STANFOR

NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

JANUARY, 1919

THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW

NEVER before within our recollection have the American people been so fully warranted as now in confronting a New Year with the confidence begotten of faith in the great Republic. Never have they been more firmly knit together in mind and soul. Never have their feet been placed more fixedly upon the solid foundations of popular sovereignty. Never were their heads higher, their vision clearer, their prospects brighter. Well, indeed, as with Hezekiah of old, may their hearts be lifted up in joyful anticipation!

We laugh at the doles of dolts who foresee disaster in embarrassment of riches. Grant that we have problems, difficult and grave, to solve! Have we not the wherewithal in men and money? In spirit purified by flame? In wisdom born of seeing? In courage sprung from gallant deeds performed? In unity? In singlemindedness? In mutual understanding?

Surely no land ever leaped so quickly into comprehension of itself as this of ours in the year now drawing to a close. A short twelvemonth ago a Gulliver bound seemingly fast by official Lilliputians, sluggish, fat, incapable, derided; today, the fetters broken, a giant among nations, erect, alert, efficient, respected, ennobled by its baptism of fire, its sacrifices, its generosity, its fidelity to truth, its devotion to humanity! Assuredly a transformation of humans worthy of the gods!.... A wonderful, wonderful year!

It has been much more than a four years' war. We may omit prologue, preface, foreword, introduction; the generations of prenatal poisoning of the twentieth century Hun. Copyright, 1918, by NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION. All Rights Reserved. VOL. CCIX. NO. 758

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Even so, we must date not the origin but the organization of Germany's design to achieve the conquest of the world at January 18, 1871; nearly forty-eight years ago. The place was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, in the palace of the old. French kings, conquered and occupied by the invading Germans. The occasion was the proclamation of William von Hohenzollern, King of Prussia, as "Deutsches Kaiser," thus recreating the Germanic empire under the autocratic headship of the successor of the most ruthless of those old robber barons who waged war solely for pillage and for conquest. Forty days later, lacking one, an earnest of the predatory purpose of the new empire was given in the demand that France, as a penalty for being beaten, surrender to the Hunnish conqueror two provinces and one billion dollars in gold. With that the war was on: Hun against humanity.

The

"Go forth, my son," said Oxenstiern, "and see with how little wisdom the world is governed." With how little vision men regard the progress of affairs was shown in that civilized peoples, our own among them, largely applauded the rise of the Hohenzollern empire as auspicious of peace and progress in the world.

The next significant date was that of June 15, 1888. On that day William the Damned succeeded to the Prussian and German thrones.

There followed a quarter century of such hypocrisy, intrigues and insidious aggression as the world never before had known; so shrewdly camouflaged that down to the very end it deceived the vast majority of the unvisioned world. In all sobriety and mature advisement it may be estimated that if a poll of humanity had been obtainable at any time before midsummer of 1914, a vast majority of mankind would have expressed confidence in the German Emperor and in the German Empire as pacific in purpose and as an irenic bulwark of the world. A few voices were raised in warning, here and there; only to be decried and condemned like that of Laocoon. It is to be remembered grimly that responsible British statesmen threatened to deprive Lord Roberts of his pension if he did not refrain from urging the need of preparation for defence against a German attack. "Go forth, my son; and see with how little vision the world is governed."

At Serajevo, in a province which Austria had stolen

and held subject, an Austrian subject assassinated the Heir Presumptive to the Austrian throne, on June 29, 1914. The unvisioned world regarded that as nothing but one of the not unusual incidents in the business of sovereignty; not being awakened even by the indications that the tragedy had been half anticipated at Vienna and Berlin, and was regarded at those capitals with satisfaction ill concealed behind pretensions of official wrath. But nearly a month later, on July 24, came the awakening shock of an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, couched in terms of such insolent arrogance as the world had not heard before. There were a few days of agitated diplomacy, the purport of which was not even yet appreciated by the half-awakened world; ending on August 1 with Germany's declaration of war against Russia, and her invasion of Luxemburg and ultimatum to Belgium preparatory to her attack upon France.

The storm had broken. In what plight did it find the world? "Never for one moment," writes Professor John Bach McMaster, "had Germany intended to keep the peace." There is documentary proof that before the assassination at Serajevo the German Government took steps toward beginning war that very summer, and that early in July, more than a fortnight before the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the definite decision for the war was made in Berlin. In consequence, Germany began the war in the completest possible state of preparation. All others, France, Russia, Great Britain, were unprepared and were taken by surprise, with a single exception. The British fleet was ready; and it saved the world. Indeed, all still unrealized by the majority of mankind, the world had within a few weeks triple salvation. The British fleet held the high seas against the Hun. The little Belgian army at Liège and the little British army at Mons, by courting self-destruction delayed the onrush of the Hunnish hordes for the few days needed to enable some little preparation on the part of France. And then France, with British aid, achieved the Miracle of the Marne. Thereafter through weary years the Allies held the line for freedom and humanity, until America should enter by their side.

What of America? Our annals bear no more astounding chapters than those which tell of our early attitude toward the war; our persistent unpreparedness; our purposed blindness to the issues and to the menace; our astound

ing tolerance of the enemy within our gates; the puerile pretence that we should be neutral in thought as well as in word and deed, and should not so much as concern ourselves to know what the war was all about; our indifference to the rape of Belgium, to the scrapping of treaties and international law; our national echoing of the pseudo-exculpatory demand of the world's first murderer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Even the Lusitania massacre, away back on May 7, 1915, failed to rouse us from the lethargic obsession of keeping out of war. Go forth, my son, and see with how little vision the world is governed."

But the crisis had to come at last. It was on February 3, 1917, that diplomatic relations were severed with Germany, and that the treacherous criminal who had made the German Embassy at Washington the centre of hostile plots against the United States, was sent home to his master. Two months later the climax was reached. On April 2 the President recommended and on April 6 Congress voted recognition of the state of war which Germany had long before practically instituted against us. But not yet was the nation fully awake. The unpreparedness of years, the happy-go-lucky habits of thought and action, the sordidness of many, and even the potential treason of not a few, hampered and all but hamstrung the nation as it struggled to arise to its vital needs. There was an army to be created. There were rifles and cannon and airplanes and what not to be manufactured. There was the whole industrial and commercial system of the nation to be reorganized on a war basis. And all had to be done in the face of pacifism in high places and Bolshevism in low places.

It was done. But it was done with agonizing slowness, while those who had for three years been our defenders and our saviors stood with their backs to the wall in a last desperate resolve to do or die. After the formal declaration of war it was nearly seven months, it was October 27, before the first shot was fired at the foe by Americans under the American flag at the war front. It was a week later, on November 3, that the first American lives, under the American flag were sacrificed in the great war that democracy and civilization might live. Enright, Gresham, Hay: Let their names be held in everlasting remembrance.

Even then our war dragged wearily. The official head of our military establishment regarded it as three thousand