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A TRAVELLER IN 
 WAR-TIME 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO - DALLAS 
 ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TORONTO 
 
W 
 E- 
 
 K 
 Q 
 
 I— I 
 
A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 WITH AN ESSAY ON 
 
 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 
 
 BY 
 
 WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 Author of *'The Inside of the Cup," "The Dwelling 
 Place of Light," etc. 
 
 ^m f afk 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 . 1918 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 COPTRIGHT. 1918 
 Bt CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 CoprEiGirx, 1918 
 Bt the MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published July, 1918. 
 
 JUL -8 1918 
 
 £)aA501086 
 
PEEFACE 
 
 I AM reprinting here, in response to requests, certain 
 recent experiences in Great Britain and Erance. 
 These were selected in the hope of conveying to Amer- 
 ican readers some idea of the atmosphere, of '' what it is 
 like '' in these countries under the inmaediate shadow 
 of the battle clouds. It was what I myself most wished 
 to know. My idea was first to send home my impres- 
 sions while they were fresh, and to refrain as far as 
 possible from comment and judgment until I should 
 have had time to make a fuller survey. Hence I chose 
 as a title for these articles,— intended to be prelim- 
 inary,—" A Traveller in War-Time." I tried to banish 
 from my mind all previous impressions gained from 
 reading. I wished to be free for the moment to accept 
 and record the chance invitation or adventure, wherever 
 met with, at the Eront, in the streets of Paris, in 
 Ireland, or on the London omnibus. Later on, I hoped 
 to write a book summarizing the changing social condi- 
 tions as I had found them. 
 
 Unfortunately for me, my stay was unexpectedly cut 
 
PREFACE 
 
 while the accomplishment of General Carey, in stopping 
 the gap with an improvised force of non-combatants, 
 will go down in history. 
 
 In an attempt to bring home to myself, as well as to 
 my readers, a realization of what American partici- 
 pation in this war means or should mean, I have added 
 to the volume an essay on the American Contribution 
 and the Democratic Idea. 
 
 WiNSTOisr Churchill. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 A Traveller in War-Time. page 
 
 Chapter I 3 
 
 Chapter II 31 
 
 Chapter III 65 
 
 An Essay on the American Contribution and the 
 
 Democratic Idea 99 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 *' The American Chateau " behind the British lines . Frontispiece 
 
 FACING 
 PAGE , 
 
 Chateau of Versailles 18-/ 
 
 Viee-Admiral Sims and his Chief of Staff, Captain Pringle 
 
 of the Destroyer Flotilla 34 
 
 American Y. M. C. A. " hut " in the Strand, London ... 40 
 
 King George and Lloyd George in conversation with an 
 
 American officer 46^ 
 
 Boating at Eton 52 
 
 The Square at Arras 90^ 
 
 The Square at Albert, showing the Leaning Virgin .... 90 
 
CHAPTEE I 
 
A TRAVELLER IN 
 WAR-TIME 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 TOWARD the end of the summer of 1917 it was 
 very hot in i^ew York, and hotter still aboard the 
 transatlantic liner thrust between the piers. One 
 glance at our cabins, at the crowded decks and dining- 
 room, at the little writing-room above, where the ink 
 had congealed in the ink-wells, sufficed to bring home to 
 us that the days of luxurious sea travel, of a la carte 
 restaurants, and Louis Seize bedrooms were gone — at 
 least for a period. The prospect of a voyage of nearly 
 two weeks was not enticing. The ship, to be sure, was 
 far from being the best of those still ruiming on a line 
 which had gained a magic reputation of immunity from 
 submarines ; three years ago she carried only second and 
 third class passengers ! But most of us were in a hurry 
 to get to the countries where war had already become a 
 grim and terrible reality. In one way or another we 
 had all enlisted. 
 
 3 
 
4 A TKAYELLER I:N^ WAE-TIME 
 
 By ^^ we " I mean the American passengers. The 
 first welcome discovery among the crowd wandering 
 aimlessly and somewhat disconsolately about the decks 
 was the cheerful face of a friend whom at first I did 
 not recognize because of his amazing disguise in uni- 
 form. Hitherto he had been associated in iny mind 
 with dinner parties and clubs. That life was past. He 
 had laid up his yacht and joined the Red Cross and, 
 henceforth, for an indeterminable period, he was to 
 abide amidst the discomforts and dangers of the Western 
 Front, with ^ve days' leave every three months. The 
 members of a group similarly attired whom I found 
 gathered by the after-rail were likewise cheerful. Two 
 well-kno^vn specialists from the Massachusetts General 
 Hospital made significant the hegira now taking place 
 that threatens to leave our country, like Britain, almost 
 doctorless. When I reached France it seemed to me 
 that I met all the celebrated medical men I ever heard 
 of. A third in the group was a business man from the 
 Middle West who had wound up his affairs and left a 
 startled family in charge of a trust company. Though 
 his physical activities had hitherto consisted of an occa- 
 sional mild game of golf, he wore his khaki like an old 
 campaigner; and he seemed undaunted by the prospect 
 — still somewhat remotely ahead of him — of a winter 
 journey across the Albanian Mountains from the ^gean 
 to the Adriatic ! 
 
A TEAVELLER m WAR-TIME 5 
 
 After a restless night, we sailed away in the hot dawn 
 of a Wednesday. The shores of America faded behind 
 us, and as the days went by, we had the odd sense of 
 threading uncharted seas; we found it more and more 
 difficult to believe that this empty, lonesome ocean was 
 the Atlantic in the twentieth century. Once we saw a 
 four-master ; once a shy, silent steamer avoided us, west- 
 ward bound ; and once in mid-ocean, tossed on a sea sun- 
 silvered under a radk of clouds, we overtook a gallant 
 little schooner out of New Bedford or Gloucester — a 
 forthfarer, too. 
 
 Meanwhile, amongst the Americans, the socializing 
 process had begun. Many elements which in a former 
 stratified existence would never have been brought into 
 contact were fusing by the pressure of a purpose, of a 
 great adventure common to us all. On the upper deck, 
 high above the waves, was a little fumoir which, by some 
 odd trick of association, reminded me of the villa for- 
 merly occupied by the Kaiser in Corfu — perhaps be- 
 cause of the faience plaques set in the walls — although 
 I cannot now recall whether the villa has faience plaques 
 or not. The room was, of course, on the order of a 
 French provincial cafe, and as such delighted the 
 bourgeoisie monopolizing the alcove tables and joking 
 with the fat steward. Here in this fumoir, lawyers, 
 doctors, business men of all descriptions, newspaper cor- 
 respondents, movie photographers, and millionaires who 
 
6 A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 
 
 had never crossed save in a cabine de luxe, rubbed elbows 
 and exchanged views and played bridge together. 
 There were Y. M. C. A. people on their way to the 
 various camps, reconstruction workers intending to 
 build temporary homes for the homeless French, and 
 youngsters in the uniform of the American Field Serv- 
 ice, going over to drive camions and ambulances ; many 
 of whom, without undue regret, had left college after a 
 freshman year. They invaded the fumoir, undaunted, 
 to practise atrocious French on the phlegmatic steward ; 
 they took possession of a protesting piano in the banal 
 little salon and sang : '^ We'll not come back till it's 
 over over there." And in the evening, on the darkened 
 decks, we listened and thrilled to the refrain : 
 
 " There's a long, long trail a-winding 
 Into the land of my dreams." 
 
 We were Argonauts — even the Ked Cross ladies on 
 their way to establish rest camps behind the lines and 
 brave the mud and rains of a winter in eastern France. 
 !N^one, indeed, were more imbued with the forthfaring 
 spirit than these women, who were leaving, without 
 regret, sheltered, comfortable lives to face hardships and 
 brave dangers without a question. And no sharper 
 proof of the failure of the old social order to provide for 
 human instincts and needs could be found than the con- 
 
A TKAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME Y 
 
 viction they gave of new and vitalizing forces released 
 in them. The timidities v^ith which their sex is sup- 
 posedly encumbered had disappeared, and even the pos- 
 sibility of a disaster at sea held no terrors for them. 
 When the sun fell down into the warm waters of the 
 Gulf Stream and the cabins below were sealed — and 
 thus become insupportable — they settled themselves for 
 the night in their steamer-chairs and smiled at the re- 
 mark of M. le Commissaire that it was a good " season '' 
 for submarines. The moonlight filtered through the 
 chinks in the burlap shrouding the deck. About 3 a. m. 
 the khaki-clad lawyer from Milwaukee became communi- 
 cative, the Red Cross ladies produced chocolate. It was 
 the genial hour before the final nap, from which one 
 awoke abruptly at the sound of squeegees and brooms to 
 find the deck a river of sea water, on whose banks a wild 
 scramble for slippers and biscuit-boxes invariably en- 
 sued. 'No experience could have been more socializing. 
 " Well, it's a relief,'' one of the ladies exclaimed, " not 
 to be travelling with half a dozen trunks and a hat-box ! 
 Oh, yes, I realize what I'm doing. I'm going to live 
 in one of those flimsy portable houses with twenty cots 
 and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, 
 but it's better than thrashing around looking for some- 
 thing to do and never finding it, never getting anything 
 real to spend one's energy on. I've closed my country 
 
8 A TKAVELIER IX WAE-TIME 
 
 house, IVe sublet mv apartment, IVe done with teas 
 and bridge, and I'm happier than I've been in my life — 
 even if I don't get enough sleep." 
 
 Another ladv, who looked still young, had two sons in 
 the armv. "' There was nothino: for me to do but sit 
 around the house and wait, and I want to be useful. My 
 husband has to stav at home: he can't leave his busi- 
 ness." Be useful ! There she struck the new and ag- 
 gressive note of emancipation from the restricted self- 
 sacrifice of the old order, of wider service for the un- 
 named and the unknown; and, above all, for the wider 
 self-realization of which service is but a by-product. I 
 recall particularly among these women a yoimg widow 
 with an eager look in clear grey eyes that gazed east- 
 ward into the unknown with hope renewed. Had she 
 lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been 
 doomed to slow desiccation. There are thousands of 
 such women in France today, and to them the great 
 war has brou£;ht salvation. 
 
 From what country other than America could so many 
 thousands of pilgTims — even before our nation had 
 entered the war — have hurried across a wide ocean to 
 take their part \ Xo matter what religion we profess, 
 whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are indi- 
 vidualists, pragmatists, empiricists for ever. Our faces 
 are set toward strange worlds presently to rise out of 
 the sea and take on form and colour and substance — 
 
A TEAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 9 
 
 worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values. 
 And on this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce's 
 splendid summary of the American philosophy — of the 
 American religion as sot forth by William James: 
 " The spirit of the frontiers-man, of the gold-seeker or 
 the home-builder transferred to the metaphysical or to 
 the religious realm. There is a far-off home, our long- 
 lost spiritual fortune. Experience alone can guide us 
 to the place where these things are, hence indeed you 
 need experience. You can only win your way on the 
 frontier unless you are willing to live there." Through 
 the pall of horror and tragedy the American sees a 
 vision; for him it is not merely a material and bloody 
 contest of arms and men, a military victory to be gained 
 over an aggressive and wrong-minded people. It is a 
 world calamity, indeed, but a calamity, since it has 
 come, to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit 
 of the future society of mankind. It must be made to 
 serve a purpose in helping to liberate the world from 
 sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and cant. 
 
 II 
 
 One night we entered the danger zone. There had 
 been an entertainment in the little salon which, 
 packed with passengers, had gradually achieved the 
 temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. For the 
 
10 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 ports had been closed as tight as gaskets could make 
 them, the electric fans, as usual, obstinately " refused to 
 march.'' After the amateur speechmaking and concert 
 pieces an Italian violinist, who had thro^vn over a lucra- 
 tive contract to become a soldier, played exquisitely ; and 
 one of the French sisters we had seen walking the deck 
 with the mincing steps of the cloister sang, somewhat 
 precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria. Its 
 pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we 
 fled into the open air, we were conscious of having 
 turned our backs irrevocably yet determinedly upon an 
 era whose life and convictions the music of the composer 
 so beautifully expressed. And the sister's sweet with- 
 ered face was reminiscent of a missal, one bright with 
 colour, and still shining faintly. A missal in a library 
 of modern books ! 
 
 On deck a fine rain was blowing through a gap in 
 our burlap shroud, a phosphorescent fringe of foam 
 hissed along the sides of the ship, giving the illusory ap- 
 pearance *of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggerat- 
 ing the sinister blackness of the night. We were, 
 apparently, a beacon in that sepia waste where modem 
 undersea monsters were lurking. 
 
 There were on board other elements which in the nor- 
 mal times gone by would have seemed disquieting 
 enough. The evening after we had left JSTew York, 
 while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 11 
 
 on the poop a crowd of steerage passengers listening 
 intently to harangues by speakers addressing them from 
 the top of a pile of life rafts. Armenians, I was told, on 
 their way to fight the Turks, all recruited in America 
 by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in 
 two by a German officer. Twilight was gathering as 
 I joined the group, the sea was silvered by the light of 
 an August moon floating serenely between swaying 
 stays. The orator's passionate words and gestures 
 evoked wild responses from his hearers, whom the drag 
 of an ancient hatred had snatched from the peaceful 
 asylum of the west. This smiling, happy folk, which 
 I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, 
 were now transformed, atavistic — all save one, a stu- 
 dent, who stared wistfully through his spectacles across 
 the waters. Later, when twilight deepened, when the 
 moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave 
 place to a singer. He had been a bootblack in America. 
 IN'ow he had become a bard. His plaintive minor chant 
 evoked, one knew not how, the flavour of that age-long 
 history of oppression and wrong these were now de- 
 termined to avenge. Their conventional costumes were 
 proof that we had harboured them — almost, indeed, 
 assimilated them. And suddenly they had reverted. 
 They were going to slaughter the Turks. 
 
 On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the 
 wide month of the Gironde, a name stirring vague mem- 
 
12 A TEAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 
 
 ories of romance and terror. The French passengers 
 gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sand and for- 
 est, but our uniformed pilgrims crowded the rail and 
 hailed it as the promised land of self-realization. A 
 richly coloured watering-place slid into view, as in a 
 moving-picture show. There was, indeed, all the 
 reality and unreality of the cinematograph about our 
 arrival ; presently the reel would end abruptly, and we 
 should find ourselves pushing our way out of the empty- 
 ing theatre into a rainy street. The impression of un- 
 reality in the face of visual evidence persisted into the 
 night when, after an afternoon at anchor, we glided up 
 the river, our decks and ports ablaze across the land. 
 Silhouettes of tall poplars loomed against the blackness ; 
 occasionally a lamp revealed the milky-blue fagade of 
 a house. This was France ! War-torn France — at 
 last vividly brought home to us when a glare appeared 
 on the sky, growing brighter and brighter until, at a 
 turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomit- 
 ing furnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like 
 beads over the crest of a hill, and, below these, dim 
 rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along 
 monotonous streets. A munitions town in the night! 
 One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs 
 where the workmen, crouching over their tasks, straight- 
 ened up at sight of us and cheered. And one cried out 
 hoarsely, '' Vous venez twus sauver, vous Americains " 
 
A TEAYELLER IN WAE-TIME 13 
 
 — " You come to save us " — an exclamation I was to 
 hear again in the days that followed. 
 
 Ill 
 
 All day long, as the rapide hurried us through the 
 smiling wine country and past the well-remembered 
 chateaux of the Loire, we wondered how we should find 
 Paris — beautiful Paris, saved from violation as by a 
 miracle ! Our first discovery, after we had pushed our 
 way out of the dim station into the obscurity of the 
 street, was that of the absence of taxi-cabs. The horse- 
 drawn buses ranged along the curb were reserved for 
 the foresighted and privileged few. Men and women 
 were rushing desperately about in search of conveyances, 
 and in the midst of this confusion, undismayed, debon- 
 nair, I spied a rugged, slouch-hatted figure standing un- 
 der a lamp — the unmistakable American soldier. 
 
 " Aren't there any cabs in Paris ? " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, yes, they tell me they're here," he said. " I've 
 given a man a dollar to chase one." 
 
 Evidently one of our millionaire privates who have 
 aroused such burnings in the heart of the French poilu, 
 with his -Q-ve sous a day! We left him there, and 
 staggered across the Seine with our bags. A French 
 officer approached us. " You come from America," he 
 said. " Let me help you." There was just enough 
 
14 A TKAVELLEE m WAR-TIME 
 
 light in the streets to prevent us from getting utterly 
 lost, and we recognized the dark mass of the Tuileries 
 as we crossed the gardens. The hotel we sought was 
 still there, and its menu, save for the war-bread and the 
 tiny portion of sugar, as irreproachable as ever. 
 
 The next morning, as if by magic, hundreds of taxis 
 had sprung into existence, though they were much in 
 demand. And in spite of the soldiers thronging the 
 sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris one 
 had always known, gay — insouciante, pleasure-bent. 
 The luxury shops appeared to be thriving, the world- 
 renowned restaurants to be doing business as usual ; to 
 judge from the prices, a little better than usual; the 
 expensive hotels were full. It is not the real France, 
 of course, yet it seemed none the less surprising that it 
 should still exist. Oddly enough the presence of such 
 overwhelming numbers of soldiers should have failed 
 to strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, 
 of the casting off of mundane troubles for which the 
 French capital has so long been known. But so it was. 
 Most of these soldiers were here precisely with the ob- 
 ject of banishing from their minds the degradations and 
 horrors of the region from which they had come, and 
 which was so unbelievably near; a few hours in an 
 automobile — less than that in one of those dragon-fly 
 machines we saw intermittently hovering in the blue 
 above our heads ! 
 
A TKAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME 15 
 
 Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated 
 little district de luxe of which the Place Vendome is the 
 centre, and we had always unconsciously thought of it 
 as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons. So it seems 
 today. One saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, 
 in all sorts of uniforms, from the new grey blue and 
 visor to the traditional cloth blouse and kepi; once in 
 a while a smart French officer. The English and Cana- 
 dians, the Australians, jSTew Zealanders, and Americans 
 were much in evidence. Set them down anywhere on 
 the face of the globe, under any conditions conceivable, 
 and you could not surprise them ; such was the impres- 
 sion. The British officers and even the British Tommies 
 were hlase, wearing the air of the semaine Anglaise, and 
 the " five o'clock tea,'' as the French delight to call it. 
 That these could have come direct from the purgatory 
 of the trenches seemed unbelievable. The Anzacs, with 
 looped-up hats, strolled about, enjoying themselves, 
 halting before the shops in the Eue de la Paix to gaze 
 at the priceless jewellery there, or stopping at a sidewalk 
 cafe to enjoy a drink. Our soldiers had not seen the 
 front ; many of them, no doubt, were on leave from the 
 training-camps, others were on duty in Paris, but all 
 seemed in a hurry to get somewhere, bound for a defi- 
 nite destination. They might have been in New York 
 or San Francisco. It was a novel sight, indeed, to 
 observe them striding across the Place Vendome with- 
 
16 A TKAVELLER 11^ WAR-TIME 
 
 out so much as deigning to cast a glance at the column 
 dedicated to the great emperor who fought that other 
 world-war a century ago; to see our square-shouldered 
 officers hustling around corners in Ford and Packard 
 automobiles. And the atmosphere of our communica- 
 tion headquarters was so essentially one of " getting 
 things done " as to make one forget the mediaeval nar- 
 rowness of the Rue Sainte Anne, and the inconvenient 
 French private-dwelling arrangements of the house. 
 You were transported back to America. Such, too, was 
 the air of our Red Cross establishment in the ancient 
 building facing the Palace de la Concorde, where the 
 unfortunate Louis lost his head. 
 
 History had been thrust into the background. I was 
 never more aware of this than when, shortly after dawn 
 Wednesday, the massive grey pile of the Palace of 
 Versailles suddenly rose before me. As the motor shot 
 through the empty Place d'Armes I made a desperate 
 attempt to summon again a vivid impression, when I 
 had first stood there many years ago, of an angry Paris 
 mob beating against that grill, of the Swiss guards dying 
 on the stairway for their Queen. But it was no use. 
 France has undergone some subtle change, yet I knew I 
 was in France. I knew it when we left Paris and sped 
 through the dim leafy tunnels of the Bois; when I be- 
 held a touch of filtered sunlight on the dense blue thatch 
 of the marroniers behind the walls of a vast estate once 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 17 
 
 dedicated to the sports and pleasures of Kings ; when I 
 caught glimpses of silent chateaux mirrored in still 
 waters. 
 
 I was on my way, with one of our naval officers, to 
 visit an American naval base on the western coast. It 
 was France, but the laughter had died on her lips. A 
 few women and old men and children were to be seen 
 in the villages, a bent figure in a field, an occasional 
 cart that drew aside as we hurried at eighty kilometers 
 an hour along deserted routes drawn as with a ruler 
 across the land. Sometimes the road dipped into a 
 canyon of poplars, and the sky between their crests was 
 a tiny strip of mottled blue and white. The sun crept 
 in and out, the clouds cast shadows on the hills; here 
 and there the tower of lonely church or castle broke the 
 line of a distant ridge. Morning-glories nodded over 
 lodge walls where the ivy was turning crimson, and the 
 little gardens were masses of colours — French colours 
 like that in the beds of the Tuileries, brick-red gerani- 
 ums and dahlias, yellow marigolds and purple asters. 
 
 We lunched at one of the little inns that for genera- 
 tions have been tucked away in the narrow streets of 
 provincial towns; this time a Cheval Blanc, with an 
 unimposing front and a blaze of sunshine in its heart. 
 After a dejeuner fit for the most exacting of hon viveurs 
 we sat in that courtyard and smoked, while an ancient 
 waiter served us with coffee that dripped through silver 
 
18 A TEAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME 
 
 percolators into our glasses. The tourists have fled. 
 " If happily you should come again, monsieur," said 
 madame, as she led me with pardonable pride through 
 her immaculate bedrooms and salons with wavy floors. 
 And I dwelt upon a future holiday there, on the joys of 
 sharing with a friend that historic place. The next 
 afternoon I lingered in another town, built on a little 
 hill ringed about with ancient walls, from whose battle- 
 ments tide-veined marshes stretched away to a gleaming 
 sea. A figTire flitting through the cobbled streets, a 
 woman in black who sat sewing, sewing in a window, 
 only served to heighten the impression of emptiness, to 
 give birth to the odd fancy that some alchemic quality 
 in the honeyed sunlight now steeping it must have pre- 
 served the place through the ages. But in the white 
 close surrounding the church were signs that life still 
 persisted. A peasant was drawing water at the pump, 
 and the handle made a noise ; a priest chatted with three 
 French ladies who had come over from a neighbouring 
 seaside resort. And then a woman in deep mourning 
 emerged from a tiny shop and took her bicycle from 
 against the wall and spoke to me. 
 
 '' Vous etes Americain, monsieur? '* 
 
 I acknowledged it. 
 
 " Yous venez nous sauver? " — the same question I 
 had heard on the lips of the workman in the night. " I 
 hope so, madame," I replied, and would have added. 
 
British Pictorial Service. 
 CHATEAU OP VERSAILLES 
 
A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 19 
 
 " We come also to save ourselves." She looked at me 
 with sad, questioning eyes, and I knew that for her — 
 and alas for many like her — we were too late. When 
 she had mounted her wheel and ridden away I bought 
 a Matin and sat down on a doorstep to read about Keren- 
 sky and the. Russian Revolution. The thing seemed in- 
 credible here — war seemed incredible, and yet its 
 tentacles had reached out to this peaceful Old World 
 spot and taken a heavy toll. Once more I sought the 
 ramparts, only to be reminded by those crumbling, ma- 
 chicolated ruins that I was in a war-ridden land. Few 
 generations had escaped the pestilence. 
 
 At no great distance lay the little city which had 
 been handed over to us by the French Government for a 
 naval base, one of the ports where our troops and sup- 
 plies are landed. Those who know provincial France 
 will visualize its narrow streets and reticent shops, its 
 grey-white and ecru houses all more or less of the same 
 design, with long French windows guarded by orna- 
 mental balconies of cast iron — a city that has never 
 experienced such a thing as a real-estate boom. Im- 
 agine, against such a background, the bewildering effect 
 of the dynamic presence of a few regiments of our new 
 army! It is a curious commentary on this war that 
 one does not think of these young men as soldiers, but as 
 citizens engaged in a scientific undertaking of a mag- 
 nitude unprecedented. You come unexpectedly upon 
 
20 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 truck-loads of tanned youngsters, whose features, de- 
 spite flannel shirts and campaign hats, sununon up mem- 
 ories of Harvard Square and the Yale Yard, of campuses 
 at Berkeley and Ithaca. The youthful drivers of these 
 camions are alert, intent, but a hard day's work on the 
 docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of the 
 passengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over 
 the cobbles. And the note they strike is presently sus- 
 tained by a glimpse, on a siding, of an efficient-looking 
 Baldwin, ranged alongside several of the tiny French 
 locomotives of yesterday; sustained, too, by an ac- 
 quaintance with the young colonel in command of the 
 town. Though an officer of the regular army, he brings 
 home to one the fact that the days of the military mar- 
 tinet have gone for ever. He is military, indeed — erect 
 and soldierly — but fortune has amazingly made him a 
 mayor and an autocrat, a builder, and in some sense a 
 railway-manager and superintendent of docks. And to 
 these functions have been added those of police com- 
 missioner, of administrator of social welfare and hy- 
 giene. It will be a comfort to those at home to learn 
 that their sons in our army in France are cared for as no 
 enlisted men have ever been cared for before. 
 
 IV 
 
 By the end of September I had reached England, 
 eager to gain a fresh impression of conditions there. 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 21 
 
 The weather in London was mild and clear. The third 
 evening after I had got settled in one of those delight- 
 fully English hotels in the heart of the city, yet re- 
 moved from the traffic, with letter-boxes that still bear 
 the initials of Victoria, I went to visit some American 
 naval officers in their sitting-room on the ground floor. 
 The cloth had not been removed from the dinner-table, 
 around which we were chatting, when a certain strange 
 sound reached our ears — a sound not to be identified 
 with the distant roar of the motor-busses in Pall Mall, 
 nor with the sharp bark of the taxi-horns, although not 
 unlike them. We sat listening intently, and heard the 
 sound again. 
 
 " The Germans have come," one of the officers re- 
 marked, as he finished his coffee. The other looked at 
 his watch. It was nine o'clock. " They must have left 
 their lines about seven," he said. 
 
 In spite of the fact that our newspapers at home had 
 made me familiar with these aeroplane raids, as I sat 
 there, amidst those comfortable surroundings, the thing 
 seemed absolutely incredible. To fly one hundred and 
 fifty miles across the Channel and southern England, 
 bomb London, and fly back again by midnight ! We 
 were going to be bombed ! The anti-aircraft guns were 
 already searching the sky for the invaders. It is sinis- 
 ter, and yet you are seized by an overwhelming curiosity 
 that draws you, first to pull aside the heavy curtains of 
 
22 A TKAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 
 
 the window, and then to rush out into the dark street — 
 both proceedings in the worst possible form! The lit- 
 tle street was deserted, but in Pall Mall the dark forms 
 of busses could be made out scurrying for shelter, one 
 wondered where ? Above the roar of London, the pop ! 
 pop! pop! of the defending guns could be heard now 
 almost continuously, followed by the shrieks and moans 
 of the shrapnel shells as they passed close overhead. 
 They sounded like giant rockets, and even as rockets 
 some of them broke into a cascade of sparks. Star shells 
 they are called, bursting, it seemed, among the immuta- 
 ble stars themselves that burned serenely on. And 
 there were other stars like l^ovember meteors hurrying 
 across space — the lights of the British planes scouring 
 the heavens for their relentless enemies. Everywhere 
 the restless white rays of the searchlights pierced the 
 darkness, seeking, but seeking in vain, l^ot a sig-n of 
 the intruders was to be seen. I w^as induced to return 
 to the sitting-room. 
 
