these leaders more readily if we had seen them

risking their lives like the boys of the American Ambulance. To weigh

sacrifice in detached phrases calls for an equal measure of service and

a shared peril. If a few of our social workers had been wounded under

fire, we should feel that their companions in the hazard were speaking

from some such depth of experience as the peasants of Lorraine. But our

idealists have not spoken from this initiation. Miss Addams is still

puzzled and grieved by the response her words about drugged soldiers

called out. Mr. Wilson is annoyed that his phrase of "too proud to

fight" gave little pleasure to the mothers of dead boys.

With fuller knowledge our leaders will turn to and build us a program

we can follow, a program of action that preserves the immutable

distinction between right and wrong, that lends strength to those

dying for the right. With such frank taking of sides, let me give two

instances where definite results could be achieved. They are both

highly supposititious cases. But they will serve.

Let us suppose, that at this moment the Russian government, under cover

of the war, is harrying and suppressing the Russian revolutionary

centers in Paris and London--the French and British governments

remaining complacent to the act because of the present war alliance.

If we had a staunch public opinion, resulting in a strong government

policy at Washington which had decided there was a right and a wrong on

the western front, and which had thrown the immense weight of its moral

support to the defenders of Belgium, such a government would be in a

position to make a friendly suggestion to France and England that "live

and let live" for Russian liberalism would be appreciated.

Let us take another imaginative case. Suppose that, under cover of the

war, Japan was tightening her hold on China, and gradually turning

China into a subject state. If our government were on relations of

powerful friendship with the Allies, it would be conceivable that

England could be asked to hint gently that unseemly pressure from Tokyo

was undesirable. The English fleet is a fact in the world of reality.

What is needed precisely is a foreign policy that will strengthen the

tendencies toward world peace, based on justice. By our indecision and

failure to take a stand, we have lessened our moral value to the world.

It is weak thinking that advocates a policy and is too timid to use

the instruments that will shape it. Because we want a restored Belgium

and France and a world peace, we need statesmen who are effective in

attaining these things. We need men who can suggest a diplomatic gain

in the cause of justice that the nations will agree on, because of a

government at Washington that carries weight with the diplomats who

will bring it to pass. We want to see the friendship of France and

England and Canada regained. We are letting all these things slip.

There will come a day when it is too late to do anything except develop

regrets. Why should not social workers declare themselves in time?

At a season of national gravity, when the future for fifty years may

be determined inside of four years, we want those men for our leaders

who can work results in the world of time and space, instead of dream

liberations in the untroubled realms of moral consciousness.

Before we have an all-embracing internationalism, we must have a series

of informal alliances, where the forces of modern democracy tend to

range on one side, and the autocratic nations tend to range on the

other side. There will be strange mixtures, of course, on both sides,

even as there are in the present war. But the grand total will lean

ever more and more to righteousness. Righteousness will prevail in

spite of us, but how much fairer our lot if we are ranged with the

"great allies--exultations, agonies, and love," and man's unconquerable

will to freedom.

III

FORGETTING THE AMERICAN TRADITION

The _Chicago Evening American_ places on its editorial page on August

10, 1916, a letter to which it gives editorial approval. The letter

says: "There are thousands of German-born citizens, in fact the

writer knows of no others, whose very German origin has made them

immune against such influences as ancestry, literature, sentiment

and language, which count for so much in their effect upon a great

percentage of our population. These very men continue to be loyal

Americans. If we are disloyal, what then do you call the Choates, the

Roosevelts, the Eliots, and the foreign-born Haven Putnams?"

The letter is signed M. Kirchberger. Mr. Hearst finds this statement of

sufficient importance to spread out before five or six million readers

of his newspapers. It is of importance, because it voices the belief of

an ever-increasing element in our population. Our ancestry, literature,

sentiment and language do produce such men as Joseph Choate, Theodore

Roosevelt, Charles William Eliot and George Haven Putnam. Those names

do go straight back in our national history to the original stock,

which shaped our national policy and ideals. It was their ancestry,

English and American literature, their racial sentiment, and the

English language, which made the historic America. Mr. Kirchberger

believes them to be disloyal to the New America. I trust he and his

numerous clan will define what sort of country he wants to make of

us, what ancestry he wishes to have prevail, what literature he will

introduce into our schools, what sentiment and what language. I hope

his group will come out into the open with their program of action. For

they have one. He sees clearly that the civilization of a nation is the

resultant of its racial inheritance, its literature, its language and

its ideas about life. He means that our civilization shall go his way,

not the way of the Choates and Eliots. He has no quarrel whatever with

the vague internationalism of many of our social workers because under

that fog he and his kind can operate unobserved. I do not underestimate

the influence of such thought as his. It is growing stronger every day.

It is sharply defined, forceful, and it will prevail unless we fight it.

When one comes among us, sharing the privileges of citizenship, to

tell us that he is "immune" from the claims of our great ancestry, and

the noble sentiment of our past, he is striking at the heart of our

nationality. He is vastly more significant than his own alien voice.

For his claims are being advocated by editors and politicians. His

ideas are sweeping our communities. Our nation does not live because

it is a geographical unit, nor because it accepts all the races of

Europe. It lives because it fought at Yorktown side by side with

Rochambeau and his Frenchmen. It lives in the songs of Whittier and in

the heart of Lincoln. By its past of struggle for ideas it has given us

a heritage. But we have substituted pacifism and commercialism for the

old struggle, and we have substituted phrases for the old ideas which

cost sacrifice to maintain. If enough citizens become "immune" from the

influences that have shaped us, we shall lose our historic continuity,

and become the sort of nation which these enemies would have us be. But

these considerations do not bring alarm to our leaders. Our leaders

supply the very intellectual defense for this treason. They supply it

in the doctrine of so-called internationalism.

Let us without delay select our position and hold it. Let us stand

firmly on our traditions and history. We have no wish to be "immune"

from our language and literature, our sentiment and ancestry. We need a

fresh inoculation of those "influences." Let us reinforce the policy of

Franklin which recognized the desirability of friendship with France

and England. Let us restate the policy of Lincoln, who paused in the

stress of a great war to strike hands with the workers of England,

because they and he were at one in the love of liberty.

No single factor of race and climate, language and culture is

determinative on that central power of cohesion which gathers a

multitude of persons--"infinitely repellent particles"--into an

organism which lives its life in unity, and forms its tradition from a

collective experience. But it does not follow that some one of these

factors cannot be so strengthened as to disturb the balance. If the

geographical territory is carved up the nation is destroyed. Successive

waves of immigration can drown out the sharply defined character of a

people. This is now taking place in the United States. The proof is

our reaction to the war. It is not that we revealed differences of

"opinion." It is that we were untrue to our tradition.

It is easy to throw the discussion into nonsense by asking: Is there

any such thing as a pure race? Are not the greatest nations of mixed

blood? Do you think race and nation are the same thing? It is true

that no one thing is determinative in the making of a nation. Race and

language, culture and government, border line and climate, religion and

economic system, are each an influence, and, together, they shape the

people in face and habit till they walk the earth with a new stride

and look out on the world with different eyes from those of any people

elsewhere. But the supreme thing about a nation is that it happened. A

certain group of people developed affinities and aspirations, cohered

and became an organism, fought its way to independence, and remembered

the blood it had spilled. That tradition of common experience and

sacrifice in victory and defeat is the cord that binds the generations.

It is a spiritual ancestry that colors every thought and governs every

action. An English historian, Professor Ramsay Muir, has stated this

aptly. He writes:

"The most potent of all nation-molding factors, the one indispensable

factor which must be present whatever else be lacking, is the

possession of a common tradition, a memory of sufferings endured and

victories won in common, expressed in song and legend, in the dear

names of great personalities that seem to embody in themselves the

character and ideals of the nation, in the names also of sacred places

wherein the national memory is enshrined."

Gilbert K. Chesterton said to me:

"Certain people like the arrangements under which they live. They

prefer to die rather than to let other people come in and change

things. Even if their nation decides on a policy that is suicidal,

they would rather die with her than live without her. That is

nationality. When the call came, the citizens of the nations answered

with what was deep in their subconsciousness. All resolutions to act as

'workers,' as members of an 'International,' fell away. If pacifists

of the ruling class, like Miss Hobhouse and Bertrand Russell, would

analyze what is really in their mind, they would find that what they

dislike is the spectacle of democracy enthusiastically and unanimously

agreeing to do something. They distrust democracy on the march. It is

their artistocratic sense that disapproves. Just now, it is the Kaiser

whom the democracies are marching out to find, and the people are not

behaving as the pacifists would like to have them."

