.A2A3S M& ^AR INFORMATION SERIES No. 12 ,•* February, 1918 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS AN APPEAL TO THOSE WHO ARE NEITHER HOT NOR COLD BY STUART P. SHERMAN Professor of English in the University of Illinois Issued by THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION WASHINGTON, D. C. Collected set. y\*Ti >W COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION Washington, D. C. (Established by Order of the President, April 14, 1917.) I. RED WHITE AND BLUE SERIES 1. How the War Came to America. 32 pages. (Translations into German, Polish Bohemian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese, Yiddish, and Croatian. 48 pages.) 2. National Service Handbook. 246 pages. (15 cents.) 3. The Battle Line of Democracy. A collection of patriotic prose and poetry. 134 pages. (15 cents.) 4. The President's Flag Day Speech, with Evidence of Germany's Plans. 32 pages. 5. Conquest and Kultur. Quotations from German writers revealing the plans and pur- poses of pan-Germany. 160 pages. f>. German War Practices: Part I — Treatment of Civilians. 91 pages. 7. War Cyclopedia: A Handbook for Ready Reference on the Great War. 321 pages. (25 cents.) 8. German Treatment of Conquered Territory: Part II of "German War Practices." 61 pages. 9. War, Labor, and Peace: Some Recent Addresses and Writings of the President. American Reply to the Pope; Address to the American Federation, of Labor; Mes- sages to Congress of Dec. 4, 1917, Jan. 8, and Feb. 11, 1918. (Ira press.) (Other issues are in preparation.) II. WAR INFORMATION SERIES 101. The War Message and the Facts Behind It. 32 pages. 102. The Nation in Arms. Two addresses by Secretaries Lane and Baker. 16 pages. 103. The Government of Germany. By Charles D. Hazen. 16 pages. 104. The Great War: From Spectator to Participant. By A. C. McLaughlin. 16 pages. 105. A War of Self-Defense. Addresses by Secretary of State Lansing and Assistant Secre- tary of Labor Post. 22 pages. 106. American Loyalty. By American citizens of German descent. 24 pages. 107. Amerikanische Biirgertreue. German translation of No. 106. 108. American Interest in Popular Government Abroad. By E. B. Greene. 16 pages. 109. Home Reading Course for Citizen Soldiers. Prepared by the War Department. 62 pages. 110. First Session of the War Congress. Complete summary of all legislation. 48 pages. 111. The German War Code. By G. W. Scott and J. W. Garner. 16 pages. 112. American and Allied Ideals. By Stuart P. Sherman. 24 pages. 113. German Militarism and its German Critics. By Charles Altschul. 44 pages. 114. The War for Peace. By Arthur D. Call. Views of American Peace organizations and leaders in the present war. (In press.) 115. Why America Fights Germany. By John S. P. Tatlock. {In press.) (Other issues are in preparation.) III. LOYALTY LEAFLETS 201. Friendly Words to the Foreign Born. By Judge Joseph Buffington. (Translations into the principal foreign languages are in preparation.) 202. The Prussian System. By Frederic C. Walcott. (Other issues in preparation.) IV. OFFICIAL BULLETIN. (Published daily; price $5 per year.) Any TWO of the above publications are distributed FREE, except as noted. Address — ■ COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION 10 Jackson Place, Washington, D. C. of D? ma « re 1918 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS AN APPEAL TO THOSE WHO ARE NEITHER HOT NOR COLD By Stuart P. Sherman Professor of English in the University of Illinois AFTER several months of war it is becoming steadily clearer to men of discernment that the victory of our soldiers in the trenches will be achieved in vain unless their cause triumphs behind their lines. At the present time their cause is still com- promised by the lukewarmness of many of our so-called leaders of light and learning who, in spite of all their opportunities, have not yet discovered what we are fighting about. The remedy indicated by the symptoms is beset with grave dangers for the unwary. It is a resolute participation, on the part of educated men and women, in propaganda for American and allied ideals. A more cautious writer would say participation in "public information"; but public information is not all that I have in mind. In this matter of inculcating American and allied ideals, every one awake to the need of the hour should be ready to cry in the words attributed by Webster to John Adams: "Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it." Let us not mince words: propagandism means zealous campaign- ing to make ideals and principles take hold upon characters and prevail in conduct. Most educated Americans of this generation have been bred and trained to look with suspicion upon the propagandist. Most of us have been indoctrinated with the ideal which is said toguide the investigator in the fields of science, namely to follow truth, patiently, dispassionately, wherever it leads, without reference to its practical consequences. Accordingly, most of us have adopted the attitude of neutral enquirers and expositors. We seek to create the impression that we have no axe to grind. We have accustomed ourselves to studying and presenting our facts with true impartiality, all that there are on one side and 3 4 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS all that there are on the other, concealing our point of view, abstaining from advocacy, withholding our conclusions, leaving the verdict to a jury which our own apparent indifference has frequently rendered genuinely indifferent. To depart from this position of personal reticence and neu- trality is for some of us distasteful and for all of us dangerous, unless we know precisely what we are about. To participate, in the fever .and excitement of war time, in a zealous campaign for political and cultural ideals is frankly to forsake the still air of delightful studies for the arena of violent and angry passions. It is to be occupied no longer with "mere literature" but with high explosives. Just as soon as we come out into the open, and proclaim our faith, and bend our efforts towards making a powerful application of our ideals to life, towards making our faith prevail, just so soon shall we be exposed to three major temptations. The first temptation of the propagandist is to become a wily liar, betraying the cause which he advocates by false emphasis, garbled reports, and the suppression of