XI

"Shut in from all the world withoutWe sat the clean-winged hearth about,"

is handed over to the huts and shanties of immigrants. Capital fights labour and labour fights capital. Politics are such that most men avoid them. The standard of work is not how well you can do your job,but how much you can make out of it. Is this democracy a success?

In answer to this, however, does not an inner consciousness in each of us, perhaps the spirit of Lafayette and perhaps our own, perhaps the whispering of an unseen, great, and infinite power, tell us that the really relevant question is not whether we have yet achieved success, but whether a successful democracy is worth striving for? If, however, I should be obliged to answer the question by "Yes" or "No" I would say, "Yes, it is a success!"

The best route for the development of any man lies along the hard and thorny road of self-development. In the end, self-development, by dint of hard work and mistakes, produces the best man, provided he has the courage to "see it through." Nations are merely big collections of individuals. In the end this self-developmentproduces the best nation. The road is filled with difficulties, but so are most roads to goals that are worth reaching.

Our national government may have been inefficient in its details, but taken as a whole it has created a country which for generations has been a haven for the oppressed of the world. How many hundred thousand Germans have immigrated to America? How many Americans have ever emigrated to Germany? We have lynchings in the South, but no other country was ever left a more hideous problem of slavery, and in 1861 when the supreme test came the government rose to it; no one but a visionary can expect an immediate Utopian readjustment. Our municipalities abound in graft, but what country before ours ever faced the problem of absorbing annually the enormous flood of unlettered immigrants thatis unceasingly poured upon us by the Old World. The wonder is not that we have graft, but that we have not more graft. We have great wealth and extreme poverty, but they are due to unusual economic causes, namely: great national resources on the one hand, and ceaseless immigration on the other. Our cities are overcrowded and our standards of work are superficial, but would this be cured by a despotism?

And always we have the hope that goes with liberty, the undying strength that accompanies the knowledge that you are master of your own soul. A good despot at the head of a military autocracy may for the time being make the most efficient government in the world; certainly a bad despot at the head of a military autocracy makes the worst government. But I will never believe that the total surrender of the individual to the guiding hand of a despoticautocracy makes in the end for the progress of the whole. History shows it to be untrue; the never-ceasing efforts of democracy, as endless as the waves of the sea, show that despotic autocracy cannot last; and the hell let loose upon earth by Prussian autocracy, its modern exponent, clinches the falsity of its creed for all but the intoxicated or maniacs.

Nowhas arisen the Menace, the eternal foe of a free people, the Prussian Creed. The following is a composite statement of Prussianism: "compiled sentence by sentence from the utterances of Prussians, the Kaiser and his generals, professors, editors, and Nietzsche, part of it said in cold blood, years before this war, and all of it a declaration of faith now being ratified by action." It is taken word for word from the eleventh chapter of Owen Wister's remarkable work "The Pentecost of Calamity,"[A]and is the most concise statement of the Menace that I have seen.

[A]"The Pentecost of Calamity," by Owen Wister. The Macmillan Company.

"We Hohenzollerns take our crown from God alone. On me the Spirit of God hasdescended. I regard my whole ... task as appointed by heaven. Who opposes me I shall crush to pieces. Nothing must be settled in this world without the intervention ... of ... the German Emperor. He who listens to public opinion runs a danger of inflicting immense harm on ... the State. When one occupies certain positions in the world one ought to make dupes rather than friends. Christian morality cannot be political. Treaties are only a disguise to conceal other political aims. Remember that the German people are the chosen of God.

"Might is right and ... is decided by war. Every youth who enters a beer-drinking and duelling club will receive the true direction of his life. War in itself is a good thing. God will see to it that war always recurs. The efforts directedtoward the abolition of war must not only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must be conducted as ruthlessly as possible.

"The Belgians should not be shotdead. They should be ... so left as to make impossible all hope of recovery. The troops are to treat the Belgian civil population with unrelenting severity and frightfulness. Weak nations have not the same right to live as powerful ... nations. The world has no longer need of little nationalities. We Germans have little esteem and less respect ... for Holland. We need to enlarge our colonial possessions; such territorial acquisitions we can only realize at the cost of other states.