This idea of nationalism, instead of being an early and now obsolete

idea, is a recent and a noble idea. What the common life of the home is

to the father and mother and children, through poverty and childbirth

and fame, that is the life of a nation to its citizens. In the blood

of sacrifice it is welded together. Mixed races cannot dilute it, a

doctored border cannot suppress it, a stern climate cannot quench it,

an oppressive government cannot enslave it. Only one thing can destroy

it and that is when it annuls its past and weakens at the heart. When

it ceases to respond to the great ideas that once aroused it, then

it is time for those who love it to look to the influences at work

that have made it forgetful. The denial of that common experience, the

refusal to inherit the great tradition, the unwillingness to continue

the noble and costly policy--these mark the decline of a nation. These

are the signs of peril we see in the unwieldy life of our immense

democracy to-day. The call that came to us from France was the same

voice that we once knew as the voice of our most precious friend. By

our failure to respond we show that we have allowed something alien

to enter our inmost life. In our equal failure to safeguard our own

helpless non-combatants, we reveal that the old compulsions no longer

move us. By the cry that went up from half our nation--not of outrage

at stricken France, not of anger for slaughtered children of our own

race--but that strange mystical cry, "He kept us out of war," we betray

that we have lost our hardihood. We have been overwhelmed by numbers.

We have suffered such a heaping up of new elements that we have no time

to teach our tradition, no will to continue our race experience.

I was talking of this recently with a profound student of race

psychology, Havelock Ellis. He said that the determining factor is the

strength of the civilization receiving the fresh contributions. Is that

civilization potent enough to shape the new contributions? The French

have always had their boundaries beaten in upon by other races, but

so distinctive, so salient, is their civilization that it absorbs the

invasion. He said that the question to decide is whether the cells are

sufficiently organized and determinate to receive alien matter.

Surely no student of our social conditions can say that our tendencies

are clear, our collective will formed, our national mind unified. We

keep adding chemical elements without coming to a solution. England

accepted a few invasions and conquests and then had to stiffen up

and work the material into a mold. France was overrun every half

century, but finally she drew the sacred circle around her borders, and

proceeded to the work of coalescing her parts. Our present stream of

tendency, and our present grip on our own historic tradition, are not

strong enough to admit of immense new European contributions. We are

losing the sense of what we mean as a people.

In dealing with any pet assumption of modern thought, one must guard

against misunderstanding. The opponent calls one reactionary and

then one's day in court is over. Or the opponent pushes a plain

statement over into an academic discussion, and the whole matter at

issue is befogged. I am not attacking the desirability of a true

internationalism. I am saying that our conception of it is all

wrong, and that our method of attaining it is futile. The greater

day of peace between nations will not come by weakening the ties

of nationality. It will come through a deepening of the sense of

citizenship in each nation. But much of our recent thinking has tended

to weaken the claims of nationality. It is against this that we must

set ourselves. We want internationalism, but the internationalism we

mean is an understanding and a good will between distinct nations,

not an internationalism which is the loss of a rich variety, and

the blurring of distinctions. Nations will not disappear. They will

heighten their individuality under the process of time. The hope of

peace lies in the appreciation of those differences. We are not to

reach internationalism by ceasing to become nations, as our present-day

theorists advocate. There lies the service of the war. It has taught

us that the Frenchman and the German will refuse to merge their ideas

about life and duty in a denationalized world league. Each wants his

plot of ground, his own patch of sky, his own kind of a world, with

those men for neighbors who think as he thinks. The Frenchman does

not wish to be speeded up by universal vocational training, and a

governmental régime where efficiency and organization are the aims

of the corporate life. The German does not wish his world to contain

waste and laziness and dilettantism. A hundred years ago the world put

up a sign in front of encroaching France: "No trespassing on these

premises." To-day the grass of France is red where the marauder crossed

the line. I have seen the soul of France at tension for two years, and

I know that her agony has deepened her sense of nationality.

It is easy to retort that it is the nationalism of Germany that has

spread fire and blood across Europe. But it is easier yet to give

the final answer. There are diseases of individuality--the "artistic

temperament," egoism, freakishness, criminality--which require

chastening. But because certain individuals have to be restrained, we

do not crush individual liberty, self-expression and the free play of

development. There are diseases of nationalism--the lust for power

and territory, the desire to impose the will, the language and the

customs, on smaller units. When a nation hands over its foreign policy

and its personal morality to the state, which is only the machinery

of a nation, and when the machine, operated by a little group of

imperialists instead of by the collective will of the nation, turns to

organized aggression, there is catastrophe. Prussian history from the

vivisection of Poland, through the rape of Schleswig and the crushing

of Paris, to the assassination of Belgium, offers us no guarantees

of a common aim for human welfare. But it is because nationality has

been betrayed, not because it has been expressed. The Uhlan officer,

murdering women, is no reason for abolishing Habeas Corpus. The

misbehavior of Germany is no excuse for rebuking the liberty of France.

At the touch of the bayonet, on the first shock of reality,

internationalism crumbles--the internationalism, I mean, that

disbelieves in national quality, and disregards essential differences.

Groups of "workers," the "universal" church of co-religionists,

dissolve. The nation emerges. Wars have been the terrible method

by which nations have created themselves, and by which they have

defended their being. Pacifism is not a disease, it is the symptom

of the disease of a false internationalism. Pacifism springs from

the belief that nations do not matter, that "humanity is the great

idea." "Why should nations go to war, since the principle of

nationality is not vital?" But, actually, this principle is vital.

"An effective internationalism can only be rendered possible by a

triumphant nationalism." The present war is a fight by the little

nations of Belgium and Serbia, and by the great nation, France, for

the preservation of their nationality. We have failed to understand

"the causes and objects" of this war, because we have weakened our own

sense of nationality. Our tradition has been drowned out by new voices.

Ninety years ago, we responded to Greece, and, later, to Garibaldi and

Kossuth. To-day, only those understand the fight of the nations who

have been reared in our American tradition. Richard Neville Hall went

from Dartmouth College and died on an Alsatian Hill, serving France.

A friend writes of him: "He was saying things about the France of

Washington and Lafayette, how he had been brought up on the tradition

of that historic friendship."

I have found something inspiring in the action of these young Americans

in France. Perhaps out of them will come the leadership which our

country lacks. My own generation moves on to middle life, and, as

is the way of elders, reveals moderation of mind and a good-natured

acceptance of conditions. Nothing is to be hoped for from us. The great

generation of Walt Whitman and Julia Ward Howe is dead, and the next

generation of George Haven Putnam and Eliot and O. O. Howard is dying.

There is nowhere to turn but to the young. They must strive where we

have failed. They must fight where we were neutral. I have seen some

hundreds of these youth who love France because they love America. In

them our tradition is continued. Through them the American idea can

be reaffirmed for all our people. May they remember their dead, their

boy-comrades who fell in service at the front. They have shared in

the greatness of France. May they come home to us very sure of their

possession. We have nothing for them. Complacent in our neutrality,

and fat with our profits, we have lost our chance. They bring us moral

leadership.

Now, all this will have no appeal to the many nationalities among us.

The American tradition (except for a few personalities and ideas) is

meaningless to them. I have dealt with their needs in the preceding

chapter. I am writing these next chapters for the inheritors of our

American tradition, who have grown slack and cosmopolitan, who, though

of the blood-strain and cultural consciousness that fought our wars

and created our civilization, are now too tired, some of them, to do

anything but exploit the other nationalities which have tumbled in on

the later waves of immigration. Others of us are simply swamped by the

multitude and find our refuge in cosmopolitanism. "They're all alike.

They will all be Americans to-morrow." If these tame descendants of

America will be true to their own tradition, they will learn to be

merciful to their fellow-countrymen with quite other traditions. It is

precisely because we "old-timers" have been forgetting our tradition

that we have been blind to the rich inherited life of those that come

to us. If we recover our own sense of spiritual values, we shall

welcome the tradition and the hope which the humblest Jew has brought

us.

