war is between the soulless Great State and democracy. Those who believe in democracy in our own land should not be blind to this issue. Drifting along as we are in America to-day, without moral leadership, with public opinion a perpetual pendulum between sentimentalism and materialism, with one class so filled with the horror of bloodshed as to want peace at any price and another counting its riches in war-stocks and war-orders and reaching out for South American trade, we need to be made to see the issue as it affects ourselves, not in our pockets, but in our principles of government, to see that the war, whatever its outcome, is bound to influence profoundly, for good or for ill, our national life.

We cannot keep out of this war. We may avoid the conflict in arms, but the question whether the democratic principle deserves to live remains ours, at least. Whether it can live is the problem of England and France.

Unless we can do one of two things, this war must mean moral loss to America: unless we can enter it as a participant for something more than a trade reason; or unless, while keeping out of it, we can prevent the soil of America from becoming engulfed in a morass of materialism, by finding an issue upon which the moral forces of this country can unite.

It is to make clear that issue, that fundamental issue of the permanence of democracy, that America to-day needs leadership.

II

We need to be made to see our own stake in this war. In 1815, the concert of the powers expressed by their joint action a final determination as to what the crushing of France should mean to the intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. It was that the last ember of the French Revolution should be relent

lessly extinguished. It meant for forty or more years the triumph of reaction, the sterilization of life, the suppression of freedom of thought, of action, of everything remotely resembling the democratic impulse in every country in Europe. In no country was the power of that reaction stronger than in Germany and in Austria under Metternich. Upon it Bismarck built the modern Germany. The conception of the Great State the state as power; the subordination of the individual wholly to the state, his rights considered as derivative and not innate; the state as the autocrat, the individual as vassal; the new feudalism headed by a divine-right monarch whose conception of power was such as died in England nearly three centuries ago with the axe which beheaded Charles the First- this became Germany's new principle of civilization. On it she has built a powerful, a highly organized, an immensely efficient government. The German militaristic government has made modern bureaucratic Germany what she is to-day-a menace to the spiritual future of the world. It was the remorseless logic of the new Jesuitism, the conception of the state as power, superior and unconstrained by law, by duty or plighted word, which marched through devastated Belgium and closed the sea over the drowning women and children of the Lusitania.

What is to be the final effect of Germany successful or Germany defeated upon American opinion and upon American life? For forty years history traces upon Europe the reaction of European thinking on the French Revolution. It was for the most part a reaction against democracy, against the bloody shibboleth of Freedom, Equality, Fraternity. What will the present war do to American opinion? The character and the future of democratic government will depend for many years

upon the lines of thinking set in motion among our people by this war. What will they be? Will they be such as to send us forward as a nation, or set us back?

It is a time in which Americans should consider anxiously their own country. Peace has its dangers no less menacing than war. Even in the midst of war, we can but see certain spiritual gains in the countries which are pouring out their blood and treasure. The development of national consciousness, the establishment in tears and sorrow of the spiritual unity of a great people, is the thing which comes to us from France, reborn in her resolve to make the France of her children free from the menace of militarism. England, with her prosperous and self-satisfied bourgeoisie, her sporting-squire government, her terrible and inexcusable poverty unrelieved except by the silly shifts of Lady Bountifuls and poor rates, her discontented and jealous working classes; England, stale with an unequal and unjust prosperity, is breaking up a caste system and reorganizing and revitalizing a national life. Belgium, devastated and exploited by barbarous invasion, will send down to generations yet unborn the thrill of her King's rejoinder to menacing Germany, that 'Belgium is a country and not a road.' The national consciousness born of war, the precious by-products of sacrifice, of tears, of common and united effort for victory in arms, is not to be denied, even to Russia. The dreaming Slav sees the beginnings of a new era in Holy Russia. Germany holding a world at bay and waging war with a relentless and deadly efficiency, such as the world never saw, girding her loins for fresh aggression, at once the menace and the marvel of our time, shouts her 'Deutschland über Alles,' the hymn of a nationalism which threatens civilization itself. The war

means, not the destruction of national spirit, but the creation of newer and perhaps finer diversities, the finding of the common soul of varied peoples, the finding in common sacrifice and effort of the spiritual basis for national life.