"Russia must no longer be our frontier. The Polish press should be annihilated ... likewise the French and Danish.... The Poles should be allowed ... three privileges: to pay taxes, serve in the army, and shut their jaws. France must be so completely crushed that she will never again cross our path. You must remember that we have not come to make war on the French people, but to bring them the higher Civilization. The French have shown themselves decadent and without respect for the Divine law. Against England we fight for booty. Our real enemy is England. We have to ... crush absolutely perfidious Albion ... subdue her to such an extent that her influence all over the world is broken forever.

"German should replace English as the world language. English, the bastardtongue ... must be swept into the remotest corners ... until it has returned to its original elements of an insignificant pirate dialect. The German language acts as a blessing which, coming direct from the hand of God, sinks into the heart like a precious balm. To us, more than any other nation, is intrusted the true structure of human existence. Our own country, by employing military power, has attained a degree of Culture which it could never have reached by peaceful means.

"The civilization of mankind suffers every time a German becomes an American. Let us drop our miserable attempts to excuse Germany's action. We willed it. Our might shall create a new law in Europe. It is Germany that strikes. We are morally and intellectually superior beyond all comparison.... We must... fight with Russian beasts, English mercenaries, and Belgian fanatics. We have nothing to apologize for. It is no consequence whatever if all the monuments ever created, all the pictures ever painted, all the buildings ever erected by the great architects of the world, be destroyed.... The ugliest stone placed to mark the burial of a German grenadier is a more glorious monument than all the cathedrals of Europe put together. No respect for the tombs of Shakespeare, Newton, and Faraday.

"They call us barbarians. What of it? The German claim must be: ... Education to hate ... Organization of hatred ... Education to the desire for hatred. Let us abolish unripe and false shame.... To us is given faith, hope, and hatred; but hatred is the greatest among them."

The German war code, introduction, paragraph three, reads as follows: "A war conducted with energy cannot be directed merely against the combatants of the enemy state, and the positions which they occupy, but will in like manner seek to destroy the total intellectual and material resources of the latter."

We areat war. On April 6, 1917, the democracy of the United States of America formally declared war against the autocracy of Germany. What are we fighting for?

Two brutes in the shape of men engage in a savage, drunken brawl. Bloody, cursing, dishevelled, with swollen and distorted features, and screaming their anathemas of drunken hate, they fight with the ferocity of beasts. Beasts they are.

A bully, a degenerate, a thug of the city, a brigand of the country, a horse thief of the western plains, attacks a weaker and unprepared victim. A man with red blood in his veins sees the assault, andattacks the attacker with strength enough to save the victim, arrest the disturber of the peace, and prevent a repetition of the offense. He has been engaged in a fight, but he is not a beast.

The spirit of Lafayette brought him to America to fight for democracy; he was a hard fighter but he was not a beast. And now, against that calculating and brutal power which with the treachery of a tiger of the jungle and all the devilish ingenuity of the highest Kultur has assaulted the peace of the world, the armies of America are led by the spirit of Lafayette.

For years the Prussian military autocracy has been preparing for the leap upon its victim. The power to declare war has been kept solely and exclusively in the hands of the military autocracy. It is responsible to no one. The great mass of people must do as they are commanded;obeying, not laws made by themselves acting through their duly-elected representatives, but orders promulgated by a self-appointed few, the military autocracy of Prussia. Woe to the unfortunate victim who refuses to obey! With cold-blooded deliberation this military autocracy which controls the German people has for years been preparing its huge fighting machine. When the time to strike came, when the neighbouring countries were least prepared to resist, Germany was deluged with the lie that the German nation was attacked, the scrap of paper otherwise called a treaty was torn up, and the tiger sprang. The world knows the result.

We enter the war for two motives, one to preserve the democracies of Europe, the other for our own preservation. The sinking of our ships by submarines was merelythe immediate cause, the match that lit the fire, just as the firing on Fort Sumter was the proximate but not the real cause of our Civil War. The real cause of our Civil War was, as Lincoln said, because this nation "could not endure half slave and half free." The real cause of the present World War is because civilization cannot endure half military autocracy and half free democracy. "The world must be made safe for democracy." We fight to save the intended victims of Prussianism, to arrest the disturber of the peace, and prevent a repetition of the offense.