IV

COSMOPOLITANISM

Cosmopolitanism is the attempt to deny the instinct of nationality. It

works in three ways with us. It seeks to impose an English culture on

our mixed races; it seeks to create an American type at one stroke;

it preaches an undiscriminating indeterminate merging of national

cultures into a new blend, "the human race," which will be composed

of individuals pretty much alike, with the same aspirations. The

differences of inheritance will be thrown away like the bundle from the

pilgrim's back. Modern thought is permeated with this "new religion of

humanity," which is going to accomplish what the Roman Empire and the

Spanish Inquisition failed to do: unify the infinite variety of human

nature.

One of its analysts says that "internally it is productive of many

evil vapors which issue from the lips in the form of catchwords." He

traces it to ill-assimilated education, and sees its final stage when

"the victim, hating his teachers and ashamed of his parentage and

nationality, is intensely miserable." He is the man without roots,

who has lost his contacts with the ideas, the ethic, the customs, the

affectionate attachments, out of which social life develops.

For the last fifty years certain Germans have preached a boundless

cosmopolitanism, while the German people have practiced an intense

ingrowing racialism. It is, of course, true that these men who

preached it were themselves rebels against the German system. Karl

Marx, Lasselle, Engels, helped to found an international movement in

protest against the form of nationality within which they lived. But

the direction and violence of their rebound were governed by the hard

surface from which they recoiled. The personality of these men and the

tonic value of their thought have been of inestimable benefit to our

age. In their main position they were much nearer the truth than their

opponents. But the precise point I am dealing with is their theory of

cosmopolitanism. And here a grievous personal experience in a cramping

environment misled these early radicals, and they incorporated in

their program the anti-national item which did not belong. Because

their analysis of conditions was in the main so searching, so just,

their thought has continued to exercise a profound influence, and the

animating ideas in their philosophy of history and in their analysis of

industrialism were imported to England and to America. The stern and

unbending leaders of socialist thought have reproduced their masters'

voice with an almost unchanged accent. A few great Russians contributed

to the same theory of cosmopolitanism, and have powerfully affected

groups of modern thinkers. I doubt if any single idea has traveled

further and more swiftly than this idea that the sense of nationality

is a mistaken thing, and that a something wider and vaguer is the goal

of the future. The Latin races have sometimes thought they believed it,

but they quickly corrected their thinking under the impact of event.

Our present school of softened, daintily stepping radicals have

whittled away some of the original doctrine of the class war. The

materialistic theory of history, surplus value and the proletarian

division have had to yield in part to the facts of the case. But the

modern reformers cling to that creation of German and Russian thought,

a cosmopolitan world, the merging of races and nations into a universal

undifferentiated brotherhood with gradually disappearing boundaries.

We find it in our intelligent skilled social workers. I mention them

in no unfriendliness, but because I believe that they and their group

are a noble influence in our country, and because their blindness and

failure in this crisis are a grief to me and to thousands of other

persons who have looked to them for leadership. We find this idea of

cosmopolitanism in the modern essayists, who are read in America, like

Lowes Dickinson, Bertrand Russell, and Bernard Shaw. This doctrine

has misled our social workers, our socialists, our radicals in social

reform, our feminists--almost every element in our social movement.

Our American radicalism is permeated with a vague cosmopolitanism,

and its child, pacifism. At no point has "modern" thought exercised a

profounder effect than on our social movement.

We need the check here of the Latin mentality. The clear Latin mind

refuses to be misled by idealistic phrases, whose meaning does not

permit of analysis into concrete terms. The French and Italians have

recognized that the contribution of nationality is vital to the future.

Their conception of social change is healthier than ours. It is Mazzini

and not Karl Marx who was the prophet of a sane evolution. Mazzini says:

"Every people has its special mission, which will co-operate towards

the fulfillment of the general mission of Humanity. That mission

constitutes its nationality. Nationality is sacred.

"In laboring, according to true principles, for our country we are

laboring for humanity. Our country is the fulcrum of the lever which

we have to wield for the common good. If we give up this fulcrum, we

run the risk of becoming useless both to our country and to humanity.

"Do not be led away by the idea of improving your material conditions

without first solving the national question. You cannot do it.

"Country is not a mere zone of territory. The true country is the

idea to which it gives birth." It is "A common principle, recognized,

accepted, and developed by all."

His thought is clear and consistent. How shall a man serve all humanity

whom he has not seen, if he does not serve his nation whom he has seen?

"The individual is too insignificant, and humanity too vast." The stuff

of nationality is the sacrifice rendered by the people to realize their

aspirations--"By the memory of our former greatness, by the sufferings

of the millions." The limits of nationality will tend toward natural

boundaries--the division of

"humanity into distinct groups or nuclei upon the face of the earth,

thus creating the germ of nationalities. Evil governments have

disfigured the divine design. Nevertheless you may still trace it,

distinctly marked out--as least as far as Europe is concerned--by the

course of the great rivers, the direction of the higher mountains, and

other geographical conditions. They (the Governments) have disfigured

it so far that, if we except England and France, there is not perhaps

a single country whose present boundaries correspond to that design.

Natural divisions, and the spontaneous, innate tendencies of the

peoples, will take the place of the arbitrary divisions sanctioned by

evil governments. The map of Europe will be redrawn.

"Then may each one of you, fortified by the power and the affection of

many millions, all speaking the same language, gifted with the same

tendencies, and educated by the same historical tradition, hope, even

by your own single effort, to be able to benefit all Humanity. O my

brothers, love your Country! Our Country is our Home, the house that

God has given us, placing therein a numerous family that loves us,

and whom we love; a family with whom we sympathize more readily, and

whom we understand more quickly than we do others; and which, from its

being centered round a given spot, and from the homogeneous nature of

its elements, is adapted to a special branch of activity."

The method of strengthening the sense of nationality is by education.

"Every citizen should receive in the national schools a moral

education, a course of nationality--comprising a summary view of the

progress of humanity and of the history of his own country; a popular

exposition of the principles directing the legislation of that country."

That Mazzini's ideas are a living force to-day is proved by the

response of the nations in this war. In the seaside town of Hove,

Sussex, where I live, his book, developing these ideas, was drawn out

from the public library thirty-eight times in the last four years.

There is a danger here of over-stressing nationality and inviting a

return to the anarchy of war, and this is the difficulty one has in

pointing out the psychologic unsoundness of Cosmopolitanism. The

limitations of the Mazzini theory have been convincingly drawn by

Graham Wallas.

"Nationalism, as interpreted either by Bismarck ("We must not swallow

more than we can digest") or by Mazzini, played a great and invaluable

part in the development of the political consciousness of Europe

during the nineteenth century. But it is becoming less and less

possible to accept it as a solution for the problems of the twentieth

century."

Wallas shows that Mazzini enormously exaggerated the simplicity of the

question. National types are not divided into homogeneous units "by the

course of the great rivers and the direction of the high mountains,"

but are intermingled from village to village. Do the Balkan mountains

represent the purposes of God in Macedonia? And for which nationality,

Greek or Bulgar? The remedy, as Wallas sees it, for recurring war

between nations is an international science of eugenics which might

"indicate that the various races should aim, not at exterminating each

other, but at encouraging the improvement by each of its own racial

type." In this way the emotion of political solidarity can be slowly

made possible between individuals of consciously different national

types. A political emotion, if it is to do away with war, cannot be

created by thwarting the instinct of nationality. It must be based,

"not upon a belief in the likeness of individual human beings, but

upon the recognition of their unlikeness." We in America have tried to

deny the facts of psychology by calling all our newcomers Americans. We

have sought to escape our problem by shutting our eyes to the infinite

dissimilarity of the individuals in our population. The only direction

for hope to travel is that the improvement of the whole species will

come rather from "a conscious world-purpose based upon a recognition

of the value of racial as well as individual variety than from mere

fighting." This is the true internationalism, and it differs as widely

from a cosmopolitan blur which "makes" Americans as from the bitter

enforced nationality of blood and iron, or spiritual imperial arrogance.

I have found a perfectly clear statement of what lies loosely in the

mind of modern Americans of mixed race and intense pre-occupation with

the game of getting on. I have found it in the editorial columns of a

Middle Western paper. The Cedar Rapids _Gazette_ says:

EXTINCT AMERICANS

"The authorities who fear that the American race will 'die out' may

not have noticed that all the ingredients of that race are still being

born in Europe at about the usual rate. And, at the worst, if one

American race dies out there will be another race as good or better in

America to take its place.

