Fourthly, the abolition of the belligerent right of blockade. Fifthly, the retention of the belligerent right of capture of enemy's commerce as defined by the Declaration of Paris.

The advantages of such an arrangement are fairly apparent. Great Britain would lose her right of blockade, it is true, but as has been already indicated she could probably never again hope to distend this right as she has done in the present war. On the other hand, because she is an island, she must always remain most vulnerable to the exercise of blockade by an enemy. Again, the appeal which the suggested compromise would make to neutral interests would guarantee its observance in any ordinary war, in which a limited number of belligerents would be bidding for neutral favor. For while the superior naval Power could speedily expel its enemy's shipping from the sea, the gap would be soon filled by neutral shipping; and by the same sign the control which superior naval strength exerts today even in peace time over a rival's commerce would be appreciably diminished. There is one point at which the arrangement just outlined might be improved from the point of view both of the British and the neutral interest, and that would be by adopting the British suggestion at the Second Hague Conference to throw overboard the whole doctrine of contraband. This, however, is a suggestion to which our own Government would be most likely to file a non possumus not to give the thing too fine a point, we have always to remember that to the southward we have a dangerous and treacherous neighbor. Should we become involved in war with Mexico, we should hardly relish the prospect of having to stand by and see other countries stock our enemy with munitions.

One point, however, remains, and it is an exceedingly delicate one. The wording of the second of President Wilson's Fourteen Points, particularly when read in the light of his earlier Address to the Senate, seems to indicate an expectation that the control of such waterways as the Straits of Gibraltar, the Dardanelles, the Bosporus, the Suez Canal, and the Panama Canal should be handed over to the League of Nations, with power to close them against a recalcitrant State. Would Great Britain agree thus to internationalize the route to India? We may answer the question with rather a confident negative. It is true that by the Convention of Constantinople of 1888 the Suez Canal is “always—free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of

commerce or of war, without distinction of flag," but as Mr. Curzon admitted in the House of Commons in 1898, this convention has never "been brought into practical operation ", and throughout the present war the Canal has constituted a British base of operations unrestrictedly. Nor do we have to rely upon inference in this matter. Mr. Winston Churchill has just informed us that " the League of Nations is no substitute for the supremacy of the British fleet". What clearer intimation could we demand that England does not propose to hand over the sources of her control of the seas to an international commission, at any rate in the near future?

The final question raised by President Wilson's proposals with reference to the Freedom of the Seas comes down apparently to this: What kind of a League of Nations are we to have? President Wilson has evidently pictured to himself an association of equal states-" a community of power to use his own phrase-which should begin to function immediately peace is made, on the basis of the utmost good will and confidence. The British view is quite different. They proceed upon the assumption that for some years to come at least international affairs, if they are to have a unified guidance, will be subject to the direction of those nations which have just brought their common cause to a successful issue. From this point of view it follows that the voluntary coöperation of these nations is a matter, certainly at present, of far greater importance for peace and good order in the world, than new and untested constructions can possibly be. Clearly they are right. But it may still be hoped that the policy of the Allies will steadily tend toward the production of a state of affairs not unlike that dreamt of by the President.

But it must be many years before the suggestion of a real internationalization of the seas can seem other than chimerical. Meantime, however, there can be a measure of disarmament at sea,-provided, of course, there is also an equivalent disarmament on land; and further a recasting of the rules of naval warfare. And these three points sum up what is today demanded in the name of Freedom of the Seas.

EDWARD S. CORWIN.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF VICTORY

BY ROLAND G. USHER

THE moment victory became a fact, the fact of victory ceased to be in itself either significant or interesting. Indeed, once the outburst of thanksgiving and elation had spent itself, victory as such sank into the background and the public mind turned instinctively to the astoundingly difficult and dangerous problems of peace and reconstruction. On both, victory could not fail to have a direct influence. The immediate results of the war, so far as both were concerned, took their character from the moment at which victory came and the precise nature of the situation from which it proceeded. For the future student, the eventuality itself, once assured, possessed literally no significance compared to the fact that it came at a definite moment and in precisely such and such a

way.

For the United States, indeed, the moment was the all important fact, for it defined the character of victory. That established its immediate significance, which in turn determined our international position for the present and perhaps for a generation, if not for a century. That the war was won was the great fact of significance to us who are now alive; that it was won this year and not next or five years hence; that it was won on French and not on German soil; that it was won without a victorious march across Germany to Berlin; these will be the facts of vital importance to our children and grandchildren.