evidence. His second temptation is to become a blind and venomous hater of every one and all things that oppose the propagation of his faith. His third temptation is to yield to megalomania and national egotism — signs of that madness which, according to the ancient proverb, appears in those whom God has marked for destruction. Why run these risks? What extraordinary crisis challenges the academic person to emerge from his academic retreat and throw all that he has of personal force into the advocacy of American and allied ideals? The obvious answer is: The same crisis as that which calls upon the soldier to incur the risks of wounds and death. The answei is good. It is a sufficient answer. But it does not directly illuminate the peculiar tasks and responsibilities of scholarship in the war. It will appeal to men of "fighting blood"; but I should like to make an answer that will appeal also to men who are not of fighting blood, who hold themselves somewhat aloof from the combat, and, like that eminent Frenchman of letters who has retreated to Switzerland, inhabit an air of intellectual tranquillity above the clouds. The so-called intellectual class in America is still infested with Laodiceans, who think they have done enough if they acquiesce AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 5 in what others do; and with industrious scholars and men of letters who have not yet regarded the war as anything but a quite extraordinary nuisance. Like Tennyson's lotos-eaters they are still crying, "Let us alone! What pleasure have we to war with evil?" Others there are who, contemplating the prostitu- tion of contemporary German science, philosophy, and scholar- ship to the service of a barbarous government, bitterly oppose the contamination of literature by politics, and fearfully appre- hend a disaster to truth in any connection of their scholarship with the destiny of nations. To such men but one valid justifica- tion for engaging in propaganda can be presented: that is, that the ideals which they are invited to defend are their own ideals, that the American and allied ideals are the ideals of interna- tionally-minded men, of scholars, and lovers of peace. I shall say something of that; but I wish to lead up to the international through the national ideals for the purpose of emphasizing their compatibility. It is generally agreed among liberal thinkers that a nation which does not conduct itself like a beast of prey, a nation which has long followed a course of tolerably decent behavior at home and abroad, has both a natural and a prescriptive right to live. It is a corollary of this agreement that such a nation has a right to defend its own life from foreign aggression. I think I may even be so bold as to say that defending its own life is it's duty and responsibility. I imagine it will also be conceded that the life of a nation includes not merely the lives and property of living generations, but also the common prin- ciples and ideals, the national culture, which these living genera- tions have received as a sacred inheritance from their fore- fathers, and which they cherish as a priceless possession to be bequeathed to their posterity. Finally I suppose we shall agree that the United States is such a nation, with such rights, such duties, and such ideals and principles. These common ideals and principles are the permanent part of the nation's life. They constitute the spiritual mold in which our fluid thoughts and emotions take the shape of American 6 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS characters. They establish our fellow citizenship with Franklin and Jefferson, with Washington and Lincoln. They are the formative forces of that great instrument which some humorous genius nicknamed the melting pot. Till the outbreak of the present war we have flattered ourselves that the melting pot was working fairly well. We have a considerable row of books describing its operation, such as Jacob Riis's Making of an American Citizen, Mary Antin's Promised Land, Mrs. Stern's My Mother and I, Max Ravage's An American in the Making. These are all narratives of men and women who came to America to become Americans; to break with their national past and to reattach themselves to a fresh national tradition. In these books one finds the records of the amazing process which trans- forms the Scandinavian, the Russian, the Pole, the Roumanian into loyal sons and daughters of the Republic, rejoicing in the stars and stripes, revering the Pilgrim Fathers, celebrating the Day of our Independence, honoring the national heroes, and glorying in the national principles and ideals. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred that astounding transformation is ac- complished by our general educational system in the schools, the colleges, the universities. And it is very largely accom- plished by inculcating American ideals through the language and literature of America, which as a matter of fact has always included the literature of England. The makers and teachers of American literature are therefore special custodians of the melting pot. If they slumber at their post, the fire goes out, and the transformation of aliens and even of the native-born into Ameri- cans ceases. Since the war, everyone has discovered that there has been going on in this country an aggressive campaign to crack the pot, to smash the mold of national life. Even before the war, many of us were aware that the national culture was being more or less systematically attacked from certain quarters by the process known as "peaceful penetration." A large body of immigrants has been organized to resist the natural operation of the American political and cultural environment. They have come to America and applied for the privileges of citizenship without any intention of becoming citizens in spirit. They have sought to preserve unmixed in this country the culture of AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 7 the country from which they came, and, wherever possible, to perpetuate their mother tongue as the preferred language in the market, the schools, the newspapers, and the churches. When, in such uses, the alien tongue is not regarded as a temporary and transitory expedient, it has usurped the place which belongs to the language of America. Those who use and seek to main- tain it as the preferred language are