"Several American races have already died to the extent that

the members are no longer to be separately identified and their

distinctive ideas no longer exert influence on the county. Among the

vanished races are the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the

Huguenots, the Acadian voyagers, the Knickerbockers, the Pennsylvania

and New Jersey Dutch, the pioneer forest tribes of Kentucky, Ohio and

southern Indiana, the picturesque Yankee, the southeastern Cracker,

the typical Plainsman and Cowboy, each of whom in his time and place

was the representative of a small and distinct nationality.

"The Americans of two generations are unlike. To use an Irish epigram,

change is the only established characteristic of the American. The

American in whose veins flows the blood of half a dozen European

races, whose grandparents may have been born in four states, his

parents in two states; whose wife may have been born in a state other

than his own and whose four children may be married to men and women

of four nationalities, is not worrying greatly regarding the exact

composition of the 'American race.' Individually he has on hand a

rather complete stock of the ingredients and is satisfied with the

idea that he is doing his best to help establish a representative

order of humanity.

"There is no need to worry about the passing of a race. The world and

humanity are the big ideas. The race that deserves to die will pass.

The race that fights for its existence, whose members have pride in

their kind, will live. A race is recruited only through the cradle. A

race that disregards its young is doomed. But mankind will not be less

numerous and that which is of value will survive. Not only the end of

the race, but the end of the world is in sight for those who leave no

children to perpetuate their bodies and their minds."

The trouble with that is that it is devoid of self-respect. It gives no

foundation for ethics. It gives no sanction for religion. It gives no

soil and roots for literature. It treats the life of man as if it were

grass to flourish and perish. It treats men as mechanical units in a

political and industrial system. They go to their lathe in the factory,

attend a motion-picture show in the evening, and so on for a few years

to dissolution. It is pessimistic with a dark annihilating quality. And

it is a habit of mind that is growing among us. It is the inevitable

reflex of our bright surface optimism, which drowns thought in speed

and change, and believes that activity under scientific direction can

satisfy the human spirit.

Actually the stock we came of matters very much--for ourselves. Being

dead, it yet lives, and we are the channel of its ongoing. Only by

using the inheritance that comes to us can we lead the life of the mind

in art and ethics and religion. "Huckleberry Finn," "The Virginian,"

"Still Jim," "The Valley of the Moon," and "Ethan Frome," possess a

permanence of appeal precisely because they are rooted in the sense

of nationality, and are a natural growth out of a tradition. Each

story describes a vanishing race, and deals with a locality assailed

by change. Each is a momentary arrest in time of an ebbing tide. Each

has the unconscious pathos of a last stand. But not one of these books

would have carried beyond the day of its appearance if it had dealt

with a life-history removed from its long inheritance. It is only so

that the nations among us will in time produce their literature. It

will not be by surface types of "rapid" Americans. It will rather

be by rendering the individual (whether Jew or Bohemian) in all the

loneliness of crowds and modern cities, and revealing the thoughts

and "notions" and desires that have come down to him from his very

ancient past, and his little ripple of activity in the endless stream

of descent. Montague Glass and Joseph Hergesheimer and Fannie Hurst

are aware of this necessity of relating their art to the instinctive

life of their character, and so under the brightest crackle of their

American smartness something goes echoing back to a day that is older

than the Coney Island and Broadway and Atlantic City of their setting.

Joseph Stella in his drawings has shown perception of this by anchoring

his type in its inherited life, and his steel workers are better than

many reports of Mr. Gary on how it is with America at the Pittsburgh

blast furnaces.

But not only is the sense of nationality needed for the finer

activities of the mind. There is need of it in "practical" politics. It

is discouraging that our American social movement has been captured by

cosmopolitanism. For the immediate future lies with radical changes in

the world of environment. Living conditions are going to be improved.

A greater measure of equality will be achieved in our own time. But how

is the social change inside the country to be related to other States?

What shall be our foreign policy? This is where the cosmopolitanism

of our radical group is a poor guide for action. It is the vice of

liberals that they don't harness their ideas to facts. The result

is that at time of crisis the power slips over in the hands of Tory

reactionaries. We have seen a recent instance in England, where the

liberals shirked the war during the premonitory years. As the result,

the good old stand-pat crowd of Tories came in with a rush, simply

because on foreign policy they had a program which at least dealt with

the facts of the case.

Until liberals are willing to think through on foreign policy,

studying European and world history, defining the meaning of the State

and visualizing its relationship to other States, we shall have a

skimmed-milk pacifism as their largest contribution to the problems of

nation-States, submerged nationalities, backward races, exploitable

territory and international straits, canals and ports of call. That is

unfortunate. For, unless the liberal mind is brought to bear on foreign

policy, we shall continue to have that policy manipulated by little

groups of expert imperialists. These inner cliques present a program

of action based on fact-study, which wins public opinion, because the

instinct of the people trusts men who know what they want more than it

trusts a bland benevolence without direction of aim.

Our social workers and other liberals would not think of advocating a

policy of "Christianizing" the employer as the sole remedy for social

maladjustment. But this is precisely the sort of thing they advocate in

inter-State relationship. They seek to work by spiritual conversion,

turning the hearts of the rulers to righteousness and softening the

mood of the bellicose mass-people. And the chaos of the outer world

will continue to pour into our tight little domestic compartments of

nicely-adjusted social relationships.

In a word, foreign policy and domestic policy are of one piece, and

the same realism must be applied to questions like the neutrality of

Belgium and the internationalization of Constantinople which we apply

to wage-scales. Until men of liberal tendency are willing to devote the

same hard study to the map which they put on social reform and internal

development, the world will continue to turn to its only experts on

foreign policy, who unfortunately are largely imperialists.

V

THE HYPHENATES

A famous American president once said to a distinguished ambassador:

"We make them into Americans. They come in immigrants of all

nationalities, but they rapidly turn into Americans and make one

nation."

And the ambassador thought within himself and later said to me:

"But a nation is a people with a long experience, who have lived and

suffered together. There is a bell in a great church, which if you

lightly flick it with the fingernail, gives out one single tone which

goes echoing through the Cathedral. If you stand at the far end,

you can hear that tone. So it is with a nation. If it is struck, it

responds as one man to its furthest border. At the stroke of crisis it

answers with one tone."

No. We are not a nation. We are a bundle of nationalities, and some day

we shall be a Commonwealth if we deal wisely with these nations who

dwell among us.

We cannot "make" Americans. We can make "imitation Americans,"

as Alfred Zimmern calls them. The Jew, spiritually sensitive and

intellectually acute, becomes an "amateur Gentile." The imaginative

Calabrian, of rich social impulse, becomes a flashily dressed Padrone.

The poetic, religious Irishman, whose instinct has been communal for

many centuries, becomes a district leader. These individuals have come

to us with rare and charming gifts, fruit of their nationality. Instead

of frankly accepting them in their inheritance, we have applied a hasty

conversion which denied their life of inherited impulses and desires.

Instead of bringing out the good in them, we have Americanized them

into commercial types.

Where does our future lie?

It lies in developing and making use of men like the great Jews, Abram

Jacobi, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and Louis Brandeis, who are true to

their own nature, and who respond to the American environment. These

men are not amateur Gentiles. They are Jews and they are Americans.

It lies in Italians like Dr. Stella, who love those elements in Italy

which are liberal, and who further every effort in America to create

free institutions. We need the help of every man of them to save our

country from commercialism.

Recently I asked one of the most brilliant of living scholars, of

German descent, to give me his views on the future in America. He wrote:

"What is America to do? I should answer: preach hyphenation. Make

the common man realize that nationality is a spiritual force which

has in essence as little to do with government as religion has. When

government interferes with freedom of worship, religion comes into

politics and stays there till its course is unimpeded. The same

is true of nationality--in Ireland, in East Europe and elsewhere.

But that is only an accident. To allow governments to exploit for

political ends the huge inarticulate emotional driving force of either

religion or nationality is to open the floodgates. Hence the wars of

religion in the Seventeenth Century and the nationalist hatreds of the

present war."

