TVT AT! ix A INA1 J.A.MACDO THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE GIFT OF Mrs. Frank A. Miller UUf DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS JAMES A. MACDONALD -277/4/7^ DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS A CANADIAN VIEW ^ BY J. A. MACDONALD, LL.D. NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY J C < Copyright, 1915. BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY To THOSE WHO CARE FOR LIBERTY, DEMOCRACY AND INTERNATIONALISM THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED A FOREWORD THE purpose of this book is to release ideas, rather than to frame an argument. The ideas with which it deals have to do with freedom for the individual, self-government for the nation, and peace for the world. These ideas are conceived and presented as in the lives of men and in the history of nations. Liberty the right to will and to choose is fun- damental to moral quality in personal character. Democracy the right of a free people to gov- ern themselves is the condition of national free- dom. Internationalism the organization of free nations into an international partnership, each with its place in the sun and all under just laws enforced by the common will is the social con- summation of liberty, democracy and fraternity in the world community of free nations. These ideas I have presented many times and under different forms during recent years : some- times in editorial articles in The Globe, some- times in addresses from public platforms in Can- ada and the United States, but always in the in- terest of ideas rather than of argument. The practical end in view was influential in deter- vii viii A FOREWORD mining the literary form of the chapters in the book, as well as of the addresses which are here reproduced in almost the very words in which they were spoken. For this same reason, sig- nificant phrases, in which root ideas are ex- pressed, are repeated, in order that the ideas may not miss fire. If the ideas of Liberty, Democracy and Inter- nationalism are made more vital and stimulat- ing in the minds of those who read these pages, the purpose of their publication will have been abundantly fulfilled. J. A. M. Toronto. CONTENTS PAGE I. GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN UNITY Unity Through Strife . . . .13 The Anglo-Saxon Impulse . . .17 The Celtic Strain 25 Self-Government : Not Separation . . 38 Democracy and Unity .... 45 II. ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE EN- DURING DEMOCRACY Lincoln ....... 53 The Lincoln Point of View ... 58 The Neighbourhood Idea .... 68 Canada's Part in the American Conflict 75 III. CANADA AND THE WORLD PROBLEM An Adventure in World Politics . . 93 Transforming the Empire . . . 104 After the War 114 IV. NORTH AMERICA'S WORLD IDEA The World Idea 127 A Year of Contrasts . . . .136 The Partnership of Nations . . . 145 x CONTENTS PAGE V. MESSAGES TO THE PEOPLE America's Message to the Nations . . 153 Internationalism and the University . .169 Leadership and the World Crisis . . 187 Canada: Its Tether and Its Toll . . 203 Christianity: The War: The Social Prob- lem 221 North America's International Experiment 232 GEORGE WASHINGTON AND THE ANGLO-AMERICAN UNITY UNITY THROUGH STRIFE THE name of George Washington is asso- ciated in the world's mind not with unity, but with strife. That name recalls division and separation the division of the English-speaking world in the eighteenth century, and the separa- tion of the American colonies from the mother- land of Britain. But Washington was not a man of strife. His political thinking was not radical. His tempera- ment was not that of a revolutionist. His in- stincts were not markedly those of a Social Demo- crat, and his ideals in politics were not primarily Republican. Events he did not originate, and conditions he could not control, carried him, as they carried his country, to the point where revo- lution was inevitable; and it fell to his lot, as Chief Executive of the nation, to be exponent before the world of the Declaration of Independ- ence. When revolution justified itself by its suc- cess the young Republic gave to him his due in electing him the first President of the United States of America. Now that more than a cen- tury has set his name in the discriminating per- spective of time, the quick judgment of his own 13 14 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS day stands approved and becomes the verdict of history. Out of the confusion and darkness of Anglo-American strife the name of George Washington emerges, more meaningful now than in his own time, the signal and the pledge of the Anglo-American unity. Unity is indeed the real note of Washington's life. On the surface and for the moment there was clash and conflict. Discord and strife seemed to fill all the sky. The hoarse cries of bitterness and hate were the loudest tones. But over it all the keynote prevailed. In the pauses the common chord was struck. Out of all the jarring came unison. That abiding unison, abid- ing through the past hundred years, transformed the alienation that prepared the way. Discords rushed in, not for the sake of discord, but that harmony might be prized. Revolution and sep- aration under George Washington in the eigh- teenth century, distressing and hurtful though they