I am not glorifying war; but, hate war as we may, it does these things. The Nelson monument set among the lions at Trafalgar Square, the tattered battle-flags in the church of St. Louis almost touching the tomb of Napoleon, the trophies of war treasured in public galleries in all great nations of the world, are not symbols of victories, or of heroes and conquerors, but expressions of that unity of spirit which makes the soul of a nation. There is no true patriotism, no true love of country, without this unity of spirit. No true nation exists or can exist without it. It is a thing which money cannot buy, or mere natural wealth create.

This is something which we Americans should remember. We hope for the day when there shall be what William James calls a moral substitute for war, that is, the attainment of true unity of national spirit, without blood, without the tears of widows and the fatherless. What will this world-war do to the largest country except China now enjoying peace? Can we endure the hardships of a mean prosperity and keep our soul? Can we evolve, from and by peace, this moral substitute for war? Can we so revitalize democracy that when the war is over America will mean to Europe something else than the land which fattened on warorders and the trade salvage of distress?

Suppose we stop for a moment our everlasting talk about the prospect of being the money market of the world, of being a creditor nation, about opportunities for South American trade and the perpetual ticker talk and the new nabobism of the war-stocks. Suppose we consider the demands which this

war makes upon American patriotism. It is only a larger and finer democracy which can produce a moral substitute for war.

The President's addresses in his recent speaking tour have been admirable in tone and have lifted the purely military aspects of preparedness to a high ethical plane where they belong. But what we have to deal with is not mere military and naval preparation in this narrow sense. The main problem with which we have to contend, and for which we must find a solution, if we are to be anything better than a South African millionaire among the nations, is the problem of democratic discipline. The wise editor of Life has put it so well, that I can do no better than quote him:

'It is Prussian discipline that is crowding the world so hard, and the question is whether democracy can produce a discipline to match and overcome it. If it cannot, Prussian discipline based on autocracy seems likely to possess the earth. So the war seems still to be a contest between absolutism and democracy, its main errand being to compel democracies to develop and maintain an effective discipline. Collectivism may be the result from the war, but it will be a by-product. The main asset will be democratic discipline.'

Where? Where else than on our own soil? Are we producing it? Are we thinking about it at all? Is this new militarism, this clamor for armaments, for a bigger navy, for a larger army, this jockeying for position among the politicians, in the name of preparedness, the best we can do? A mean pacificism feebly denounces the principle of preparedness. A stupid and blustering militarism talks about preparedness with a tone of finality as though a bigger navy and army for America were all that was needed for the apotheosis

of a shiftless, undisciplined democracy, for its transformation into something which will fill the eye and sicken the soul.

III

We are in a perilous period of American democracy; we are threatened with what bankers and fools call prosperity; we are threatened with wealth which we have not earned and do not deserve. What will it do to us? Can we evolve the higher democracy? No boy is proud of his father simply because he is rich; no man is proud of his country simply because it is prosperous. This war is creating in every European country a flood of new and finer loyalties, patriotic affections born of sacrifice and tears. Will the sea which separates us from the war separate us from these finer things also? Can we attain the high patriotism without war?

A former hifalutin period in our country was vocal with manifest destiny. The slogan has not been heard among thoughtful Americans for a generation. It was based upon our natural resources, boundless opportunities, the contributions, not of man, but of nature. In the wasteful and orderless exploitation of these natural resources, a lawless, undisciplined, and formless type of government followed. At a moment when the necessity for a democratic discipline comes home to us, we are forced to realize some of the ugly things which come in our own country from the absence of that discipline. Take first the 'hyphen.'

What is there about the much berated hyphenated American which irritates us? Is it not first and foremost a feeling of failure at a point where we had always blissfully assumed success? We had assumed that, having carefully inspected the immigrant for contagious diseases and a few other matters, before letting him loose upon our soil to

be exploited and to struggle with that new and pervasive lawlessness which we called American opportunity, he would straightway, certainly after a few years, become an American.

The menace of non-assimilated masses in our undisciplined democracy has taken a new meaning in the presence of the possibility of our own participation in the war. The disturbances in Lawrence, Paterson, Colorado, were mere labor troubles a few years ago. We are uneasily conscious now of a new element of danger. We reflect upon it from a new angle of vision to-day. Unamericanized America is a new aspect of the discontent which we had repressed with martial law and which flamed forth in the I.W.W., the Socialists, the Syndicalists, and the dynamiters. What could we expect for the defense of our institutions from those who are taught by Socialism to-day that our constitution was formulated by grafters, to make money out of the depreciated paper currency which they had bought up in anticipation of a rise after a more stable government had been adopted? What could we expect from those who are taught by the same teachers that patriotism is folly and that government is the mere expression of conscious and purposeful class-selfishness in its effort to exploit the worker-the worker, moreover, who in turn is urged to grasp for government, to rule in turn by making laws, not for the general good, but for his own immediate and selfish interest?