The President of the United States in his great message, delivered in the Congress of the United States on the second day of April, 1917, in which he advised the Congress to accept the status of belligerent thrust upon us by the acts of the Imperial Government of Germany in unlawfullysinking our ships and killing our citizens, said: "Let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are.... Our object ... is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people....

"We are now about to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty andshall, if necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its pretensions and its power.... The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them."

We areat war with the Menace. It is the same Menace—now grown to a monster with four heads dominated by one brain—that over a hundred years ago invited Lafayette to its palace at Potsdam to review the Prussian army, and then cynically suggested to him an end upon the scaffold. It is the same Menace, now from its four mouths spitting its spume of hate upon a chaotic world, that thrust the body of the champion of democracy into a dungeon, but could not kill his soul. Our present war against this creature of evil is but one more act in the drama begun by the spirit of Lafayette.

How shall this act end? Listen to this.I quote largely from André Chéradame, a man who deals not in platitudes and conceits to tickle the vanity of a nation, but in cold, hard facts.

In 1914, when the war began, Prussian militarism controlled Germany, with a population of sixty-eight millions; and Germany had one ally, Austria-Hungary, of whose thirty million people a majority were directly antagonistic to Berlin. By the spring of 1915 it had extended and organized its power among these thirty million Austro-Hungarians, who until that time had taken orders from their own independent military chiefs. In the fall of 1915 it joined hands with Bulgaria and Turkey over the corpse of Serbia. Thus, since the beginning of the war, has been formed the Quadruple Alliance, dominated by Prussian militarism.

This alliance, or Prussia before the alliancewas completed, has since the beginning of the war seized Belgium, Poland, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, part of France, and most of Roumania. The population now controlled by Prussian militarism is about one hundred and seventy-five million people. The economic resources controlled by it show a corresponding increase. Before the war began, Prussia planned for a Pan-Germanism of this nature, and this plan has now been almost completed.

If Prussia can now, by granting pretentious but ineffective political reforms to its own people and by fighting a defensive war until the contest becomes a deadlock, hold this Pan-Germany in its present position, then after peace has been declared it can organize this vast additional strength in man power and resources which it has gained, can Prussianize this additional one hundred million, can, by the sameintrigue which it has used in the past, undermine during this period of peace the internal defensive effectiveness of the democracies, and when the time comes can strike again. And if the democracies are unable to win now, what chance will they have then?

Drop the scales from our eyes and look clearly at the facts, hard as they are. The Menace has been fighting a winning fight. By merely keeping a deadlock for the rest of the war, and forcing a truce under the guise of peace, the Menace will win; provided, however, that it is not expelled by the German people themselves. This is the strength—and the weakness—of the foe against which we have declared war.

The Prussian looks a long way ahead. M. Chéradame, in his work, "Le Complot Pan-Germaniste Demasqué," recites the following incident: "In 1898, before Manila,the German Rear-Admiral von Goetzen, a friend of the Kaiser, said to the American Admiral Dewey, 'In about fifteen years my country will begin a great war.... Some months after we have done our business in Europe we shall take New York and probably Washington, and we shall keep them for a time.... We shall extract one or two billions of dollars from New York and other towns.'" The months referred to by the German sailor may be turned into years, and the one or two billions may be multiplied by ten—but the Prussian looks a long way ahead.

Howcan our rights and the rights of mankind to which the President has alluded be made secure? What definite concrete facts must be established in order that democracy may be made safe?

In the first place, the autocratic power that now puts terror into the heart of the world must be broken beyond repair. The Hohenzollerns and the rest of the military caste which now controls Germany must be politically exterminated. No pretended or half-way internal political reforms, leaving a road for their return to power, will be sufficient. Annihilate the Menace. The cancer must be cut out, with no roots left in the body politicto spread its hideous disease again. Make an effective job of it once for all. We want no chance, under the cloak of peace, for the return of this monster.

"The time has come to conquer or submit," wrote President Wilson shortly after our declaration of war. It is true. Can any one doubt what would have happened to the United States of America if Prussian autocracy had dictated terms of peace to vanquished Allies and as part of those terms had taken over the allied fleet and obtained territory in Canada? Or can any one doubt what will now happen to all the democracies if the present Pan-Germany, now existing by means of Prussian victories in this war, is during the next ten years consolidated, organized, Prussianized—and then, a fighting machine twice as powerful as the machine of 1914, hurled against the democracies? Withan army of seven or eight million men trained to the hour, with equipped reserves of ten or twelve million more, with a complete network of military railroads capable of concentrating the units of this engine of destruction wherever military strategy shall designate, and with aeroplanes and transatlantic submarines in proportion, what chance will the democracies have?

