still holds a valuable part of France, though with slowly relaxing grasp, and practically the whole of Belgium. Its armies press close upon Russia and overrun Poland at their will. It can not go farther; it dare not go back. It wishes to close its bargain before it is too late. and it has little left to offer for the pound of flesh it will demand. The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see very clearly to what point fate has brought them. If they fall back or are forced back an inch, their power both abroad and at home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power at home they are thinking about now more than their power abroad. It is that power which is trembling under their very feet; and deep fear has entered their hearts. They have but one chance to perpetuate their military power or even their controlling political influence. If they can secure peace now, with the immense advantages still in their hands which they have up to this point apparently gained, they will have justified themselves before the German people; they will have gained by force what they promised to gain by it-an immense expansion of German power, an immense enlargement of German industrial and commercial opportunities. Their prestige will be secure, and with their prestige their political power. If they fail, their people will thrust them aside; a government accountable to the people themselves will be set up in Germany as it has been in England, in the United States, in France, and in all the great countries of the modern time except Germany. If they succeed they are safe, and Germany and the world are undone; if they fail, Germany is saved and the world will be at peace. If they succeed, America will fall within the menace. We and all the rest of the world must remain armed, as they will remain, and must make ready for the next step in their aggression; if they fail, the world may unite for peace, and Germany may be of the union. Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany do not hesitate to use any agency that promises to effect their purpose, the deceit of the nations? Their present particular aim is to deceive all those who throughout the world. stand for the rights of peoples and the self-government of nations; for they see what immense strength of the forces of justice and of liberalism are gathering out of this war. They are employing liberals in their enterprise. They are using men, in Germany and without, as their spokesmen whom they have hitherto despised and oppressed, using them for their own destruction-socialists, the leaders of labor, the thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. Let them once succeed and these men, now their tools, will be ground to powder beneath the weight of the great military empire they will have set up; the revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all succor or cooperation in western Europe and a counter revolution fostered and supported; Germany herself will lose her chance of freedom; and all Europe will arm for the next, the final struggle. The sinister intrigue is being no less actively conducted in this country than in Russia and in every country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of the Imperial German Government can get access. That Government has many spokesmen here, in places high and low. They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions; set England at the center of the stage and talk of her ambition to assert economic dominion throughout the world; appeal to our ancient tradition of isolation in the politics of the nations; and seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles. But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in every accent. It is only friends and partisans of the German Government whom we have already identified who utter these thinly disguised disloyalties. The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a people's war, a war for freedom and justice and self-government amongst all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live upon it and have made it their own, the German people themselves included; and that with us rests the choice to break through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of selfconstituted masters, by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and the most irresistible armaments-a power to which the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of which political freedom must wither and perish. For us there is but one choice. We have made it. Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution, when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a new luster. Once more we shall make good with our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face of our people. HOW THE WAR CAME TO AMERICA [The Red, White and Blue Book.] PUBLISHED BY THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC In the years when this republic was still struggling for existence, in the face of threatened encroachments by hostile monarchies over the sea, in order to make the New World safe for democracy our forefathers established here the policy that soon came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine. Warning the Old World not to interfere in the political life of the New, our Government pledged itself in return to abstain from interference in the political conflicts of Europe; and history has vindicated the wisdom of this course. We were then too weak to influence the destinies of Europe, and it was vital to mankind that this first great experiment in government of and by the people should not be disturbed by foreign attack. Reinforced by the experience of our expanding national life, this doctrine has been ever since the dominating element in the growth of our foreign policy. Whether or not we could have maintained it in case of concerted attack from abroad, it has seemed of such importance to us that we were at all times ready to go to war in its defense. And though since it was first enunciated our strength has grown by leaps and bounds, although in that time the vast increase in our foreign trade and of travel abroad, modern transport, modern mails, the cables and the wireless have brought us close to Europe and have made our isolation more and more imaginary, there has been until the outbreak of the present conflict small desire on our part to abrogate or even amend the old familiar tradition which has for so long given us peace. In both conferences at The Hague, in 1899 and 1907, we reaffirmed this policy. As our delegates signed the first convention in regard to arbitration they read into the minutes this statement: "Nothing contained in this convention shall be so construed as to require the United States of America to depart from its traditional policy of not intruding upon, interfering with or entangling itself in the political questions or policy or internal administration of any foreign state; nor shall anything contained in the said convention be construed to imply a relinquishment by the United States of America of its traditional attitude toward purely American questions." At The Hague we pledged ourselves, in case we ever went to war, to observe certain broad general rules of decency and fair fighting. But at the same time we cleared ourselves from any responsibility for forcing other nations to observe similar pledges. And in 1906, when our delegates took part in the Algeciras Conference, which was to regulate |