deliberate colonists for a foreign empire, and enemies of the American Republic; and their operations, it is heartening to recognize, have been even more seriously resented by honest and intelligent naturalized citizens than by the native-born. Along with such overt attempts to colonize, there has been instituted an anti-American campaign of a more insidious char- acter, conducted mainly in the English language and ostensibly by American citizens. Among its leaders are editors of maga- zines, poets, novelists, critics, brewers, and professors' in the universities. The program of these men is about as follows: attack England; praise Germany; attack everything in America that is due to English influence; praise everything in America that is due to German influence. Accordingly they sneer at the ideals and professions of democratic government; they sneer at the Pilgrim Fathers and at all the Puritans who since the seventeenth century have constituted the moral backbone of the nation; they set themselves against every movement of moral re- form; they sneer at all the humanitarian movements associated with Christianity; they sneer at those works of American literature which we recognize as classical. In short they keep up a con- tinuous cannonade against every revered American tradition, against every established political ideal, against every accepted article of our public and private morality, against everything admirable in our social aspirations, against everything charac- teristic of the common sense of the American people. On the other hand, they celebrate the biological-pontical ideals of Prussian statecraft, the biological immoralism of Nietzsche, and the literature of Berlin and Vienna, especially that nastiest part of it which they are certain will offend what they scoffmgly call the Puritanical sensibilities of Americans. "Our education," says one of these Prussianizing Americans, "our art, and our science are ineradicably German. Our soil 8 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS itself welcomes a German. The Englishman is, after all, only a German with a Norman veneer. In America the veneer drops off. By brain-fiber and by blood we are more German than English." A second proselyting pilgrim steadily presents for our consideration the thought, that America is a "young" nation with as yet no "culture" of her own. His purpose is the same as that of a third apostle who exclaims despairingly that all America, east and west, north and south, is under the relent- less sway of Puritan morality, is infatuated with popular educa- tion, and adores the idols of democracy. The first, second, and the third statements are utterly inconsistent, and the third destroys the other two by presenting substantially the truth. It acknowledges the fact that we have indeed a powerful and effec- tive national culture, while urging that it ought to be destroyed and supplanted. The German imperialist who seeks to prepare the way for his master by informing us that we are a young nation without a national culture is, in plain English, an im- pudent, maladroit, and palpable liar. The German imperialist who concedes that an old and nation-wide culture has got to be destroyed before America can become a vineyard meet for his master — such a German has at least the virtue of Prussian "realism." Now, waiving for the moment the question whether the Ger- man or the French or the Turkish or the Japanese or the Jewish culture is or is not superior to the American culture, I should like to present an important objection to the isolated perpetua- tion in this country of an alien culture, or to the attempt to assimilate, as it is called, the various cultures of all our aliens. The objection is this: Each national culture develops, in response to the peculiar needs of the particular people. among whom it arises. Its value is directly related to the time and place and circumstances of that particular people, and with a change of circumstance its peculiar value may largely disappear. As every locomotive has its driving rod and its brake, as every heart has its diastole and its systole, so every adequate national culture must develop a principle of expansion and a principle of contraction. I might speak of the principle of contraction in the austere family discipline of French life, or in the aristocratic code of honor among the Japanese nobility, or in the religious AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 9 observances of the Mohammedan, or in the minute prescriptions of the Mosaic law imposed upon the orthodox Jew. Let us only remark that the American who becomes a "cosmopolitan" abroad practically never embraces the principles of contraction in the countries that he visits; and that the foreigners who come to this country almost universally leave the contractive principle behind them or lose it in the second generation. The natural tendency of the cosmopolitan — the man who thinks he is as- similating all cultures — his natural tendency is to embrace the expansive principles of all nations and the contractive principles of none. But let us confine ourselves to a broad distinction between the German and the American cultures. The ideal of the German, we infer from what he tells us, is external control and "inner freedom"; the Government looks after his conduct and he looks after his liberty. The ideal of the American is external freedom and inner control; the in- dividual looks after his conduct and the Government looks after his liberty. Thus Verboten in Germany is pronounced by the Government and enforced by the police. In American Verboten is pronounced by public opinion and enforced by the individual conscience. In this light it should appear that Puritanism, our national principle of contraction, is the indispensable check on democracy, our national principle of expansion. I use the word Puritanism in the sense given to it by German and German- American critics: the inner check upon the expansion of natural impulse. Now, the Germans coming to America leave behind them the rigorous regulative force of the German Government, just as the emancipated Jews leave behind them the rigorous regulative force of the Mosaic law. They find themselves in a country where the good American in ordinary times is practically unconscious of any governmental check upon his liberty. Unless they are made to understand