In the second place, it ought to be very clear that future power and prosperity on the part of the plain people of Germany will be no bar to securing our rights, provided, however, that this power and prosperity is not owned and controlled by Prussian autocracy so that it can again be forced into a huge fighting machine to put the rest of the world in terror. The spirit of Lafayette, although its fight against such masters is eternal, will notlead in a war of conquest or annihilation against the German people.

"We have no quarrel with the German people," said the President of the United States in his message of April 2, 1917. "We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellowmen as pawns and tools." It was a war determined upon by the same Menace that thrust the democrat Lafayette into a dungeon, and which so hated democracythat when compelled to release him it attempted to impose terms that he should be deported to America, never again to place foot on Prussian or Austrian soil.

The corollary of this is that the best security for the rights of democracy is the establishment of a republic in Germany. A real republic, not a sham one. This is the one definite, concrete fact which would make the world safer for its peoples.

When will the German people see the light? When will there be a government of the people of Germany, for the people, and by the people? The shades of her dead, led to the slaughter by a merciless and heartless autocracy in a needless war, cry out for it. What say you, you men of Germany? Among you are men whose souls are brave and strong and true, an unnumbered host. How long, slaves, will you bend your backs to the lash of yourmilitary masters? They lied to you and made you believe the Fatherland was attacked, and led you, dupes, into a war of conquest. Your modern Pilate, in his blasphemous pride, with the name of God upon his lips and the blood of innocents upon his hands, is now crucifying Freedom upon his cross of iron. But the day of the resurrection will come; and how will your record stand then? Awake, ye free of Germany! When shall you come into your own?

Every hour that the coming of such a republic is shortened means just so much less agony for the peoples of the world. There is no better pledge for the safety of democracy. "Self-governed nations," said the President of the United States in the message referred to above, "do not fill their neighbour states with spies or set the course of intrigue to bringabout some critical posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can be successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs."

Whatelse? The union. The final act in the world-wide drama of democracy. The union of the democracies of the world to insure mutual protection and peace. I mean a union for this purpose of all those governments where the people, by their representatives, control. The union on two hemispheres of what the spirit of Lafayette foresaw, symbolized, and battled for on both.

The union ought to include the Austrian and German people themselves. It can never, however, include the Prussian military autocracy or any other military autocracy. I quote again from the President's message: "A steadfast concertfor peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a league of honour, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.... One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and even our offices of government with spies, and set criminal intrigues everywhereafoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace within and without, our industries, and our commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies were here even before the war began; and it is unhappily not a matter of conjecture, but a fact proved in our courts of justice, that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government accredited to the Government of the United States."

The union must be a union to keep the future safe against war, a league to compel every nation after the close of the present war to settle any claim it may have against its neighbour in the same way that individuals settle their disputes—by rules of rightand reason instead of by the law of might. It must be "some definite concert of power that will make it virtually impossible that any such catastrophe should ever overwhelm us again." In a memorable address to the Senate of the United States on January 22, 1917, the President urged that the United States enter into such a league after the close of the present war, and on the point of effectiveness said: "Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created, as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement, so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be made is to endure it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind."

"Cur non?"—"Why not?" The union of the democracies will be the culmination of the world-wide drama begun by the spirit of Lafayette.

Jesus Christ, nineteen hundred years ago in his Sermon on the Mount, said to the wondering multitude: "For verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." Since then, as sure and certain as the evolution of time itself, the evolution of the law has been toward such a union.

"God's ways seem dark, but soon or lateThey touch the shining hills of day;The evil cannot brook delay,The good can well afford to wait.Give ermined kings their hour of crime,Ye have the future grand and greatThe safe appeal of truth to time."