were, will be understood in their higher meaning and in their world significance only as the twentieth century affirms and makes domi- nant the supreme conception of Anglo-American unity. Unity was not a world-note in Washington's day. That was the day of international isolation and of the ignorance and the prejudice isolation breeds. That was the day, too, of national ex- UNITY THROUGH STRIFE 15 pansion and conquest, and of the selfishness and the fear that follow in their train. No Briton to-day is under obligation to defend either the spirit or the method of the jingoes and the junk- ers who dominated politics in Britain in the days of George the Third. Nor is any American now obliged to justify the extravagances of speech and behaviour of the political iconoclasts who held the colonial stage in the days of George Washington. That was the age of intense dog- matism, in State and in Church, and of the spirit of violent secession into which dogmatic author- ity always reacts among a free people. The forces of that age were centrifugal. Fragments of creed were thrown off and produced sects. Segments of philosophy became ingrowing cir- cles of inverted ideas. There were stir and move- ment everywhere, in Britain and in America, in politics and in religion, and that restless indi- vidualism of the eighteenth century was a factor in the revolutionary uprisings in Britain and in the discontent in the colonies that led to the Dec- laration of Independence. The autocratic ideas in government, as the aristocratic ideas in so- ciety, were divisive forces in Washington's day. The world-note was not unity. But a new day will dawn, dawn for society, dawn for the world. It is the day of wider hori- zons, of higher ideals, of nobler motives. For 16 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS the moment the storm-cloud hangs black and menacing all around the sky. The thunders speak of death. The lightnings flash of hell. Europe is bleeding at every pore. North Amer- ica, in all its nationalities and peoples, has learned the meaning of Gethsemane. The world itself is broken, its civilisation crossed by barbarism, its glory turned to shame. The sun is in eclipse. But the night will not come back. Dawn will rise with day on its shoulders. The jungle, with its tangled fens, its fevers and its beasts of prey, will be driven further back. The neighbourhood of the English-speaking peoples will yet be an ensample to the world. The desert of the na- tions will rejoice and blossom like the rose: the seas will no longer divide : and deep in the heart of all classes and races will stir the sense of hu- man brotherhood in the abiding neighbourhood of all peoples. We of to-day are on the edge of a great new time, a world-time. The nations of the English speech and of the Anglo-Saxon tradition when this world-war is over must face an unprece- dented world-challenge: the challenge of all the world to the nations of the Anglo-Saxon im- pulse, that, after strife, have kept the peace for a hundred years in the Anglo-American unity. THE ANGLO-SAXON IMPULSE THE Anglo-Saxon Impulse ! The very name "Anglo-Saxon" carries us back through fifteen centuries of Europe's history; far back of the England we know, and beyond the North Sea, to the breeding-place of the first English- men and to the home-land of the Anglo-Saxon tradition; back to the fifth century, to Angli and the little home of the Angles or Engles, in the Province of Schleswig, on the shores of the Bal- tic, and to the land of the Saxons at the mouth of the Elbe. There, in the dim twilight of Teutonic history, far from the incoming currents of Roman life and civilisation, the primitive idea of political self-government sprang up and organised itself in the tribal economy of the people. There was held the township meeting, and the larger repre- sentative assemblies, in which not the leaders alone, but the common people as well, held their rightful place of speech and vote. There among the Angles and Saxons, in the northern forests of Germany, were set up those first crude institu- tions of democratic self-government which be- came common to the Germanic peoples while as 17 18 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS yet the Celtic tribes in the England we know were bleeding from the Roman rods and carried the galling yoke of Rome's military despotism. That original Teuton idea was the germ out of which grew the institutions of political free- dom and self-government in Britain and in Amer- ica. When the Roman Empire in the fifth cen- tury declined and fell into decay at home the Ro- man legions were withdrawn from Britain. Then, in 449, came the seafaring Engles and Saxons across the North Sea, bringing with them their worship of the Teuton gods of Woden and Thor, and their political ideas of democratic self- government. The remnants of Roman absolut- ism were destroyed. The Celtic tribes were slaughtered as the Belgian people have been slaughtered to-day. A new Engla-land was founded. The Anglo-Saxon triumphed. De- mocracy in England had its beginning, and from that day to this has never been without a wit- ness. The Witenagemot the Meeting of the Wise Men or the Great Council, or the Parlia- ment, even in the darkest days of the feudal des- pots, has always claimed to speak as representing the people. The Roman