 " But what are they shooting at ? '' I asked. 
 
 " Listen," said one of the officers. There came a lull 
 in the firing and then a faint, droning noise like the 
 humming of insects on a still summer day. " It's all 
 they have to shoot at, that noise." 
 
 " But their own planes ? " I objected. 
 
 " The Gotha has two engines, it has a slightly dif- 
 ferent noise, when you get used to it. You'd better step 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAE-TIME 23 
 
 out of that window. It's against the law to show light, 
 and if a bomb falls in the street you'd be filled with 
 glass." I overcame my fascination and obeyed. " It 
 isn't only the bombs," my friend went on, " it's the 
 falling shrapnel, too*" 
 
 The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, un- 
 forgetable, and quite distinct from the chorus of the 
 guns and shrapnel — a crashing note, reverberating, sus- 
 tained, like the E minor of some giant calliope. 
 
 In face of the raids, which coincide with the coming 
 of the moon, London is calm, but naturally indignant 
 over such methods of warfare. The damage done is 
 ridiculously small ; the percentage of deaths and injuries 
 insignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riff- 
 raff to get panicky : these are mostly foreigners ; they 
 seek the Tubes, and some the crypt of St. Paul's, for it 
 is wise to get under shelter during the brief period of 
 the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of the 
 police. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt 
 by shrapnel. The Friday following the raid I have 
 described I went out of town for a week-end, and re- 
 turned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gone 
 through the roof outside of the room I had vacated, 
 and the ceiling and floor of the bedroom of one of the 
 officers who lived below. He was covered with dust 
 and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly stepped 
 through the window. " You'd best have your dinner 
 
24 A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 
 
 early, sir/' I was told by the waiter on my return. 
 " Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs, her chicken 
 in the office, and her coffee in the cellar.'' It is worth 
 while noting that she had all three. Another evening, 
 when I was dining with Sir James Barrie, he showed me 
 a handful of shrapnel fragments. "" I gathered them 
 off the roof," he informed me. And a lady next to 
 whom I sat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone 
 that a bomb had fallen the night before in the garden of 
 her town house. " It was quite disagreeable," she said, 
 " and broke all our windows on that side." 
 
 During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by 
 a new and ingenious system of barrage fire the Germans 
 were driven off. The question of the ethics of reprisals 
 is agitating London. 
 
 One " raid," which occurred at midday, is worth re- 
 cording. I was on my way to our Embassy when, in 
 the residential quarter through which I passed, I found 
 all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky, 
 and I was told by a man in a grocer's cart that the Huns 
 had come again. But the invader on this occasion 
 turned out to be a British aviator from one of the camps 
 who was bringing a message to London. The warmth 
 of his reception was all that could be desired, and he 
 alighted hastily in the first open space that presented 
 itself. 
 
A TKAVELLER m WAK-TIME 25 
 
 Looking back to the time when I left America, I can 
 recall the expectation of finding a Britain beginning to 
 show signs of distress. I was prepared to live on a 
 small ration. And the impression of the scarcity of 
 food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being 
 set for the first meal at my hotel ; when the waiter, who 
 chanced to be an old friend, pointed to a little bowl 
 half -full of sugar and exclaimed : " I ought to warn 
 you, sir, it's all you're to have for a week, and I'm 
 sorry to say you're only allowed a bit of bread, too." 
 It is human perversity to want a great deal of bread 
 when bread becomes scarce ; even war bread, which, by 
 the way, is better than white. But the rest of the 
 luncheon, when it came, proved that John Bull was 
 under no necessity of stinting himself. Save for wheat 
 and sugar, he is not in want. Everywhere in London 
 you are confronted by signs of an incomprehensible 
 prosperity; everywhere, indeed, in Great Britain, 
 There can be no doubt about that of the wage-earners 
 — nothing like it has ever been seen before. One sure 
 sign of this is the phenomenal sale of pianos to house- 
 holds whose occupants had never dreamed of such lux- 
 uries. And not once, but many times, have I read in 
 the newspapers of workingmen's families of four or ^ve 
 which are gaining collectively more than five hundred 
 pounds a year. The economic and social significance 
 
26 A TEAYELLEK IIN" WAR-TIME 
 
 of this tendency, the new attitude of the working 
 classes, the ferment it is causing need not be dwelt upon 
 here. That England will be a changed England is un- 
 questionable. 
 
 The London theatres are full, the " movies " crowded, 
 and you have to wait your turn for a seat at a restaurant. 
 Bond Street and Piccadillv are doinc: a thriving busi- 
 ness — never so thriving, you are told, and presently 
 you are willing to believe it. The vendor beggars, so 
 familiar a sight a few years ago, have all but disap- 
 peared, and you may walk from Waterloo Station to the 
 Ha;)Tnarket without so much as meeting a needy soul 
 anxious to carry your bag. Taxicabs are in great de- 
 mand. And one odd result of the scarcity of what the 
 English are pleased to call ^' petrol," by which they 
 mean gasoline, is the reappearance of that respectable, 
 but almost obsolete animal, the family carriage-horse ; of 
 that equally obsolete vehicle, the victoria. The men on 
 the box are invariably in black. In spite of taxes to 
 make the hair of an American turn grey, in spite of lav- 
 ish charities, the wealthy classes still seem wealthy — if 
 the expression may be allowed. That they are not so 
 wealthy as they were goes without saying. In the coun- 
 try houses of the old aristocracy the most rigid economy 
 prevails. There are new fortunes, undoubtedly, muni- 
 tions and war fortunes made before certain measures 
 
A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 27 
 
 were taken to control profits ; and some establishments, 
 including a few supported by American accumulations, 
 still exhibit the number of men servants and amount of 
 gold plate formerly thought adequate. But in most of 
 these great houses maids have replaced tbe butlers and 
 footmen; mansions have been given over for hospitals; 
 gardeners are fighting in the trenches, and courts and 
 drives of country places are often overgrown with grass 
 and weeds. 
 
 " Yes, we do dine in public quite often," said a very 
 great lady. " It's cheaper than keeping servants." 
 
 Two of her three sons had been killed in Prance, 
 but she did not mention this. The English do not 
 advertise their sorrows. Still another explanation: 
 when husbands and sons and brothers come back across 
 the Channel for a few days' leave after long months in 
 the trenches, nothing is too good for them. And when 
 these days have flown, there is always the possibility that 
 there may never be another leave. Not long ago I read 
 a heart-rending article about the tragedies of the good- 
 byes in the stations and the terminal hotels — tragedies 
 hidden by silence and a smile. " Well, so long," says 
 an officer — ^' bring back a V. C," cries his sister from 
 the group on the platform, and he waves his hand in 
 deprecation as the train pulls out, lights his pipe, and 
 pretends to be reading the Sphere. 
 
28 A TEAVELLEK IN WAE-TIME 
 
 Some evening, perchance, you happen to be in the 
 dark street outside of Charing Cross station. An oc- 
 casional hooded lamp throws a precarious gleam on a 
 long line of men carrying — so gently — stretchers on 
 which lie the silent forms of rich and poor alike. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
CHAPTEK II 
 
 FOR the student of history who is able to place him- 
 self within the stream of evolution the really im- 
 portant events of today are not taking place on the 
 battle lines, but behind them. The kev-note of the new 
 era has been struck in Russia. And as I write these 
 words, after the Italian retreat, a second revolution 
 seems possible. For three years one has thought in- 
 evitably of 1789, and of the ensuing world conflict out of 
 which issued the beginnings of democracy. History 
 does not repeat itself, yet evolution is fairly consistent. 
 While our attention has been focused on the military 
 drama enacted before our eyes and recorded in the news- 
 papers, another drama, unpremeditated but of vastly 
 greater sigTiificance, is unfolding itself behind the stage. 
 I*Tever in the history of the world were generals and ad- 
 mirals, statesmen and politicians so sensitive to or con- 
 cerned about public opinion as they are today. 
 
 From a military point of view the situation of the 
 Allies at the present writing is far from reassuring. 
 
 Germany and her associates have the advantage of in- 
 
 31 
 
32 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 terior lines, of a single dominating and purposeful lead- 
 ership, while our five big nations, democracies or semi- 
 democracies, are stretched in a huge ring with pre- 
 carious connections on land, with the submarine alert 
 on the sea. Much of their territory is occupied. Thej 
 did not seek the war; they still lack co-ordination and 
 leadership in waging it. In some of these countries, at 
 least, politicians and statesmen are so absorbed by ad- 
 ministrative duties, by national rather than interna- 
 tional problems, by the effort to sustain themselves, that 
 they have little time for allied strategy. Governments 
 rise and fall, familiar names and reputations are jug- 
 gled about like numbered balls in a shaker, come to the 
 top to be submerged again in a new emeute. There are 
 conferences and conferences without end. Meanwhile a 
 social ferment is at work, in Russia conspicuously, in 
 Italy a little less so, in Germany and Austria undoubt- 
 edly, in France and England, and even in our own 
 country — once of the most radical in the world, now 
 become the most conservative ! 
 
 What form will the social revolution take ? Will it be 
 unbridled, unguided ; will it run through a long period 
 of anarchy before the fermentation begun shall have 
 been completed, or shall it be handled, in all the nations 
 concerned, by leaders who understand and sympathize 
 with the evolutionary trend, who are capable of con- 
 trolling it, of taking the necessary international steps of 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 33 
 
 co-operation in order that it may become secure and 
 mutually beneficial to all ? This is an age of co-opera- 
 tion, and in this at least, if not in other matters, the 
 United States of America is in an ideal position to 
 assume the leadership. 
 
 To a certain extent, one is not prepared to say how 
 far, the military and social crises are interdependent. 
 And undoubtedly the military problem rests on the sup- 
 pression of the submarine. If Germany continues to 
 destroy shipping on the seas, if we are not able to supply 
 our new armies and the Allied nations with food and 
 other things, the increasing social ferment will paralyze 
 the military operations of the Entente. The result of 
 a German victory under such circumstances is impossible 
 to predict ; but the chances are certainly not worth run- 
 ning. In a sense, therefore, in a great sense, the sit- 
 uation is " up " to us in more ways than one, not only 
 to supply wise democratic leadership but to contribute 
 material aid and brains in suppressing the submarine, 
 and to build ships enough to keep Britain, Erance, and 
 Italy from starving. We are looked upon by all the 
 Allies, and I believe justly, as being a disinterested na- 
 tion, free from the age-long jealousies of Europe. And 
 we can do much in bringing together and making more 
 purposeful the various elements represented by the na- 
 tions to whose aid we have come. 
 
 I had not intended in these early papers to comment. 
 
34 A TEAVELLER IN WAE-TIME 
 
 but to confine myself to such of my experiences abroad 
 as might prove interesting and somewhat illuminating. 
 So much I cannot refrain from saying. 
 
 II 
 
 It is a pleasure to praise where praise is due, and 
 too much cannot be said of the personnel of our naval 
 service — something of which I can speak from inti- 
 mate personal experience. In these days, in that part 
 of London near the Admiralty, you may chance to run 
 across a tall, erect, and broad-shouldered man in blue 
 uniform with three stars on his collar, striding rapidly 
 along the sidewalk, and sometimes, in his haste, cutting 
 across a street. People smile at him — costermongers, 
 clerks, and shoppers — and whisper among themselves^ 
 " There goes the American admiral ! " and he invariably 
 smiles back at them, especially at the children. He is 
 an admiral, every inch a seaman, commanding a devoted 
 loyalty from his staff and from the young men who are 
 scouring the seas with our destroyers. In Prance as 
 well as in England the name Sims is a household word, 
 and if he chose he might be feted every day of the week. 
 He does not choose. He spends long hours instead in 
 the quarters devoted to his administration in Grosvenor 
 Gardens, or in travelling in Prance and Ireland super- 
 vising the growing forces under his coramand. 
 
A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 35 
 
 It may not be out of place to relate a characteristic 
 story of Admiral Sims, whose career in our service, 
 whose notable contributions to naval gunnery are too 
 well known to need repetition. Several years ago, on 
 a memorable trip to England, he was designated by the 
 admiral of the fleet to be present at a banquet given our 
 sailors in the Guildhall. Of course the lord mayor 
 called upon him for a speech, but Commander Sims in- 
 sisted that a bluejacket should make the address. 
 " What, a bluejacket ! " exclaimed the lord mayor in 
 astonishment. " Do bluejackets make speeches in your 
 country ? " " Certainly they do,'' said Sims. " Now 
 there's a fine-looking man over there, a quartermaster 
 on my ship. Let's call on him and see what he has 
 to say." The quartermaster, duly summoned, rose with 
 aplomb and delivered himself of a speech that made the 
 hall ring, that formed the subject of a puzzled and 
 amazed comment by the newspapers of the British 
 Capital. Nor was it ever divulged that Commander 
 Sims had foreseen the occasion and had picked out the 
 impressive quartermaster to make a reputation for ora- 
 tory for the enlisted force. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to add that 
 there were and are other non-commissioned officers and 
 enlisted men in the service who could have acquitted 
 themselves equally well. One has only to attend some 
 of their theatrical performances to be assured of it. 
 
36 A TKAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 
 
 But to the European mind our bluejacket is still some- 
 thing of an anomaly. He is a credit to our public 
 schools, a fruit of our system of universal education. 
 And he belongs to a service in which are reconciled, 
 paradoxically, democracy and discipline. One moment 
 you may hear a bluejacket talking to an officer as man 
 to man, and the next you will see him salute and obey 
 an order implicitly. 
 
 On a wet and smoky night I went from the London 
 streets into the brightness and warmth of that refuge 
 for American soldiers and sailors, the " Eagle Hut," as 
 the Y. M. C. A. is called. The place was full, as usual, 
 but my glance was at once attracted by three strapping, 
 intelligent-looking men in sailor blouses playing pool 
 in a corner. " I simply can't get used to the fact that 
 people like that are ordinary sailors," said the lady in 
 charge to me as we leaned against the soda-fountain. 
 " They're a continual pride and delight to us Americans 
 here — always so willing to help when there's anything 
 to be done, and so interesting to talk to." When I sug- 
 gested that her ideas of the navy must have been derived 
 from Pinafore she laughed. ^^ I can't imagine using 
 a cat-o'-nine-tails on them ! " she exclaimed — and nei- 
 ther could I. I heard many similar comments. They 
 are indubitably American, these sailors, youngsters with 
 the stamp of our environment on their features, keen 
 and self-reliant. I am not speaking now only of those 
 
A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 37 
 
 who have enlisted since the war, but of those others, 
 largely from the small towns and villages of our Middle 
 West, who in the past dozen years or so have been re- 
 cruited by an interesting and scientific system which is 
 the result of the genius of our naval recruiting officers. 
 In the files at Washington may be seen, carefully tab- 
 ulated, the several reasons for their enlisting. Some 
 have " friends in the service " ; others wish to " perfect 
 themselves in a trade," to " complete their education " 
 or " see the world " — our adventurous spirit. And 
 they are seeing it. 
 
 They are also engaged in the most exciting and adven- 
 turous sport — with the exception of aerial warfare — 
 ever devised or developed — that of hunting down in 
 all weathers over the wide spaces of the Atlantic those 
 modern sea monsters that prey upon the Allied ship- 
 ping. Eor the superdreadnouglit is reposing behind 
 the nets, the battle-cruiser ignominiously laying mines ; 
 and for the present at least, until some wizard shall 
 invent a more effective method of annihilation, victory 
 over Germany depends primarily on the airplane and 
 the destroyer. 
 
 At three o'clock one morning I stood on the crowded 
 deck of an Irish mail-boat watching the full moon riding 
 over Holyhead Mountain and shimmering on the Irish 
 Sea. A few hours later, in the early light, I saw the 
 green hills of Killarney against a washed and clearing 
 
38 A TKAVELLEK IN WAK-TIME 
 
 sky, the mud-flats beside the railway shining like purple 
 enamel. All the forenoon, in the train, I travelled 
 through a country bathed in translucent colours, a 
 country of green pastures dotted over w^ith v^hite sheep, 
 of banked hedges and perfect trees, of shadowy blue 
 hills in the high distance. It reminded one of nothing 
 so much as a stained-glass window depicting some 
 delectable land of plenty and peace. And it was Ire- 
 land ! When at length I arrived at the station of the 
 port for which I was bound, and which the censor does 
 not permit me to name, I caught sight of the figure 
 of our Admiral on the platform; and the fact that I 
 was in Ireland and not in Emmanuel's Land was 
 brought home to me by the jolting drive we took on an 
 " outside car," the admiral perched precariously over 
 one wheel and I over the other. Winding up the hill by 
 narrow roads, we reached the gates of the Admiralty 
 House. 
 
 The house sits, as it were, in the emperor's seat of 
 the amphitheatre of the town, overlooking the panorama 
 of a perfect harbour. A ring of emerald hills is broken 
 by a little gap to seaward, and in the centre is a min- 
 iature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed 
 like children's boats in a pond. To the right, where a 
 river empties in, were scattered groups of queer, rakish 
 craft, each with four slanting pipes and a tiny flag float- 
 ing from her halyards ; a flag — as the binoculars re- 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 39 
 
 vealed — of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. 
 These were our American destroyers. And in the midst 
 of them, swinging to the tide, were the big " mother 
 ships " we have sent over to nurse them when, after 
 many days and nights of hazardous work at sea, they 
 have brought their flock of transports and merchantmen 
 safely to port. This " mothering " by repair-ships — 
 which are merely huge machine-shops afloat — this trick 
 of keeping destroyers tuned up and constantly ready for 
 service has inspired much favourable comment from ouf 
 allies in the British service. It is an instance of our 
 national adaptability, learned from an experience on 
 long coasts where navy-yards are not too handy. Eew 
 landsmen understand how delicate an instrument the 
 destroyer is. 
 
 A service so hazardous, demanding as it does such 
 qualities as the ability to make instantaneous decisions 
 and powers of mental and physical endurance, a service 
 so irresistibly attractive to the young and adventurous, 
 produces a type of ofiicer quite unmistakable. The day 
 I arrived in London from France, seeking a character- 
 istically English meal, I went to Simpson's in the 
 Strand, where I found myself seated by the side of 
 two very junior officers of the British navy. It ap- 
 peared that they were celebrating what was left of a 
 precious leave. At a neighbouring table they spied two 
 of our officers, almost equally youthful. " Let's have 
 
40 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 'em over/' suggested one of the Britishers; and they 
 were " had " over ; he raised his glass. " Here's how 
 — as you say in America ! " he exclaimed. ^^ You 
 destroyer chaps are certainly top hole." And then he 
 added, with a blush, " I say, I hope you don't think I'm 
 cheeking you ! " 
 
 I saw them afloat, I saw them coming ashore in that 
 Irish port, these young destroyer captains, after five 
 wakeful nights at sea, weather-bitten, clear-eyed, 
 trained down to the last ounce. One, with whom I 
 had played golf on the "New England hills, carried his 
 clubs in his hand and invited me to have a game with 
 him. Another, who apologized for not being dressed 
 at noon on Sunday — he had made the harbour at 
 three that morning ! — was taking his racquet out of 
 its case, preparing to spend the afternoon on the hos- 
 pitable courts of Admiralty House with a fellow cap- 
 tain and two British officers. He was ashamed of 
 his late rising, but when it was suggested that some 
 sleep was necessary he explained that, on the trip just 
 ended, it wasn't only the submarines that kept him 
 awake. " Wlien these craft get jumping about in a 
 seaway you can't sleep even if you want to." He 
 who has had experience with them knows the truth of 
 this remark. Incidentally, though he did not mention 
 it, this young captain was one of three who had been 
 recommended by the British admiral to his govern- 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 41 
 
 ment for the Distinguished Service Order. The cap- 
 tain's report, which I read, is terse, and needs to be 
 visualized. There is simply a statement of the lat- 
 itude and longitude, the time of day, the fact that 
 the wave of a periscope was sighted at 1,500 yards by 
 the quartermaster first class on duty; general quar- 
 ters rung, the executive officer signals full speed ahead, 
 the commanding officer takes charge and manoeuvres 
 for position — and then something happens which the 
 censor may be fussy about mentioning. At any rate, 
 oil and other things rise to the surface of the sea, 
 and the Germans are minus another submarine. The 
 chief machinist's mate, however, comes in for special 
 mention. It seems that he ignored the ladder and 
 literally fell down the hatch, dislocating his shoulder 
 but getting the throttle wide open within five seconds ! 
 In this town, facing the sea, is a street lined with 
 quaint houses painted in yellows and browns and 
 greens, and under each house the kind of a shop that 
 brings back to the middle-aged delectable memories of 
 extreme youth and nickels to spend. Up and down 
 that street on a bright Saturday afternoon may be seen 
 our Middle-Western jackies chumming with the Brit- 
 ish sailors and Tommies, or flirting with the Irish 
 girls, or gazing through the little panes of the show- 
 windows, whose enterprising proprietors have imported 
 from the States a popular brand of chewing-gum to 
 
42 A TEAVELLER IIST WAE-TIME 
 
 make us feel more at home. In one of these shops, 
 where I went to choose a picture post-card, I caught 
 sight of an artistic display of a delicacy I had thought 
 long obsolete — the everlasting gum-drop. But when 
 I produced a shilling the shopkeeper shook his head. 
 ^' Sure, every day the sailors are wanting to buy them 
 off me, but it's for ornament I'm keeping them," he 
 said. ^^ There's no more to be had till the war will 
 be over. Eight years they're here now, and you 
 wouldn't get a tooth in them, sir ! " So I wandered 
 out again, joined the admiral, and inspected the Blue- 
 jackets' Club by the water's edge. Nothing one sees, 
 perhaps, is so eloquent of the change that has taken 
 place in the life and fabric of our navy. If you are 
 an enlisted man, here in this commodious group of 
 buildings you can get a good shore meal and entertain 
 your friends among the Allies, you may sleep in a real 
 bed, instead of a hammock, you may play pool, or 
 see a moving-picture show, or witness a vaudeville 
 worthy of professionals, like that recently given in 
 honour of the visit of the admiral of our Atlantic 
 fleet. A band of thirty pieces furnished the music, 
 and in the opinion of the jackies one feature alone was 
 lacking to make the entertainment a complete success 
 — the new drop-curtain had failed to arrive from 
 London. I happened to be present when this curtain 
 was first unrolled, and beheld spread out before me a 
 
A TEAVELLEE lE^ WAE-TIME 43 
 
 most realistic presentation of '' little old 'New York," 
 seen from the !N^orth Eiver, towering against blue 
 American skies. And though I have never been over- 
 fond of ISTew York, that curtain in that place gave me 
 a sensation ! 
 
 Such is the life of our officers and sailors in these 
 strange times that have descended upon us. Five to 
 eight days of vigilance, of hardship and danger — in 
 short, of war — and then three days of relaxation and 
 enjoyment in clubs, on golf-courses and tennis-courts, 
 barring the time it takes to clean ship and paint. There 
 need be no fear that the war will be neglected. It is 
 eminently safe to declare that our service will be true to 
 its traditions. 
 
 Ill 
 
 " Dogged does it '' ought to be added to '^ Dieu et 
 mon droit " and other devices of England. On a day 
 when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd George in the 
 dining-room at 10 Downing Street that looks out over 
 the Horse Guards' Parade, the present premier, with a 
 characteristic gesture, flung out his hand toward the 
 portrait of a young man in the panel over the mantel. 
 It was of the younger Pitt, who had taken his meals 
 and drunk his port in this very room in that other great 
 war a hundred years ago. The news of Austerlitz, 
 brought to him during his illness, is said to have killed 
 
44 A TKAVELLER IN WAK-TIME 
 
 him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a dec- 
 ade, and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens 
 even heavier than Pitt's, happily retains his health ; 
 and his is the indomitable spirit characteristic of the 
 new Britain as well as of the old. Por it is a new 
 Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime min- 
 ister of a transformed Britain, a Britain modernized 
 and democratized. Like the Englishman who, when 
 he first Avitnessed a performance of "^ Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin," cried out, '' How very unlike the home life 
 of our dear Queen ! " the American who lunches in 
 Downing Street is inclined to exclaim : '' How differ- 
 ent from Lord North and Palmerston ! " We have, I 
 fear, been too long accustomed to interpret Britain in 
 terms of these two ministers and of what they repre- 
 sented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an 
 inimical aristocracy. Three out of the five men who 
 form the war cabinet of an empire are of w^hat would 
 once have been termed an " humble origin." One was, 
 if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General 
 Smuts, unofficially associated wuth this council, not 
 many vears as'o was in arms ao'ainst Britain in South 
 Africa, and the prime minister himself is the son of a 
 Welsh tailor. A situation that should mollify the most 
 exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats ! 
 I listened to many speeches and explanations of the 
 
A TKAVELLER m WAE-TIME 45 
 
 prejudice that existed in the mind of the dyed-in-the- 
 wool American against England, and the reason most 
 frequently given was the " school-book " reason ; our 
 histories kept the feeling alive. l!Tow, there is no doubt 
 that the histories out of which we were taught made 
 what psychologists would call " action patterns," or 
 "complexes," in our brains, just as the school-books 
 have made similar complexes in the brains of German 
 children and prepared them for this war. But, after 
 all, there was a certain animus behind the histories. 
 Boiled down, the sentiment was one against the rule 
 of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had 
 it long before the separation took place. The Middle- 
 Western farmer has no prejudice against Erance, be- 
 cause Erance is a republic. The Erench are lovable, 
 and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can 
 give them. But Britain is still nominally a monarchy, 
 and our patriot thinks of its people very much as the 
 cowboy used to regard citizens of New York. They all 
 lived on Eifth Avenue. Eor the cowboy, the residents 
 of the dreary side streets simply did not exist. We 
 have been wont to think of all the British as aristocrats, 
 while they have returned the compliment by visualizing 
 all Americans as plutocrats — despite the fact that one- 
 tenth of our population is said to own nine-tenths of 
 all our wealth ! 
 
 But the war will change that, is already changing it. 
 
46 A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 Tout coniprendre c'est tout pardonner. We have been 
 soaked in the same common law, literature, and tradi- 
 tions of liberty — or of chaos, as one likes. Whether 
 we all be of British origin or not, it is the mind that 
 makes the true patriot; and there is no American so 
 dead as not to feel a thrill when he first sets foot on 
 British soil. Our school-teachers felt it when they be- 
 gan to travel some twenty years ago, and the thousands 
 of our soldiers who pass through on their way to France 
 are feeling it today, and writing home about it. Our 
 soldiers and sailors are being cared for and entertained 
 in England just as they would be cared for and enter- 
 tained at home. So are their officers. !Not long ago 
 one of the finest to^vn houses in London was donated by 
 the owner for an American officers' club, the funds were 
 raised by contributions from British officers, and the 
 club was inaugurated by the King and Queen — and 
 Admiral Sims. Hospitality and good-will have gone 
 much further than this. Any one who knows London 
 will understand the sacredness of those private squares, 
 surrounded by proprietary residences, where every tree 
 and every blade of grass has been jealously guarded 
 from intrusion for a century or more. And of all these 
 squares that of St. James's is perhaps the most exclu- 
 sive, and yet it is precisely in St. James's there is to be 
 built the first of those hotels designed primarily for the 
 
KING GEORGE AND LLOYD GEORGE IN CONVERSATION WITH 
 AN AMERICAN OFFICER 
 
A TEAVELLER i:^ WAR-TIME 47 
 
 benefit of American officers, where they can get a good 
 room for five shillings a night and breakfast at a rea- 
 sonable price. One has only to sample the war-time 
 prices of certain hostelries to appreciate the value of 
 this. 
 