the check of individual responsi- bility which the good American's moral culture imposes upon his liberty, they may easily leap to the conclusion that America is a paradise for the lawless. If these immigrants, having ac- cepted the civic liberty and equality provided by our Govern- ment, refuse the correlative restraints and obligations with which in America the individual conscience is charged, the result is anarchy. % 10 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS We have had anarchy, we are now in the presence of anarchy, and we shall continue to have anarchy till we recognize and act upon the principle that the American who has not been thor- oughly indoctrinated with American ideals is a menace to the Republic. Let us have an answer ready for those wheedling sophists who urge us to believe that we shall enrich our national life by harboring un- Americanized tribes of Russians in Iowa, Poles in Pennsylvania, Hungarians in Colorado, or Germans in Illinois. Let us say that our democratic government was not designed for the effective control of unconverted alien peoples. Let us add that history shows few examples of governments that are so designed, and that of those few still fewer commend them- selves to our admiration. Russia of the czars has attempted such control with periodic massacres of the Jews within her borders. Turkey of the sultans has attempted it with periodic attempts to exterminate the Armenian Christians. Austria- Hungary has attempted it; and I read in the Chicago Tribune of November 21, 1917, this report of her progress: "Eighty thousand persons have been hanged in Austria-Hungary since the beginning of the war for political or racial opposition to the Government, pacifist activities and separatist propaganda, according to estimates here." But why seek examples in the old world? The United States has attempted it with the result that in the time of a great national crisis a big block of hyphenated Americans, united and organized without reference to American party divisions, at- tempted to bribe and bully Congress and terrorize statesmen in the interest of a foreign sovereign. These men were not brought under the folds of the American flag by conquest; if they had been, we could understand their revolt. But they have come into this hospitable land by their own will and choice; and now we are forced to conclude that they have come to pull down the stars and stripes and to run up the flag of the land they have deserted. Their acts strike at the very heart of our national life; and the only answer to them is a counterstroke. We can no longer afford to let this fact speak for itself: we have got to insist that it speak; we have got to speak for it. They have kindled the fire of an alien propaganda and self-preserva- tion demands the counterfire of an American propaganda. AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 11 They are zealous and impassioned workers for a German Kultur, and we must be zealous and impassioned workers for American culture or American culture will be swept out of its own rightful home and heritage on American soil. It is one thing to fight for American ideals in Berlin and Vienna, and quite another thing to fight for American ideals in New York and Chicago. Liberty, equality, and fraternity does not imply my right to go into my neighbor's house, and throw out his gods and goods, and install my gods and goods in his place — not even if I have a big club and he has no club at all. The inheritor of American ideals who is not willing to throw the weight of his character and passion against a usurpation like this is something less than an American. I think he is a kind of tedious old ghost who should be put into petticoats and set to knitting mufflers for the governors of Belgium. II Up to this point in our argument we have been discussing propaganda for American ideals on American soil. We are in little danger as yet of incurring the mendacity, hatred, and megalomania which beset the path of the propagandist. For here is no question whether Americans or Germans shall rule the world. It is only a question whether Germans or Americans shall rule in America. And to that question we can answer truthfully, kindly and humbly that Americans have the prior claim. But let us turn now from domestic to international relations, where lying, hating, and megalomania are ordinarily called into play to second the efforts of world politicians. I have heard one of our prophets declaring that either Germany or America is destined to rule the world, and that on the whole he hopes it will be America. If I may speak out of my own convictions, there is one thing more abhorrent to my conscience than that Germany should dominate the world by force of arms. That one more abhorrent thing is that America should dominate the world by force of arms. When a man execrates on the part of a foreign nation a course which he praises on the part of his own nation; when a man curses Germany because it is militaristic and then rebukes America because it is not militaristic; when a 12 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS man reviles the Germans for crying, "On to Calais" and then turns to his fellow countrymen crying, "On to Panama"; when a man ridicules the Germans for calling themselves God's chosen people, and then turns to the Americans and calls them God's chosen people; when a man upbraids the Germans for shouting right or wrong my country, and then turns to the Americans shouting right or wrong my country — confronted by this bull- ' headed preposterous nationalism the experienced Muse of history bursts into scornful laughter; he that sitteth in the heavens turns away his face; and Americans in the midst of this horrible slaughter are properly admonished to prepare for the next war! Nor can we escape from the derisive laughter of the Immortals by talking about the Anglo-Saxons. Only one degree removed from the preposterous nationalist is the preposterous Anglo- Saxon. I feel fairly intimate with the ideals of America; they are mine. I know something of the ideals of England; they are allied to America's. But what are the Anglo-Saxon ideals? Do they include Disraeli's, Mr. Lloyd George's, or Mr. Wilson's? For that matter, who are the Anglo-Saxons — other than those Germanic tribes that drove back the Celtic and Pictish an- cestors of our Scotch-Irish