What will democratic discipline do with the American immigrant after the war? Will it continue as before to consider him merely as a human mechanism, an asset for industrial exploitation, or as a man, a potential unhyphenated American? Shall we wait until after the war to begin to formulate a programme, wait until the flood-gates are open and the inundation begins? Shall we con

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tent ourselves with abusing our foreign-born as though the love of the old country were not a virtue, a potential benefit to the new? There are no hyphenated gypsies. Do we want more of them?

Shall we organize our army under the stimulus of the clamor for preparedness on a basis hostile to, or auxiliary to democracy? An army may be a menace to democracy. Many European armies are of this character. An army may also be a training-school for democratic discipline, a means for the union of all classes and conditions of men for service on the basis of a common duty to the state in such fashion as to create new and desirable conceptions of national unity; a means, moreover, of creating a closer association of men from different walks of life, as good for democratic government as ploughing is for the soil. Shall the army for preparedness be made an instrument of democracy, or a menace to it, a sheer adventure in militarism foreign to our traditions and repugnant to our ideals?

The 'hyphen,' the immigrant, and the army are in the foreground. But the great America- the America large enough to meet the obligations of a new world must respond to new reactions which will result either in a larger and finer conception of democratic discipline, or a humiliating failure to attain a triumph for democratic ideals which will mean loss, not merely to us, but to the whole world.

One of the first problems which will come to us will be a result of certain new reactions due to a confusion of militaristic Germany with German social and industrial organization. A considerable part of the industrial legislation which Germany had adopted for the physical well-being of her people is associated now in our country with a conception of the state which is distasteful to us and wholly foreign to

our own ideas,—a conception of the state in which the worker is a feudal dependent upon an autocratic, militant, but otherwise benevolent overlord, and under which, as we are now told, his individual initiative and personal freedom have been so fully suppressed that the average workman is unconscious of their absence. Industrial Germany conserves her human resources. Militant Germany to-day uses those resources. This principle of conservation is new with us, is practically untried and much needed. Individual initiative and personal freedom as political rights are our oldest and most cherished doctrines. The wreckage occasioned by our failure to work out effective modifications of our individualism to meet a new industrialism had in recent years inclined many of us to experiments with German industrial legislation for the conservation of human resources to meet our own economic conditions. The workmen's compensation laws of recent years are of German origin. They have taken firm root and are not likely to be dislodged in the near future by any reaction against what is now called the German conception of the Servile State. But the compulsory pensions, the occupational-disease, old-age and sickness insurance plans, the state-controlled housing systems, all of which are parts of German social legislation and which honest and efficient management have there brought to a high degree of perfection, are already being considered with critical eyes and their availability in a democracy is being questioned. The logic involved seems to be this: German social legislation has produced a vast number of physically fit soldiers for the German armies. Therefore, the system which makes them fit as soldiers is evil and should be avoided in a democracy. The startling figures on the unfitness of the English as soldiers,

shown by the percentages of rejections for physical reasons, which Price Collier1 gave us a few years ago, do not disturb us. We dislike to think of our own workers as possible soldiers.

We prefer to ignore the great fact of modern warfare, that war to-day is no longer the mere putting into battle array of a small percentage of the population, leaving the great majority of citizens to their ordinary employment. The war which is going on in Europe is a war, not merely of soldiers but of nations. Every particle of economic power is being invoked to make military success. It will not be soldiers, but the discipline of nationality, expressed in countless ways, which will triumph. In such a warfare, how would the discipline of American life, of American government, of American industrial and social organization stand the test which would be placed upon them?

In the report of the Secretary of the Interior for 1915 occur some wise words on this subject, which will bear repetition:

'Some months since I sought to learn what I could of the assets of this country as they might be revealed by this department, where we were in point of

1 Price Collier says (in his England and the English):

"The following table, covering a twelvemonth ended September 30, 1907, gives a commentary upon the physical condition of the men offering themselves as recruits for the regular army.'