 On the first of four unforgettable days during whicli 
 I was a guest behind the British lines in France the 
 officer who was my guide stopped the motor in the 
 street of an old village, beside a courtyard surrounded 
 by ancient barns. 
 
 " There are some of your Americans," he remarked. 
 
 I had recognized them, not by their uniforms but 
 by their type. Despite their costumes, which were 
 negligible, they were eloquent of college campuses in 
 every one of our eight and forty States, lean, thin- 
 hipped, alert. The persistent rains had ceased, a 
 dazzling sunlight made that beautiful countryside as 
 bright as a coloured picture post-card, but a riotous 
 cold gale was blowing; yet all wore cotton trousers 
 that left their knees as bare as Highlanders^ kilts. 
 Above these some had on sweaters, others brown khaki 
 tunics, from which I gathered that they belonged to 
 the officers' training corps. They were drawn up on 
 two lines facing each other with fixed bayonets, a grim 
 look on their faces that would certainly have put any 
 
48 A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 Hun to flight. Between the files stood an unmistak- 
 able Kipling sergeant with a crimson face and a 
 bristling little chestnut moustache, talking like a ma- 
 chine gun. 
 
 " Now, then, not too lidylike ! — there's a Bosch in 
 front of you ! Run 'im through ! Now, then ! " 
 
 The lines surged forward, out went the bayonets, 
 first the long thrust and then the short, and then a 
 man's gun was seized and by a swift backward twist 
 of the arm he was made helpless. 
 
 " Do you feel it ? " asked the officer, as he turned 
 to me. I did. '^ Up and down your spine," he added, 
 and I nodded. ^^ Those chaps will do," he said. He 
 had been through that terrible battle of the Somme, and 
 he knew. So had the sergeant. 
 
 Presently came a resting-spell. One of the squad 
 approached me, whom I recognized as a young man I 
 had met in the Harvard Union. 
 
 " If you write about this," he said, " just tell our 
 people that we're going to take that sergeant home with 
 us when the war's over. He's too good to lose." 
 
 IV 
 
 It is trite to observe that democracies are organized 
 — if, indeed, they are organized at all — not for war 
 but for peace. And nowhere is this fact more appar- 
 ent than in Britain. Even while the war is in prog- 
 
A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 49 
 
 ress has that internal democratic process of evolution 
 been going on, presaging profound changes in the social 
 fabric. And these changes must be dealt with by 
 statesmen, must be guided with one hand while the 
 war is being prosecuted with the other. The task is 
 colossal. In no previous war have the British given 
 more striking proof of their inherent quality of dogged- 
 ness. Greatness, as Confucius said, does not consist in 
 never falling, but in rising every time you fall. The 
 British speak with appalling frankness of their blunders. 
 They are fighting, indeed, for the privilege of making 
 blunders — since out of blunders arise new truths and 
 discoveries not contemplated in German philosophy. 
 America must now contribute what Britain and 
 Prance, with all their energies and resources and deter- 
 mination, have hitherto been unable to contribute. It 
 must not be men, money, and material alone, but some 
 quality that America has had in herself during her 
 century and a half of independent self-realization. 
 Mr. Chesterton, in writing about the American Rev- 
 olution, observes that the real case for the colonists 
 is that they felt that they could be something which 
 England would not help them to be. It is, in fact, 
 the only case for separation. What may be called the 
 English tradition of democracy, which we inherit, 
 grows through conflicts and differences, through exper- 
 iments and failures and successes, toward an intel- 
 
50 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 lectualized unity, — experiments by states, experiments 
 by individuals, a widely spread development, and new 
 contributions to the whole. 
 
 Democracy has arrived at the stage when it is ceasing 
 to be national and selfish. 
 
 It must be said of England, in her treatment of 
 her colonies subsequent to our Revolution, that she took 
 this greatest of all her national blunders to heart. As a 
 result, Canada and Australia and New Zealand have 
 sent their sons across the seas to fight for an empire that 
 refrains from coercion; while, thanks to the policy of 
 the British Liberals — which was the expression of the 
 sentiment of the British nation — we have the spec- 
 tacle today of a Botha and a Smuts fighting under the 
 Union Jack. 
 
 And how about Ireland? England has blundered 
 there, and she admits it freely. They exist in Eng- 
 laud who cry out for the coercion of Ireland, and who 
 at times have almost had their way. But to do this, 
 of course, would be a surrender to the German con- 
 tentions, an acknowledgment of the wisdom of the 
 German methods against which she is protesting with 
 all her might. Democracy, apparently, must blunder 
 on until that question too, is solved. 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 51 
 
 Many of those picturesque features of the older 
 England, that stir us by their beauty and by the sense 
 of stability and permanence they convey, will no doubt 
 disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the 
 great estates, some of which date from Norman times; 
 I am thinking of the aristocracy, which we Americans 
 repudiated in order to set up a plutocracy instead. 
 Let us hope that what is fine in it will be preserved, 
 for there is much. By the theory of the British con- 
 stitution — that unwritten but very real document — 
 in return for honours, emoluments, and titles, the 
 burden of government has hitherto been thrown on 
 a class. Nor can it be said that they have been un- 
 true to their responsibility. That class developed a 
 tradition and held fast to it; and they had a foreign 
 policy that guided England through centuries of great- 
 ness. Democracy too must have a foreign policy, a 
 tradition of service; a trained if not hereditary group 
 to guide it through troubled waters. Even in an in- 
 telligent community there must be leadership. And, 
 if the world will no longer tolerate the old theories, a 
 tribute may at least be paid to those who from con- 
 viction upheld them; who ruled, perhaps in affluence, 
 yet were also willing to toil and, if need be, to die for 
 the privilege. 
 
52 A TKAVELLER IN WAE--TIME 
 
 One Saturday afternoon, after watching for a while 
 the boys playing fives and football and romping over 
 the green lawns at Eton, on my way to the head mas- 
 ter's rooms I paused in one of the ancient quads. 
 ^J eye had been caught by a long column of names 
 posted there, printed in heavy black letters. Etona 
 non immemora! Every week many new names are 
 added to those columns. On the walls of the chapel 
 and in other quads and passages may be found tablets 
 and inscriptions in memory of those who have died 
 for England and the empire in by-gone wars. I am 
 told that the proportion of Etonians of killed to 
 wounded is greater than that of any other public school 
 — which is saying a great deal. They go back across 
 the channel and back again until their names appear on 
 the last and highest honour list of the school and 
 nation. 
 
 In one of the hospitals I visited lay a wounded giant 
 who had once been a truckman in a little town in Kent. 
 Incidentally, in common with his neighbours, he had 
 taken no interest in the war, which had seemed as re- 
 mote to him as though he had lived in North Da- 
 kota. One day a Zeppelin dropped a bomb on that 
 village, whereupon the able-bodied males enlisted to 
 a man, and he with them. A subaltern in his com- 
 pany was an Eton boy. " We just couldn't think of 
 'im as an orficer, sir; in the camps 'e used to play 
 
A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 53 
 
 witli us like a child. And then we went to Erance. 
 And one night when we was wet to the skin and the 
 Boschs was droppin' shell all around us we got the 
 word. It was him leaped over the top first of all, 
 shouting back at us to come on. He tumbled right 
 back and died in my arms, 'e did, as I was climbin' up 
 after Mm. I shan't ever forget 'im.'' 
 
 As you travel about in these days you become con- 
 scious, among the people you meet, of a certain be- 
 wilderment. A static w^orld and a static order are 
 dissolving; and in England that order was so static 
 as to make the present spectacle the more surprising. 
 Signs of the disintegration of the old social strata were 
 not lacking, indeed, in the earlier years of the twentieth 
 century, when labour members and north-country rad- 
 icals began to invade parliament; but the cataclysm 
 of this war has accelerated the process. In the muddy 
 trenches of Flanders and France a new comradeship 
 has sprung up between ofiicers and Tommies, while 
 time-honoured precedent has been broken by the ne- 
 cessity of giving thousands of commissions to men of 
 merit who do not belong to the " officer caste." At the 
 Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audience 
 wildly applaud a play in which the local tailor be- 
 comes a major-general and returns home to marry the 
 daughter of the lord of a manor whose clothes he used 
 to cut before the war. 
 
54 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 " The age of great adventure/' were the words used 
 by Mr. H. G. Wells to describe this epoch as we dis- 
 cussed it. And a large proportion of the descendants 
 of those who have governed England for centuries are 
 apparently imbued with the spirit of this adventure, 
 even though it may spell the end of their exclusive 
 rule. As significant of the social mingling of elements 
 which in the past never exchanged ideas or points of 
 view I shall describe a week-end party at a large coun- 
 try house of Liberal complexion, on the Thames. I 
 have reason to believe it fairly typical. The owner of 
 this estate holds an important position in the Foreign 
 Office, and the hostess has, by her wit and intelligent 
 grasp of affairs, made an enviable place for herself. 
 On her right, at luncheon on Sunday, was a labour 
 leader, the head of one of the most powerful unions 
 in Britain, and next him sat a member of one of the 
 oldest of England's titled families. The two were on 
 terms of Christian names. The group included two 
 or three women, a sculptor and an educator, another 
 Foreign Office official who has made a reputation since 
 the beginning of the war, and finally an employer of 
 labour, the chairman of the biggest shipbuilding com- 
 pany in England. 
 
 That a company presenting such a variety of inter- 
 ests should have been brought together in the frescoed 
 dining-room of that particular house is noteworthy. 
 
A TEAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 55 
 
 The thing could happen nowhere save in the England 
 of today. At first the talk was general, ranging over 
 a number of subjects from that of the personality of 
 certain politicians to the conduct of the war and the 
 disturbing problem raised by the " conscientious objec- 
 tor " ; little by little, however, the rest of us became 
 silent, to listen to a debate which had begun between 
 the labour leader and the ship-builder on the " labour 
 question. '^ It is not my purpose here to record what 
 they said. Needless to add that they did not wholly 
 agree, but they were much nearer to agreement than 
 one would have thought possible. What was inter- 
 esting was the open-mindedness with which, on both 
 sides, the argument was conducted, and the fact that 
 it could seriously take place then and there. For the 
 subject of it had long been the supreme problem in the 
 lives of both these men, their feelings concerning it 
 must at times have been tinged with bitterness, yet 
 they spoke with courtesy and restraint, and though 
 each maintained his contentions he was quick to ac- 
 knowledge a point made by the other. As one listened 
 one was led to hope that a happier day is perhaps at 
 hand when such things as " complexes " and convictions 
 will disappear. 
 
 The types of these two were in striking contrast. 
 The labour leader was stocky, chestnut-coloured, vital, 
 possessing the bulldog quality of the British self-made 
 
66 A TRAVELLEE IN WAR-TIME 
 
 man combined with a natural wit, sharpened in the 
 arena, that often startled the company into an appre- 
 ciative laughter. The ship-builder, on the other hand, 
 was one of those spare and hard Englishmen whom no 
 amount of business cares will induce to neglect the ex- 
 ercise of his body, the obligation at all times to keep 
 " fit " ; square-rigged, as it were, with a lean face and 
 a wide moustache accentuating a square chin. Occa- 
 sionally a gleam of humour, a ray of idealism, lighted 
 his practical grey eyes. Each of these two had man- 
 aged rather marvellously to triumph over early train- 
 ing by self -education : the labour leader, who had had 
 his first lessons in life from injustices and hard knocks ; 
 and the ship-builder, who had overcome the handicap 
 of the public-school tradition and of Manchester eco- 
 nomics. 
 
 " Yes, titles and fortunes must go," remarked our 
 hostess with a smile as she rose from the table and 
 led the way out on the sunny, stone-flagged terrace. 
 Below us was a wide parterre whose flower-beds, laid 
 out by a celebrated landscape-gardener in the days of 
 the Stuarts, were filled with vegetables. The day was 
 like our "New England Indian summer — though the 
 trees were still heavy with leaves — and a gossamer- 
 blue veil of haze stained the hills between which the 
 shining river ran. If the social revolution, or evolu- 
 
A TRAVELLEE IN WAR-TIME 57 
 
 tion, takes place, one wonders what will become of this 
 long-cherished beauty. 
 
 I venture to dwell upon one more experience of 
 that week-end party. The Friday evening of my ar- 
 rival I was met at the station, not by a limousine with 
 a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with 
 a taxicab — one of the many reminders that a war 
 is going on. London had been reeking in a green- 
 yellow fog, but here the mist was white, and through 
 it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees 
 in a park, and presently saw the great house with its 
 clock-tower looming up before me. A fire was crack- 
 ling in the hall, and before it my hostess was conversing 
 amusedly with a well-known sculptor — a sculptor typ- 
 ical of these renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with 
 vigorous opinions on all sorts of matters. 
 
 " A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to 
 the wounded in the amusement-hall of the hospital," 
 our hostess informed us. " And you both must come 
 and speak too." 
 
 The three of us got into the only motor of which 
 the establishment now boasts, a little runabout using 
 a minimum of " petrol," and she guided us rap- 
 idly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of 
 light proclaimed the presence of a building, one of 
 some score or more built on the golf-course by the 
 
58 A TRAVELLEK IN WAE-TIME 
 
 British Government. I have not space here to de- 
 scribe that hospital, which is one of the best in Eng- 
 land; but it must be observed that its excellence and 
 the happiness of its inmates are almost wholly due to 
 the efforts of the ladj who now conducted us across the 
 stage of the amusement-hall, where all the convalescents 
 who could walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs 
 were gathered. The lecturer had not arrived. But 
 the lady of the manor seated herself at the speaker's 
 table, singling out Scotch wits in the audience — for 
 whom she was more than a match — while the sculptor 
 and I looked on and grinned and resisted her blandish- 
 ments to make speeches. When at last the lecturer 
 came he sat down informally on the table with one 
 foot hanging in the air and grinned, too, at her ban- 
 tering but complimentary introduction. It was then 
 I discovered for the first time that he was one of 
 the best educational experts of that interesting branch 
 of the British Government, the Department of Recon- 
 struction, whose business it is to teach the convalescents 
 the elements of social and political science. This was 
 not to be a lecture, he told them, but a debate in which 
 every man must take a part. And his first startling 
 question was this : 
 
 " Why should Mr. Lloyd George, instead of getting 
 ^we thousand pounds a year for his services as prime 
 minister, receive any more than a conmaon labourer ? " 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 59 
 
 The question was a poser. The speaker folded his 
 hands and beamed down at them; he seemed fairly to 
 radiate benignity. 
 
 " Now we mustn't be afraid of him, just because 
 he seems to be intelligent," declared our hostess. This 
 sally was greeted with spasmodic laughter. Her eyes 
 flitted from bench to bench, yet met nothing save 
 averted glances. " Jock ! Where are you, Jock ? 
 Why don't you speak up ? — you've never been dovmed 
 before." 
 
 More laughter, and craning of necks for the Jocks. 
 This appeared to be her generic name for the wits. 
 But the Jocks remained obdurately modest. The pro- 
 longed silence did not seem in the least painful to the 
 lecturer, who thrust his hand in his pocket and con- 
 tinued to beam. He had learned how to wait. And 
 at last his patience was rewarded. A middle-aged 
 soldier with a very serious manner arose hesitatingly, 
 with encouraging noises from his comrades. 
 
 " It's not Mr. Lloyd George I'm worrying about, 
 sir," he said, '^ all I wants is enough for the missus and 
 me. I had trouble to get that before the war." 
 
 Cries of "Hear! Hear!" 
 
 " Why did you have trouble ? " inquired the lecturer 
 mildly. 
 
 " The wages was too low." 
 
 '^ And why were the wages too low ? " 
 
60 A TEAVELLER IIST WAR-TIME 
 
 " YouVe got me there. I hadn't thought." 
 
 " But isn't it jour business as a voter to think ? " 
 asked the lecturer. " That's why the government is 
 sending me here, to start you to thinking, to remind 
 you that it is you soldiers who will have to take charge 
 of this country and run it after the war is over. And 
 you won't be able to do that unless you think, and 
 think straight." 
 
 " We've never been taught to think," was the illu- 
 minating reply. 
 
 " And if we do think we've never been educated to 
 express ourselves, same as you ! " shouted another man, 
 in whom excitement had overcome timidity. 
 
 " I'm here to help you educate yourselves," said the 
 lecturer. ^' But first let's hear any ideas you may have 
 on the question I asked you." 
 
 There turned out to be plenty of ideas, after all. 
 An opinion was ventured that Mr. Lloyd George served 
 the nation, not for money but from public spirit ; a con- 
 servative insisted that ability should be rewarded and 
 rewarded well; whereupon ensued one of the most en- 
 lightening discussions, not only as a revelation of intel- 
 ligence, but of complexes and obsessions pervading many 
 of the minds in whose power lies the ultimate con- 
 trol of democracies. One, for instance, declared that 
 " if every man went to church proper of a Sunday 
 and minded his own business the country would get 
 
A TKAVELLEE IN WAE-TIME 61 
 
 along well enough." He was evidently of the opinion 
 that there was too much thinking and not enough of 
 what he would have termed " religion." Gradually 
 that audience split up into liberals and conservatives; 
 and the liberals noticeably were the younger men who 
 had had the advantages of better board schools, who 
 had formed fewer complexes and had had less time in 
 which to get them set. Of these, a Canadian made a 
 plea for the American system of universal education, 
 whereupon a combative ^^ stand-patter " declared that 
 every man wasn't fit to be educated, that the American 
 plan made only for discontent. " Look at them," he 
 exdlaimed, " they're never satisfied to stay in their 
 places." This provoked laughter, but it was too much 
 for the sculptor — and for me. We both broke our 
 vows and made speeches in favour of equality and men- 
 tal opportunity, while the lecturer looked on and 
 smiled. Mr. Lloyd George and his salary were for- 
 gotten. By some subtle art of the chairman the de- 
 bate had been guided to the very point where he had 
 from the first intended to guide it — to the burning 
 question of our day — education as the true foundation 
 of democracy! Perhaps, after all, this may be our 
 American contribution to the world's advance. 
 
 As we walked homeward through the fog I talked to 
 him of Professor Dewey's work and its results, while 
 he explained to me the methods of the Reconstruction 
 
62 A TKAVELLER IIST WAE-TIME 
 
 Department. " Out of every audience like that we get 
 a group and form a class," he said. ^' They're always 
 a bit backward at first, just as they were tonight, but 
 they grow very keen. We have a great many classes 
 already started, and we see to it that they are provided 
 with text-books and teachers. Oh, no, it's not propa- 
 ganda," he added, in answer to my query ; " all we do 
 is to try to give them facts in such a way as to make 
 them able to draw their own conclusions and join any 
 political party they choose — just so they join one 
 intelligently." 
 
 I must add that before Sunday was over he had 
 organized his class and arranged for their future in- 
 struction. 
 
CHAPTEE III 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 1 WOULD speak first of a contrast — and yet I have 
 come to recognize how impossible it is to convey to 
 the dweller in America the difference in atmosphere 
 between England and France on the one hand and our 
 country on the other. And when I use the word " at- 
 mosphere " I mean the mental state of the peoples as 
 well as the weather and the aspect of the skies. I have 
 referred in another article to the anxious, feverish pros- 
 perity one beholds in London and Paris, to that appar- 
 ent indifference, despite the presence on the streets of 
 crowds of soldiers to the existence of a war of which 
 one is ever aware. Yet, along with this, one is ever 
 conscious of pressure. The air is heavy; there is a 
 corresponding lack of the buoyancy of mind which is 
 the normal American condition. Perhaps, if German 
 troops occupied I^ew England and New York, our own 
 mental barometer might be lower. It is difficult to say. 
 At any rate, after an ocean voyage of nine days one's 
 spirits rise perceptibly as the ship nears Nantucket; 
 
 and the icy-bright sunlight of New York harbour, the 
 
 65 
 
66 A TKAYELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 sight of the buildings aspiring to blue skies restore the 
 throbbing optimism which with us is normal; and it 
 was with an effort, when I talked to the reporters on 
 landing, that I was able to achieve and express the pes- 
 simism and darkness out of which I had come. Pes- 
 simism is perhaps too strong a word, and takes no ac- 
 count of the continued unimpaired morale and deter- 
 mination of the greater part of the British and French 
 peoples. They expect much from us. Yet the impres- 
 sion was instantaneous, when I set forth in the streets 
 of Xew York, that we had not fully measured the mag- 
 nitude of our task — an impression that has been amply 
 confirmed as the weeks have passed. 
 
 The sense of relief I felt was not only the result of 
 bright skies and a high barometer, of the palpable self- 
 confidence of the pedestrians, of the white bread on the 
 table and the knowledge that there was more, but also 
 of the ease of accomplishing things. I called for a tele- 
 phone number and got it cheerfully and instantly. I 
 sent several telegrams, and did not have to wait twenty 
 minutes before a wicket while a painstaking official mul- 
 tiplied and added and subtracted and paused to talk 
 with a friend ; the speed of the express in which I flew 
 down-town seemed emblematic of America itself. I 
 had been transported, in fact, into another world — my 
 world ; and in order to realize again that from which I 
 had come I turned to a diary recording a London filled 
 
A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 67 
 
 with the sulphur fumes of fog, through which the lamps 
 of the taxis and buses shone as yellow blots reflected on 
 glistening streets ; or, for some reason a still greater con- 
 trast, a blue, blue November Sunday afternoon in Paris, 
 the Esplanade of the Invalides black with people — 
 sad people — and the Invalides itself all etched in blue, 
 as seen through the wide vista from the Seine. 
 
 A few days later, with some children, I went to the 
 Hippodrome. And it remained for the Hippodrome, 
 of all places, to give me the thrill I had not achieved 
 abroad, the thrill I had not experienced since the first 
 months of the war. Mr. George Cohan accomplished 
 it. The transport with steam up, is ready to leave 
 the wharf, the khaki-clad regiment of erect and vigorous 
 young Americans marches across the great stage, and the 
 audience strains forward and begins to sing, under its 
 breath, the words that proclaim, as nothing else perhaps 
 proclaims, how America feels. 
 
 " Send the word, send the word over there . . . 
 We'll be o-ver, we're coming over, 
 And we won't come back till it's o-ver, over there! " 
 
 Is it the prelude of a tragedy ? We have always been 
 so successful, we Americans. Are we to fail now? I 
 am an American, and I do not believe we are to fail. 
 But I am soberer, somehow a different American than 
 he who sailed away in August. Shall we learn other 
 
68 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 things than those that have hitherto been contained in 
 our philosophy ? 
 
 Of one thing I am convinced. It is the first war of 
 the world that is not a miltary war, although miltarj 
 genius is demanded, although it is the bloodiest war in 
 history. But other qualities are required; men and 
 women who are not professional soldiers are fighting in 
 it and will aid in victory. The pomp and circumstance 
 of other wars are lacking in this, the greatest of all. 
 We had the thrills, even in America, three years ago, 
 when Britain and France and Canada went in. We 
 tingled when we read of the mobilizing of the huge 
 armies, of the leave-takings of the soldiers. We bought 
 every extra for news of those first battles on Belgian 
 soil. And I remember my sensations when in the prov- 
 ince of Quebec in the autumn of 1914, looking out of 
 the car-window at the troops gathering on the platforms 
 who were to go across the seas to fight for the empire 
 and liberty. They were singing " Tipperary ! " " Tip- 
 perary ! '^ One seldoms hears it now, and the way has 
 proved long — longer than we reckoned. And we are 
 singing " Over There ! " 
 
 In those first months of the war there was, we were 
 told, in England and France a revival of " religion,'' 
 and indeed many of the books then written gave evi- 
 dence of having been composed in exalted, mystic moods. 
 I remember one in particular, called " En Campagne," 
 
A TRAVELLER m WAR-TIME 69 
 
 by a young French officer. And then, somehow, the 
 note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a 
 period of realism. Read " Le Feu," which is most typi- 
 cal, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a 
 picture of that other aspect — the grinmess, the mo- 
 notony, and the frequent bestiality of trench life, the 
 horror of slaughtering millions of men by highly spe- 
 cialized machinery. And yet, as an American, I strike 
 inevitably the note of optimism once more. Even now 
 the truer spiritual goal is glimpsed through the battle 
 clouds, and has been hailed in world-reverberating 
 phrases by our American President. Day by day the 
 real issue is clearer, while the " religion " it implies 
 embraces not one nation, wills not one patriotism, but 
 humanity itself. I heard a Frenchwoman who had 
 been deeply " religious " in the old sense exclaim : " I 
 no longer have any faith in God ; he is on the side of the 
 Germans.'' When the war began there were many evi- 
 dences of a survival of that faith that God fights for 
 nations, interferes in behalf of the " righteous " cause. 
 When General Joffre was in America he was asked by 
 one of our countrywomen how the battle of the Marne 
 was won. " Madame,'' he is reported to have said, " it 
 was won by me, by my generals and soldiers." The 
 tendency to regard this victory, which we hope saved 
 France and the Western humanitarian civilization we 
 cherish, as a special interposition of Providence, as a 
 
70 A TRAVELLER IX WAR-TIAIE 
 
 miracle, has given place to the realization that the battle 
 was won by the resourcefulness, science, and coolness of 
 the French commander-in-chief. Science preserves ar- 
 mies, since killina:, if it has to be done, is now whoUv 
 within that realm ; science heals the wounded, transports 
 them rapidly to the hospitals, gives the shattered some- 
 thing still t^ live for : and, if we are able to abandon the 
 sentimental view and look facts in the face — as many 
 anointed chaplains in Europe are doing — science not 
 only eliminates typhoid but is able to prevent those ter- 
 rible diseases that devastate armies and nations. And 
 science is no longer confined to the physical but has in- 
 vaded the social kingdom, is able to weave a juster fabric 
 into the government of peoples. On all sides we are 
 beginning to embrace the religion of self-reliance, a 
 faith that God is on the side of intelligence — intel- 
 ligence with a broader meaning than the Germans have 
 given it, for it includes charity. 
 
 n 
 
 It seems \(^ me that I remember, somewhere in the 
 realistic novel I have mentioned — ** Le Feu " — read- 
 ing of singing soldiers, and an assumption on the part 
 of their hearers that such songs are prompted only by a 
 devil-may-care lightness of heart which the soldier 
 achieves. A shallow psychology (as the author points 
 out), especially in these days of trench warfare! The 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 71 
 
 soldier sings to hide his real feelings, perhaps to give 
 vent to them. I am reminded of all this in connection 
 with my trip to the British front. I left London after 
 lunch on one of those dreary, grey days to which I have 
 referred; the rain had begun to splash angrily against 
 the panes of the car windows before we reached the 
 coast. At five o'clock the boat pushed off into a black 
 channel, whipped by a gale that drove the rain across 
 the decks and into every passage and gangway. The 
 steamer was literally loaded with human beings, officers 
 and men returning from a brief glimpse of home. 
 There was nothing of the glory of war in the embark- 
 ation, and, to add to the sad and sinister effect of it, each 
 man as he came aboard mounted the ladder and chose, 
 from a pile on the hatch combing, a sodden life-pre- 
 server, which he flung around his shoulders as he went 
 in search of a shelter. The saloon below, where we had 
 our tea, was lighted indeed, but sealed so tight as to be 
 insupportable; and the cabin above, stifling too, was 
 dark as a pocket. One stumbled over unseen passengers 
 on the lounges, or sitting on kits on the floor. Even the 
 steps up which I groped my way to the deck above were 
 filled, while on the deck there was standing-room only 
 and not much of that. Mai de mer added to the dis- 
 comforts of many. At length I found an uncertain 
 refuge in a gangway amidships, hedged in between un- 
 seen companions ; but even here the rain stung our faces 
 
72 A TKAVELLEK IN WAR-TIME 
 
 and the spray of an occasional comber drenched our 
 feet, while through the gloom of the night only a few 
 yards of white water were to be discerned. For three 
 hours I stood there, trying to imagine what was in the 
 minds of these men with whose bodies I was in such inti- 
 mate contact. They were going to a foreign land to 
 fight, many of them to die, not in one of those adven- 
 turous campaigns of times gone by, but in the wet 
 trenches or the hideous No Man's Land between. What 
 were the images they summoned up in the darkness ? 
 Visions of long-familiar homes and long-familiar 
 friends ? And just how were they facing the future ? 
 Even as I wondered, voices rose in a song, English 
 voices, soldier voices. It was not " Tipperary," the 
 song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch 
 the words : 
 
 " I want to go home ! 
 I don't want to go back to the trenches no more, 
 Where there are bullets and shrapnel galore, 
 I want to go home ! '* 
 
 It was sung boisterously, in a defiant tone of mockery 
 of the desire it expressed, and thus tremendously gained 
 in pathos. They did want to go home — naturally. It 
 was sung with the same spirit our men sing " We won't 
 come back till it's over, over there ! " The difference is 
 that these Britishers have been over there, have seen the 
 horrors face to face, have tasted the sweets of home, and 
 
A TRAVELLEK IN WAE-TIME Y3 
 
 in spite of heartsickness and seasickness are resolved to 
 see it through. Such is the morale of the British army. 
 I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the morale 
 of our own army also, but at present the British are 
 holding the fort. Tommy would never give up the war, 
 but he has had a realistic taste of it, and his songs reflect 
 his experience. Other songs reached my ears each 
 night, above the hissing and pounding of the Channel 
 seas, but the unseen group returned always to this. One 
 thought of Agincourt and Crecy, of Waterloo, of the 
 countless journeys across this same stormy strip of 
 water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, 
 and one wondered whether war were eternal and in- 
 evitable, after all. 
 
