President Wilson was far stronger than his party. The Republicans elected governors in a number of states which appeared in the Wilson column, reduced the Democratic majority of 16 to 12 in the Senate, and exactly wiped out the Democratic majority of 29 in the House (to which each party elected 214 members). Except for Mr. Wilson himself, it was very much like a Republican victory. But the presidential vote was, after all, the important element in the crisis. It was a vote of confidence in Woodrow Wilson. If the country was indeed approaching the brink of war, as an increasing number of our people (including the President himself) believed, it was a decision, in the homely phrase of Abraham Lincoln, not to swap horses while crossing the stream.

CHAPTER IX

THE UNITED STATES IN THE WORLD WAR

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.—WOODROW WILSON

THE TOGA YIELDS TO ARMS

President Wilson made heroic efforts to redeem the pledge implicit in the campaign slogan and explicit in his letter of the previous February to Senator Stone, to "keep us out of war." Although he had put himself at the head of the movement for preparedness at the beginning of 1916, warning the people that there was "not a day to lose" and urging upon Congress a military and naval program of adequate defense, his mind was still set not upon making ready for war but upon mediating peace. Preparedness was a disagreeable duty thrust upon him by his responsibility for the protection of American rights; mediation was a glorious opportunity offered to him by the proud position of the United States as the leading neutral nation of the world. As the summer and autumn of 1916 wore on, it looked as if the President's hopes might be realized. Germany was observing the Sussex pledge. As we have seen (p. 619), the advocates of the drastic submarine campaign were in temporary disfavor at Berlin. On the western front of battle both the Germans and the Allies failed to gain a decisive victory in their great drives at Verdun and the Somme, and it looked to many as if the war must end in a military stalemate. The Minority Socialists in the Reichstag were pressing for a negotiated peace. To consolidate the factions at home and weaken the cohesion of the Allies, the Kaiser dispatched his famous peace offer of December 12, not as a suppliant asking for terms, but as a victor fortified in the belief that the attempt of the Entente nations to crush the Fatherland in a "ring of iron" had failed.

If he was to be a successful mediator, as Roosevelt had been in the Russo-Japanese war a decade before, President Wilson must hold the scales of judgment equally balanced between the two sides, in detached and disinterested friendship. Speaking in Washington before the League to Enforce Peace, on May 27, 1916, he had prepared the way for his mediatory offices by emphasizing again that objective view of the European conflict which he had announced in its earlier days. "With the causes and the objects of the war," he said, "we are not concerned. . . . The obscure fountains from which its stupendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for or explore." It was a condition and not a theory that confronted him. The world was torn with strife. Dwelling on the "causes and objects" of the strife would not heal but only exacerbate it. "The longer the war lasts," he said, "the more deeply do we become concerned that it should be brought to an end and the world be permitted to resume its normal life and course again." When Ambassador Page returned from London in August on a visit, he found an amazing indifference among the high officials at Washington to the situation abroad. The politics of the election campaign absorbed their attention. He sat at table with the President and with cabinet officers without hearing a word about our foreign affairs.1 Though Page had been summoned home officially, it was five weeks before he succeeded in securing an opportunity to deliver to President Wilson his "important and confidential messages from the British government." When he finally did have an interview at Shadow Lawn late in

1"I sat at luncheon at a hotel with Lansing, Secretary of State; Lane, Secretary of the Interior; Gregory, Attorney-General; Baker, Secretary of War; Daniels, Secretary of the Navy; and Sharp, ambassador to France; and all the talk was jocular or semijocular and personal-mere cheap chaffing. Not a question was asked either of the ambassador to France or of the ambassador to Great Britain about the war or about our foreign relations. The war wasn't mentioned. Sharp and I might have come from Bungtown or Jonesville and not from France and England. We were not encouraged to talk. . . . The Vice President confessed to his neighbor at a Gridiron dinner that he had read none of the White Papers or Orange Papers etc. of the belligerent governments-confessed this with pride-lest he should form an opinion and cease to be neutral!" (Burton J. Hendrick, "Life and Letters of Walter H. Page," Vol. II, pp. 174-175.)

September, and tried to impress upon the President the sinister purposes of the German militarists and the desperate situation of the Allies, he found "Mr. Wilson utterly cold, utterly unresponsive, interested only in ending the war." The President showed no interest in the Lusitania medal which Page had brought, but expressed irritation with the commercial measures of Great Britain.1 Page returned to England with the sorrowful conviction that the government at Washington was in truth "not concerned with the objects of the war."

Shortly after the indorsement of his administration by the American people in the election of November, President Wilson prepared an identical note to be sent to the belligerent powers, asking them for "such an avowal of their respective views as to the terms on which the war might be concluded and the arrangements which would be deemed satisfactory as a guaranty against its renewal. . . as would make it possible frankly to compare them." He was not, he said, "proposing peace or even offering mediation." He was "merely proposing that soundings be taken in order that we may learn, the neutral nations with the belligerents, how near the haven of peace may be for which all mankind longs with an intense and increasing longing." The dispatch of the note was delayed (chiefly on account of the indignant protest raised in this country by the wholesale deportation of Belgians to work in the fields and factories of Germany), so that it was not until after the publication of the Kaiser's "peace drive" of December 12 (to which it seemed, but was not, a reply) that the Wilson note was sent. Its nicely balanced judgment, or rather disclaimer of judgment, between the merits of the respective causes of the belligerents again gave umbrage to the Allies and their sympathizers in this country. For the President took the liberty of calling attention to the fact that "the objects which the statesmen of the belligerents on both sides have in mind in this war are virtually the same, as stated in general terms to their own people and to the world"; namely, to secure the rights and privileges of weak states against aggression and to make their own position assured against the recurrence of like

1" Life and Letters of Walter H. Page," Vol. II, pp. 185-188.

wars, to discourage the future formation of rival leagues, and to coöperate in "the formation of a league of nations to insure peace and justice throughout the world." "The leaders of the several belligerents have," he said, "stated those objects in general terms. But stated in general terms they seem the same on both sides." He asked for an authoritative statement of the precise objects sought. Although the President did not say that the objects for which both sides were fighting were the same, he gave equal credence to the protestations of both sides. The Germans replied immediately, repeating their readiness to join in a conference at some neutral place, but specifying no more "precise objects sought" in the war than they had given before. The reply of the Allies (January 10, 1917), while declaring that their demands for restitution, reparations, and guaranties for the future had already been plainly stated, nevertheless enumerated the particular points as President Wilson requested: the restoration of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro, with indemnities; the evacuation of the invaded territories of France, Russia, and Rumania, with reparations; the liberation of Italians, Slavs, Rumanians, and Czechoslovaks from foreign domination; the expulsion of the Turk from Europe. The joint reply of the Allies was supplemented by a note from Belgium protesting against the President's apparent assumption that "the statesmen of the two opposing camps pursue the same objects of war." Mr. A. J. Balfour, the British foreign minister, also sent a separate note, repudiating the least suggestion that the belligerents were contending for the same objects or that any lasting peace could be had until the military despotism of the Hohenzollerns was destroyed.

While the reply of the Allies to the Wilson note was being awaited at Washington, an event happened in Berlin which persuaded many in this country that the administration was willing to go to any lengths in its desire to conciliate the German government. Ambassador Gerard, who had just returned from a visit to America, was given a banquet at the Hotel Adlon by the American Association of Commerce and Trade. Vice Chancellor Helfferich, the vice president of the Reichstag, and the