Presidents? I do not see how the American scholar's sympathies can be strongly enlisted in a feud in behalf of the Anglo-Saxon blood. What stake have the countrymen of Lafayette in a blood feud of the Anglo-Saxons? Or the countrymen of Garibaldi? Or the countrymen of Ker- ensky? Or the Japanese? Or the Brazilians? Or the Portuguese? Or the people of China and Siam? The ties of blood and race count for next to nothing in this conflict. The English-speaking peoples have no monopoly in the ideals of the Allies. The American who now raises the flag of Anglo-Saxonism raises a meaningless symbol which insults the pride of millions of his fellow countrymen and most of the Allies, and may well challenge the Orient to muster and drill her millions for the next war. Appeals to race prejudice, to a purely self-regarding patriotism, to the old-fashioned nationalism, happily do not nowadays always carry conviction to the intellectual class to which educated men are alleged to belong. Many of them have banished race prejudice as a relic of tribal days. Many of them are convinced that national pride needs a schoolmaster; AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 13 and are glad that it has one! They have studied the world upheaval in which the nations now quake; they have searchingly scrutinized their own consciences; and many of them have reached the conclusion that the master cause of this tragedy, of which all the world's the stage, is precisely the old self-regarding nationalism — the nationalism which glorifies power and has no principle of contraction to oppose to its principle of expansion. When they hear Germans shouting " Deutschla?id uberAlles" and Americans shouting " A merica uber A lies" their hearts refuse to rally to either call. They say that the only way to avoid brutal and hideous clashes of international strife for national expansion is to stop this barbaric shouting; and to set up and establish supernational ideals and principles which shall impose an effective check upon the indefinitely expansive principle of nationality. Some of our statesmen tell us that it cannot be done. They declare that they are too stupid to contrive the machinery of international government. We do not altogether believe them. We have a very great confidence in both the ingenuity and the power of statesmen; and it is based upon experience. We believe that statesmen can do anything that they have a mind to do. We believe in the ingenuity and power of statesmen, because we see them all around the world accomplishing much more difficult and incredible things, such, for example, as persuading great nations to pledge their last dollar and their last man and to walk through the valley of the shadow of hideous death to sup- port a statesman's word, plighted perhaps without their knowl- edge or consent. From that spectacle we derive our belief that when statesmen heartily apply their ingenuity to contriving what the hearts of all the plain people of the world desire, they will be not a little surprised to discover the easiness of the task and the inexhaustible power behind them. Where shall we find the supernational principles and powers which we wish our statesmen to establish, which we demand that they shall establish? We shall find them in the cause for which America and her associates are now fighting. Cynics may say that each of the Allies is fighting for its own special interest, its own peculiar culture, its trade, to recover this or that bit of territory, to annex this or that province or port, Doubt- 14 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS less selfish motives do enter to some extent into the practical considerations of most of the Governments, just as brutal and selfish men enter into the armies. But unless the leading spokesmen of the Allies are black-hearted liars, they are about a nobler business than national buccaneering. And whatever the Governments are about, we are profoundly convinced that the great mass of the people of the Allies are not cynics and do not intend to be dupes; that they are not fighting for ports and provinces and trade; that they are fighting for the common interests of the whole family of civilized nations — for nothing less than the cause of mankind. They can unite from the ends of the earth as one people, sinking their national peculiarities, because they are drawn by a bond deeper than language or nationality or race; they are drawn by the bond that unites the commonwealth of nations. They are not fighting for French or English or American law, justice, truth, and honor, but for international law, international truth, international justice, international honor. The new national pride and patriotism developed by this conflict finds its basis in the service which each nation renders to the cause above all nations, the cause of civilized society, the cause of civilized man. The new type of patriot no longer cries, "my country against the world," but "my country for the world." The moment that he takes that attitude he finds no more hos- tility between the idea of. nationalism and the idea of inter- nationalism than between the idea of a company and the idea of a regiment, or the idea of a State and the idea of a nation. As each good citizen's loyalty to his State accepts a principle of control in his loyalty to his nation, so his loyalty to his nation accepts a principle of control in his loyalty to the general family of nations. Here is the great fact which challenges the loyalty of every humane man. Propaganda for America and the Allies is not to be urged to the disadvantage of any nation whatsoever, pro- vided only that each nation is willing to behave like a member of a family of nations, provided only that it will accept for its con- duct outside its borders the fundamental principles of civilization. Our propaganda is not for separatism and exclusion. It is rather our profound conviction that there is no room left in the - AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 15 world for barbarians, for heathen tribes without the law. Humanity is not safe while any nation professes inhumanity. We are not fighting to put the Germans out but to get them in. Furthermore we have got to take the Orient in, frankly and fully; or in all probability we or our children, or oui children's children, will have to fight the Orient. To some of us the