 And what does Tommy think about it — this war? 
 My own limited experience thoroughly indorses Mr. 
 Galsworthy's splendid analysis of British-soldier psy- 
 chology that appeared in the December North Ameri- 
 can, The average man, with native doggedness, is fight- 
 ing for the defence of England. The British Govern- 
 ment itself, in its reconstruction department for the 
 political education of the wounded, has given partial 
 denial to the old maxim that it is the soldier's business 
 not to think but to obey; and the British army is leav- 
 ened with men who read and reflect in the long nights of 
 watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas about con- 
 ditions in the past and resolutions concerning those of 
 
74 A TEAVELLEK IN WAU-'J IME 
 
 the future. The very army itself has had a miracle 
 happen to it: it has heeii democratized — and with the 
 cheerful consent of the class to which formerly the pos- 
 session of conmiissions was largely confined. Grad- 
 ually, to these soldier-thinkers, as well as to the mass of 
 others at home, is unfolding the vision of a new social 
 order which is indeed worth fighting for and dying for. 
 
 ill 
 
 At last, our knees cramped and onr feet soaked, we 
 saw the lights of the French port dancing across the 
 veil of rain, like thistledo\vns of fire, and presently we 
 were at rest at a stono quay. As I stood waiting on the 
 deck to have my passf)ort vised, I tried to reconstruct 
 the features of this little seaport as I had seen it, many 
 years lu^fore, on a bright summer's day when I had 
 motored from Paris on my way to London. The gay 
 line of hotels facing the water was hidden in the dark- 
 ness. Suddenly I heard my name called, and I was 
 rescued from the group of civilians by a British officer 
 who introduced himself as my host. It was after nine 
 o'cloc^k, and he had been on the lookout for me since 
 half-past seven. The efTect of his welcome at that time 
 and place was electrical, and I was further immensely 
 cheered by the news he gave me, as we hurried along 
 the street, that two friends of mine were here and quite 
 hungry, having delayed dinner for my arrival. One of 
 
A TEAVELLEK IN WATi-TIME 75 
 
 them was a young rnernlxir of Congress who had been 
 making exhaustive studies of the situation in Italy, 
 Franco and England, and the other one of our best- 
 knowu writ(;rs, both bound for London. We sat around 
 the table until nearly (ilevc^n, (5xchanging impressions 
 and experiences. Th(.'n my oflicer declared that it was 
 time to go home. 
 
 " Home '' provtid to bo tlie big chateau which the Brit- 
 ish Government has leased for the kindly purpose of 
 entertaining siifh American guests as they choose to 
 invite. It is known as the; " American Chateau/^ and 
 in the early morning }K>urs wa reached it after a long 
 drive through the gale. We (grossed a bridge over a 
 moat and traversed a huge stone hall to the Gothic draw- 
 ing-room. Were, a fire was crackling on the hearth, 
 refreshments were laid out, and the major in command 
 rose from his book to greet me. Hospitality, witli these 
 people, has attained to art, and, though I had come here 
 at the invitation of his government, I had the feeling of 
 being his personal guest in his own house. Presently he 
 led the way up the stone stairs and showed me the room 
 I was to occupy. 
 
 I awoke to the sound of the wind whistling through 
 the open lattice, and looking down on th(; ruffkid blue 
 waters of the moat I saw a great white swan at his morn- 
 ing toilet, his f(;athers dazzling in the sun. It was one 
 of those rare crisp and sparkling days that remind one 
 
76 A TEAVELLER i:^r WAB-TIME 
 
 of our American autumn. A green stretch of lawn 
 made a vista through the woods. Following the ex- 
 ample of the swan, I plunged into the tin tub the orderly 
 had placed beside my bed and went down to porridge in 
 a glow. Porridge, for the major was Scotch, and had 
 taught his French cook to make it as the Scotch make 
 it. Then, going out into the hall, from a table on 
 which lay a contour map of the battle region, the major 
 picked up a hideous mask that seemed to have been 
 made for some barbaric revelries. 
 
 " We may not strike any gas," he said, " but it's as 
 well to be on the safe side," whereupon he made me 
 practise inserting the tube in my mouth, pinching the 
 nostrils instantly with the wire-covered nippers. He 
 also presented me with a steel helmet. Thus equipped 
 for any untoward occurrence, putting on sweaters and 
 heavy overcoats, and wrapping ourselves in the fur rugs 
 of the waiting automobile, we started off, with the gale 
 on our quarter, for the front. 
 
 Picardy, on whose soil has been shed so much English 
 blood, never was more beautiful than on that October 
 day. The trees were still in full leaf, the fields green, 
 though the crops had been gathered, and the crystal air 
 gave vivid value to every colour in the landscape. 
 From time to time we wound through the cobble-stoned 
 streets of historic villages, each having its stone church 
 and the bodkin-shaped steeple of blue slate so character- 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAE-TIME 77 
 
 istic of that country. And, as though we were still in 
 the pastoral times of peace, in the square of one of 
 these villages a horse-fair was in progress, blue-smocked 
 peasants were trotting chunky ponies over the stones. 
 It was like a picture from one of De Maupassant's tales. 
 In other villages the shawled women sat knitting behind 
 piles of beets and cabbages and apples, their farm-carts 
 atilt in the sun. Again and again I tried to grasp the 
 fact that the greatest of world wars was being fought 
 only a few miles away — and failed. 
 
 We had met, indeed, an occasional officer or orderly, 
 huddled in a greatcoat and head against the wind, exer- 
 cising those wonderful animals that are the pride of 
 the British cavalry and which General Sir Douglas 
 Haig, himself a cavalryman, some day hopes to bring 
 into service. We had overtaken an artillery train 
 rumbling along toward the east, the men laughing and 
 joking as they rode, as though they were going to 
 manoeuvres. Farther on, as the soldiers along the high- 
 roads and in the towns grew more and more numerous, 
 they seemed so harmoniously part of the peaceful scene 
 that war was as difficult to visualize as ever. Many 
 sat about smoking their pipes and playing with the vil- 
 lage children, others were in squads going to drill 
 or exercise — something the Briton never neglects. 
 The amazing thing to a visitor who has seen the trenches 
 awash on a typical wet day, who knows that even billet- 
 
78 A TKAVELLER IJST WAE-TIME 
 
 ing in cold farms and barns behind the lines can scarcely 
 be compared to the comforts of home, is how these men 
 keep well under the conditions. To say that they are 
 well is to understate the fact: the ruddy faces and 
 clear eyes and hard muscles — even of those who once 
 were pale London clerks — proclaim a triumph for the 
 system of hygiene of their army. 
 
 Suddenly we came upon a house with a great round 
 hole in its wall, and then upon several in ruins beside 
 the village street. Meanwhile, at work under the wind- 
 swept trees of the highway, were strange, dark men from 
 the uttermost parts of the earth, physiognomies as old 
 as the tombs of Pharaoh. It was, indeed, not so much 
 the graven red profiles of priests and soldiers that came 
 to me at sight of these Egyptians, but the singing fella- 
 heen of the water-buckets of the Nile. And here, too, 
 shovelling the crushed rock, were East Indians oddly 
 clad in European garb, careless of the cold. That sense 
 of the vastness of the British Empire, which at times is 
 so profound, was mingled now with a knowledge that 
 it was fighting for its life, marshalling all its resources 
 for Armageddon. 
 
 Saint Eloi is named after the good bishop who ven- 
 tured to advise King Dagobert about his costume. And 
 the church stands — what is left of it — all alone on 
 the greenest of terraces jutting out toward the east; 
 and the tower, ruggedly picturesque against the sky, 
 
A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 79 
 
 resembles that of some crumbled abbey. As a matter of 
 fact, it has been a target for German gunners. Dodg- 
 ing an army-truck and rounding one of those military- 
 traflic policemen one meets at every important carrefour 
 we climbed the hill and left the motor among the great 
 trees, which arc still fortunately preserved. And we 
 stood for a few minutes, gazing over miles and miles of 
 devastation. Then, taking the motor once more, we 
 passed through wrecked and empty villages until we 
 came to the foot of Vimy Ridge. Notre Dame de Lor- 
 ette rose against the sky-line to the north. 
 
 Vimy and Notre Dame de Lorette — sweet but ter- 
 rible names ! Only a summer had passed since Vimy 
 was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the war. 
 From a distance the prevailing colour of the steep slope 
 is ochre ; it gives the effect of having been scraped bare 
 in preparation for some gigantic enterprise. A nearer 
 view reveals a flush of green ; nature is already striving 
 to heal. From top to bottom it is pockmarked by shells 
 and scarred by trenches — trenches every few feet, and 
 between them tangled masses of barbed wire still cling- 
 ing to the " knife rests " and corkscrew stanchions to 
 which it had been strung. The huge shell-holes, reveal- 
 ing the chalk subsoil, were half-filled with water. And 
 even though the field had been cleaned by those East 
 Indians I had seen on the road, and the thousands who 
 had died here buried, bits of uniform, shoes, and ac- 
 
80 A TKAVELLER m WAR-TIME 
 
 coutrements and shattered rifles were sticking in the 
 clay — and once we came across a portion of a bedstead, 
 doubtless taken by some officer from a ruined and now 
 vanished village to his dugout. Painfully, pausing 
 frequently to ponder over these remnants, so eloquent of 
 the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every step 
 and despite our care getting tangled in the wire, we 
 made our way up the slope. Buttercups and daisies 
 were blooming around the edges of the craters. 
 
 As we drew near the crest the major warned me not 
 to expose myself. " It isn't because there is much 
 chance of our being shot," he explained, " but a matter 
 of drawing the German fire upon others." And yet I 
 found it hard to believe — despite the evidence at my 
 feet — that war existed here. The brightness of the 
 day, the emptiness of the place, the silence — save for 
 the humming of the gale — denied it. And then, when 
 we had cautiously rounded a hummock at the top, my 
 steel helmet was blown off — not by a shrapnel, but by 
 the wind ! I had neglected to tighten the chin-strap. 
 
 Immediately below us I could make out scars like 
 earthquake cracks running across the meadows — the 
 front trenches. Both armies were buried like moles in 
 these furrows. The country was spread out before us, 
 like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal 
 mound rising against the green, or a deserted shaft-head. 
 I was gazing at the famous battle-field of Lens. Vil- 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 81 
 
 iages, woods, whose names came back to me as the major 
 repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny 
 plain, and the faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, 
 was Lens itself. I marked it by a single white tower. 
 And suddenly another white tower, loftier than the first, 
 had risen up! But even as I stared its substance 
 seemed to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no 
 longer to be seen. !N'ot until then did I realize that a 
 monster shell had burst beside the trenches in front of 
 the city. Occasionally after that there came to my ears 
 the muffled report of some hidden gun, and a ball like 
 a powder-puff lay lightly on the plain, and vanished. 
 But even the presence of these, oddly enough, did not 
 rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace. 
 
 We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white 
 wine in a sheltered cut of the road that runs up that 
 other ridge which the French gained at such an ap- 
 palling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major 
 described to me some features of the Lens battle, in 
 which he had taken part. I discovered incidentally that 
 he had been severely wounded at the Somme. Though 
 he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his 
 true passion was painting, and he drew my attention 
 to the rare greens and silver-greys of the stones above us, 
 steeped in sunlight — all that remained of the little 
 church of Notre Dame — more beautiful, more signifi- 
 cant, perhaps, as a ruin. It reminded the major of the 
 
82 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 Turners he had admired in his youth. After lunch we 
 lingered in the cemetery, where the graves and vaults 
 had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ran right 
 through them. And here, in this desecrated resting- 
 place of the village dead, where the shattered gravestones 
 were mingled with barbed wire, death-dealing fragments 
 of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that had failed to ex- 
 plode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written 
 the name of Hans Siebert, Mouldering at the foot of 
 the cross was a grey woollen German tunic from which 
 the buttons had been cut. 
 
 We kept the road to the top, for !N'otre Dame de Lor- 
 ette is as steep as Yimy. There we looked upon the 
 panorama of the Lens battle-field once more, and started 
 down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expanse 
 covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth 
 of deep ditches, dugouts, and pits ; gruesome remnants 
 of the battle lay half -concealed under the grass. We 
 walked slowly, making desperate leaps over the trenches, 
 sometimes perforce going through them, treading gin- 
 gerly on the " duck board " at the bottom. We stumbled 
 over stick-bombs and unexploded shells. No plough can 
 be put here — the only solution for the land for years 
 to come is forest. Just before we gained the road at 
 the bottom, where the car was awaiting us, we were 
 startled by the sudden flight of a covey of partridges. 
 
 The skies were grey when we reached the banal out- 
 
A TKAVELLER IN WAH-TIME 83 
 
 skirts of a town where the bourgeoise houses were mod- 
 ern, commonplace, save those which had been ennobled 
 by ruin. It was Arras, one of those few magic names, 
 eloquent with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, 
 intrigue and chivalry; while upon their* significance, 
 since the war began, has been superimposed still another, 
 no less eloquent but charged with pathos. We halted 
 for a moment in the open space before the railroad sta- 
 tion, a comparatively new structure of steel and glass, 
 designed on geometrical curves, with an uninspiring, 
 cheaply ornamented front. It had been, undoubtedly, 
 the pride of the little city. Yet finding it here had at 
 first something of the eifect of the discovery of an office- 
 building — let us say — on the site of the Reims 
 Cathedral. Presently, however, its emptiness, its 
 silence began to have their effects — these and the rents 
 one began to perceive in the roof. For it was still the 
 object of the intermittent yet persistent fire of the Ger- 
 man artillery. One began to realize that by these 
 wounds it had achieved a dignity that transcended the 
 mediocre imagination of its provincial designer. A fine 
 rain had set in before we found the square, and here in- 
 deed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction ; despite the 
 wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poign- 
 antly haunted it. Although the Hotel de Ville, which 
 had expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, 
 the civic pride of those bygone burghers, was razed to 
 
84 A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied 
 yet harmonious fagades of Flemish houses made fa- 
 miliar by photogTaphs. Of some of these the plaster 
 between the carved beams had been shot away, the roofs 
 blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters were bared to the 
 sky. The place was empty in the gathering gloom of 
 the twilight. The gaiety and warmth of the hut erected 
 in the Public Gardens which houses the British Officers' 
 Club were a relief. 
 
 The experiences of the next day will remain for ever 
 in my memory etched, as it were, in sepia. My guide 
 was a younger officer who had seen heroic service, and I 
 wondered constantly how his delicate frame had survived 
 in the trenches the constant hardship of such weather 
 as now, warmly wrapped and with the car-curtains 
 drawn, we faced. The inevitable, relentless rain of 
 that region had set in again, the rain in which our own 
 soldiers will have to fight, and the skies were of a dark- 
 ness seldom known in America. The countryside was 
 no longer smiling. After some two hours of progress we 
 came, in that devastated district near the front, to an ex- 
 panse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like 
 dinosaurs in primeval slime. At some distance from 
 the road others stood apparently tethered in line, await- 
 ing their turn for exercise. These were the far-famed 
 tanks. Their commander, or chief mahout — as I was 
 inclined to call him — was a cheerful young giant of 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 85 
 
 colonial origin, who has often driven them serenely 
 across 'No Man's Land and into the German trenches. 
 He had been expecting us, and led me along a duck 
 board over the morass, to where one of these leviathans 
 was awaiting us. You crawl through a greasy hole in 
 the bottom, and the inside is as full of machinery as 
 the turret of the Pennsylvania, and you grope your way 
 to the seat in front beside that of the captain and con- 
 ductor, looking out through a slot in the armour over a 
 waste of water and mud. From here you are sup- 
 posed to operate a machine gun. Behind you two me- 
 chanics have started the engines with a deafening roar, 
 above which are heard the hoarse commands of the 
 captain as he grinds in his gears. Then you realize that 
 the thing is actually moving, that the bosses on the belt 
 have managed to find a grip on the slime — and pres- 
 ently you come to the brink of what appears, to your ex- 
 aggerated sense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with 
 distant steep banks on the farther side that look unat- 
 tainable and insurmountable. It is an old German 
 trench which the rains have worn and widened. You 
 brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass 
 handles in front of you, while leviathan hesitates, seems 
 to sit up on his haunches, and then gently buries his nose 
 in the pasty clay and paws his way upward into the 
 field beyond. It was like sitting in a huge rocking- 
 chair. That we might have had a bump, and a bone- 
 
86 A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 breaking one, I was informed after I had left the scene 
 of the adventure. It all depends upon the skill of the' 
 driver. The monsters are not as tractable as they seem. 
 That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is character- 
 istic of the whole of this district of levelled villages and 
 vanished woods. Imagine a continuous clay vacant lot 
 in one of our Middle Western cities on the rainiest day 
 you can recall ; and further imagine, on this limitless lot, 
 a network of narrow-gauge tracks and wagon roads, a 
 scattering of contractors' shanties, and you will have 
 some idea of the daily life and surroundings of one of 
 our American engineer regiments, which is running a 
 railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to 
 see these men and talk with them to be convinced of the 
 truth that human happiness and even human health — 
 thanks to modern science — are not dependent upon an 
 existence in a Garden of Eden. I do not mean exactly 
 that these men would choose to spend the rest of their 
 existences in this waste, but they are happy in the con- 
 sciousness of a job well done. It was really inspiring to 
 encounter here the familiar conductors and brakemen, 
 engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily, and for an 
 ideal, left their homes in a remote and peaceful republic 
 three thousand miles away, to find contentment and a 
 new vitality, a wider vision, in the difiicult and danger- 
 ous task they were performing. They were frequently 
 under fire — when they brought back the wounded or 
 
A TEAVELLEE m WAE-TIME 87 
 
 fetclied car-loads of munitions to the great guns on the 
 ridiculous little trains of flat cars with open-work wheels, 
 which they named — with American humour — the 
 Federal Express and the Twentieth Century Limited. 
 And their officers were equally happy. Their colonel, 
 of our regular Army Engineer Corps, was one of those 
 broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walk the 
 streets of Paris, compel pedestrians to turn admiringly 
 and give one a new pride in the manhood of our nation. 
 Hospitably he drew us out of the wind and rain into 
 his little hut, and sat us down beside the stove, cheer- 
 fully informing us that, only the night before, the gale 
 had blown his door in, and his roof had started for the 
 German lines. In a neighbouring hut, reached by a 
 duck board, we had lunch with him and his officers — 
 baked beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The 
 American food, the American jokes and voices in that 
 environment seemed strange indeed ! But as we smoked 
 and chatted about the friends we had in common, about 
 political events at home and the changes that were tak- 
 ing place there, it seemed as if we were in America 
 once more. The English officer listened and smiled in 
 sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctant depar- 
 ture, that America was an extraordinary land. 
 
 He directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that 
 wilderness which the Germans had so wantonly made 
 in their retreat to the Hindenburg line. ^Nothing could 
 
88 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 have been more dismal than our slow progress in the 
 steady rain, through the deserted streets of this town. 
 Home after home had been blasted — their intimate yet 
 harrowing interiors were revealed. The shops and 
 cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their walls 
 blown out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished 
 and homeless proprietors still hung above the doors. I 
 wondered how we should feel in l^ew England if such an 
 outrage had been done to Boston, for instance, or little 
 Concord ! The church, the great cathedral on its ter- 
 race, the bishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet 
 and filthy ruins ! It was dismal, indeed, but scarcely 
 more dismal than that which followed ; for at Bapaume 
 we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. 
 And I chanced to remember that the name had first been 
 indelibly impressed on my consciousness at a comfort- 
 able breakfast-table at home, where I sat looking out on 
 a bright 'New England garden. In the headlines and 
 columns of my morning newspaper I had read again and 
 again, during the summer of 1916, of Thiepval and La 
 Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Bois des 
 Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote sig- 
 nificance; now I was to see them, or what was left of 
 them! 
 
 As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the 
 tragedy which had happened here, the indigo afternoon 
 could not have been better chosen. Description fails 
 
A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 89 
 
 to do justice to the abomination of desolation of that vast 
 battle-field in the rain, and the imagination refuses to 
 reconstruct the scene of peace — the chateaux and happy 
 villages, the forests and pastures, that flourished here so 
 brief a time ago. In my fancy the long, low swells of 
 land, like those of some dreary sea, were for the mo- 
 ment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had 
 rolled here and extinguished all life. Beside the road 
 only the blood-red soil betrayed the sites of powdered 
 villages; and through it, in every direction, trenches 
 had been cut. Between the trenches the earth was torn 
 and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing proc- 
 ess, in its moment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. 
 On the hummocks were graves, graves marked by wooden 
 crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in the ground. 
 Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern can- 
 non that had cost priceless hours of skilled labour ; and 
 once we were confronted by one of those monsters, 
 wounded to the death, I had seen that morning. The 
 sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emo- 
 tions I had felt, as a child, when contemplating dead 
 elephants in a battle picture of the army of a Persian 
 king. 
 
 Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we 
 saw lifted out of that rolling waste the " Butt " of 
 Warlencourt — the burial-mound of this modern Mara- 
 thon. It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the 
 
90 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 Germans who clung to it found their graves, while the 
 victorious British army swept around it toward Ba- 
 paume. Everywhere along that road, which runs like 
 an arrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves. 
 Repetition seems the only method of giving an ade- 
 quate impression of their numbers; and near what was 
 once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all, 
 a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. 
 Seven months the British sappers had toiled far below 
 in the chalk, digging the passage and chamber ; and one 
 summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it had burst 
 directly under the German trench. Long we stood on 
 the slippery edge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire 
 and litter of battle that strewed the bottom, while the 
 rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, said my officer- 
 guide, as had drenched this country through the long 
 winter months of preparation. *^ We never got dry," he 
 told me ; and added with a smile, in answer to my query : 
 " Perhaps that was the reason we never caught colds." 
 When we entered Albert, the starting point of the 
 British advance, there was just light enough to see the 
 statue of the Virgin leaning far above us over the street. 
 The church-tower on which it had once stood erect had 
 been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent 
 and not broken. Local superstition declares that when 
 the Virgin of Albert falls the war will be ended. 
 
., V'' '" 'i - *i 
 
 I if r m ""■ " "• " 
 
 • ■ !i ri n 
 
 
 
 .1^1 
 
 ^'^^-Sl"^. 
 
 Briluih Pictorial Service. 
 THE SQUARE AT ARRAS 
 
 Brilish Pictorial Service. 
 THE SQUARE AT ALBERT, SHOWING THE LEANING VIRGIN. 
 
A TEAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 91 
 
 IV 
 
 I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has 
 learned more from this war than any other nation, and 
 will probably gain more by that knowledge. We are all 
 wanting, of course, to know what we shall get out of it, 
 since it was forced upon us ; and of course the only gain 
 worth considering — as many of those to whom its com- 
 ing has brought home the first glimmerings of social 
 science are beginning to see — is precisely a newly ac- 
 quired vision of the art of self-government. It has been 
 unfortunately necessary — or perhaps fortunately neces- 
 sary — for the great democracies to turn their energies 
 and resources and the inventive ingenuity of their citi- 
 zens to the organization of armies and indeed of entire 
 populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans to 
 remove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay 
 in human life is appallingly unfortunate. But the 
 necessity for national organization socializes the nation 
 capable of it ; or, to put the matter more truly, if the so- 
 cializing process had anticipated the war — as it had in 
 Great Britain — the ability to complete it under stress 
 is the test of a democratic nation ; and hence the test of 
 democracy, since the socializing process becomes inter- 
 national. Britain has stood the test, even from the old- 
 fashioned militarist point of view, since it is apparent 
 that no democracy can wage a sustained great war un- 
 
92 A TKAVELLER IN WAR-TIME 
 
 less it is socialized. After the war she will probably 
 lead all other countries in a sane and scientific liberal- 
 ization. The encouraging fact is that not in spite of her 
 liberalism, but because of it, she has met military Ger- 
 many on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expres- 
 sion^ gone her one better. In 1914, as armies go to- 
 day, the British Army was a mere handful of men 
 whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men 
 and brave officers, indeed ! But at present it is a war 
 organization of an excellence which the Germans never 
 surpassed. I have no space to enter into a description 
 of the amazing system, of the network of arteries con- 
 verging at the channel ports and spreading out until it 
 feeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes 
 him with newspapers and tobacco, and gives him the 
 greatest contentment compatible with the conditions un- 
 der which he has to live. The number of shells flung at 
 the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that 
 fire them. I should like to tell with what swiftness, un- 
 der the stress of battle, the wounded are hurried back to 
 the coast and even to England itself. I may not state 
 the thousands carried on leave every dav across the 
 channel and back again — in spite of submarines. But 
 I went one day through Saint Omer, with its beautiful 
 church and little blue chateau, past the rest-camps of the 
 big regiments of guards to a seaport on the do^vns, for- 
 merly a quiet little French town, transformed now into 
 
A TKAVKLLKU IN WAK-TIMK Dii 
 
 an iM'ilcrod H.Mbt^l. Tlic (immu Is parndoxicnl, hut, I \cl it 
 staiuL lMii;lisli, Irisli, ;mil Scotcli from l\\o l^rilisli 
 JsK's :nul i\\c (MuIs o( tlic cartli inlnt;K' IIkm'c with In- 
 dians, l\i;vplians, and \\\v chixUvvluiX, Mt)ni;-()lians iu 
 (]niHM' tni* c'aps who work in tlio bak(M*ios. 
 