Alfred Zimmern says:

"It seems strange that there should be Americans who still hold firmly

to the old-fashioned view of what I can only call instantaneous

conversion, of the desirability and possibility of the immigrant

shedding his whole ancestral inheritance and flinging himself into

the melting-pot of transatlantic life to emerge into a clean white

American soul of the brand approved by the Pilgrim Fathers. Now the

only way to teach immigrants how to become good Americans, that is

to say, how to be good in America, is by appealing to that in them

which made them good in Croatia, or Bohemia, or Poland, or wherever

they came from. And by far the best and the most useful leverage for

this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because nationality is more

than a creed or a doctrine or a code of conduct, it is an instinctive

attachment."

The road to sound Internationalism, to an understanding between States,

lies "through Nationalism, not through leveling men down to a gray,

indistinctive Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the best elements

in the corporate inheritance of each nation." True democracy wishes to

use the best that is in men in all their infinite diversity, not to

melt away their difference into one economic man. The American passion

for uniformity, for creating a "snappy," efficient, undifferentiated

type, is merely the local and recent form of the rigid aristocratic

desire to "Christianize" the Jew, to Anglicize Ireland, to modernize

the Hindu. It is the wish to make man in our own image. It is the last

bad relic of the missionary zeal which conducted the Inquisition. It is

only subtler and more dangerous, because persecution called out hidden

powers of resistance, but triumphant Commercialism, as engineered by

our industrial oligarchy, calls out imitation.

I have a collection of photographs made at Ellis Island by Julian

Dimock. They are subjects chosen almost at random from the stream of

newcomers on the morning of ship-arrival. There is often something very

touching in the expression of these faces: a trust in the goodness

of life, in the goodness of human nature. Man and woman and youth,

they seem to carry something that has been won by long generations of

rooted life and passed on to them for safe-keeping. And suddenly at

the landing in the new world the tradition is touched to a dream of

hope. But that light never lasts for long. Watch those same newcomers

as they are disgorged from our city factories. How soon the light

goes out of their faces, the inhabiting spirit withdrawn to its own

inaccessible home. Something brisk and natty and pert replaces that

unconscious dignity. Something tired from unceasing surface stimulus

takes possession of what was fresh and innocent in open peasant life

and the friendly intercourse of neighbors.

These races, in their weakness and poverty, have been unable to swing

back to their own deep center of consciousness. Unaided, it is doubtful

if they will ever raise their buried life from its sleep. The Jewish

nation is the only dispersion among us which has gathered its will

and recovered its self-consciousness enough to give us any promising

movement. They are slowly recognizing what is being done to their

young. They begin to see that their nation is losing its one priceless

jewel, the possession of spiritual insight. In the movement which is

spreading through the day schools for teaching young Jews the great

ethical tradition of their people, in their educational alliances, in

the Menorah Association, in the Zionist Movement, in the writings of

Brandeis, Kallen and Bourne, they are showing the first glimmerings of

statesmanship and making the first application of intelligence to our

commercialized cosmopolitan materialistic country which we have had

since we passed on from "Anglo-Saxon" Protestant civilization. May

their grip on their nationality never grow less. May the clear program

which they have constructed against the drift and rush of our careless

life seize the imagination of Italian and Serb and Bohemian. So and no

otherwise, we shall at last have a spiritual basis for our civilization.

Frank acceptance of the fact of dual nationality leads to such clear

statement as Randolph Bourne has given us in _The Menorah Journal_ for

December, 1916. He shows the fallacy of the "melting pot" idea, which

attempts to knead the whole population into an undefined colorless

mass, labeled American. In place of that undesirable and absurd

consummation, he offers a coöperation of cultures. "America has become

a vast reservoir of dispersions," and Coöperative Americanism will meet

"the demands of the foreign immigré who wishes freedom to preserve his

heritage at the same time that he coöperates loyally with all other

nationals in the building up of America."

What is Coöperative Americanism? Mr. Bourne answers that it is "an

ideal of a freely mingling society of peoples of very different racial

and cultural antecedents, with a common political allegiance and common

social ends, but with free and distinctive cultural allegiances which

may be placed anywhere in the world that they like. If the Jews have

been the first international race, I look to America to be the first

international nation."

Now, there is no unpopularity to-day in lauding a Jew or a Greek or an

Irishman. May I go a step further, and say that the same freedom to

express the tradition within them must be extended to the Americans of

the old stock, even those who hold a grateful love for France (some of

them recently have died for that), even those who love England for her

long struggle for political liberty. I cannot feel that Agnes Repplier,

Lyman Abbott, George Haven Putnam and the American Rights League are

deserving of a certain fine intellectual scorn which Randolph Bourne

and Max Eastman have applied to them. The American Rights League is

entitled to the same open field and the same respect which the Menorah

Society should receive. Why does Mr. Bourne applaud the one and lash

the other? I trust he will welcome both. What I think Bourne, James

Oppenheim, Walter Lippmann and Max Eastman have failed to see is that

the old American stock (of diverse race but common tradition) had a

right to respond vigorously to this war, where their inheritance of

social, legal and political ideas were battling with hostile ideas.

Somewhere, at some point, the new American tradition must plant itself.

In some issue it must take root. We of the old stock sought to make

this war the issue. We failed. All right. It is now your turn. In the

open arena of discussion the ideas of all of us must collide into

harmony. I can make clear the difficulty one has in reaffirming the

old American idea by quoting from the letter of an American editor in

response to what the chapters of this book are stating:

"It seems so curiously out of focus in its estimation of the Old, the

vanishing, America. Do you really believe that Old America should be

raised from the dead:--The America of convenient transcendentalism

where religion allowed a whole race to devote its body and spirit

to material aggrandizement? If you blame America for Christian

Science optimism, you must remember that Emerson and Whitman were

our teachers. If you blame America for not taking part in the

European war, you must remember that Washington told us to keep out

of 'entangling alliances.' It is historic America that was grossly

material, out of which our vast industrialism sprang with its

importation of cheap labor. But the Garden of Eden always lies behind

us, and nothing is commoner than finding Paradise in the past."

What I have tried to say is that the tradition of a nation is not a

dead thing, locked in the past. It is a living thing, operating on the

present. A tradition is a shared experience, governing present life.

The State needs to cohere and find itself and establish a cultural

consciousness, blended from manifold contributions. It is destructive

to have new swirling elements ceaselessly driving through the mass.

So I have protested against the too ready and ruthless discarding of

the cultural consciousness bequeathed us by the older American stock.

While the ideas imbedded in that consciousness will never again be in

sole command, I believe that they should be more potent than they are

to-day. I believe that politically they have a living value for us, and

that we persistently underestimate the English contribution to freedom

and justice. I deny that my desire that these ideas shall prevail is an

attempt to locate the Garden of Eden and Paradise in the smoky past.

It is, instead, the wish to see our country appropriate a particular

political contribution from the English stock, exactly as it needs to

appropriate certain social values from the Italians and the Greeks, and

many very definite spiritual ideas from the culture of the Jews.

What is the solution of these diverse elements? What blend can we

obtain from a score of mixtures? How fashion a civilization that shall

absorb and assimilate those blood-strains and traditional beliefs? I

think the one clear answer lies in the creation of free institutions,

which shall answer a common need, and which shall violate the

instinctive life and traditions of none. Those free institutions will

be the product of education, legislation, Coöperation, Trades Unionism

and Syndicalism, municipal and State ownership, and widely spread

private ownership and enterprise. The organized State under democratic

control will be the thing aimed at. But these free institutions must

gradually extend over areas far wider than vocational training and

economic well-being. They should seek to offer free expression to the

fully-functioning mind in art, science, ethics and religion. In this

way they will give a good life. We have the shadowy beginnings of such

institutions in the public school and library. But we have nothing like

the Danish or English coöperative movement. Our institution of property

affords us nothing like true peasant proprietorship of Ireland.

No apter illustration of how little we have tackled our job can be

found than in American Socialism. There is no American Socialism.

Orthodox socialism in America is dead doctrine, brought across by

German and Russian revolutionaries, reacting on their peculiar

environment, and then exhumed in a new country. Meanwhile a great

vital movement toward democratic control goes on in Europe, in Trades

Unionism, Coöperation and municipal and State ownership. Our socialist

locals repeat formulæ which Shaw, the Webbs, Rowntree, Wallas, Kautsky,

Vandervelde and Hervé outgrew a generation ago. It is here I hold

that the old American stock can do a service in interpreting American

conditions to our recent arrivals.