The significance of victory was determined in the first place by the reasons for German collapse, by the facts it revealed about the attitude of the German people toward their own Government, and about the internal condition of Germany. It had been clear from the first that seventy millions of people could not by any sort of military victory be literally annihilated or crushed, could not by any army of occupation be coerced and policed, if they remained strong

and unrepentant. The attitude of the German people toward their own Government, toward the war, toward victory or defeat, toward the future, had been hidden by clouds of propaganda and deceit which only the end of the war could dispel. From a military victory, the result of the superior numbers of Germany's enemies, one sort of a peace and one kind of a settlement became inevitable. Drastic territorial guarantees would be essential to assure even a moderate measure of relative security for France and Belgium and the continuation of armament, fleets and debts for the future. Such a victory signified a foe beaten but strong, crushed but united, defiant, arrogant, unrepentant because still able to resist. It meant victory with qualifications, victory with conditions, safety without security, and peace impermanent and unstable. But if the victory should be due not merely to a military defeat but to a military collapse, itself produced by an economic collapse, by a political revolution, or by the loss of morale in army or people or both, it would have an utterly different significance for the future and provide for both peace and reconstruction premises of the utmost consequence.

Victory was in truth the result of a defeat in the field simultaneous with economic exhaustion, loss of morale, and the first throes of political revolution. It was victory with the foe surrendering in regiments and battalions; with the Reichstag clamoring for the Kaiser's abdication; victory with a republic proclaimed in Munich, with the fleet mutinous, with the "glorious allies" ingloriously deserting, with the Kaiser and Crown Prince in flight. There were those-indeed there are still those who vividly regretted that Marshal Foch should not have dictated the terms of armistice on German soil, that the Allied army should have had no chance to give the Germans a little taste of their own medicine. But the significance of victory is greater, the outlook for the future brighter because the end of the war did not witness a defeated people doggedly selling their lives on the banks of the Rhine in a vain effort to save the Fatherland. Unconditional surrender in Berlin would have been vastly different from unconditional surrender with the Allies still a measurable distance from the German frontier and far from the final line of German defense, the Rhine. It stood for a lack of national cohesion, for a lack of national faith in their own cause, in their own strength and resources. It stood for a

national unwillingness to die for the cause which is all but the most significant fact possible for the future. It proved the aggression of the war: when the moment for self-defense came, they threw up their hands and cried, "Kamerad." If the war had been begun in literal self-defense, there would have been at its end no weakening but rather a stiffening of morale as the enemy approached the frontier. The Government and not the people cried, "Kamerad." The officers, snugly ensconsed in luxurious parlors around mahogany tables, and not ragged men in trenches nor starving peasants in the fields, cried " Kamerad." There they convicted themselves of the true meaning of the war and gave real significance to victory. Yellow will out: the stain of aggression is uneffaceable.

They did more, they gave us the first unmistakable clue to the real attitude toward the war of the masses in Germany, the first irrefutable evidence that the German people have been more sinned against than sinning. The leaders knew the hearts of the nation were not in the war; that the nation had not willed it; that its confidence had never been theirs in the highest sense. They counseled no desperate defense; they made no attempt to rally back to back; they proclaimed no resistance till death as preferable to slavery for free men. They did not deem the German people capable of any such magnificent response as the French made in 1870, with their army crushed, the emperor imprisoned, the state itself overthrown, and Paris surrounded. Was there then talk of surrender with or without conditions? Armies arose from the soil over night like the crop from the sowing of the dragon's teeth. A government was extemporized; generals appeared as if by magic; national leaders were found and followed. Bismarck grew day by day to wonder whether victory was possible even after the war had been won.

Nor did the German leaders believe possible any such stubborn resistance as the Belgian nation had displayed, silent, contemptuous, unconquerable, even though crushed beneath the heel of a foreign army and incapable of the least physical resistance with a breath of hope for success. But who in Belgium spoke of capitulation, who talked of defeat, who gave up hope? Even Serbia, crushed by overwhelming odds, decimated by disease, its territory occupied by the invader, fought on. And Italy! Trembling on the verge of collapse, its armies in rout from the most dire catas