 I wcMil tlii'(nii;h ono o( (licsc^ hak(M'i(\^, almost, as lariz;(^ 
 as an antoniohilo facltn-v, frai::rant with tho aroma oi' 
 two hnndred Ihonsand K)av(>s ot* hrt^uL This bakerv 
 alono S(MuL^ i^imv (hiv to tlio tronclies two Inindrtn] tlion- 
 sand loavos ma(h* i'vom {\\c whoat of wostin-n Canada! 
 0( all sights \o ho S(Vmi in this [)lac(\ howtnor, tho 
 roolaniat ion " plant." is tho most, wondorful. It covers 
 aoros. Kvorvthini;' which is brokcMi in war, from a pair 
 of otHc'(M''s litdd-i;lass(*s \o a nino-inch howitzer oarriaixo 
 is nuMuiod lioro if it can hv mended. Iler(\ when a 
 battle-field is cK>are(i, vxt^-y article that can [mssibly be 
 "liseci auain is hi-(Mii;ht ; and the manai;'er pointed with 
 jn-ide to the t'nrnaces in his {>ow(M--house, wliich formerly 
 burncul coal and wow are ftnl with r(>fuse — broken 
 W'luH>ls oi' i;nii carriai;('s, sawdnst, and even old shoes. 
 Hundreds o\' b'rench i;irls and own C<erman prisoners 
 are resiilin^- and [>atehing sboes with tho aid of American 
 machincM-y, and t>ven the uppers of sneh as are otherwise 
 hopeless are cn( in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, 
 and overcoats art* mended by tailors; rusty camp cook- 
 ers are retinned, and in the foundries the precious scraps 
 of cast iron are melted into brazi(u-s to keep Tonnny in 
 
94 A TRAVELLEK m WAE-TIME 
 
 the trenches wariiL In the machine-shops the injured 
 guns and cannon are repaired. German prisoners are 
 working there, too. At a distance, in their homely grey 
 tunics, with their bullet-shaped heads close-cropped and 
 the hairs standing out like the needles of a cylinder of a 
 music-box, they had the appearance of hard citizens who 
 had become rather sullen convicts. Some wore spec- 
 tacles. A closer view revealed that most of them were 
 contented, and some actually cheerful. None, indeed, 
 seemed more cheerful than a recently captured group 
 I saw later, who were actually building the barbed-wire 
 fence that was to confine them ! 
 
 My last visit in this town was to the tiny hut on a 
 " comer lot," in which the Duchess of Sutherland has 
 lived now for some years. As we had tea she told me 
 she was going on a fortnight^s leave to England; and 
 no Tommy in the trenches could have been more excited 
 over the prospect. Her own hospital, which occupies 
 the rest of the lot, is one of those marvels which in- 
 dividual initiative and a strong social sense such as hers 
 has produced in this war. Special enterprise was re- 
 quired to save such desperate cases as are made a spe- 
 cialty of here, and all that medical and surgical science 
 can do has been concentrated, with extraordinary suc- 
 cess, on the shattered men who are brought to her wards. 
 That most of the horrible fractures I saw are healed, and 
 healed quickly — thanks largely to the drainage system 
 
A TKAVELLER m WAE-TIME 95 
 
 of our own Doctor Carrel — is not the least of the won- 
 ders of the remarkable times in which we live. 
 
 The next day, Sunday, I left for Paris, bidding fare- 
 well regretfully to the last of my British-officer hosts. 
 He seemed like an old, old friend — though I had known 
 him but a few days. I can see him now as he waved 
 me a good-bye from the platform in his Glengarry cap 
 and short tunic and plaid trousers. He is the owner of 
 a castle and some seventy square miles of land in Scot- 
 land alone. For the comfort of his nation's guests, he 
 toils like a hired courier. 
 
A'N ESSAY ON THE AMEEICAN C0:N'TEIBU- 
 
 tio:n" and the demockatic idea 
 
AN ESSAY ON THE AMERICA:^' CONTRIBU- 
 TION AND THE DEMOCRATIC IDEA 
 
 FAILURE to recognize that the American is at 
 heart an idealist is to lack understanding of our 
 national character. Two of our greatest interpreters 
 proclaimed it, Emerson and William James. In a re- 
 cent address at the Paris Sorbonne on *^ American 
 Idealism/' M. Eirmin Roz ^ observed that a people is 
 rarely justly estimated by its contemporaries. The 
 Erench, he says, have been celebrated chiefly for the 
 skill of their chefs and their vaudeville actors, while in 
 the disturbed speculum mundi Americans have appeared 
 as a collection of money grubbers whose philosophy is 
 the dollar. It remained for the war to reveal the true 
 nature of both peoples. The American colonists, M. 
 Roz continues, unlike other colonists, were animated not 
 by material motives, but by the desire to safeguard and 
 realize an ideal; our inherent characteristic today is a 
 belief in the virtue and power of ideas, of a national, 
 
 1 Secretaire de la Section France-Etats Unis due Comity France- 
 Amerique. 
 
 99 
 
100 THE AMERICAN CONTEIBUTION 
 
 indeed, of a universal, mission. In the Eighteenth 
 Centurj we proposed a Philosophy and adopted a Con- 
 stitution far in advance of the political practice of the 
 day, and set up a government of which Europe predicted 
 the early downfall. JS'evertheless, thanks partly to good 
 fortune, and to the farseeing wisdom of our early states- 
 men who perceived that the success of our experiment 
 depended upon the maintenance of an isolation from 
 European affairs, we established democracy as a prac- 
 tical form of government. 
 
 We have not always lived up to our beliefs in ideas. 
 In our dealings with other nations, we yielded often to 
 imperialistic ambitions and thus, to a certain extent, 
 justified the cynicism of Europe. We took what we 
 wanted — and more. Erom Spain we seized western 
 Elorida; the annexation of Texas and the subsequent 
 war with Mexico are acts upon which we cannot look 
 back with unmixed democratic pride; while more than 
 once we professed a naive willingness to fight England 
 in order to push our boundaries further north. We 
 regarded the Monroe Doctrine as altruistic, while others 
 smiled. But it suited England, and her sea power gave 
 it force. 
 
 Our war with Spain in 1898, however, was fought for 
 an idea, and, despite the imperialistic impulse that fol- 
 lowed it, marks a transition, an advance, in international 
 ethics. Imperialistic cynics were not lacking to scoff 
 
THE AMEKICA:N" C0:N^TRIBUTI0N 101 
 
 at our protestation that we were fighting Spain in order 
 to liberate Cuba; and yet this, for the American 
 people at large, was undoubtedly the inspiration of the 
 war. We kept our promise, we did not annex Cuba, we 
 introduced into international affairs what is known as 
 the Big Brother idea. Then came the Piatt Amend- 
 ment. Cuba was free, but she must not wallow near 
 our shores in an unhygienic state, or borrow money 
 without our consent. We acquired valuable naval 
 bases. Moreover, the sudden and unexpected acquisi- 
 tion of Porto Eico and the Philippines made us impe- 
 rialists in spite of ourselves. 
 
 Nations as well as individuals, however, must be 
 judged by their intentions. The sound public opinion 
 of our people has undoubtedly remained in favour of 
 ultimate self-government for the Philippines, and the 
 greatest measure of self-determination for little Porto 
 Rico; it has been unquestionably opposed to commercial 
 exploitation of the islands, desirous of yielding to these 
 peoples the fruits of their labour in developing the re- 
 sources of their own lands. An intention, by the way, 
 diametrically different from that of Germany. In re- 
 gard to our protectorate in the island of San Domingo, 
 our " semi-protectorate " in Nicaragua, the same argu- 
 ment of intention may fairly be urged. Germany, who 
 desired them, would have exploited them. To a cer- 
 tain extent, no doubt, as a result of the momentum of 
 
102 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 commercial imperialism, we are still exploiting them. 
 But the attitude of the majority of Americans toward 
 more backward peoples is not cynical; hence there is 
 hope that a democratic solution of the Caribbean and 
 Central American problem may be found. And we are 
 not ready, as yet, to accept without further experiment 
 the dogma that tropical and sub-tropical people will not 
 ultimately be able to govern themselves. If this even- 
 tually prove to be the case, at least some such experi- 
 ment as the new British Labour Party has proposed for 
 the Empire may be tried. Our general theory that the 
 exploitation of foreign peoples reacts unfavourably on 
 the exploiters is undoubtedly sound. 
 
 Nor are the ethics of the manner of our acquisition 
 of a part of Panama and the Canal wholly defensible 
 from the point of view of international democracy. 
 Yet it must be remembered that President Roosevelt 
 was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and hostile 
 government, and that the Canal had become a necessity 
 not only for our own development, but for that of the 
 civilization of the world. 
 
 The Spanish War, as has been said, marked a transi- 
 tion, a development of the American Idea. In obedi- 
 ence to a growing perception that dominion and exploi- 
 tation are incompatible with and detrimental to our 
 system of government, we fought in good faith to gain 
 self-determination for an alien people. The only real 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIOlSr 103 
 
 peril confronting democracy is the arrest of growth. 
 Its true conquests are in the realms of ideas, and hence 
 it calls for a statesmanship which, while not breaking 
 with the past, while taking into account the inherent 
 nature of a people, is able to deal creatively with new 
 situations — always under the guidance of current 
 social science. 
 
 Woodrow Wilson's Mexican policy, being a projection 
 of the American Idea to foreign affairs, a step toward 
 international democracy, marks the beginning of a new 
 era. Though not wholly understood, though opposed by 
 a powerful minority of our citizens, it stirred the con- 
 sciousness of a national mission to whicli our people are 
 invariably ready to respond. Since it was essentially 
 experimental, and therefore not lacking in mistakes, 
 there was ample opportunity for a criticism that seemed 
 at times extremely plausible. The old and tried method 
 of dealing with such anarchy as existed across our south- 
 ern border was made to seem the safe one; while the 
 new, because it was untried, was presented as disastrous. 
 In reality, the reverse was the case. 
 
 Mr. Wilson's opponents were, generally speaking, the 
 commercial classes in the community, whose environ- 
 ment and training led them to demand a foreign policy 
 similar to that of other great powers, a financial impe- 
 rialism which is the logical counterpart in foreign 
 affairs of the commercial exploitation of domestic na- 
 
104 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 tional resources and domestic labour. These were the 
 classes which combated the growth of democracy at 
 home, in national and state politics. Erom their point 
 of view — not that of the larger vision — they were 
 consistent. On the other hand, the nation grasped the 
 fact that to have one brand of democracy at home and 
 another for dealing with foreign nations was not only 
 illogical but, in the long run, would be suicidal to the 
 Republic. And the people at large were committed to 
 democratic progress at home. They were struggling 
 for it. 
 
 One of the most important issues of the American 
 liberal movement early in this century had been that 
 for the conservation of what remains of our natural 
 resources of coal and metals and oil and timber and 
 waterpower for the benefit of all the people, on the 
 theory that these are the property of the people. But 
 if the natural resources of this country belong to the 
 people of the United States, those of Mexico belong to 
 the people of Mexico. It makes no difference how 
 " lazy," ignorant, and indifferent to their own interests 
 the Mexicans at present may be. And even more im- 
 portant in these liberal campaigns was the issue of the 
 conservation of human resources — men and women and 
 children who are forced by necessity to labour. These 
 must be protected in health, given economic freedom 
 and a just reward for their toil. The American democ- 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 105 
 
 racy, committed to the principle of the conservation of 
 domestic natural and human resources, could not with- 
 out detriment to itself persist in a foreign policy that 
 ignored them. Eor many years our own government 
 had permitted the squandering of these resources by 
 adventurous capitalists; and gradually, as we became 
 a rich industrial nation, these capitalists sought profit- 
 able investments for their increasing surplus in foreign 
 lands. Their manner of acquiring " concessions " in 
 Mexico was quite similar to that by which they had 
 seized — because of the indifference and ignorance of 
 our own people — our own mines and timber lands 
 which our government held in trust. Sometimes these 
 American "concessions" have been valid in law — 
 though the law itself violated a democratic principle; 
 more often corrupt officials winked at violations of the 
 law, enabling capitalists to absorb bogus claims. 
 
 The various rulers of Mexico sold to American and 
 other foreign capitalists the resources belonging to the 
 people of their country, and pocketed, with their fol- 
 lowers, the proceeds of the sale. Their control of the 
 country rested upon force ; the stability of the Diaz 
 rule, for instance, depended upon the " President's " 
 ablity to maintain his dictatorship — a precarious guar- 
 antee to the titles he had given. Hence the premium 
 on revolutions. There was always the incentive to the 
 upstart political and military buccaneer to overthrow 
 
106 THE AMERICAIS' CONTRIBUTIOI^ 
 
 the dictator and gain possession of the spoils, to sell new 
 doubtful concessions and levy new tribute on the capi- 
 talists holding claims from a former tyrant. 
 
 The foreign capitalists appealed to their governments ; 
 commercial imperialism responded by dispatching mili- 
 tary forces to protect the lives and " property " of its 
 citizens, in some instances going so far as to take pos- 
 session of the country. A classic case, as cited by Hob- 
 son, is Britain's South African War, in which the blood 
 and treasure of the people of the United Kingdom were 
 expended because British capitalists had found the 
 Boers recalcitrant, bent on retaining their own country 
 for themselves. To be sure. South Africa, like Mexico, 
 is rich in resources for which advancing civilization con- 
 tinually makes demands. And, in the case of Mexico, 
 the products of the tropics, such as rubber, are increas- 
 ingly necessary to the industrial powers of the temper- 
 ate zone. On the other hand, if the exploiting nation 
 aspire to self-government, the imperialistic method of 
 obtaining these products by the selfish exploitation of 
 the natural and human resources of the backward coun- 
 tries reacts so powerfully on the growth of democracy at 
 home — and hence on the growth of democracy through- 
 out the world — as to threaten the very future of civili- 
 zation. The British Liberals, when they came into 
 power, perceived this, and at once did their best to make 
 amends to South Africa by granting her autonomy and 
 
THE AMEBICAN CONTKIBUTIO]^ 107 
 
 virtual independence, linking her to Britain by the 
 silken thread of Anglo-Saxon democratic culture. How 
 strong this thread has proved is shown by the action of 
 those of Dutch blood in the Dominion during the pres- 
 ent war. 
 
 Eventually, if democracy is not to perish from the 
 face of the earth, some other than the crude imperial- 
 istic method of dealing with backward peoples, of obtain- 
 ing for civilization the needed resources of their lands, 
 must be inaugurated — a democratic method. And 
 this is perhaps the supreme problem of democracy today. 
 It demands for its solution a complete reversal of the 
 established policy of imperialism, a new theory of inter- 
 national relationships, a mutual helpfulness and part- 
 nership between nations, even as democracy implies 
 co-operation between individual citizens. Therefore 
 President Wilson laid down the doctrine that American 
 citizens enter Mexico at their own risk ; that they must 
 not expect that American blood will be shed or the 
 nation's money be expended to protect their lives or the 
 " property " they have acquired from Mexican dictators. 
 This applies also to the small capitalists, the owners of 
 the coffee plantations, as well as to those Americans in 
 Mexico who are not capitalists but wage earners. The 
 people of Mexico are entitled to try the experiment of 
 self-determination. It is an experiment, we frankJy 
 acknowledge that fact, a democratic experiment depend- 
 
108 THE AMERICAN CONTKIBUTIO:Nr 
 
 ent on physical science, social science, and scientific 
 education. The other horn of the dilemma, our per- 
 sistence in imperialism, is even worse — since by such 
 persistence we destroy ourselves. 
 
 A subjective judgment, in accordance with our own 
 democratic standards, by the American Government as 
 to the methods employed by a Huerta, for instance, is 
 indeed demanded ; not on the ground, however, that such 
 methods are " good " or ^^ bad " ; but whether they are 
 detrimental to Mexican self-determination, and hence 
 to the progi'ess of our own democracy. 
 
 II 
 
 If America had started to prepare when Belgium was 
 invaded, had entered the war when the Lusitariia was 
 sunk, Germany might by now have been defeated, hun- 
 dreds of thousands of lives might have been spared. All 
 this may be admitted. Yet, looking backward, it is easy 
 to read the reason for our hesitancy in our national 
 character and traditions. We were pacifists, yes, but 
 pacifists of a peculiar kind. One of our greatest Ameri- 
 can prophets, William James, knew that there was an 
 issue for which we were ready to fight, for which we 
 were willing to make the extreme sacrifice, — and that 
 issue he defined as " war against war.'' It remained 
 for America to make the issue. 
 
 Peoples do not rush to arms unless their national 
 
THE AMEEICAN C0NTKIBUTI0:N' 109 
 
 existence is threatened. It is what may be called the 
 environmental cause that drives nations quickly into 
 war. It drove the Entente nations into war, though 
 incidentally they were struggling for certain democratic 
 institutions, for international justice. But in the case 
 of America, the environmental cause was absent. 
 Whether or not our national existence was or is actually 
 threatened, the average American does not believe that 
 it is. He was called upon to abandon his tradition, to 
 mingle in a European conflict, to fight for an idea 
 alone. Ideas require time to develop, to seize the 
 imagination of masses. And it must be remembered 
 that in 1914 the great issue had not been defined. Curi- 
 ously enough, now that it is defined, it proves to be an 
 American issue — a logical and positive projection of 
 our Washingtonian tradition and Monroe doctrine. 
 These had for their object the preservation and develop- 
 ment of democracy, the banishment from the Western 
 Hemisphere of European imperialistic conflict and war. 
 We are now, with the help of our allies, striving to ban- 
 ish these things from the face of the earth. It is un- 
 doubtedly the greatest idea for which man has been 
 summoned to make the supreme sacrifice. 
 
 Its evolution has been traced. Democracy was the 
 issue in the Spanish War, when we fought a weak na- 
 tion. We have followed its broader application to 
 Mexico, when we were willing to ignore the taunts and 
 
110 THE AMERICAN CONTEIBUTIOl^ 
 
 insults of another weak nation, even the loss of " pres- 
 tige/' for the sake of the larger good. And we have 
 now the clue to the President's interpretation of the 
 nation's mind during the first three years of the present 
 war. We were willing to bear the taunts and insults of 
 Germany so long as it appeared that a future world 
 peace might best be brought about by the preservation 
 of neutrality, by turning the weight of the impartial 
 public opinion of our democracy and that of other neu- 
 trals against militarism and imperialism. Our na- 
 tional aim was ever consistent with the ideal of William 
 James, to advance democracy and put an end to the 
 evil of war. 
 
 The only sufficient reason for the abandonment of the 
 Washingtonian policy is the furtherance of the object 
 for which it was inaugurated, the advance of democ- 
 racy. And we had established the precedent, with 
 Spain and Mexico, that the Republic shall engage in no 
 war of imperialistic conquest. We war only in behalf 
 of, or in defence of, democracy. 
 
 Before the entrance of America, however, the issues 
 of the European War were by no means clear cut along 
 democratic lines. What kind of democracy were the 
 allies fighting for ? Nowhere and at no time had it been 
 defined by any of their statesmen. On the contrary, 
 the various allied governments had entered into com- 
 pacts for the transference of territory in the event of 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIO:^" 111 
 
 victory; and had even, by the offer of rewards, sought 
 to play one small nation against another. This secret 
 diplomacy of bargains, of course, was a European herit- 
 age, the result of an imperialistic environment which 
 the American did not understand, and from which he 
 was happily free. Its effect on France is peculiarly 
 enlightening. The hostility of European governments, 
 due to their fear of her republican institutions, retarded 
 her democratic growth, and her history during the reign 
 of ISTapoleon III is one of intrigue for aggrandizement 
 differing from Bismarck's only in the fact that it was 
 unsuccessful. Britain, because she was separated from 
 the continent and protected by her fleet, virtually with- 
 drew from European affairs in the latter part of the 
 nineteenth century, and, as a result, made great strides 
 in democracy. The aggressions of Germany forced 
 Britain in self-defence into coalitions. Because of her 
 power and wealth she became the Entente leader, yet 
 her liberal government was compelled to enter into secret 
 agreements with certain allied governments in order to 
 satisfy what they deemed to be their needs and just 
 ambitions. She had honestly sought, before the war, to 
 come to terms with Germany, and had even proposed 
 gradual disarmament. But, despite the best intentions, 
 circumstances and environment, as well as the precari- 
 ous situation of her empire, prevented her from liberal- 
 izing her foreign relations to conform with the growth 
 
112 THE AMERICAN COISTTRIBUTIOJS" 
 
 of democracy within the United Kingdom and the 
 Dominions. 
 
 Americans felt a profound pity for Belgium. But 
 she was not, as Cuba had been, our affair. The great 
 majority of our citizens sympathized with the Entente, 
 regarded with amazement and disgust the sudden dis- 
 closure of the true character of the German militaristic 
 government. Yet for the average American the war 
 wore the complexion of other European conflicts, was 
 one involving a Balance of Power, mysterious and inex- 
 plicable. To him the underlying issue was not demo- 
 cratic, but imperialistic ; and this was partly because he 
 was unable to make a mental connection between a Euro- 
 pean war and the brand of democracy he recognized. 
 Preaching and propaganda fail unless it can be brought 
 home to a people that something dear to their inner- 
 most nature is at stake, that the fate of the thing they 
 most desire, and are willing to make sacrifices for, hangs 
 in the balance. 
 
 During a decade the old political parties, between 
 which there was now little more than an artificial align- 
 ment, had been breaking up. Americans were absorbed 
 in the great liberal movement begun under the leader- 
 ship of President Roosevelt, the result of which was to 
 transform democracy from a static to a pragmatic and 
 evolutionary conception, — in order to meet and correct 
 new and unforeseen evils. Political freedom was seen 
 
THE AMEKICA:N CONTKIBUTIOlSr 113 
 
 to be of little worth unless also accompanied by the ^ 
 economic freedom the nation had enjoyed before the 
 advent of industrialism. Clerks and farmers, profes- 
 sional men and shopkeepers and artisans were ready 
 to follow the liberal leaders in states and nation ; intel- 
 lectual elements from colleges and universities were en- 
 listed. Paralleling the movement, at times mingling 
 with it, was the revolt of labour, manifested not only 
 in political action, but in strikes and violence. Readily 
 accessible books and magazines together with club and 
 forum lectures in cities, towns, and villages were rap- 
 idly educating the population in social science, and the 
 result was a growing independent vote to make politi- 
 cians despair. 
 
 Here was an instance of a democratic culture growing 
 in isolation, resentful of all external interference. To 
 millions of Americans — especially in our middle west- 
 ern and western states — bent upon social reforms, the 
 European War appeared as an arresting influence. 
 American participation meant the triumph of the forces 
 of reaction. Colour was lent to this belief because 
 the conservative element which had opposed social re- 
 forms was loudest in its demand for intervention. The 
 wealthy and travelled classes organized preparedness 
 parades and distributed propaganda. In short, those 
 who had apparently done their utmost to oppose democ- 
 racy at home were most insistent that we should embark 
 
114 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 upon a war for democracy across the seas. Again, what 
 kind of democracy ? Obviously a status quo, commer- 
 cially imperialistic democracy, which the awakening 
 liberal was bent upon abolishing. 
 
 There is undoubtedly in such an office as the Ameri- 
 can presidency some virtue w^hich, in times of crisis, 
 inspires in capable men an intellectual and moral 
 growth proportional to developing events. Lincoln, our 
 most striking example, grew more between 1861 and 
 1865 than during all the earlier years of his life. Nor 
 is the growth of democratic leaders, when seen through 
 the distorted passions of their day, apparently a con- 
 sistent thing. Greatness, near at hand, is startlingly 
 like inconsistency; it seems at moments to vacillate, to 
 turn back upon and deny itself, and thus lays itself 
 open to seemingly plausible criticism by politicians and 
 time servers and all who cry out for precedent. Yet it 
 is an interesting and encouraging fact that the faith of 
 democratic peoples goes out, and goes out alone, to 
 leaders who — whatever their minor faults and fail- 
 ings — do not fear to reverse themselves when occa- 
 sion demands ; to enunciate new doctrines, seemingly in 
 contradiction to former assertions, to meet new crises. 
 When a democratic leader who has given evidence of 
 greatness ceases to develop new ideas, he loses the pub- 
 lic confidence. He flops back into the ranks of the con- 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 115 
 
 servatives lie formerly opposed, who catch up with him 
 only when he ceases to grow. 
 
 In 1916 the majority of the American people elected 
 Mr. Wilson in the belief that he would keep them out of 
 war. In 1017 he entered the war with the nation be- 
 hind him. A recalcitrant Middle West was the first to 
 fill its quota of volunteers, and we witnessed the extraor- 
 dinary spectacle of the endorsement of conscription. 
 What had happened ? A very simple, but a very great 
 thing. Mr. Wilson had made the issue of the war a 
 democratic issue, an American issue, in harmony with 
 our national hopes and traditions. But why could not 
 this issue have been announced in 1914 or 1915 ? The 
 answer seems to be that peoples, as well as their leaders 
 and interpreters, must grow to meet critical situations. 
 In 1861 the moral idea of the Civil War was obscured 
 and hidden by economic and material interests. The 
 Abraham Lincoln who entered the White House in 1861 
 was indeed the same man who signed the Emancipation 
 Proclamation in 1863; and yet, in a sense, he was not 
 the same man ; events and responsibilities had effected a 
 profound but logical growth, in his personality. And 
 the people of the Union were not ready to endorse 
 Emancipation in 1861. In 1863, in the darkest hour of 
 the war, the spirit of the North responded to the call, 
 and, despite the vilification of the President, was true 
 
116 THE AMERICAN COXTRIBUTIOIS" 
 
 to him to victory. More significant still, in view of the 
 events of today, is what then occurred in England. The 
 British Government was unfriendly ; the British people 
 as a whole had looked upon our Civil War very much 
 in the same light as the American people regarded the 
 present war at its inception — which is to say that the 
 economic and materialistic issue seemed to overshadow 
 the moral one. But when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed 
 it to be a war for hiunan freedom, the sentiment of the 
 British people changed — of the British people as dis- 
 tinct from the governing classes ; and the textile workers 
 of the northern counties, whose mills could not get cot- 
 ton on account of the blockade, declared their willing- 
 ness to suffer and starve if the slaves in America might 
 be freed. 
 
 Abraham Lincoln at that time represented the Ameri- 
 can people as the British Government did not represent 
 the British people. We are concerned today with peo- 
 ples rather than governments. 
 