But if we continue to leave the door open we shall continue to be

swamped, and we shall employ our little hasty ready-made devices for

turning peasants with a thousand years of inherited characteristics

into citizens. We shatter them against our environment, and then are

astonished that their thwarted instincts, trained to another world,

revenge themselves in political corruption, abnormal vices, and

murderous "gunman" activities. Psychologists like Ross warn us in vain.

These overlapping hordes of "aliens" destroy the economic basis on

which alone free institutions can be reared. People, to whom we cannot

afford to pay a living wage, or for whom we do not care to arrange a

living wage, will not help us in creating free institutions. Instead,

they are manipulated by the industrial oligarchy into a force for

breaking down the standard of living of all workers. A resolute

restriction of immigration is not a discrimination against any race. It

is the first step toward unlocking the capacities of the races already

among us. The reason for stopping immigration, then, is economic.

It rests in the fact that our wage-scale and standard of living are

being shot to pieces by the newcomers. As the result our existent

institutions are not developing in liberal directions, and we are

failing to create new free institutions. It requires a somewhat stable

population, and a fairly uniform economic basis to create a Coöperative

movement, like that in Ireland, or a Trade Union movement, like that in

Australia.

Slowly the new order is coming, the day of the Commonwealth of

nationalities, where men from many lands, drawing their spiritual

reserves from the home that nourished their line through the long

generations, will yet render loyal citizenship to the new State which

harbors them and gives them a good life. The task of America is to

create that Commonwealth, that entity which men gladly serve, and

for which at need they willingly die. Our politics have not yet held

that appeal. Not yet can an American of these recent years stand off

from the stream of his experience, saying, "What does it mean that I

am an American?" and answer it in the high terms which a Frenchman

can use. Fifty years ago the American could answer in fairly definite

terms. But does our recent history mean much to Czech or Russian Jew

or Calabrian who has settled among us? It does not. The stirring of

their blood responds to another history than ours. Shall we take away

their tradition from them? We cannot if we would. What we can do with

their help is to create free institutions which will win them to a new

allegiance, and this will slowly root itself in the fiber of their line.

For a few generations they will continue at time of stress to hear

the call of their old home, as a bird in the autumn takes the call of

the South. The Serb will return to his mountains when the battle-line

is drawn, as he returned five years ago. The German will go back to

his barracks when Russia begins to spread toward the West. And over

those that do not go back a great restlessness will come, and they

will torment themselves, like a caged bird in the month of flight. But

with each generation the call will grow fainter, till finally the old

tradition is subdued and the citizen is domesticated. In this way only

can the new allegiance and instinctive sense of nationality be created,

growing very gradually out of free institutions.

Out of free institutions in State, property, religion and marriage,

ever-developing to fit a developing people; out of the unfolding

process of law, escaping from legalism and applying psychology to human

relationship; out of an education, sanctioned by human interest, and

devoted not only to vocational training but to the sense of beauty and

wonder; out of vast movements of the mass-people toward democratic

control; there will some day grow the new American tradition, which in

the fullness of time will take possession of the heart of these diverse

races and clashing nationalities. It will not root itself and grow in

the years of "naturalization," nor yet in one or two generations. But

in a hundred or two hundred years it will coalesce infinitely repellant

particles and gently conquer antagonisms, and in that day, which not

even our children's children will see, there will at last emerge the

American Commonwealth.

VI

THE REMEDY

I have made out the best case I can for our people. These chapters have

listed every excuse that can reasonably be given for our failure to

declare ourselves on the moral issue of this war. They have said that

a careless, busy folk, like those of the Middle West, need many facts

to enable them to see where the truth lies. They have pointed out how

short-sighted is the foreign policy of the Allies which gives few facts

to the American public. They have shown how the best of our radicals

have failed to think clearly because they have been befuddled by a

vague pseudo-internationalism. I have stated what I believe to be the

falsity in our present-day conception of Europe, the self-complacency

in our monopoly of freedom and justice; and I have tried to reveal how

that assumption of merit blinded our eyes to the struggles of other

peoples for the same causes. I have blamed our failure on Germany and

on England. But after every explanation has been made, it is still

true that our people ought to have been sensitive. At a great moment

of history we failed of greatness. There remains a shame to us that we

held aloof. There was no organized campaign of facts needed to convince

France that we were fighting for human rights in our Revolution. Three

thousand miles of water did not drown the appeal of our extremity. But

to-day our leaders are so bewildered by dreams of universal brotherhood

that they overlook our blood-brother on the Marne. Our common people

have their eyes to their work, and do not look up, as the workers of

Lancashire looked up with cheer and sympathy when we rocked in the

balance of 1863.

This war has shown to us that we are not at the level of earlier days.

We have lost our national unity, our sense of direction. The war has

revealed in us an unpreparedness in foreign and domestic policy. It is

a curse to know one's weakness unless one cures it. So this war will

not leave us blessed until we take a program of action. It is a waste

of time to write a book on the war except to convince and move to

action.

The steps are clear.

Our first step is to set our house in order. We need to recover our

self-consciousness, to restate what we mean by America. A half million

newcomers each year will not help us to find ourselves. We shall be

the better friends of freedom if we digest our present welter. Let us

fearlessly and at once advocate a stringent restriction of immigration.

Our citizenship has become somewhat cheap. Our ideals have become

somewhat mixed. Let us take time to locate the direction in which we

wish to go, and decide on the goal at which we aim. "Thou, Oh! my

country, must forever endure," said a famous patriot; but in a few

years his country had been melted down into an autocracy. We cannot

rely for all time on luck and happy drift. Size, numbers, the physical

economic conquest of a continent--these are not a final good. They are

at best only means toward worthy living. It is easier to rush in fresh

masses of cheap labor than it is to deal with the workers already here

as members of a free community, aid them in winning a high standard of

living, and establish with them an industrial democracy. The cheapest

way of digging our ditches and working our factories, and sewing our

shirts, is of course to continue holding open our flood gates and

letting the deluge come. It is the clever policy of our exploiters,

and the sentimental policy of the rest of us who love to be let alone,

if only we can cover our unconcern with a humanitarian varnish. But

the result of it is the America of to-day with its oligarchy of

industrial captains and bankers, with its aristocracy of labor, made

up of powerful trades unions and restricted "Brotherhoods," and with

its unskilled alien masses of mine and factory labor, unorganized,

exploited. Let us begin to build the better America by sacrificing the

easy immediate benefits of unrestricted immigration.

Our second step is to teach our tradition to the hundred million

already here. It is a large enough classroom. We can advertise for new

pupils when our present group matriculates. When it has matriculated,

there will be no popularity for phrases like "He kept us out of war,"

nor for songs of "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier." The teaching

of that tradition will reveal the interweaving of the American and

the French Revolutions as products of a single impulse toward world

liberation. If we had known our history, we should have answered

the need of France, as Hall, Chapman, Thaw, Seeger, and many more

answered it who have laid down their lives for their friend, France.

The teaching of the American tradition will reveal to our awakened

astonished minds that our policy has not been that of neutrality toward

oppressed peoples like the Belgians. It will reveal that the British

fleet has served us well from the time of Canning down to Manila Bay.

It will stir in us loyalties that have long been asleep. It will show

what a phrase like "Government for the people" has meant in terms of

social legislation. It will point to the long road we must tread

before we reach that ideal goal. We cannot leave the teaching of our

tradition to the public schools alone. Courses of evening lectures for

the people, the newspapers and periodicals, clergymen and economists

and social workers, all must help.

Our third step is a deep understanding sympathy with the forces in the

world making for righteousness. We should have been sensitive enough

to see the right and the wrong of the present war. But that chance

has gone by. Let us now make ready to contribute to the future. The

fundamental question is this: Are the democracies of the world to

stand together, or is the world-fight for freedom to be made, with our

nation on the side-lines? The whole emphasis of the world's emotion

has shifted from war to peace. When thought follows this emotion and

rationalizes it, we can begin constructive work. The test of our

desire for peace will be found in this: Do we mean business? Pacifism

is valueless, because it is a vague emotion. Peace is a thing won

by thought and effort. It is not alone a "state of mind." If we are

willing to give guarantees by army and navy, and to back up protest

by force, we can serve the cause of peace. But if we continue our

"internationalism" of recent years, we shall not be admitted to any

such effective league of peace as France and England will form. We must

take our place by the side of the nations who mean to make freedom and

justice prevail throughout the world.