in- fluence upon the Orient of the German rebellion against the Family of Nations appears as not the least ominous and dreadful aspect of the present war. If out of the infinite travail of this war there is to come a new birth of national freedom under international law, if these our numberless dead are not to have died in vain, we must keep our .great war aims ever vividly before us. We must not merely defeat our adversaries but also establish the principles for which we drew the sword. If in the day of victory the apathy of en- lightened men permits reactionaries and old-fashioned statesmen to arrange a peace under which the nations revert to the former state of international anarchy and competitive preparations for fresh conflicts, the spirits of millions of bemocked and victimized young dead men should rise from their graves to protest against the great betrayal. To insure that the war shall end as a purg- ing tragedy and not as an empty farce we need now and shall need for a long time to come impassioned expositors of the laws of man and God, profaned by the enemy and defended by America and the Allies. The first duty of the propagandist is to determine what the ideals and principles of the Allies are; and this involves deter- mining what they are not. One can best discover what they are not by reading modern German literature, German news- papers, German ethics and politics, the works of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Treitschke, Bernhardi, Hartmann, etc. If time is short, one can quickly sharpen one's consciousness of what our ideals are not by reading daily one or two selections from an anthology of German thought, such as is contained in Conquest and Kultur, published by the Committee on Public Information. In this literature one will make acquaintance with the Kaiser's tribal god who has merited the iron cross for his able support of the strategy of the German General Staff, the god who is to stand arm in arm with the Kaiser reviewing his Uhlans on the 16 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS Day of Judgment. There one will find the leaders of German thought deifying a State with no aspect of deity but power; denying the right of small nations to live; reviving old and in- stituting new forms of slavery; affirming that might is right; defending ohe ravishment of Belgium; rejoicing in the Lusitania massacre; glorifying Schrecldichkeit; recommending that ships of friendly neutrals should be spurlos versenkt; advocating keeping subject peoples in ignorance and misery; chanting the holiness of war and hoping that it may last forever; extolling war as the prime element in their Kultur; and proudly declaring their opposition to the establishment on earth of the kingdom of righteousness and peace. There one will find the ideals and principles of a Government which has covenanted with death and agreed with hell. The propagandist can do good service by holding these ideas up to execration, not because they are German ideas but because they are ideas hostile to the commonwealth of man. And if by chance any spokesman of the Allied nations falls into the error of saying anything resembling these ideas, the propagandist may perform equally good service by pointing out with emphasis that he speaks like one of the depraved leaders of German thought and an enemy of the Allies. His happiest occupation, however, should be the discovery, collection, and enthusiastic promulgation on every proffered occasion of the ideals of the Allies. This kind of propaganda has not yet received the attention it deserves. The tendency has been to expose the perversity and iniquity of the enemy's aims and to take for granted the righteousness and justice of our own. As the war proceeds, the Allied nations are steadily drawn by necessity to fight fire with fire; to parry the blow of an autocratic Government, they have had to make their own Governments temporarily autocratic; to meet the rush of a nation in arms, they have had to put their own nations in arms; to resist the assault of a people trained to sacrifice all to the State, they have been compelled for the nonce to demand a similar sacrifice. As all the participants in this dreadful melee become more and more deeply imbrued in the blood and wrath of combat, it grows increasingly difficult to distinguish by their external aspects the victim from the assassin. This hour when AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 17 his hands are subdued to the dark color of the bleeding mire wherein he grapples with the foe is the bitter hour for the idealist. It is the hour of sinister opportunity for the man who builds his philosophy upon the incorrigible baseness of our human natures. It is then that the cynic and the reactionary croak and shout: "You are all tarred with the same brush. We bet on the black- est. Fall to! and the devil take the hindmost." This is the hour when it tremendously concerns us to be reminded who began the war and what it is about. This is the hour when it behooves us to remember that our soldiers are defending the causes which our statesmen define. It is the business of the strategists of international idealism to demand that the armies of the Allies shall never fight for a cause unworthy of the com- monwealth of man. Where shall we look for the ideals of the Allies? Primarily, perhaps, in the utterances of the Allied statesmen at the present time and in the vast literature of the conflict. Take, if you like, Siam's statement of its reasons for entering the war, to "uphold the sanctity of international rights against nations showing a contempt of humanity." Or take Mr. Wilson's statement that our motive is not "revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion"; or his other statement that we fight "for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." It should be a great source of inspiration and confidence to recognize that the ideals of the Allies have been the ideals of just men in all ages; so that we may find them, most of them, expressed in all the great literatures of the world, ancient and modern, including the literature of the great Germans of the eighteenth century. Contemporary German thought is pre- historic, reversionary, paradoxical. It seeks to fly against the great winds of time, to row against the deep current of human purposes, to ignore the grand agreements of