 It remained for an American President to announce 
 the moral issue of the present war, and thus to solidify 
 behind him, not onlv the liberal mind of America, but 
 the liberal elements within the nations of Europe. He 
 became the democratic leader of the world. The issue, 
 simply stated, is the advancement of democracy and 
 peace. They are inseparable. Democracy, for prog- 
 ress, demands peace. It had reached a stage, when, in 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 117 
 
 a contracting world, it could no longer advance through 
 isolation : its very existence in every country was threat- 
 ened, not only by the partisans of reaction from within, 
 but by the menace from without of a militaristic and 
 imperialistic nation determined to crush it, restore su- 
 perimposed authority, and dominate the globe. Democ- 
 racy, divided against itself, cannot stand. A league of 
 democratic nations, of democratic peoples, has become 
 imperative. Hereafter, if democracy wins, self-deter- 
 mination, and not imperialistic exploitation, is to be 
 the universal rule. It is the extension, on a world 
 scale, of Mr. Wilson^s Mexican policy, the application 
 of democratic principles to international relationships, 
 and marks the inauguration of a new era. We resort 
 to force against force, not for dominion, but to make the 
 world safe for the idea on which we believe the future 
 of civilization depends, the sacred right of self-govern- 
 ment. We stand prepared to treat with the German 
 people when they are ready to cast off autocracy and 
 militarism. Our attitude toward them is precisely our 
 attitude toward the Mexican people. We believe, and 
 with good reason, that the German system of education 
 is authoritative and false, and was more or less delib- 
 erately conceived in order to warp the nature and pro- 
 duce complexes in the mind of the German people for 
 the end of preserving and perpetuating the power of 
 the Junkers. We have no quarrel with the duped and 
 
118 THE AMEKICAISr CONTKIBUTIOiT 
 
 oppressed, but we war against the agents of oppression. 
 
 To the conservative mind such an aspiration appears 
 chimerical. But America, youngest of the nations, was 
 born when modern science was gathering the momentum 
 which since has enabled it to overcome, with a bewilder- 
 ing rapidity, many evils previously held by superstition 
 to be ineradicable. As a corollary to our democratic 
 creed, we accepted the dictum that to human intelligence 
 all things are possible. The virtue of this dictum lies 
 not in dogma, but in an indomitable attitude of mind 
 to which the world owes its every advance in civiliza- 
 tion; quixotic, perhaps, but necessary to great accom- 
 plishment. In searching for a present-day protagonist, 
 no happier example could be found than Mr. Henry 
 Ford, who exhibits the characteristic American mixture 
 of the practical and the ideal. He introduces into in- 
 dustry humanitarian practices that even tend to increase 
 the vast fortune which by his own efforts he has accumu- 
 lated. He sees that democratic peoples do not desire 
 to go to war, he does not believe that war is necessary 
 and inevitable, he lays himself open to ridicule by 
 financing a Peace Mission. Circumstances force him 
 to abandon his project, but he is not for one moment 
 discouraged. His intention remains. He throws all 
 his energy and wealth into a war to end war, and the 
 value of his contribution is inestimable. 
 
 A study of Mr. Ford's mental processes and acts illu- 
 
THE AMEEICA:N' contribution 119 
 
 minates the true mind of America. In the autumn of 
 1916 Mr. Wilson declared that " the people of the 
 United States want to be sure what they are fighting 
 about, and they want to be sure that they are fighting 
 for the things that will bring the world justice and 
 peace. Define the elements; let us know that we are 
 not fighting for the prevalence of this nation over that, 
 for the ambitions of this group of nations as compared 
 with the ambitions of that group of nations, let us once 
 be convinced that we are called in to a great combina- 
 tion for the rights of mankind, and America will unite 
 her force and spill her blood for the great things s^^'^ 
 has always believed in and followed." 
 
 " America is always ready to fight '^' 
 which are American." Even in thf 
 mark the anniversary of our 
 But let it be remembered ^ 
 
 days of the Civil War A .o- 
 
 claimed the democratic, ideu c oiruggle. 
 
 The Russian Revolution, which we inust seek to under- 
 stand and not condemn, the Allied defeats that are its 
 consequences, can only make our purpose the firmer to 
 put forth all our strength for the building up of a better 
 world. The President's masterly series of state pa- 
 pers, distributed in all parts of the globe, have indeed 
 been so many Proclamations of Emancipation for the 
 world's oppressed. Not only powerful nations shall 
 
120 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 cease to exploit little nations, but powerful individuals 
 shall cease to exploit their fellow men. Henceforth no 
 wars for dominion shall be waged, and to this end secret 
 treaties shall be abolished. Peoples through their rep- 
 resentatives shall make their own treaties. And just as 
 democracy insures to the individual the greatest amount 
 of self-determination, nations also shall have self-deter- 
 mination, in order that each shall be free to make its 
 world contribution. All citizens have duties to perform 
 toward their fellow citizens ; all democratic nations must 
 V interdependent. 
 
 • ^i+h this purpose America has entered the war. 
 
 Dlies that our own household must be swept 
 
 "^^e injustices and inequalities existing 
 
 ^•he false standards of worth, the 
 
 nd waste must be purged from 
 
 In fighiji^^ indeed fighting an evil 
 
 Will — evil because it o^eKs to crush the growth of 
 individual and national freedom. Its object is to put 
 the world back under the thrall of self-constituted au- 
 thority. So long as this Will can compel the bodies of 
 soldiers to do its bidding, these bodies must be de- 
 stroyed. Until the Will behind them is broken, the 
 world cannot be free. Junkerism is the final expression 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 121 
 
 of reaction, organized to the highest efficiency. The 
 war against the Junkers marks the consummation of a 
 long struggle for human liberty in all lands, symbolizes 
 the real cleavage dividing the world. As in the French 
 Revolution and the wars that followed it, the true sig- 
 nificance of this war is social. But today the Russian 
 Revolution sounds the keynote. Revolutions tend to 
 express the extremes of the philosophies of their times 
 — human desires, discontents, and passions that cannot 
 be organized. The French Revolution was a struggle 
 for political freedom ; the underlying issue of the pres- 
 ent war is economic freedom — without which political 
 freedom is of no account. It will not, therefore, suffice 
 merely to crush the Junkers, and with them militarism 
 and autocracy. Unless, as the fruit of this appalling 
 bloodshed and suffering, the democracies achieve eco- 
 nomic freedom, the war will have been fought in vain. 
 More revolutions, wastage and bloodshed will follow, 
 the world will be reduced to absolute chaos unless, in 
 the more advanced democracies, an intelligent social 
 order tending to remove the causes of injustice and dis- 
 content can be devised and ready for inauguration. 
 This new social order depends, in turn, upon a world 
 order of mutually helpful, free peoples, a League of 
 Nations. If the world is to be made safe for democ- 
 racy, this democratic plan must be ready for the day 
 
122 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTIOJST 
 
 when the German Junker is beaten and peace is de- 
 clared. 
 
 The real issue of our time is industrial democracy — 
 we must face that fact. And those in America and the 
 Entente nations who continue to oppose it will do so 
 at their peril. Eortunately, as will be shown, that ele- 
 ment of our population which may be designated as do- 
 mestic Junkers is capable of being influenced by con- 
 temporary currents of thought, is awakening to the real- 
 ization of social conditions deplorable and dangerous. 
 Prosperity and power had made them blind and arro- 
 gant. Their enthusiasm for the war was, however, 
 genuine; the sacrifices they are making are changing 
 and softening them; but as yet they can scarcely be 
 expected, as a class, to rejoice over the revelation — just 
 beginning to dawn upon their minds — that victory for 
 the Allies spells the end of privilege. Their conception 
 of democracy remains archaic, while wealth is inher- 
 ently conservative. Those who possess it in America 
 have as a rule received an education in terms of an 
 obsolete economics, of the thought of an age gone by. 
 It is only within the past few years that our colleges 
 and universities have begun to teach modern economics, 
 social science and psycholog}^ — and this in the face of 
 opposition from trustees. Successful business men, as 
 a rule, have had neither the time nor the inclination to 
 read books which they regard as visionary, as subver- 
 
THE AMERICAN^ CONTEIBUTION 123 
 
 sive to an order bj which they have profited. And that 
 some Americans are fools, and have been dazzled in 
 Europe by the glamour of a privilege not attainable at 
 home, is a deplorable yet indubitable fact. These have 
 little sympathy with democracy; they have even been 
 heard to declare that we have no right to dictate to an- 
 other nation, even an enemy nation, what form of gov- 
 ernment it shall assume. We have no right to demand, 
 when peace comes, that the negotiations must be with 
 the representatives of the German people. These are 
 they who deplore the absence among us of a tradition of 
 monarchy, since the American people "should have 
 something to look up to." But this state of mind, 
 which needs no comment, is comparatively rare, and 
 represents an extreme. We are not lacking, however, 
 in the type of conservative who, innocent of a knowl- 
 edge of psychology, insists that '' human nature cannot 
 be changed,'' and that the " survival of the fittest " is the 
 law of life, yet these would deny Darwin if he were a 
 contemporary. They reject the idea that society can 
 be organized by intelligence, and war ended by eliminat- 
 ing its causes from the social order. On the contrary 
 they cling to the orthodox contention that war is a neces- 
 sary and salutary thing, and proclaim that the American 
 fibre was growing weak and flabby from luxury and 
 peace, curiously ignoring the fact that their own eco- 
 nomic class, — the small percentage of our population 
 
1-24: THE AMERICAX COXTRIBFTIOX 
 
 owning sixty per cent, of the wealth of the country, and 
 ^Yhioh therefore should be most debilitated by luxury, 
 was most eager for war, aud since war has been declared 
 has most amply proved its oouragv and fighting quality. 
 This, however, and other evidences of the patriotic sac- 
 rifices of those of our oountrymen who possess wealth, 
 prove that they are still Americans, and encourages the 
 hope and belief that as .Vmericans they ultimately will 
 do their share toward a democratic solution of tlio prob- 
 lem of society. Alany of them are capable of vision, 
 and are beginning to see the light today. 
 
 In America we succeeded in eliminating hereditary 
 power, in obtaining a large measure of political liberty, 
 only to see the rise of an economic power, and the con- 
 sequent loss of economic liberty. The industrial devel- 
 opment of the United States was of course a necessary 
 and desirable thing, but the economic doctrine which 
 formed the basis of Aiuoricau institutions proved to be 
 unsuited to industrialism, and introduced unforeseen 
 evils that were a serious menace to the Kepublic. An 
 individualistic ecoiiomic philosophy worked admirably 
 while there was ample land for the pioneer, equality of 
 opportunity to satisfy the individual initiative of the 
 enterprising. But what is known as industrialism 
 brought in its train fear and favour, privilege and pov- 
 ertv, slums, disease, and municipal vice, fostered a too 
 rapid immigi-ation, established in jVinerica a tenant sys- 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION^ 125 
 
 tern alien to our traditions. The conditions which ex- 
 isted before the advent of industrialism are admirably 
 pictured, for instance, in the autobiography of Mr. 
 Charles Francis Adams, when he describes his native 
 town of Quincy in the first half of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury. In those early communities, poverty was negli- 
 gible, there was no great contrast between rich and poor ; 
 the artisan, the farmer, the well-to-do merchant met on 
 terms of mutual self-respect, as man to man ; economic 
 class consciousness was non-existent; education was so 
 widespread that European travellers wonderingly com- 
 mented on the fact that we had no " peasantry '' ; and 
 with few exceptions every citizen owned a piece of land 
 and a home. Property, a refuge a man may call his 
 own, and on which he may express his individuality, is 
 essential to happiness and self-respect. Today, less 
 than two thirds of our farmers own their land, while 
 vast numbers of our working men and women possess 
 nothing but the labour of their hands. The designation 
 of labour as " property '' by our courts only served to 
 tighten the bonds, by obstructing for a time the move- 
 ment to decrease the tedious and debilitating hours of 
 contact of the human organism with the machine, — a 
 menace to the future of the race, especially in the case 
 of women and children. If labour is " property,^' 
 wretches driven by economic necessity have indeed only 
 the choice of a change of masters. In addition to the 
 
126 THE america:n^ COIsTTEIBUTION 
 
 manual workers, an army of clerical workers of both 
 sexes likewise became tenants, and dependents who knew 
 not the satisfaction of a real home. 
 
 Such conditions gradually brought about a pro- 
 found discontent, a grouping of classes. Among the 
 comparatively prosperous there was set up a social 
 competition in luxury that was the bane of large and 
 small communities. Skilled labour banded itself into 
 unions, employers organized to oppose them, and the 
 result was a class conflict never contemplated by the 
 founders of the Republic, repugnant to democracy — 
 which by its very nature depends for its existence on 
 the elimination of classes. In addition to this, owing 
 to the unprecedented immigration of ignorant Euro- 
 peans to supply the labour demand, we acquired a sinis- 
 ter proletariat of unskilled economic slaves. Before the 
 war labour discovered its strength ; since the war began, 
 especially in the allied nations with quasi-democratic 
 institutions, it is aware of its power to exert a leverage 
 capable of paralyzing industry for a period sufficient to 
 destroy the chances of victory. The probability of the 
 occurrence of such a calamity depends wholly on whether 
 or not the workman can be convinced that it is his war, 
 for he will not exert himself to perpetuate a social order 
 in which he has lost faith, even though he now obtains 
 a considerable increase in wages. Agreements entered 
 into with the government by union leaders will not hold 
 
THE AMERICA:^ CO]^TRIBUTION 127 
 
 him if at any time he fails to be satisfied that the present 
 world conflict will not result in a greater social justice. 
 This fact has been demonstrated by what is known as 
 the ^' shop steward " movement in England, where the 
 workers repudiated the leaders' agreements and every- 
 where organized local strikes. And in America, the un- 
 skilled workers are largely outside of the unions. 
 
 The workman has a natural and laudable desire to 
 share more fully in the good things of life. And it is 
 coming to be recognized that material prosperity, up to 
 a certain point, is the foundation of mental and spiritual 
 welfare: clean and comfortable surroundings, beauty, 
 rational amusements, opportunity for a rational satis- 
 faction of the human instincts are essential to content- 
 ment and progress. The individual, of course, must be 
 enlightened; and local labour unions, recognizing this, 
 are spending considerable sums all over the country on 
 schools to educate their members. If a workman is a 
 profiteer, he is more to be excused than the business 
 profiteer, against whom his anger is directed ; if he is a 
 spendthrift, prodigality is a natural consequence of 
 rapid acquisition. We have been a nation of spend- 
 thrifts. 
 
 A failure to grasp the psychology of the worker in- 
 volves disastrous consequences. A discussion as to 
 whether or not his attitude is unpatriotic and selfish is 
 futile. No more profound mistake could be made than 
 
128 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 to attribute to any element of the population motives 
 wholly base. Human nature is neither all black nor 
 all white, yet is capable of supreme sacrifices when ade- 
 quately appealed to. What we must get into our minds 
 is the fact that a social order that insured a large meas- 
 ure of democracy in the early days of the Republic 
 is inadequate to meet modern industrial conditions. 
 Higher wages, material prosperity alone will not suf- 
 fice to satisfy aspirations for a fuller self-realization, 
 once the method by which these aspirations can be 
 gained is glimpsed. For it cannot be too often repeated 
 that the unquenchable conflicts are those waged for 
 ideas and not dollars. These are tinged with religious 
 emotion. 
 
 IV 
 
 Mr. Wilson's messages to the American people and 
 to the world have proclaimed a new international order, 
 a League of Democracies. And in a recent letter to 
 New Jersey Democrats we find him warning his party, 
 or more properly the nation, of the domestic social 
 changes necessarily flowing from his international pro- 
 gram. While rightly resolved to prosecute the war on 
 the battle lines to the utmost limit of American re- 
 sources, he points out that the true significance of the 
 conflict lies in " revolutionary change." " Economic 
 and social forces," he says, " are being released upon 
 
THE AMEKICAN CONTEIBUTIOlSr 129 
 
 the world, whose effect no political seer dare to con- 
 jecture." And we " must search our hearts through 
 and through and make them ready for the birth of a 
 new day — a day we hope and believe of greater oppor- 
 tunity and greater prosperity for the average mass of 
 struggling men and women.'' He recognizes that the 
 next great step in the development of democracy — 
 which the war must bring about — is the emancipation 
 of labour; to use his own phrase, the redemption of 
 masses of men and women from " economic serfdom." 
 " The old party slogans," he declares, " will mean noth- 
 ing to the future." 
 
 Judging from this announcement, the President seems 
 prepared to condemn boldly all the rotten timbers of 
 the social structure that have outlived their usefulness 
 — a position that hitherto no responsible politician has 
 dared to take. Politicians, on the contrary, have re- 
 vered the dead wood, have sought to shore the old tim- 
 bers for their own purposes. But so far as any party 
 is concerned, Mr. Wilson stands alone. Both of the 
 two great parties, the Republican and the Democratic, 
 in order to make a show of keeping abreast of the times, 
 have merely patched their plajtforms with the new ideas. 
 The Socialist Party in the United States is relatively 
 small, is divided against itself, and has given no evi- 
 dence of a leadership of broad sanity and vision. It 
 is fortunate we have been spared in this country the 
 
130 THE AMEEICAN C0]N"TEIBUTI0:N' 
 
 formation of a political labour party, because such a 
 party would have been composed of manual workers 
 alone, and hence would have tended further to develop 
 economic class consciousness, to crystallize class antag- 
 onisms. Today, however, neither the Republican nor 
 the Democratic party represents the great issue of the 
 times; the cleavage between them is wholly artificial. 
 The formation of a Liberal Party, with a platform 
 avowedly based on modern social science, has become 
 essential. Such a party, to be in harmony with our 
 traditions and our creed, to arrest in our democracy the 
 process of class stratification which threatens to destroy 
 it, must not draw its members from the ranks of manual 
 labour alone, but from all elements of our population. 
 It should contain all the liberal professions, and clerks 
 and shopkeepers, as well as manual workers; adminis- 
 trators, and even those employers who have become con- 
 vinced that our present economic system does not sufiice 
 to meet the needs of the day. In short, membership in 
 such a party, as far as possible, should not be based 
 upon occupation or economic status, but on an honest 
 difference of view from that of the conservative oppo- 
 sition. This would be a distinctly American solution. 
 In order to form such a party a campaign of education 
 will be necessary. For today Mr. Wilson's strength is 
 derived from the independent vote representing the 
 faith of the people as a whole; but the majority of those 
 
THE AMERICAN C0:^TRIBUTI01T 131 
 
 who support the President, while they ardently desire 
 the abolition in the world of absolute monarchy, of 
 militarism and commercial imperialism, while they are 
 anxious that this war shall expedite and not retard the 
 social reforms in which they are interested, have as yet 
 but a vague conception of the social order which these 
 reforms imply. 
 
 It marks a signal advance in democracy when liberal 
 opinion in any nation turns for guidance and support 
 to a statesman of another nation. No clearer sign of 
 the times could be desired than the fact that our Amer- 
 ican President has suddenly become the liberal leader 
 of the world. The traveller in France, and especially 
 in Britain, meets on all sides striking evidence of this. 
 In these countries, until America's entrance into the 
 war, liberals had grown more and more dissatisfied 
 with the failure of their governments to define in demo- 
 cratic terms the issue of the conflict, had resented the 
 secret inter-allied compacts, savouring of imperialism 
 and containing the germs of future war. They are now 
 looking across the Atlantic for leadership. In Prance 
 M. Albert Thomas declared that Woodrow Wilson had 
 given voice to the aspirations of his party, while a prom- 
 inent Liberal in England announced in a speech that it 
 had remained for the American President to express the 
 will and purpose of the British people. The new Brit- 
 ish Labour Party and the Inter- Allied Labour and So- 
 
132 THE AMERICAN^ C0:N'TRIBUTI0N 
 
 cialist Conferences have adopted Mr. Wilson's program 
 and have made use of his striking phrases. But we 
 have between America and Britain this difference: in 
 America the President stands virtually alone, without 
 a party behind him representing his views; in Britain 
 the general democratic will of the nation is now being 
 organized, but has obtained as yet no spokesman in the 
 government. 
 
 Extraordinary sjTuptomatic phenomena have oc- 
 curred in Russia as well as in Britain. In Russia the 
 rebellion of an awakening people against an age-long 
 tyranny has almost at once leaped to the issue of the 
 day, taken on the complexion of a struggle for industrial 
 democracy. Whether the Germans shall be able to ex- 
 ploit the country, bring about a reaction and restore 
 for a time monarchical institutions depends largely upon 
 the fortunes of the war. In Russia there is revolution, 
 with concomitant chaos ; but in Britain there is evolu- 
 tion, an orderly attempt of a people long accustomed 
 to progress in self-government to establish a new social 
 order, peacefully and scientifically, and in accordance 
 with a traditional political procedure. 
 
 The recent development of the British Labour Party, 
 although of deep significance to Americans, has taken 
 place almost without comment in this country. It was 
 formally established in 1900, and was then composed 
 of manual workers alone. In 1906, out of 50 candi- 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 133 
 
 dates at the polls, 39 were elected to Parliament; in 
 1910, 42 were elected. The Parliamentary Labour 
 Party, so called, has now been amalgamated with four 
 and a half millions of Trade Unionists, and with the 
 three and a half millions of members of the Co-operative 
 Wholesale Society and the Co-operative Union. Al- 
 lowing for duplication of membership, these three or- 
 ganizations — according to Mr. Sidney Webb — prob- 
 ably include two fifths of the population of the United 
 Kingdom. " So great an aggregation of working class 
 organizations,'' he says, " has never come shoulder to 
 shoulder in any country." Other smaller societies and 
 organizations are likewise embraced, including the So- 
 cialists. And now that the suffrage has been extended, 
 provision is made for the inclusion of women. The new 
 party is organizing in from three to four hundred con- 
 stituencies, and at the next general election is not un- 
 likely to gain control of the political balance of power. 
 With the majority of Americans, however, the word 
 " labour '' as designating a party arouses suspicion and 
 distrust. By nature and tradition we are inclined to 
 deplore and oppose any tendency toward the stratifica- 
 tion of class antagonisms — the result of industrial dis- 
 content — into political groups. The British tradition 
 is likewise hostile to such a tendency. But in Britain 
 the industrial ferment has gone much further than with 
 us, and such a result was inevitable. By taking advan- 
 
134 THE ameeica:^ co:n'tkibution 
 
 tage of the British experience, of the closer ties now 
 being knit between the two democracies, we may in 
 America be spared a stage which in Britain was neces- 
 sary. Indeed, the program of the new British Labour 
 Party seems to point to a distinctly American solution, 
 one in harmony with the steady growth of Anglo-Saxon 
 democracy. For it is now announced that the word 
 " labour/' as applied to the new party, does not mean 
 manual labour alone, but also mental labour. The Brit- 
 ish unions have gradually developed and placed in 
 power leaders educated in social science, who have now 
 come into touch with the intellectual leaders of the 
 United Kingdom, with the sociologists, economists, and 
 social scientists. The surprising and encouraging re- 
 sult of such association is the announcement that the 
 new Labour Party is today publicly thrown open to all 
 workers, both by hand and by brain, with the object of 
 securing for these the full fruits of their industry. This 
 means the inclusion of physicians, professors, writers, 
 architects, engineers, and inventors, of lawyers who no 
 longer regard their profession as a bulwark of the status 
 quo; of clerks, of administrators of the type evolved by 
 the war, who indeed have gained their skill under the 
 old order but who now in a social spirit are dedicating 
 their gifts to the common weal, organizing and direct- 
 ing vast enterprises for their governments. In short, 
 all useful citizens who make worthy contributions — as 
 
THE AMEEICA¥ COINTRIBUTIOiN' 135 
 
 distinguished from parasites, profiteers, and drones, — 
 are invited to be members ; there is no class distinction 
 here. The fortunes of such a party are, of course, de- 
 pendent upon the military success of the allied armies 
 and navies. But it has defined the kind of democracy 
 the Allies are fighting for, and thus has brought about 
 an unqualified endorsement of the war by those ele- 
 ments of the population which hitherto have felt the 
 issue to be imperialistic and vague rather than demo- 
 cratic and clear cut. President Wilson's international 
 program is approved of and elaborated. 
 
 The Report on Reconstruction of the new British 
 Labour Party is perhaps the most important political 
 document presented to the world since the Declaration 
 of Independence. And like the Declaration, it is writ- 
 ten in the pure English that alone gives the high emo- 
 tional quality of sincerity. The phrases in which it 
 tersely describes its objects are admirable. " What is 
 to be reconstructed after the war is over is not this or 
 that government department, this or that piece of social 
 machinery, but Society itself." There is to be a sys- 
 tematic approach towards a '' healthy equality of ma- 
 terial circumstance for every person born into the world, 
 and not an enforced dominion over subject nations, 
 subject colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex." In 
 industry as well as in government the social order is 
 to be based " on that equal freedom, that general con- 
 
136 THE AMERICA:N' CONTRIBUTIOIsr 
 
 scioiisness of consent, and that widest participation in 
 power, both economic and political, which is charac- 
 teristic of democracy." But all this, it should be noted, 
 is not to be achieved in a year or two of " feverish re- 
 construction '' ; ^' each brick that the Labour Party helps 
 to lay shall go to erect the structure it intends and no 
 other." 
 
 In considering the main features of this program, 
 one must have in mind whether these are a logical pro- 
 jection and continuation of the Anglo-Saxon democratic 
 tradition, or whether they constitute an absolute break 
 with that tradition. The only valid reason for the 
 adoption of such a progi'am in America would be, of 
 course, the restoration of some such equality of oppor- 
 tunity and economic freedom as existed in our Republic 
 before we became an industrial nation. ^^ The first con- 
 dition of democracy," — to quote again from the pro- 
 gram, " is effective personal freedom." 
 
 What is called the " Universal Enforcement of the 
 [N'ational Minimum " contemplates the extension of laws 
 already on the statute books in order to prevent the 
 extreme degradation of the standard of life brought 
 about by the old economic system under industrialism. 
 A living minimum wage is to be established. The Brit- 
 ish Labour Party intends " to secure to every member 
 of the community, in good times and bad alike ... all 
 the requisites of healthy life and worthy citizenship." 
 
THE AMERICA:^' CONTRIBUTION 137 
 
 After the war there is to be no cheap labour market, 
 nor are the millions of workers and soldiers to fall into 
 the clutches of charity; but it shall be a national obli- 
 gation to provide each of these with work according to 
 his ca|)acitj. In order to maintain the demand for la- 
 bour at a uniform level, the government is to provide 
 public works. The population is to be rehoused in 
 suitable dwellings, both in rural districts and town 
 slums ; new and more adequate schools and training col- 
 leges are to be inaugurated ; land is to be reclaimed and 
 afforested, and gradually brought under common owner- 
 ship; railways and canals are to be reorganized and 
 nationalized, mines and electric power systems. One 
 of the significant proposals under this head is that which 
 demands the retention of the centralization of the pur- 
 chase of raw materials brought about by the war. 
 
 In order to accomplish these objects there must be 
 a " Revolution in National Einance." The present 
 method of raising funds is denounced ; and it is pointed 
 out that only one quarter of the colossal expenditure 
 made necessary by the war has been raised by taxation, 
 and that the three quarters borrowed at onerous rates is 
 sure to be a burden on the nation's future. The cap- 
 ital needed, when peace comes, to ensure a happy and 
 contented democracy must be procured without en- 
 croaching on the minimum standard of life, and with- 
 out hampering production. Indirect taxation must 
 
138 THE AMERICAN C0:N"TRIBUTI0:N' 
 
 therefore be concentrated on those luxuries of which it 
 is desirable that the consumption be discouraged. The 
 steadily rising unearned increment of urban and min- 
 eral land ought, by appropriate direct taxation, to be 
 brought into the public exchequer ; " the definite teach- 
 ings of economic science are no longer to be disre- 
 garded." Hence incomes are to be taxed above the 
 necessary cost of family maintenance, private fortunes 
 during life and at death; while a special capital levy 
 must be made to pay off a substantial portion of the 
 national debt. 
 