Our fourth step will be that measure of preparedness which will render

us effective in playing our part in world history. We cannot go on

forever asking the English fleet to supply the missing members in our

Monroe Doctrine. We cannot go on forever developing a rich ripeness,

trusting that no hand will pluck us. In a competitive world, which

builds Krupp guns, we cannot place our sole reliance in a good-nature

which will be touched to friendliness because we are a special people.

That preparedness will not stop with enriching munition makers, and

playing into the hands of Eastern bankers. It will be a preparedness

which enlists labor, by safeguarding wages and hours. It is the

preparedness of an ever-encroaching equality: a democracy of free

citizens, prosperous not in spots but in a wide commonalty, disciplined

not only by national service of arms, but by the fundamental discipline

of an active effective citizenship. It is a preparedness which

will call on the women to share the burden of citizenship. It is a

preparedness which mobilizes all the inner forces of a nation by

clearing the ground for equality. It will be a preparedness not against

an evil day, but for the furtherance of the great hopes of the race.

SECTION III

THE GERMANS THAT ROSE FROM THE DEAD

I

LORD BRYCE ON GERMAN METHODS

In presenting the facts that follow of the behavior of the German Army,

I am fortunate in being able to introduce them with a statement written

for me by Lord Bryce. The words of Lord Bryce carry more weight with

the American people than those of any other man in Europe, and his

analysis of the methods of the German Staff is authoritative, because

he was the Chairman of what is known as the "Bryce Committee," which

issued the famous report on German "frightfulness." When I told him

that our country would respond to a statement from him, he asked me to

submit questions, and to these questions he has written answers.

The first question submitted to Viscount Bryce was this:

"America has been startled by Cardinal Mercier's statement concerning

the deportation of Belgian men. Our people will appreciate a statement

from you as to the meaning of this latest German move."

Lord Bryce replied to me:

"Nothing could be more shocking than this wholesale carrying away of

men from Belgium. I know of no case in European history to surpass it.

Not even in the Thirty Years War were there such things as the German

Government has done, first and last in Belgium. This last case is

virtual slavery. The act is like that of those Arab slave raiders in

Africa who carried off negroes to the coast to sell. And the severity

is enhanced because these Belgians and the work forcibly extracted from

them are going to be used against their own people. Having invaded

Belgium, and murdered many hundreds, indeed even thousands, among

them women and children, who could not be accused of 'sniping,' the

German military government dislocated the industrial system of the

community. They carried off all the raw materials of industry and

most of the machinery in factories, and then having thus deprived the

inhabitants of work, the invaders used this unemployment as the pretext

for deporting them in very large numbers to places where nothing will

be known of their fate. They were not even allowed to take leave of

their wives and children. Many of them may never be heard of again.

And von Bissing calls this 'a humanitarian measure.' Actually, it is

all a part of the invasion policy. They defend it as being 'war,' as

they justify everything, however inhuman, done because the military

needs of Germany are alleged to call for it. It shows how hard pressed

the military power is beginning to find itself at this latest stage

of the war. It is said that Attila, when he was bringing his hosts of

Huns out of Asia for his great assault on Western Europe, forced the

conquered tribes into his army, and made them a part of his invasion. I

can hardly think of a like case since then. In principle it resembles

the Turkish plan when they formed the Janissaries. The Turks used their

Christian subjects, taken quite young and made Moslems, and enrolled

them as soldiers (to fight against Christians) to fill their armies, of

which they were the most efficient part. These Belgians are not indeed

actually made to fight, but they are being forced to do the labor of

war, some of them probably digging trenches, or making shells, or

working in quarries to extract chalk to make cement for war purposes.

The carrying off of young girls from Lille was terrible enough, and it

seemed to us at the time that nothing could be worse. But the taking

away of many thousand of the Belgian population from their homes to

work against their own countrymen, with all the mental torture that

separation from one's family brings--this is the most shocking thing

we have yet heard of. I have been shown in confidence the reports

received from Belgium of what has happened there. The details given

and the sources they come from satisfied me of their substantial truth.

The very excuses the German authorities are putting forward admit the

facts. In Belgian Luxemburg I hear that they have been trying to stop

the existing employment in order to have an excuse for taking off the

men."

The second question read:

"How are such acts of German severity to be accounted for?"

Lord Bryce replied:

"When the early accounts of the atrocious conduct of the German

Government in Belgium were laid before the Committee over which I

presided they seemed hardly credible. But when we sifted them, going

carefully through every case, and rejecting all those that seemed

doubtful, we found such a mass of concurrent testimony coming from

different sources, and carefully tested by the lawyers who examined

the witnesses, that we could not doubt that the facts which remained

were beyond question. You ask how German officers came to give such

orders. The Committee tried to answer that question in a passage of

their report. They point out that for the German officer caste morality

and right stop when war begins. The German Chancellor admitted that

they had done wrong in invading Belgium, but they would go on and hack

their way through. The German military class had brooded so long on

war that their minds had become morbid. To Prussian officers war has

become, when the interests of the State require it, a sort of sacred

mission: everything may be done by and for the omnipotent State. Pity

and morality vanish, and are superseded by the new standard justifying

every means that conduces to success. 'This,' said the Committee, 'is

a specifically military doctrine, the outcome of a theory held by a

ruling caste who have brooded and thought, written and talked and

dreamed about war until they have fallen under its obsession and been

hypnotized by its spirit.' You will find these doctrines set forth in

'Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege,' the German Official Monograph on the

usages of war on land, issued under the direction of the German Staff.

What military needs suggest becomes lawful. You will find in that book

a justification for everything the German Army has done, for seizing

hostages, i. e., innocent inhabitants of an invaded area, and shooting

them if necessary. You will find what amounts to a justification even

of assassination. The German soldiers' diaries captured on prisoners

offer the proof that the German officers acted upon this principle.

'This is not the only case that history records in which a false

theory, disguising itself as loyalty to a State or a Church, has

perverted the conception of Duty, and become a source of danger to the

world.' This doctrine spread outside military circles. I do not venture

to say that it has infected anything like the whole people. I hope that

it did not. But national pride and national vanity were enlisted, and

it became a widespread doctrine accepted by the military and even by

many civilians. The Prussians are far more penetrated by the military

spirit than the Americans or English or French, and such a doctrine

ministered to the greatness of the power of Prussia. It was part of

Prussian military theory and sometimes of practice a century ago. But

in the rest of Germany it is a new thing. There was nothing of the kind

in southern Germany when I knew it fifty years ago.

"In an army there will be individual cases of horrible

brutality--plunder, rape, ill-treatment of civilians. There will always

be men of criminal instinct whose passion is loosed by the immunities

of war conditions. Drunkenness, moreover, may turn a decent soldier

into a wild beast. But most of the crimes committed in Belgium were

not committed by drunken troops. The German peasant, the 'Hans' whom

we know, is a good, simple, kindly sort of fellow, as are the rural

folk in every country. But remember in the German army there is a habit

of implicit obedience. The officers are extremely severe in military

discipline. They will shoot readily for a minor infraction. It is the

officers more than the private soldiers that were to blame. And some

of the officers were shocked by what they were forced to do. 'I am

merely executing orders and I should be punished if I did not execute

them,' said more than one officer whose words were recorded. How can

an officer in war time disobey the orders of the supreme military

command? He would be shot, and if he were to say he could not remain

in an army where he was expected to commit crimes, to retire in war

time, if he were permitted to retire, would mean disgrace to his name.

It is the spirit of the Higher German Army Command that is to blame.

The authority that issued the orders is guilty. The German people as a

whole are not cruel, but many of them have been infected by this war

spirit.

"And we little realize how strict is the German censorship. The German

people have been fed with falsehoods. So far are they from believing

in the record of their own army's cruelties, that they have been made

to believe in cruelties alleged to have been committed by French and

English troops. They have been fed on stories of soldiers with their

eyes put out by Belgians. The Chancellor of the German Empire in a

press communication said:

"Belgian girls gouged out the eyes of the German wounded. Officials

of Belgian cities have invited our officers to dinner and shot and

killed them across the table. Contrary to all international law, the

whole civilian population of Belgium was called out, and after having

at first shown friendliness, carried on in the rear of our troops

terrible warfare with concealed weapons. Belgian women cut the throats

of soldiers whom they had quartered in their homes while they were

sleeping.

"There was no truth at all in these stories."