Year has followed year and century has followed century, and through it all, surely, slowly, often torn and twisted out of shape but always growing, evolving, moving onward, the law has followed the safe appeal of truth to time, toward this great goal. One jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from it till all be fulfilled. It is the spirit of Lafayette that leads. It was he who saw "the glory of the coming of the Lord." He saw fulfilled in fact the union of the separate democracies on one hemisphere; his spirit sees the vision of their union on two.

Gaze for a moment on what this soldier spirit has looked down upon in the past and on the vision of what it sees for the future.

Centuries ago individual man settledall his disputes with individual man by fighting. It was the primitive method. There was no law: might made right. The spirit saw savage primeval force, unconquered, untaught, powerful and brutal in the wanton exercise of its strength.

Then, under the safe appeal of truth to time, there gradually evolved, as between man and man, the method of voluntary submission to a judicial tribunal. Twisted and gnarled was this growth however, for even under Anglo-Saxon law the right of trial by battle was jealously guarded, and lasted for many years. A noble knight charged with an offense could always demand trial by battle; and if he succeeded in running through the body or otherwise disabling the man who made the accusation, he thereby established his own innocence and was acquitted by the court. This also the spirit saw.

Then gradually force was conquered, tamed, and used; and there evolved the modern court backed by the harnessed force of the community—backed by force sufficient to compel individual man to settle his disputes in court instead of by fighting, and if he refused and chose to fight, sufficient to compel him to desist and to punish him for his attempt. Force, a human Niagara, wild from the beginning, now controlled and directed by a higher law. Imagine the modern courts of our cities and states without the backing of organized force—courts and judges and rules of judicial procedure with no force to support them, and each individual in the community vested with the option in case of a dispute with a neighbour to settle that dispute by attacking the neighbour! We should have anarchy within six months.

What about nations? What has thespirit seen there? For nations are merely large collections of individuals. The same law of evolution governs both.

The first and primitive method of settling disputes between nations, and for a long time the only one, was war; and this the spirit beheld. Then gradually evolved the method of voluntary submission to a judicial tribunal such as the tribunal now existing at The Hague, each nation retaining, however, its right of trial by battle. The next method, the vision of the future, the new internationalism of which the living Lafayette was the symbol, is the harnessing of the united force of the peoples of the world, the union of the democracies to enforce the peace of the world. It is a vision of the union to form a modern court backed by force trained to obey the higher law, backed by force sufficient to compel nations to settle their disputes in courtinstead of by fighting. It is a vision of the war ogre, who has for centuries ravaged the world, at last shackled and bound; of the monster who with bloody claws and fangs has torn, ripped, and murdered his victims by the million, at last overcome; a vision of this evil brute of war conquered, and of primeval force trained, civilized, and forging the chains to hold this devil of hell.

Didthat Indian warrior who met Lafayette in the American wilderness speak more wisely than he knew? Were the footsteps of this soldier of France directed by the Great Spirit? Who can tell!

This must be the last war. We shall not hand down to our children this heritage of calamity. Our Revolutionary War settled for all time the independence of these United States of America. The Civil War settled for all time the question of slavery in this hemisphere. This war must and shall settle for all time the question of military autocratic domination of the world. "The time has come to conquer or submit."

And if after we have checked and curbed this natural foe to liberty there shall arise a concert of the powers of the world, a world-wide union to insure and enforce future peace, a union based not merely on treaty obligations which may be avoided, or on a contract which may be broken, but on a wide understanding and realization that organized democracy must in the future act concertedly as the police of the world—then by just so much as we make posterity safe, the awful sacrifice will not have been made in vain.

We build for posterity. "Cur non?"—"Why not?" It is the spirit of Lafayette that calls. And with the call we hear from the heavens the chant of a mighty chorus, singing not the hymn of hate but the pæan of peace on earth, good-will toward men.

Those who do not know us gibe at us andthrow our sins in our teeth. But this mightiest of democracies is at last awakening, is casting out the evil genii of opulence, is girding on its sword for the great work. Soldier of freedom, thou camest to us in the time of our greatest need. "Now," thou saidst, "is precisely the moment to serve your cause." Symbol of the united democracies of the world, symbol of a union which will make the earth safe for its peoples, symbol of a union of peace, we are led by thy spirit. We fight for democracy; we build for posterity.

And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not; for it was founded upon a rock.

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESSGARDEN CITY, N. Y.

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