 " The Democratic Control of Industry '' contem- 
 plates the progressive elimination of the private cap- 
 italist and the setting free of all who work by hand and 
 brain for the welfare of all. 
 
 The Surplus Wealth is to be expended for the Com- 
 mon Good. That which Carlyle designates as the " in- 
 ward spiritual/' in contrast to the " outward econom- 
 ical/' is also to be provided for. " Society/' says the 
 document, " like the individual, does not live by bread 
 alone, does not exist only for perpetual wealth produc- 
 tion." Eirst of all, there is to be education according 
 to the highest modern standard ; and along with educa- 
 tion, the protection and advancement of the public 
 health, meiis sana in corpore sano. While large sums 
 must be set aside, not only for original research in 
 every branch of knowledge, but for the promotion of 
 
THE AMERICA]^ C0NTRIBUTI0:N' 139 
 
 music, literature, and fine art, upon which " any real 
 development of civilization fundamentally depends." 
 
 In regard to the British Empire, the Labour Party 
 urges self-government for any people, whatever its col- 
 our, proving itself capable, and the right of that peo- 
 ple to the proceeds of its own toil upon the resources 
 of its territory. An unequivocal stand is taken for the 
 establishment, as a part of the treaty of peace, of a 
 Universal Society of Nations ; and recognizing that the 
 future progress of democracy depends upon co-opera- 
 tion and fellowship between liberals of all countries, 
 the maintenance of intimate relationships is advocated 
 with liberals oversea. 
 
 Einally, a scientific investigation of each succeed- 
 ing problem in government is insisted upon, and a much 
 more rapid dissemination among the people of the sci- 
 ence that exists. " A plutocratic party may choose to 
 ignore science, but no labour party can hope to main- 
 tain its position unless its proposals are, in fact, the 
 outcome of the best political science of its time." 
 
 There are, it will be seen, some elements in the pro- 
 gram of the new British Labour Party apparently at 
 variance with American and English institutions, tra- 
 ditions, and ideas. We are left in doubt, for instance. 
 
140 THE AMERICAI^ CONTRIBUTION^ 
 
 in regard to its attitude toward private property. The 
 instinct for property is probably innate in humanity, 
 and American conservatism in this regard is, accord- 
 ing to certain modern economists, undoubtedly sound. 
 A man should be permitted to acquire at least as much 
 property as is required for the expression of his per- 
 sonality ; such a wise limitation, also, would abolish 
 the evil known as absentee ownership. Again, there 
 will arise in many minds the question whether the funds 
 for the plan of National finance outlined in the pro- 
 gram may be obtained without seriously deranging the 
 economic system of the nation and of the world. The 
 older school denounces the program as Utopian. On 
 the other hand, economists of the modern school who 
 have been consulted have declared it practical. It is 
 certain that before the war began it would not have 
 been thought possible to raise the billions which in four 
 years have been expended on sheer destruction; and 
 one of our saddest reflections today must be of regret 
 that a small portion of these billions which have gone 
 to waste could not have been expended for the very pur- 
 poses outlined — education, public health, the advance- 
 ment of science and art, public buildings, roads and 
 parks, and the proper housing of populations! It is 
 also dawning upon us, as a result of new practices 
 brought about by the war, that our organization of in- 
 dustry was happy-go-lucky, ineflScient «nd wasteful, and 
 
THE AMERICAIs^ CONTRIBUTION 141 
 
 that a more scientific and economical organization is 
 imperative. Under such a new system it may well be, 
 as modern economists claim, that we shall have an 
 ample surplus for the Common Good. 
 
 The chief objection to a National or Democratic Con- 
 trol of Industry has been that it would tend to create 
 vast political machines and thus give the politicians 
 in office a nefarious power. It is not intended here to 
 attempt a refutation of this contention. The remedy 
 lies in a changed attitude of the employe and the citi- 
 zen toward government, and the fact that such an atti- 
 tude is now developing is not subject to absolute proof. 
 It may be said, however, that no greater menace to 
 democracy could have arisen than the one we seem 
 barely to have escaped — the control of politics and 
 government by the capitalistic interests of the nation. 
 What seems very clear is that an evolutionary drift to- 
 ward the national control of industry has for many 
 years been going on, and that the war has tremendously 
 speeded up the tendency. Government has stepped in 
 to protect the consumer of necessities from the profiteer, 
 and is beginning to set a limit upon profits; has regu- 
 lated exports and imports; established a national ship- 
 ping corporation and merchant marine, and entered into 
 other industries ; it has taken over the railroads at least 
 for the duration of the war, and may take over coal 
 mines, and metal resources, as well as the forests and 
 
142 THE AMEEICAN C0:N'TRIBUTI0N 
 
 water power; it now contemplates the regulation of 
 wages. 
 
 The exigency caused by the war, moreover, has trans- 
 formed the former practice of international intercourse. 
 Co-operation has replaced competition. We are reor- 
 ganizing and regulating our industries, our business, 
 making sacrifices and preparing to make more sacri- 
 fices in order to meet the needs of our Allies, now that 
 they are sore beset. Eor a considerable period after 
 the war is ended, they will require our aid. We shall 
 be better off than any other of the belligerent nations, 
 and we shall therefore be called upon to practice, during 
 the years of reconstruction, a continuation of the same 
 policy of helpfulness. Indeed, for the nations of the 
 world to spring, commercially speaking, at one an- 
 other's throats would be suicidal even if it were possible. 
 Mr. Sidney Webb has thrown a flood of light npon the 
 conditions likely to prevail. For example, speculative 
 export trade is being replaced by collective importing, 
 bringing business more directly under the control of the 
 consumer. This has been done by co-operative socie- 
 ties, by municipalities and states, in Switzerland, 
 France, the United Kingdom, and in Germany. The 
 Co-operative Wholesale Society of Great Britain, act- 
 ing on behalf of three and a half million families, buys 
 two and a half million dollars of purchases annually. 
 And the Entente nations, in order to avoid competitive 
 
THE AMERICAlSr COISTTRIBUTIO]^ 143 
 
 bidding, are buying collectively from us, not only muni- 
 tions of war, but other supplies, while the British Gov- 
 ernment has made itself the sole importer of such neces- 
 sities as wheat, sugar, tea, refrigerated meat, wool, and 
 various metals. The French and Italian governments, 
 and also certain neutral states, have done likewise. A 
 purchasing commission for all the Allies and America 
 is now proposed. 
 
 After the war, as an inevitable result, for one thing, 
 of transforming some thirty million citizens into sol- 
 diers, of engaging a like number of men and women at 
 enhanced wages on the manufacture of the requisites of 
 war, Mr. Webb predicts a world shortage not only in 
 wheat and foodstuffs but in nearly all important raw 
 materials. These will be required for the resumption 
 of manufacture. In brief, international co-operation 
 will be the only means of salvation. The policy of in- 
 ternational trade implied by world shortage is not 
 founded upon a law of " supply and demand." The 
 necessities cannot be permitted to go to those who can 
 afford to pay the highest prices, but to those who need 
 them most. For the " free play of economic forces " 
 would mean famine on a large scale, because the richer 
 nations and the richer classes within the nations might 
 be fully supplied; but to the detriment and ruin of 
 the world the poorer nations and the poorer classes would 
 be starved. Therefore governments are already begin- 
 
144 THE AMEKICA]^ CONTRIBUTION 
 
 ning to give consideration to a new organization of in- 
 ternational trade for at least three years after the war. 
 Now if this organization produce, as it may produce, 
 a more desirable civilization and a happier world- 
 order, we are not likely entirely to go back — especially 
 in regard to commodities which are necessities — to a 
 competitive system. The principle of " priority of 
 need '' will supersede the law of " supply and demand." 
 And the organizations built up during the war, if they 
 prove efficient, will not be abolished. Hours of labour 
 and wages in the co-operative League of Nati6ns will 
 gradually be equalized, and tariffs will become things of 
 the past. " The axiom will be established," says Mr. 
 Webb, "that the resources of every country must be 
 held for the benefit not only of its own people but of the 
 world. . . . The world shortage will, for years to come, 
 make import duties look both oppressive and ridicu- 
 lous." 
 
 So much may be said for the principle of Democratic 
 Control. In spite of all theoretical opposition, circum- 
 stances and evolution apparently point to its establish- 
 ment. A system that puts a premium on commercial 
 greed seems no longer possible. 
 
 The above comments, based on the drift of political 
 practice during the past decade and a half, may be 
 taken for what they are worth. Predictions are pre- 
 carious. The average American will be inclined to 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 145 
 
 regard the program of the new British Labour Party 
 as the embodiment of what he vaguely calls Socialism, 
 and to him the very word is repugnant. Although he 
 may never have heard of Marx, it is the Marxian con- 
 ception that comes to his mind, and this implies coer- 
 cion, a government that constantly interferes with his 
 personal liberty, that compels him to tasks for which 
 he has no relish. But your American, and your Eng- 
 lishman, for that matter, is inherently an individualist : 
 he wants as little government as is compatible with any 
 government at all. And the descendants of the con- 
 tinental Europeans who flock to our shores are Anglo- 
 Saxonized, also become by environment and education 
 individualists. The great importance of preserving 
 this individualism, this spirit in our citizens of self- 
 reliance, this suspicion against too much interference 
 with personal liberty, must at once be admitted. And 
 any scheme for a social order that tends to eliminate 
 and destroy it should by Americans be summarily re- 
 jected. 
 
 The question of supreme interest to us, therefore, is 
 whether the social order implied in the British pro- 
 gram is mainly in the nature of a development of, or a 
 break with, the Anglo-Saxon democratic tradition. The 
 program is derived from an English source. It is based 
 on what is known as modern social science, which has 
 as its ultimate sanction the nature of the human mind 
 
146 THE AMERICAJST CONTEIBUTIOI^ 
 
 as revealed by psychology. A consideration of the 
 principles underlying this proposed social order may 
 prove that it is essentially — if perhaps paradoxically 
 — individualistic, a logical evolution of institutions 
 which had their origin in the Magna Charta. Our 
 Declaration of Independence proclaimed that every citi- 
 zen had the right to " life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
 happiness," which means the opportunity to achieve 
 the greatest self-development and self-realization. The 
 theory is that each citizen shall find his place, according 
 to his gifts and abilities, and be satisfied therewith. We 
 may discover that this is precisely what social science, 
 in an industrial age, and by spiritualizing human effort, 
 aims to achieve. We may find that the appearance of 
 such a program as that of the British Labour Party, 
 supported as it is by an imposing proportion of the 
 population of the United Kingdom, marks a further 
 step, not only in the advance of social science and de- 
 mocracy, but also of Christianity. 
 
 I mention Christianity, not for controversial or 
 apologetic reasons, but because it has been the leaven 
 of our western civilization ever since the fall of the 
 Roman Empire. Its constant influence has been to 
 soften and spiritualize individual and national relation- 
 ships. The bitter controversies, wars, and persecutions 
 which have raged in its name are utterly alien to its 
 being. And that the present war is now being fought 
 
THE AMERICAISr CONTRIBUTIO:^ 147 
 
 by the Allies in the hope of putting an end to war, and 
 is thus in the true spirit of Christianity, marks an in- 
 comparable advance. 
 
 Almost up to the present day, both in our concep- 
 tion and practice of Christianity, we have largely neg- 
 lected its most important elements. Christian ortho- 
 doxy, as Auguste Sabatier points out, is largely derived 
 from the older supernatural religions. The preserva- 
 tive shell of dogma and superstition has been cracking, 
 and is now ready to burst, and the social teaching of 
 Jesus would seem to be the kernel from which has 
 sprung modern democracy, modern science, and modern 
 religion — a trinity and unity. 
 
 For nearly two thousand years orthodoxy has in- 
 sisted that the social principles of Christianity are im- 
 practical. And indeed, until the present day, they have 
 been so. Physical science, by enormously accelerating 
 the means of transportation and communication, has so 
 contracted the world as to bring into communion peo- 
 ples and races hitherto far apart ; has made possible an 
 intelligent organization of industry which, for the first 
 time in history, can create a surplus ample to maintain 
 in comfort the world's population. But this demands 
 the will to co-operation, which is a Christian principle 
 — a recognition of the brotherhood of man. Further- 
 more, physical science has increased the need for world 
 peace and international co-operation because the terri- 
 
148 THE AMEKICAK C0NTEIBUTI0:N' 
 
 tories of all nations are now subject to swift and terrible 
 invasion by modern instruments of destruction, while 
 the future submarine may sweep commerce from the 
 seas. 
 
 Again, orthodoxy declares that human nature is in- 
 herently " bad," while true Christianity, endorsed by 
 psychology, proclaims it inherently " good," which 
 means that, properly guided, properly educated, it is 
 creative and contributive rather than destructive. No 
 more striking proof of this fact can be cited than the 
 modern experiment in prison reform in which hardened 
 convicts, when " given a chance," frequently become 
 useful citizens. Unjust and unintelligent social condi- 
 tions are the chief factors in making criminals. 
 
 Our most modern system of education, of which Pro- 
 fessor John Dewey is the chief protagonist, is based 
 upon the assertions of psychology that human nature is 
 essentially " good " — creative. Every normal child is 
 supposed to have a special ^' distinction " or gift, which 
 it is the task of the educator to discover. This distinc- 
 tion found, the child achieves happiness in creation and 
 contribution. Self-realization demands knowledge and 
 training: the doing of right is not a negative but a 
 positive act; it is not without significance that the 
 Greek word for sin is literally " missing the mark." 
 Christianity emphasizes above all else the worth of the 
 individual, yet recognizes that the individual can de- 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 149 
 
 velop only in society. And if the individual be of 
 great worth, this worth must be by society developed 
 to its utmost. Universal suffrage is a logical corol- 
 lary. 
 
 Universal suffrage, however, implies individual judg- 
 ment, which means that the orthodox principle of ex- 
 ternal authority is out of place both in Christianity 
 and democracy. The Christian theory is that none shall 
 intervene between a man's Maker and himself; de- 
 mocracy presupposes that no citizen shall accept his be- 
 liefs 'and convictions from others, but shall make up 
 his own mind and act accordingly. Openmindedness 
 is the first requisite of science and democracy. 
 
 What has been deemed, however, in Christianity the 
 most unrealizable ideal is that which may be called 
 pacifism — to resist not evil, to turn the other cheek, 
 to agree with your adversary while you are in the way 
 with him. " I come not," said Jesus, in one of those 
 paradoxical statements hitherto so difficult to under- 
 stand, " I come not to bring peace, but a sword." It 
 is indeed what we are fighting for — peace. But we 
 believe today, more strongly than ever before, as de- 
 mocracy advances, as peoples tend to gain more and 
 more control over their governments, that even this may 
 not be an unrealizable ideal. Democracies, intent on 
 self-realization and self-development, do not desire war. 
 
 The problem of social science, then, appears to be to 
 
160 THE AMEKICAIT CONTKIBUTION 
 
 organize human society on the principles and ideals of 
 Christianity. But in view of the fact that the trend 
 of evolution is towards the elimination of commercial 
 competition, the question which must seriously concern 
 us today is — What in the future shall be the spur 
 of individual initiative ? Orthodoxy and even demo- 
 cratic practice have hitherto taken it for granted — in 
 spite of the examples of highly socialized men, bene- 
 factors of society — that the average citizen will bestir 
 himself only for material gain. And it must be ad- 
 mitted that competition of some sort is necessary for 
 self-realization, that human nature demands a prize. 
 There can be no self-sacrifice without a corresponding 
 self-satisfaction. The answer is that in the theory of 
 democracy, as well as in that of Christianity, individual- 
 ism and co-operation are paradoxically blended. For 
 competition, Christianity substitutes emulation. And 
 with democracy, it declares that mankind itself can 
 gradually be raised towards the level of the choice in- 
 dividual who does not labour for gain, but in behalf of 
 society. For the process of democracy is not degrading, 
 but lifting. Like Christianity, democracy demands 
 faith, and has as its inspiring interpretation of civiliza- 
 tion evolution towards a spiritual goal. Yet the kind 
 of faith required is no longer a blind faith, but one 
 founded on sane and carefully evolved theories. De- 
 mocracy has become a scientific experiment. 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 151 
 
 In this connection, as one notably inspired by emu- 
 lation, by the joy of creative work and service, the 
 medical profession comes first to mind. The finer 
 element in this profession is constantly increasing in 
 numbers, growing more and more influential, making 
 life less easy for the quack, the vendor of nostrums, 
 the commercial proprietor of the bogus medical college. 
 The doctor who uses his talents for gain is frowned 
 upon by those of his fellow practitioners whose opin- 
 ion really counts. Respected physicians in our cities 
 give much of their time to teaching, animating students 
 with their own spirit; and labour long hours, for no 
 material return, in the clinics of the poor. And how 
 often, in reading our newspapers, do we learn that some 
 medical scientist, by patient work, and often at the 
 risk of life and health, has triumphed over a scourge 
 which has played havoc with humanity throughout the 
 ages! Typhoid has been conquered, and infant paral- 
 ysis; gangrene and tetanus, which have taken such tall 
 of the wounded in Flanders and France; yellow fever 
 has been stamped out in the tropics ; hideous lesions are 
 now healed by a system of drainage. The very list of 
 these achievements is bewildering, and latterly we are 
 given hope of the prolongation of life itself. Here in 
 truth are Christian deeds multiplied by science, made 
 possible by a growing knowledge of and mastery over 
 Nature. 
 
152 THE AMERICA:Nr CONTRIBUTION 
 
 Such men by virtue of their high mission are above 
 the vicious social and commercial competition poison- 
 ing the lives of so many of their fellow citizens. In 
 our democracy they have found their work, and the 
 work is its own reward. They give striking testimony 
 to the theory that absorption in a creative or contribu- 
 tive task is the only source of self-realization. And he 
 has little faith in mankind who shall declare that the 
 medical profession is the only group capable of being 
 socialized, or, rather, of socializing themselves — for 
 such is the true process of democracy. Public opinion 
 should be the leaven. What is possible for the doctor 
 is also possible for the lawyer, for the teacher. In a 
 democracy, teaching should be the most honoured of 
 the professions, and indeed once was, — before the 
 advent of industrialism, when it gradually fell into 
 neglect, — occasionally into deplorable submission to 
 the possessors of wealth. Yet a wage disgracefully 
 low, hardship, and even poverty have not hindered men 
 of ability from entering it in increasing numbers, re- 
 nouncing ease and luxuries. The worth of the contri- 
 butions of our professors to civilization has been in- 
 estimable; and fortunately signs are not lacking that 
 we are coming to an appreciation of the value of the 
 expert in government, who is replacing the panderer 
 and the politician. A new solidarity of teaching pro- 
 fessional opinion, together with a growing realization 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 153 
 
 by our public of the primary importance of the calling, 
 is tending to emancipate it, to establish it in its rightful 
 place. 
 
 Nor are our engineers without their ideal. A Goe- 
 thals did not cut an isthmus in two for gain. 
 
 Industrialism, with its concomitant " corporation " 
 practice, has undoubtedly been detrimental to the legal 
 profession, since it has resulted in large fees; in the 
 accumulation of vast fortunes, frequently by methods 
 ethically questionable. Grave social injustices have 
 been done, though often in good faith, since the lawyer, 
 by training and experience, has hitherto been least 
 open to the teachings of the new social science, has 
 been an honest advocate of the system of laissez faire. 
 But to say that the American legal profession is with- 
 out ideals and lacking in the emulative spirit would 
 be to do it a grave injustice. The increasing influence 
 of national and state bar associations evidences a pro- 
 fessional opinion discouraging to the unscrupulous ; 
 while a new evolutionary and more humanitarian con- 
 ception of law is now beginning to be taught, and young 
 men are entering the ranks imbued with this. Legal 
 clinics, like medical clinics, are established for the 
 benefit of those who cannot afford to pay fees, for the 
 protection of the duped from the predatory quack. And 
 it must be said of this profession, which hitherto has 
 held a foremost place in America, that its leaders have 
 
154 THE AMEEICAlSr CONTKIBUTIOIT 
 
 never hesitated to respond to a public call, to sacrifice 
 their practices to serve the nation. Their highest am- 
 bition has even been to attain the Supreme Court, where 
 the salary is a mere pittance compared to what they 
 may earn as private citizens. 
 
 Thus we may review all the groups in the nation, 
 but the most significant transformation of all is taking 
 place within the business group, — where indeed it 
 might be least expected. Even before the war there 
 were many evidences that the emulative spirit in busi- 
 ness had begun to modify the merely competitive, and 
 we had the spectacle of large employers of labour awak- 
 ening to the evils of industrialism, and themselves at- 
 tempting to inaugurate reforms. As in the case of 
 labour, it would be obviously unfair to claim that the 
 employer element was actuated by motives of self-in- 
 terest alone ; nor were their concessions due only to 
 fear. Instances could be cited, if there were space, of 
 voluntary shortening of hours of labour, of raising of 
 wages, when no coercion was exerted either by the labour 
 unions or the state ; and — perhaps to their surprise — 
 employers discovered that such acts were not only hu- 
 mane but profitable ! Among these employers, in fact, 
 may be observed individuals in various stages of en- 
 lightenment, from the few who have educated themselves 
 in social science, who are convinced that the time has 
 come when it is not only practicable but right, who 
 
THE AMERICAN C0:NTRIBUTI0:N" 155 
 
 realize that a new era has dawned; to others who still 
 believe in the old system, who are trying to holster it up 
 by granting concessions, by establishing committees of 
 conference, by giving a voice and often a financial in- 
 terest, but not a vote, in the conduct of the corporation 
 concerned. These are the counterpart, in industry, of 
 sovereigns whose sway has been absolute, whose inten- 
 tions are good, but who hesitate, often from conviction, 
 to grant constitutions. Yet even these are responding 
 in some degree to social currents, though the aggressive 
 struggles of labour may have influenced them, and par- 
 tially opened their eyes. They are far better than 
 their associates who still seek to control the supplies of 
 food and other necessities, whose efficiency is still solely 
 directed, not toward a social end, but toward the amass- 
 ing of large fortunes, and is therefore wasted so far 
 as society is concerned. They do not perceive that by 
 seeking to control prices they merely hasten the tend- 
 ency of government control, for it is better to have 
 government regulation for the benefit of the many than 
 proprietary control, however efficient, for the benefit 
 of the few. 
 
 That a significant change of heart and mind has be- 
 gun to take place amongst capitalists, that the nucleus 
 of a " public opinion " has been formed within an ele- 
 ment which, by the use and wont of business and hab- 
 its of thought might be regarded as least subject to the 
 
156 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 influence of social ideas, is a most hopeful augury. 
 This nascent opinion has begun to operate by shaming 
 unscrupulous and recalcitrant employers into better 
 practices. It would indeed fare ill with democracy if, 
 in such an era, men of large business proved to be lack- 
 ing in democratic initiative, wholly unreceptive and 
 hostile to the gradual introduction of democracy into 
 industry, which means the perpetuation of the Ameri- 
 can Idea. Fortunately, with us, this capitalistic ele- 
 ment is of comparatively recent growth, the majority 
 of its members are essentially Americans; they have 
 risen from small beginnings, and are responsive to a 
 democratic appeal — if that appeal be properly pre- 
 sented. And, as a matter of fact, for many years a 
 leaven had been at work among them ; the truth has been 
 brought home to them that the mere acquisition of 
 wealth brings neither happiness nor self-realization; 
 they have lavished their money on hospitals and uni- 
 versities, clinics, foundations for scientific research, and 
 other gifts of inestimable benefit to the nation and man- 
 kind. Although the munificence was on a Medicean 
 scale, this private charity was in accord with the older 
 conception of democracy, and paved the way for a 
 new order. 
 
 The patriotic and humanitarian motive aroused by 
 the war greatly accelerated the socializing transforma- 
 tion of the business man and the capitalist. We have, 
 
THE AMEKICA:^ contribution 157 
 
 indeed, our profiteers seeking short cuts to luxury and 
 wealth ; but those happily most representative of Amer- 
 ican affairs, including the creative administrators, has- 
 tened to Washington with a willingness to accept any 
 position in which they might be useful, and in numer- 
 ous instances placed at the disposal of the government 
 the manufacturing establishments which, by industry 
 and ability, they themselves had built up. That in 
 thus surrendering the properties for which they were 
 largely responsible they hoped at the conclusion of 
 peace to see restored the status quo ante should not be 
 held against them. Some are now beginning to sur- 
 mise that a complete restoration is impossible; and as 
 a result of their socializing experience, are even won- 
 dering whether it is desirable. These are beginning to 
 perceive that the national and international organiza- 
 tions in the course of construction to meet the demands 
 of the world conflict must form the model for a future 
 social structure ; that the unprecedented pressure caused 
 by the cataclysm is compelling a recrystallization of 
 society in which there must be fewer misfits, in which 
 many more individuals than formerly shall find public 
 or semi-public tasks in accordance with their gifts and 
 abilities. 
 
 It may be argued that war compels socialization, that 
 after the war the world will perforce return to material- 
 istic individualism. But this calamity, terrible above 
 
158 THE AMEKICAlSr CONTEIBUTION 
 
 all others, has warned us of the imperative need of an 
 order that shall be socializing, if we are not to witness 
 the destruction of our civilization itself. Confidence 
 that such an order, thanks to the advancement of sci- 
 ence, is now within our grasp should not be difficult for 
 Americans, once thej have rightly conceived it. We, 
 who have always pinned our faith to ideas, who entered 
 the conflict for an Idea, must be the last to shirk the 
 task, however Herculean, of world reconstruction along 
 the lines of our own professed faith. We cannot be 
 renegades to Democracy. 
 
 Above all things, then, it is essential for us as a 
 people not to abandon our faith in man, our belief that 
 not only the exceptional individual but the majority 
 of mankind can be socialized. What is true of our 
 physicians, our scientists and professional men, our 
 manual workers, is also true of our capitalists and 
 business men. In a more just and intelligent organ- 
 ization of society these will be found willing to admin- 
 ister and improve for the common weal the national 
 resources which formerly they exploited for the bene- 
 fit of themselves and their associates. The social re- 
 sponse, granted the conditions, is innate in humanity, 
 and individual initiative can best be satisfied in social 
 realization. 
 
THE AMEKICA:N^ COKTKIBUTIO]^ 159 
 
 YI 
 
 Universal education is the cornerstone of democracy. 
 And the recog-nition of this fact may be called the great 
 American contribution. But in our society the fullest 
 self-realization depends upon a well balanced knowl- 
 edge of scientific facts, upon a rounded culture. Thus 
 education, properly conceived, is a preparation for in- 
 telligent, ethical, and contented citizenship. Upon the 
 welfare of the individual depends the welfare of all. 
 Without education, free institutions and universal suf- 
 frage are mockeries; semi-learned masses of the popu- 
 lation are at the mercy of scheming politicians, con- 
 troversialists, and pseudo-scientific religionists, and 
 their votes are swayed by prejudice. 
 