civilized men, and to seek its sanction in the unconscious law of the jungle. The Allies are seeking to cooperate with the power not ourselves which has been struggling for righteousness through the entire 18 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS history of man; and their cause will be borne forward by the confluent moral energies of all times and peoples. It was to Goethe that Arnold generously gave credit for the idea of an international republic of intellectual men, an idea precious to every scholar and man of letters. "Let us conceive, " said Arnold, "of the whole group of civilized nations as being, for*intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of the past out of which they all proceed, and of one another. This was the idea of Goethe, and it is an ideal which will impose itself upon the thoughts of our modern societies more and more." It was Goethe who said: "National hatred is something peculiar. You ' will always find it strongest where there is the lowest degree of culture. And there is a degree where it vanishes altogether and where one stands to a certain extent above nations." These are ideals of the Allies, now scoffed at by the depraved leaders of the thought of. Goethe's countrymen. Mr. Roosevelt has discovered the cause of the Allies in the words of Micah: "What more doth the Lord require of thee than to do justice and love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God?" Another of the Prophets, as if foreseeing the advice given by the German General Staff to the God of the German armies, expressed an ideal of the Allies when he said: "Who hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his Counsellor hath taught him? . . . Behold, the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance. . . . All nations before him are as nothing; and they are counted to him less than nothing and vanity. . . . [When his spirit is poured from on high] judgment shall dwell in the wilderness, and righteousness remain in the fruitful field. And the work of righteousness shall be peace; and'the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance forever." Confucius expressed an ideal of the Allies, "very dear to the heart of all Americans, when he said: "People despotically governed and kept in order by punishment may avoid infrac- tion of the law, but they will lose their moral sense. People virtuously governed and kept in order by the inner law of self- control will retain their moral sense, and moreover become good." AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 19 Cicero expressed a majestic ideal of the Allies, when he said: "True law is right reason conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. . . . Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. . . . It is not one thing at Rome, and another at Athens; one thing to-day, and another to-morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must forever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all things. God himself is its author, its promulgator, its enforcer. And he who does not obey it flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man." English literature, especially since the seventeenth century when the divine right of kings received its death blow, is full of expressions of Allied ideals. Milton implies one in Paradise Regained: — They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to overrun Large countries, and in field great battles win, Great cities by assault; what do these worthies But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave Peaceable nations, neighboring or remote Made captive, yet deserving freedom more Than those their conquerors, who leave behind Nothing but ruin wheresoe'r they rove And all the flourishing works of peace destroy.* And Milton expresses an ideal of the Allies for the period follow- ing the war: "If after being released from the toils of war, you neglect the arts of peace ... if you think it is a more grand, or a more beneficial, or a more wise policy, to invent subtle expedients for increasing the revenue, to multiply our naval and military force, to rival in craft the ambassadors of foreign States, to form skillful treaties and alliances, than to administer unpolluted justice to the people, to redress the in- jured, to succor the distressed, and speedily to restore to every one his own, you are involved in a cloud of error, and too late you will perceive, when the illusion of those mighty benefits has *Quoted by E. de Selincourt in English Poets and the National Ideal. 20 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS vanished, that in neglecting these,, you have only been pre- cipitating your own ruin and despair." The literature of France, especially since the French Revolu- tion, is full of the ideals of the Allies. For France I will quote a few lines from the essay by Victor Giraud on French civilization, recently published in this country by the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Michigan: "France has never been able to believe that force alone, the force of pride and brute strength, could be the last word in the affairs of this world. She has never admitted that science could have for its ultimate purpose to multiply the means of destruc- tion and oppression, and it was one of her old writers, Rabelais, who pronounced these memorable words: 'Science without con- science is the ruin of the soul.' She has not been able to con- ceive that an ethnic group, a particular type of mind, should have the right to suppress others: instead of a rigid and mechani- cal uniformity of thought and life, the ideal to which she aspires is that of the free play, spontaneous development, and the living harmony of the nations of the world." In the response of the South American States to the appeal of the cause of the Allies, deep has called unto deep. No novel circumstance, no momentary impulse, no revelation of yesterday has revealed to the Latin-American peoples their essential com- munity of interest with France, with England, with the United States of the North. Through all temporary misunderstandings and estrangements, they have remembered that they are kindred offspring of one great emancipative idea, inheritors of a common political purpose, pilgrims to a common goal. Through the con- fusions of desperate wars Simon Bolivar, the Washington of their revolutions, led them a