The next question was submitted as follows:

"Has the German Government made any effort to prove their general

charges and to disprove the detailed charges of your report and the

report made by the French Government?"

Lord Bryce writes in reply:

"The diaries of German soldiers referred to have been published

throughout the world, and no question has been raised of their

authenticity. They contain testimony to outrages committed in Belgium

and France that is overwhelming. No answer is possible. The German

Government have never made a reply to the Report of the British

Committee. They attempted to answer some of the reports made by the

Belgian Government. But their answer was really an admission to the

facts, for it consisted in allegations that Belgian civilians had given

provocation. They endeavored to prove that Belgian civilians had shot

at them. It would not have been strange if some civilians had shot at

those who suddenly burst into their country, but no proof has ever been

given of more than a few of such cases, nor of the stories of outrages

committed by Belgian priests, women and children on German soldiers.

Even if such occasional shooting by civilians had taken place, as very

likely it did, that did not justify the wholesale slaughter of innocent

persons and the burning of whole villages. In the burning of the 26

houses at Melle, which you tell me you witnessed, no allegations were

made of shooting by civilians. The little girl murdered at Alost, to

whom you refer, had not shot at the Germans. The woman, eighty years

old, had not shot at them. These severities were committed as a method

to achieve an end. That end was to terrorize the civilian population,

and destroy the spiritual resources of the nation."

The final question was this:

"As the result of this war, what hope have we of reconstruction and an

altered policy in Germany?"

Viscount Bryce answered:

"It is to be hoped and expected that the Allies will so completely

defeat Germany as to discredit the whole military system and the ideas

out of which the horrors of German war practice have developed. It is

essential to inflict a defeat sufficiently decisive in the eyes of the

German people that they will have done with their military caste and

its nefarious doctrine, and it is essential to discredit the methods

themselves--discredit them by their failure--in so thorough a manner

that no nation will ever use them again. The way, then, of ending what

is called 'frightfulness' is by a complete victory over it. It is our

task to show that shocking military practices and total disregard of

right do not succeed. We must bring to pass the judgment of facts

to the effect that such methods do not avail. In this determination

our British people are unanimous as they have never been before. The

invasion of Belgium, the atrocities committed there, and the sinking of

the _Lusitania_--these three series of acts united the whole British

people in its firm resolve to prosecute the war to a complete victory.

Now on the top of these things and of isolated crimes of the German

Government, like the shooting of Miss Cavell and Captain Fryatt, come

these abominable deportations of Belgians into a sort of slavery."

In all communication with Lord Bryce, one feels the accurate

fair-minded scholar. He is without heat and partisanship. He added in a

note:

"We know that our British soldiers fight hard, but they fight fair,

and they have no personal hatred to their enemies. I have been at the

British front and have seen their spirit. I was told that our men

when they take a prisoner often clap him on the back and give him a

cigarette. There is no personal hatred among our officers or men.

Efforts are properly made here at home to keep bitterness against the

German people as a whole from the minds of our people, but it is right

that they should detest and do their utmost to overthrow the system

that has produced this war and has made it so horrible."

II

SOME GERMAN WAR DIARIES

I have seen the original diaries of the German soldiers in the army

which devastated Belgium and Northern France. Things tumble out just as

they happened, hideous acts, unedited thoughts. Phillips Brooke once

spoke of the sensation there would be if the contents of our minds were

dumped on Boston Common for people to see. Here is the soul of the

German people spilled out into writing. This is what Germany was in the

year 1914. This record left by dead men and by captured men is a very

living thing to me, because I saw these German soldiers at their work

of burning and torture. Here they have themselves told of doing the

very thing I saw them do. We must not miss the point of their proof,

written and signed by the perpetrators themselves. It is the proof of

systematic massacre, systematic pillage, systematic arson.

These diaries found on the field of battle were brought to the French

General Staff along with the arms and equipments of the dead and the

prisoners. They are written by the soldiers because of Article 75 of

the German Instruction for Campaign Service (Felddienst-Ordnung), which

states that "these journals of war serve for information on the general

operations, and, by bringing together the various reports of active

fighting, they are the basis for the later definitive histories of the

campaigns. They should be kept daily." No words could be more exactly

prophetic. Those diaries will be the basis of all future histories of

the war. The keeping of them is obligatory for the officers, and seems

to be voluntary on the part of the men, but with a measure of implied

requirement. So stern did some of the soldiers feel the military

requirement to be that they kept on with their record up to the point

of death. Here is the diary of a soldier of the Fourth Company of the

Tenth Battalion of Light Infantry Reserves, which he was writing at the

moment he was fatally wounded.

"Ich bin verwundet. Behüte dich Gott. Küsse das Kind. Es soll fromm

sein." And then the pencil stops forever. The writing on that final

page of all is regular and firm up to the "Ich bin verwundet." Those

last four sentences are each just a line long, as if each was a cry.

He wrote the word "Küsse" and could hardly rally himself. His pencil

slips into three marks without meaning, then he writes "das Kind." I

trust my German readers will not deny me the use of this diary. It is

the only one of which I have not seen the original. The photographic

reproduction is my only evidence of this flash of tenderness among a

thousand acts of infamy.

The diaries are little black-covered pocket copybooks: the sort that

women in our country use for the family accounts. They contain about

100 pages. They average five inches in length and three in width. A few

of the diaries, and those mostly belonging to officers, are written in

ink. But most of them are in pencil, occasionally in black, but the

large majority in purple.

Many of the diaries are curt records of daily marches and military

operations. The man is too tired to write anything but distances, names

of places, engagements. That was what the Great German General Staff

had in mind in ordering the practice. They could not foresee what would

slip through into the record, because in all their calculations they

have always forgotten the human spirit. Once again we are indebted to

German thoroughness. The causes, the objects, the methods of this war,

will not be in doubt, as in other wars of the past. History will be

clear in dealing its judgments. Like the surgeon's ray on a fester,

German light has played on the sore spots. So the soldiers have gone

on making their naked records of crimes committed and their naïve

mental reactions on what they did, till all too late the German machine

forbade further exposure of the national soul. But the faithful peasant

fingers had written what all eternity cannot annul.

"These booklets, stained, bruised, sometimes perforated by bayonet or

torn by splinters of shell, the pencilings in haste, day by day, in

spite of fatigue, in spite even of wounds"--they are the most human

documents of the war.

This privilege of working with the originals themselves was extended

by the Ministry of War. The General Staff issued a _Laissez-Passer_,

and gave me an introduction to the fine white-haired old Lieutenant,

who is a Russian and German scholar. Together we went word by word

over the booklets. I was impressed by the fair-minded attitude of my

co-worker. "An honest man," he said, when we came to Harlak's record.

"Un brave soldat," he declared of the old reservist, who protested

against murder. He was not trying to make a case. He had no need to

make a case. The pity of it is that the case has been so thoroughly

made by German hands. These diaries have not been doctored in the

smallest detail. There they are, as they were taken from the body of

the dead man and the pocket of the prisoners. The room where we worked

is stuffed with the booklets of German soldiers. Shelves are lined

with the black-bound diaries and the little red books of identification

carried by each soldier. They overflow upon tables. In this room and

a suite adjoining sit the official translators of the French General

Staff. I have purposely selected certain of my examples from the

official reports of the French Government. I wanted to verify for

American "neutrals" that no slightest word had been altered, that no

insertions had been made.

My first diary was that of a Saxon officer of the Eighth Company, of

the 178th Regiment, of the XII Army Corps. He makes his entry for 26

August, 1914.

"The lovely village of Gué-d'Hossus, apparently entirely innocent, has

been given to the flames. A cyclist is said to have fallen from his

machine, and in so doing his rifle was discharged, so they fired at

him. Accordingly the male inhabitants were cast into the flames. Such

atrocities are not to happen again, one hopes."

The German phrases carry the writer's sense of outrage: "Das

wunderschöne Dorf Gué-d'Hossus soll ganz unschuldig in Flammen gegangen

sein. ... Man hat männliche Einwohner einfach in die Flammen geworfen.

Solche Scheusslichkeiten Kommen hoffentlich nich wieder vor."

He adds: "At Läffe, about 200 men have been shot. There it was an

example for the place; it was inevitable for the innocent to suffer.

Even so there ought to be a verification of mere suspicions of guilt

before aiming a fusillade at everybody."

In the village of Bouvignes on August 23, 1914, he and his men entered

a private home.