 In a materialistic competitive order, success in life 
 depends upon the knack — innate or acquired, and not 
 to be highly rated — of outwitting one's neighbour 
 under the rules of the game — the law; education is 
 merely a cultural leaven within the reach of the com- 
 paratively few who can afford to attend a university. 
 The business college is a more logical institution. In 
 an emulative civilization, however, the problem is to 
 discover and develop in childhood and youth the per- 
 sonal aptitude or gift of as many citizens as possible, 
 in order that they may find self-realization by making 
 
160 THE AMERICAlSr CONTRIBUTION 
 
 their peculiar contribution towards the advancement of 
 society. 
 
 The prevailing system of education, which we have 
 inherited from the past, largely fails to accomplish this. 
 In the first place, it has been authoritative rather than 
 scientific, which is to say that students have been in- 
 duced to accept the statements of teachers and text books, 
 and have not been trained to weigh for themselves their 
 reasonableness and worth ; a principle essentially un- 
 scientific and undemocratic, since it inculcates in the 
 future citizen convictions rather than encourages the 
 habit of openmindedness so necessary for democratic 
 citizenship. For democracy — it cannot be too often 
 repeated — is a dynamic thing, experimental, creative 
 ' in its very essence. No static set of opinions can apply 
 to the constantly changing aspect of affairs. New dis- 
 coveries, which come upon us with such bewildering 
 rapidity, are apt abruptly to alter social and industrial 
 conditions, while morals and conventions are no longer 
 absolute. Sudden crises threaten the stability of na- 
 tions and civilizations. Safety lies alone in the ability 
 to go forward, to progress. Psychology teaches us that 
 if authoritative opinions, convictions, or " complexes '' 
 are stamped upon the plastic brain of the youth they 
 tend to harden, and he is apt to become a Democrat 
 or Republican, an Episcopalian or a Baptist, a free 
 trader or a tariff advocate or a Manchester economist 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 161 
 
 without asking why. Such " complexes " were prob- 
 ably referred to by the celebrated physician who em- 
 phasized the hopelessness of most individuals over forty. 
 And every reformer and forum lecturer knows how 
 difficult it is to convert the average audience of sea- 
 soned adults to a new idea: he finds the most respon- 
 sive groups in the universities and colleges. It is sig- 
 nificant that the ^' educated " adult audiences in clubs 
 and prosperous churches are the least open to conver- 
 sion, because, in the scientific sense, the '^ educated " 
 classes retain complexes, and hence are the least pre- 
 pared to cope with the world as it is today. The Ger- 
 man system, which has been bent upon installing au- 
 thoritative conviction instead of encouraging freedom 
 of thought, should be a warning to us. 
 
 Again, outside of the realm of physical science, our 
 text books have been controversial rather than impar- 
 tial, especially in economics and history; resulting in 
 erroneous and distorted and prejudiced ideas of events, 
 such for instance, as our American Revolution. The 
 day of the controversialist is happily coming to an end, 
 and of the writer who twists the facts of science to suit 
 a world of his own making, or of that of a group with 
 which he is associated. Theory can now be labelled 
 theory, and fact, fact. Impartial and painstaking in- 
 vestigation is the sole method of obtaining truth. 
 
 The old system of education benefited only the com- 
 
162 THE AMERICAN C0NTRIBUTI0:N' 
 
 parativelj few to whose nature and inclination it was 
 adapted. We have need, indeed, of classical scholars, 
 but the majority of men and women are meant for other 
 work; many, by their very construction of mind, are 
 unfitted to become such. And only in the most excep- 
 tional cases are the ancient languages really mastered; 
 a smattering of these, imposed upon the unwilling 
 scholar by a principle opposed to psychology, — a smat- 
 tering from which is derived no use and joy in after 
 life, and which has no connection with individual in- 
 clination — is worse than nothing. Precious time is 
 wasted during the years when the mind is most re- 
 ceptive. While the argument of the old school that 
 discipline can only be inculcated by the imposition of a 
 distasteful task is unsound. As Professor Dewey 
 points out, unless the interest is in some way involved 
 there can be no useful discipline. And how many of 
 our university and high school graduates today are 
 in any sense disciplined ? Stimulated interest alone 
 can overcome the resistance imposed by a difficult task, 
 as any scientist, artist, organizer or administrator 
 knows. Men will discipline themselves to gain a de- 
 sired end. Under the old system of education a few 
 children succeed either because they are desirous of 
 doing well, interested in the game of mental competi- 
 tion ; or else because they contrive to clothe with flesh 
 and blood some subject presented as a skeleton. It is 
 
THE AMEKICAN CONTKIBUTION 163 
 
 not uncommon, indeed, to recognize in later years with 
 astonishment a useful citizen or genius whom at school 
 or college we recall as a dunce or laggard. In our 
 present society, because of archaic methods of educa- 
 tion, the development of such is largely left to chance. 
 Those who might have been developed in time, who 
 might have found their task, often become wasters, 
 drudges, and even criminals. 
 
 The old system tends to make types, to stamp every 
 scholar in the same mould, whether he fits it or not. 
 More and more the parents of today are looking about 
 for new schools, insisting that a son or daughter pos- 
 sesses some special gift which, under teachers of genius, 
 might be developed before it is too late. And in most 
 cases, strange to say, the parents are right. They them- 
 selves have been victims of* a standardized system. 
 
 A new and distinctly American system of education, 
 designed to meet the demands of modern conditions, has 
 been put in practice in parts of the United States. In 
 spite of opposition from school boards, from all those 
 who cling to the conviction that education must of neces- 
 sity be an unpalatable and " disciplinary " process, the 
 number of these schools is growing. The objection, put 
 forth by many, that they are still in the experimental 
 stage, is met by the reply that experiment is the very 
 essence of the system. Democracy is experimental, and 
 henceforth education will remain experimental for all 
 
164 THE AMERICAISr CONTRIBUTION^ 
 
 time. But, as in any other branch of science, the ele- 
 ment of ascertained fact will gradually increase: the 
 latent possibilities in the mind of the healthy child will 
 be discovered by knowledge gained through impartial 
 investigation. The old system, like all other institu- 
 tions handed down to us from the ages, proceeds on no 
 intelligent theory, has no basis on psychology, and is 
 accepted merely because it exists. 
 
 The new education is selective. The mind of each 
 child is patiently studied with the view of discovering 
 the peculiar bent, and this bent is guided and encour- 
 aged. The child is allowed to forge ahead in those sub- 
 jects for which he shows an aptitude, and not compelled 
 to wait on a class. Such supervision, of course, de- 
 mands more teachers, teachers of an ability hitherto 
 deplorably rare, and thoroughly trained in their sub- 
 jects, with a sympathetic knowledge of the human 
 mind. Theirs will be the highest and most responsi- 
 ble function in the state, and they must be rewarded in 
 proportion to their services. 
 
 A superficial criticism declares that in the new schools 
 children will study only " what they like." On the 
 contrary, all subjects requisite for a wide culture, as 
 well as for the ability to cope with existence in a highly 
 complex civilization, are insisted upon. It is true, how- 
 ever, that the trained and gifted teacher is able to dis- 
 cover a method of so presenting a subject as to seize the 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 165 
 
 imagination and arouse the interest and industry of a 
 majority of pupils. In the modern schools French, for 
 example, is really taught ; pupils do not acquire a mere 
 smattering of the language. And, what is more im- 
 portant, the course of study is directly related to life, 
 and to practical experience, instead of being set forth 
 abstractly, as something which at the time the pupil 
 perceives no possibility of putting into use. At one of 
 the new schools in the south, the ignorant child of the 
 mountains at once acquires a knowledge of measure- 
 ment and elementary arithmetic by laying out a gar- 
 den, of letters by inscribing his name on a little sign- 
 board in order to identify his patch — for the moment 
 private property. And this principle is carried through 
 all the grades. In the Gary Schools and elsewhere the 
 making of things in the shops, the modelling of a Pan- 
 ama Canal, the inspection of industries and governmen- 
 tal establishments, the designing, building, and decora- 
 tion of houses, the discussion and even dramatization of 
 the books read, — all are a logical and inevitable con- 
 tinuation of the abstract knowledge of the schoolroom. 
 The success of the direct application of learning to in- 
 dustrial and professional life may also be observed in 
 such colleges as those at Cincinnati and Schenectady, 
 where young men spend half the time of the course in 
 the shops of manufacturing corporations, often earning 
 more than enough to pay their tuition. 
 
166 THE AMEEICAIT CO:N'TKIBUTIOiT 
 
 Children are not only prepared for democratic citi- 
 zenship by being encouraged to think for themselves, 
 but also to govern and discipline themselves. On the 
 moral side, under the authoritative system of lay and 
 religious training, character v^as acquired at the ex- 
 pense of mental flexibility — the Puritan method; our 
 problem today, which the new system undertakes, is to 
 produce character with openmindedness — the kind of 
 character possessed by many great scientists. Absorp- 
 tion in an appropriate task creates a moral will, while 
 science, knowledge, informs the mind why a thing 
 is " bad " or " good,'' disintegrating or upbuilding. 
 Moreover, these children are trained for democratic gov- 
 ernment by the granting of autonomy. They have their 
 own elected officials, their own courts; their decisions 
 are, of course, subject to reversal by the principal, but 
 in practice this seldom occurs. 
 
 The Gary Schools and many of the new schools are 
 public schools. And the principle of the new education 
 that the state is primarily responsible for the health of 
 pupils — because an unsound body is apt to make an 
 unsound citizen of backward intelligence — is now be- 
 ing generally adopted by public schools all over the 
 country. This idea is essentially an element of the 
 democratic contention that all citizens must be given 
 an equality of opportunity — though all may not be 
 created equal — now becoming a positive rather than 
 
THE AMERICA:^" CONTEIBUTIOlSr 167 
 
 a negative right, guaranteed by the state itself. An 
 earnest attempt is thus made bj the state to give every 
 citizen a fair start that in later years he may have no 
 ground for discontent or complaint. He stands on his 
 own feet, he rises in proportion to his ability and in- 
 dustry. Hence the program of the British Labour 
 Party rightly lays stress on education, on ^' freedom of 
 mental opportunity." The vast sums it proposes to 
 spend for this purpose are justified. 
 
 If such a system of education as that briefly outlined 
 above is carefully and impartially considered, the ob- 
 jection that democratic government founded on modern 
 social science is coercive must disappear. So far as 
 the intention and effort of the state is able to confer it, 
 every citizen will have his choice of the task he is to 
 perform for society, his opportunity for self-realization. 
 For freedom without education is a myth. By degrees 
 men and women are making ready to take their places 
 in an emulative rather than a materialistically competi- 
 tive order. But the experimental aspect of this system 
 should always be borne in mind, with the fact that its 
 introduction and progress, like that of other elements 
 in the democratic program, must be gradual, though al- 
 ways proceeding along sound lines. Eor we have ar- 
 rived at that stage of enlightenment when we realize 
 that the only mundane perfection lies in progress rather 
 than achievement. The millennium is always a lap 
 
168 THE AMERICAN CONTRIBUTION 
 
 ahead. There would be no satisfaction in overtaking 
 it, for then we should have nothing more to do, nothing 
 more to work for. 
 
 yii 
 
 The German Junkers have prostituted science by 
 employing it for the destruction of humanity. In the 
 name of Christianity they have waged the most bar- 
 baric war in history. Yet if they shall have demon- 
 strated to mankind the futility of efficiency achieved 
 merely for material ends; if, by throwing them on a 
 world screen, they shall have revealed the evils of power 
 upheld alone by ruthlessness and force, they will un- 
 wittingly have performed a world service. Privilege 
 and dominion, powers and principalities acquired by 
 force must be sustained by force. To fail will be fatal. 
 Even a duped people, trained in servility, will not con- 
 sent to be governed by an unsuccessful autocracy. Ar- 
 rogantly Germany has staked her all on world domina- 
 tion. Hence a victory for the Allies must mean a 
 democratic Germany. 
 
 Nothing short of victory. There can be no arrange- 
 ment, no agreement, no parley with or confidence in 
 these modern scions of darkness — Hohenzollerns, Hin- 
 denburgs, Ludendorffs and their tools. Propaganda 
 must not cease; the eyes of Germans still capable of 
 
THE AMERICAN CONTEIBUTION 169 
 
 sight must be opened. But, as the President says, force 
 must be used to the limit — force for a social end as 
 opposed to force for an evil end. There are those 
 among us who advocate a boycott of Germany after 
 peace is declared. These would seem to take it for 
 granted that we shall fall short of victory, and hence 
 that selfish retaliative or vindictive practices between 
 nations, sanctioned by imperialism, will continue to 
 flourish after the war. But should Germany win she 
 will see to it that there is no boycott against her. A 
 compromised peace would indeed mean the perpetua- 
 tion of both imperialism and militarism. 
 
 It is characteristic of those who put their faith in 
 might alone that they are not only blind to the finer 
 relationships between individuals and nations, but take 
 no account of the moral forces in human affairs which 
 in the long run are decisive, — a lack of sensitiveness 
 which explains Germany's colossal blunders. The first 
 had to do with Britain. The German militarists per- 
 sisted in the belief that the United Kingdom was de- 
 generated by democracy, intent upon the acquisition 
 of wealth, distracted by strife at home, uncertain of 
 the Empire, and thus would selfishly remain aloof 
 while the Kaiser's armies overran and enslaved the 
 continent. What happened, to Germany's detriment, 
 was the instant socialization of Britain, and the 
 binding together of the British Empire. Germany's 
 
170 THE AMERICA:^r CONTRIBUTIO:^^ 
 
 second great blunder was an arrogant underestimation 
 of a self-reliant people of English culture and traditions. 
 She believed that we, too, had been made flabby by 
 democracy, were wholly intent upon the pursuit of the 
 dollar — only to learn that America would lavish her 
 vast resources and shed her blood for a cause which was 
 American. Germany herself provided that cause, 
 shaped the issues so that there was no avoiding them. 
 She provided the occasion for the socializing of America 
 also ; and thus brought about, within a year, a national 
 transformation which in times of peace might scarce in 
 half a century have been accomplished. 
 
 Above all, as a consequence of these two blunders, 
 Germany has been compelled to witness the consumma- 
 tion of that which of all things she had most to fear, the 
 cementing of a lasting fellowship between the English 
 speaking Eepublic and the English speaking Empire. 
 For we had been severed since the 18th Century by 
 misunderstandings which of late Germany herself had 
 been more or less successful in fostering. She has 
 furnished a bond not only between our governments, but 
 — what is vastly more important for democracy — a 
 bond between our peoples. Our soldiers are now side by 
 side with those of the Empire on the Frontier of 
 Freedom; the blood of all is shed and mingled for a 
 great cause embodied in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of 
 democracy ; and our peoples, through the realization of 
 
THE AMERICAN COISTTEIBUTIOK 171 
 
 cominon ideas and common ends, are learning the su- 
 preme lesson of co-operation between nations with a 
 common past, are being cemented into a union which is 
 the symbol and forerunner of the democratic League of 
 Nations to come. Henceforth, we believe, because of 
 this union, so natural yet so long delayed, by virtue of 
 the ultimate victory it forecasts, the sun will never set 
 on the Empire of the free, for the drum beats of democ- 
 racy have been heard around the world. To this Em- 
 pire will be added the precious culture of France, which 
 the courage of her sons will have preserved, the con- 
 tributions of Italy, and of Russia, yes, and of Japan. 
 
 Our philosophy and our religion are changing ; hence 
 it is more and more difficult to use the old terms to 
 describe moral conduct. We say, for instance, that 
 America's action in entering the war has been ^' unself- 
 ish.'^ But this merely means that we have our own 
 convictions concerning the ultimate comfort of the 
 world, the manner of self-realization of individuals and 
 nations. We are attempting to turn calamity into good. 
 If this terrible conflict shall, result in the inauguration 
 of an emulative society, if it shall bring us to the recog- 
 nition that intelligence and science may be used for the 
 upbuilding of such an order, and for an eventual 
 achievement of world peace, every sacrifice shall have 
 been justified. 
 
172 THE AMERICA]^ COlSrTRIBUTIO:^' 
 
 Such is the American Issue. Our statesmen and 
 thinkers have helped to evolve it, our people with their 
 blood and treasure are consecrating it. And these 
 statesmen and thinkers, of whom our American Presi- 
 dent is not the least, are of democracy the pioneers. 
 Erom the mountain tops on which they stand they be- 
 hold the features of the new world, the dawn of the new 
 day hidden as yet from their brothers in the valley. Let 
 us have faith always that it is coming, and struggle on, 
 highly resolving that those who gave their lives in the 
 hour of darkness shall not have died in vain. 
 
 THE END 
 
 FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 
HTHE following pages contain advertisements of 
 Macmillan books by the same author. 
 
The Dwelling Place of Light 
 
 By WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 Author of "The Inside of the Cup," ''Richard Carvel," etc. 
 With frontispiece by Arthur I. Keller. 
 
 Cloth, i2mo., $i.6o 
 
 "One of the most absorbing and fascinating romances, 
 and one of the most finished masterpieces of serious literary 
 art which have appeared in this year or in this century." — 
 New York Tribune, 
 
 *Tt is a powerful story, wonderfully told, the gifted author 
 has succeeded in gripping the reader's attention and in 
 holding his interest to the very last. , . . Janet is a charac- 
 ter that will live, for there are thousands of young women 
 who will recognize in her some phase of their own experi- 
 ence and some of their own aspirations." — Philadelphia 
 Ledger, 
 
 "He has never hitherto depicted a woman character with 
 quite so much insight, skill and surety as he portrays Janet 
 Bumpus." — New York Times. 
 
 America, dynamic, changing, diverse, with new laws and 
 old desires, new industries and old social rights, new people 
 and old — this is the environment in which Mr. Churchill 
 places the heroine of his new book. He has never written 
 a more entertaining story ; he has never written one that is 
 more significant in its interpretation of human relation- 
 ships to-day. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue Kew YorK 
 
A Far Country 
 
 By WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 Author of " The Inside of the Cup," etc. 
 
 Illustrated, $i.^0 
 
 "No one can afford to miss reading 'A Far Country/ or read- 
 ing it can fail to be interested. The themes Mr. Churchill handles 
 are the big themes confronting all America and in the fortunes and 
 misfortunes of his characters he indicates energies and developments 
 that are nation-wide. It touches on what is vital . . - and it will 
 help in no small degree to broaden our thought and clarify our vis- ' 
 ion. Many people read ^The Inside of the Cup,' but 'A Far Coua-( 
 try' should reach a wider audience." — A^eiv York Times. 
 
 "A powerfully written story, displaying wonderful scope and clar- 
 ity of vision. Presents a wonderful study of American emotions." 
 
 — Boston Globe, 
 
 " A story worthily complete . . . vastly encouraging. The kind 
 of a book that points to a hope and a right road." 
 
 — New York World, 
 
 " Mr. Churchill has done a difficult thing well. . . . We congrat- 
 ulate him on an achievement well worth while." — Chicago Post. 
 
 "A great piece of art, comprising admirable humanization, plot 
 and sympathy, diverse as intrinsic . . . and many interesting side 
 issues. Any author might well be proud of such an achievement." 
 
 — Chicago Herald. 
 
 "<A Far Country'" is a strong story that is vital and compelling. 
 \ • • Adds one more leaf to Mr. Churchill's literary laurels." 
 
 — Philadelphia Ledger, 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Piil)li8hers 6^66 Fifth Avenue New Tosk 
 
**The Most Profoundly Interesting Novel of the Times*^ 
 
 The Inside of the Cup 
 
 By WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 Author of "Richard Carvel," "The Crisis," "The Crossing," "The Celebrity," 
 "Coniston," "Mr. Crewe's Career," "A Modern Chronicle" 
 
 Illustrated, cloth, $1.50 
 
 "A book tremendously in earnest, stamped with the zeal of a man who is setting 
 forth in it truths of the greatest significance to his fellowmen. . ._ . The stage set- 
 ting and the actors are typical of our American present-day civilization. They 
 Strike true of our well-to-do society in any of our large cities. Those who are in- 
 terested in present-day currents of thought will read this book with profound in- 
 terest and will be thankful that Mr. Churchill was moved to write it. 'The Inside 
 of the Cup' is not only significant as an indication of modern tendencies, it fur- 
 nishes also a valuable contribution to a cause that grows more and more vital." 
 — New York Times. 
 
 "A novel which ought to arouse as much comment as ' Robert Elsmere ' did twenty- 
 five years ago. The story is told with far greater skill than Mrs. Ward showed in 
 'Robert Elsmere' or its successors. There is a love story, which is extremely well 
 told, and there are fine characterizations, notably of Eldon Parr, the big financier. 
 He will stand with Jethro Bass, the poUtical boss in 'Coniston,'_as a proof of Mr. 
 Churchill's power to seize and portray reahties. The scenes with the woman of 
 the slums, too, are vivid and would come over the footUghts with great dramatic 
 force, if it were possible to dramatize the book." — Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 A Modern Chronicle 
 
 Illustrated, $1.50 
 
 This, Mr. Churchill's first great presentation of the Eternal Feminine, is through- 
 out a profound study of a fascinating young American woman. It is frankly a 
 modern love story. 
 
 "The most thorough and artistic work the author has yet turned out. A very 
 interesting story and a faithful picture of character . . . one that will give rise to 
 much discussion." — New York Sun. 
 
 "A brilliant tale. His Honora has rare beauty of soul and body, and best of 
 all she is comprehensible and real." — Boston Herald. 
 
 "Nothing that Winston Churchill has done has quite reached the high-water 
 mark of this cross-section of contemporary American Ufe, cut so from the heart of 
 things that every nerve and vein and fibre of it, show their connection with the 
 human news of the hour." — Albany Argus. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 The Crossing 
 
 Illustrated, $1.50 
 
 "A thoroughly interesting book, packed with exciting adventure and 
 sentimental incident, yet faithful to historical fact both in detail and in 
 spirit." — The Dial. 
 
 "Mr. Churchill's novel is a vigorous and absorbing love story." — The 
 Seattle Times. 
 
 "Deals with one of the most fascinating dramas in the history of the world. 
 It is brimming with interest." — Brooklyn Eagle. 
 
 "So widespread is Winston Churchill's popularity, so breathless the 
 public interest excited by each anxiously awaited new novel from his pen, 
 that one is perforce compelled to pay him the compliment of early reading 
 and thorough consideration. But his achievement is noteworthy. . . . 
 
 "'The Crossing' is, moreover, far in advance of 'The Crisis.' It is more 
 real, more genuine, more spontaneous, more vigorous, a clearer and more 
 coherent picture of its times. It contains no little humor." — Boston 
 Transcript. 
 
 The Crisis illustrated, $1.50 
 
 "A charming love story that never loses its interest. . . . The intense 
 political bitterness, the intense patriotism of both parties, are shown un- 
 derstandingly." — Evening Telegraph, Philadelphia. 
 
 "In some respects 'Richard Carvel' was a new thing; by comparison 
 *The Crisis' is something that has been done often before, but never done 
 so well. The vivacity, variety and spirit of the old Southern social life 
 have never been so well suggested, not even in 'Red Rock.' The women are 
 altogether delightful — Mr. Churchill's forte is fascinating and spirited 
 patrician women." — Boston Herald. 
 
 "There have been many novels built upon the interests aroused and 
 stilled by the Civil War, but there has been none surpassing this in truth 
 and power." — Argonaut, San Francisco. 
 
 "It is a high office to give a new generation of Americans their first vivid 
 conception of the struggle in which the Nation was reborn." — The Review 
 of Reviews. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 PabUshers 64-66 Fifth Aveam* Hew Tork 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 ConiStOn illustrated, $1.50 
 
 "A lighter, gayer spirit and a deeper, tenderer touch than Mr. Churchill 
 has ever achieved before. . . . One of the truest and finest transcripts 
 of modem American life thus far achieved in our fiction." — Chicago Record- 
 Herald. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — "There is not a page without its interest, colour, 
 and significance." 
 
 "'Coniston* is a thoroughly characteristic American novel . . . among 
 the small company of the best." — Chicago Tribune. 
 
 "'Coniston' is, first of all, a delightful love story, vigorous, vibrant, and 
 realistic .... the great novel of the year." — Philadelphia North American. 
 
 "Mr. Churchill has more of the epic quality than any writer now living. 
 In 'Coniston' there is not a page without its interest, color, significance, and 
 all contributory to that unity of character and meaning which decides for 
 a work of art the question of performance." — London Times. 
 
 "The drawing of the character of Jethro Bass is a masterpiece of litera- 
 ture." — St. Louis Globe-Democrat. 
 
 The Celebrity $1.50 
 
 AN EPISODE 
 
 "No such piece of inimitable comedy in a literary way has appeared for 
 years. It is the purest, keenest fun." — Chicago Inter-Ocean. 
 
 "... The most delightful surprise to the usual novel reader." — New 
 Orleans Times-Democrat. 
 
 "One of the best stories that have come from the presses." — Brooklyn 
 Eagle. 
 
 "A delightful entertaining novel." — Boston Courier, 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenne New Tork 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 Mr. Crewe's Career ciom, i2mc, $1.50 
 
 Illustrated by Mr. Keller and the Kinneys 
 
 "Representative of conditions to be found in every State of the Union. 'Mr. 
 Crewe's Career' is one of the greatest of American novels." 
 
 "Mr. Churchill rises to a level he has never known before and gives us one of the 
 best stories of American life ever written. ... It is written out of a sympathy that 
 goes deep. . . . We go on to the end with glowing appreciation. ... It is good 
 to have such a book." — New York Tribune. 
 
 "American reaUsm, American romance, and American doctrine, all overtraced 
 by the kindUest, most appeaUng American humor." — New York World. 
 
 "It is an honest and fair story. ... It is very interesting; and the heroine is 
 a type of woman as fresh, original, and captivating as any that has appeared in 
 American novels for a long time past." — The Outlook. 
 
 "We go 'way back and sit down before 'Mr. Crewe's Career,' which The Mac- 
 millan Company publishes to-day. The new story has all the author's virtues — 
 which are many — and almost none of his faults. It is some fifty pages shorter 
 than 'Coniston,' and we would willingly have read fifty pages more. . . . The 
 love story of Victoria FUnt, the railroad president's daughter, and Austen Vane, the 
 railroad's chief counsel's rebelUous son, is a golden one. There is something starry 
 and vivid about Mr. Churchill's heroine that recalls Meredith's Miss Middleton — 
 and Clara, we have Stevenson's word for it, 'is the nicest girl that was ever in a 
 book.' In short, 'Mr. Crewe's Career' is a fine a'^hievement, of which Mr. 
 Churchill and his countrymen may be proud, and it is, moreover, a truly representa- 
 tive and distinctly American novel." — New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser. 
 
 Richard Carvel $1.50 
 
 Illustrated by Carlton T. Chapman and Malcolm Frazer 
 
 "In breadth of canvas, massing of dramatic eflE^ect, depth of feeling and rare 
 wholesomeness of spirit, has seldom, if ever, been surpassed by an American ro- 
 mance." — Chicago Tribune. 
 
 "One of the most brilUant works of imagination of the decade. It breathes the 
 spirit of fine romance . . . in a way that is truly fascinating." — The Philadelphia 
 Press. 
 
 "Contains, besides a score of characters which are worth remembering, a few 
 which one could not forget if one should try." — N . Y. Globe. 
 
 "The book altogether is a delightful one, abounding in powerful scenes, with a 
 romance running charmingly through is pages, and to many the most interesting 
 features of all will be the clever pen-pictures of some of the greatest men of those 
 stirring times." — The Evening Telegraph, Phila. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-86 Fifth Avenue Hew York 
 
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