hundred years ago to the threshold of the new world of national independence, civic equality, liberty, popular sovereignty and justice. He, man of strife though he had to be, cherished lifelong his fond dream of a parliament of man, and in the evening of his life summoned on the Isthmus of Panama a congress of nations, which he intended should present a united front to imperial aggression, become the perpetual source and guarantor of public law, and establish concord among all peace-loving peoples. From that day to this the statesmen of South America have been with increasing earnestness and AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 21 effectiveness the friends of arbitral justice and the architects of international peace. What shall I say of America but that the ideals for which the Allies are now every day more consciously fighting presided over her birth as a nation and have been her guiding stars in all the high moments of her history? I mean that the American nation, established at an epoch of intellectual expansion, was to a re- markable degree founded upon international principles by men of international outlook and sympathies. Our founders in general claimed nothing for Americans but what they were will- ing and anxious to concede to all men; so that it has ever been a splendid tradition of the American Government, when about to take a momentous step, frankly to state its case, and openly to invite the considerate judgment — not of Americans — but of mankind, thus checking the expansive principle of nationalism by the contractive principle of a supernational allegiance. America, furthermore, has never established the worship of a tribal or national deity. The God invoked by the framers of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our Con- gress, our Courts, and by our great Presidents, has quite obvi- ously, I think, been approached as the Father of Mankind. The eighteenth century deists — men like Paine, Franklin, and Jefferson — had indeed thoroughly repudiated the idea of a warlike tribal Jehovah; the qualities which they habitually attributed to the deity were justice and benevolence; and these characteristics have remained, I believe, the leading ones in what we may call oui national conceptions of divinity. And how has our national faith in a Father of all Mankind been re- flected in our political conceptions? Well, Benjamin Franklin said in the midst of a great war: "Justice is as strictly due between neighbour Nations as between neighbour citizens . . . and a Nation which makes an unjust war is only a great Gang." And our Declaration of Independence holds that the God of nature has made it self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Washington, in his Farewell Address, expresses his faith that Providence has connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue; accordingly he urges his countrymen to forego temporary national advantages, and to 22 AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS try the novel experiment of always acting nationally on princi- ples of "exalted justice and benevolence." Jefferson, in his first inaugural, felicitates his countrymen on the fact that religion in America, under all its various forms, inculcates "honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man." Liberty, equality, justice, benevolence, truth — these are not tribal ideals. All these ideals which our national fathers derived from the Father of all Nations, Lincoln received and cherished as a sacred heritage, and he added something precious to them. • He took them into his great heart and quickened them with his own warm sense of human brotherhood, with his instinctive gentleness and compassion for all the children of men. "With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness for the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." Why do these words, uttered near the bitter end of a long war, touch us so deeply, and thrill us year after year? Because in them the finest mor- ality of the individual American is identified at last with the morality of the nation. The words consecrate the loftiest of all American ideals, namely, that the conduct of the nation shall be inspired by a humanity so pure and exalted that the humanest citizen may realize his highest ideals in devotion to it. That ideal still animates the American people. We are not sending out our young men to-day to fight for a State which acknowledges no duty but the extension of its own merciless power. We are sending them out to fight for a State which finds its highest duty in the defense and extension of justice and mercy. Our national purpose has been solemnly rededicated to the objects of the canonized Father and the Preserver of the Republic. We are not to break with our great traditional aspira- tion towards the expression in the State of the civility, morality, and responsibility of the humanest citizens. In the noble words of Mr. Wilson's recent address: "The hand of God is laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only if they rise to the clear heights of his own justice and mercy." So believe all just men. AMERICAN AND ALLIED IDEALS 23 Here then let us close our appeal to those who have drawii apart from this our war and have sought for their emotions a neutral place of refuge above the conflict. The cause of America and the Allies is the defense of the common culture of the family of civilized nations. It is the cause of the commonwealth of man. The ideals and principles which we wish to take hold of character and govern conduct are the best principles and ideals that men have. We need not fear the perils that beset the propagandist if we have once a clear vision of the object of our propaganda. We need not fear lest we become wily liars, for our very object is that central human truth which is the object of all knowledge. We need not fear lest we become venomous haters, for our very object is the inculcation of the sense of human brotherhood and human compassion. We need not fear lest we become besotted nationalists, for our very object is the inculcation of a sense for those common things which should be precious to all men, everywhere, at all times. We have drawn the sword to defend what Cicero beautifully called, "the country of all intelligent beings." LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 020 913 097 ft *