Empire itself, enervated by war and luxury, declined before the assaults of the sturdy Germanic tribes, but in time, all over Eu- rope, Roman ideas of government by military THE ANGLO-SAXON IMPULSE 19 force prevailed over the simpler Teutonic democ- racy. Ideas triumphed over physical strength. History repeated itself. Roman power conquered Greece, but Greek ideas in turn impregnated Ro- man literature and shaped Roman culture. Rome, having lost her virility, yielded to Ger- manic arms, but victorious Germany was Roman- ised. Roman Christianity triumphed over Teu- ton paganism. The Roman idea of government by military autocracy crowded the old Teutonic ideal of self-government out of its own German homeland. Through the centuries the light of democracy was kept burning in the lowlands of Holland and in the highlands of Switzerland, but elsewhere Europe was given over to feudal tyr- anny. And the tragedy of Europe to-day is that the birthplace of democratic institutions is under the heel of a Romanised autocracy, and the na- tion that started Britain and America on the high road to political liberty has given its own neck to the half -Slavonic yoke of Prussian des- potism. But in Britain the Anglo-Saxon idea, brought over by Hengist and his hordes before the end of the fifth century, had a free chance. It took firm root. Generation after generation and age after age it grew and strengthened. Sometimes in the centuries of feudalism that followed the Norman conquest it seemed to have been over- 20 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS borne. But the idea of freedom never died. It survived the despotism of the Plantagenets, the autocracy of the Stuarts, and the dull reaction of the Hanoverians. Like the grain of mustard seed, it has grown into the tree of world-democ- racy, and under its spreading branches the free Parliament of Britain, the Congress of the United States of America, and the Parliaments of the self-governing British Dominions on all the Seven Seas stand together the exponents and the defenders of the world's political democracy. Through these fifteen hundred years of conflict and achievement that Anglo-Saxon idea has been dominant in English-speaking civilisation, and its unspent impulse is to-day the organising pow- er in the English-speaking world, the secret and the strength of the Anglo-American unity. It was that Anglo-Saxon impulse for freedom that first sent Englishmen across the uncharted seas to America. The Royalists came to Virginia with the aristocratic blood of the Cavaliers of King Charles and their aristocratic ideals for Church and for State. For that aristocracy the land system of great estates and the social sys- tem of negro slavery were natural and easy. To New England came the Pilgrim Fathers, with the intellectual arrogance of Cromwell, and the Puritan's inextinguishable spark of political de- mocracy. Through the colonial days Massachu- THE ANGLO-SAXON IMPULSE 21 setts returned to the more democratic institutions of the Anglo-Saxons in England before the in- coming of Norman feudalism, while Virginia had more in common with the English landed aristocracy that forced the Magna Charta from King John. But in both colonies stirred the blood of Anglo-Saxon freemen. The discontent of the colonies, that gave concern to statesmen and rul- ers in England, was at bottom the irrepressible impulse for self-government which Anglo-Nor- man Toryism in London could not understand. In the light of history even a blind man can now see that revolution and the Declaration of Inde- pendence were inevitable. The Anglo-Saxon im- pulse was astir. Neither King George and his reactionary advisers in England nor George Washington and his patriot supporters in Amer- ica knew of any other alternative. It was co- lonial subjection, or it was national independence. Facing the risk, suffering the loss, paying the price, the Anglo-Saxon impulse drove on to revo- lution and ended in national self-government. But the same blood was in Englishmen at home. And that blood told. The protest of the American colonies and the wider democratic freedom of the new American Constitution re- acted on the British situation. Under Walpole, Pitt and Peel the achievement of responsible gov- ernment and the British Cabinet system made 22 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS "the bounds of freedom wider yet." Indeed, had it not been for the wild excesses of red republic- anism in revolutionary France during the "Reign of Terror," which startled even liberal-minded leaders like Burke and Pitt and Wordsworth and Burns into reaction, the mother country might earlier have outstripped the daughter republic on the high road to the goal of Anglo-Saxon liberty. In the nineteenth century the United States, under Lincoln, again yielded to the Anglo-Saxon impulse. Through the great social and political upheavals of the Civil War not only were the pledges of liberty and equality which Washing- ton and the Declaration gave to the Republic jus- tified, but a new impetus was given to democracy all over the English-speaking world. In the opening years of the twentieth century Britain again took the lead. Against one of the most venerable and most strongly entrenched in- stitutions of autocratic privilege in all the world the determined democracy of the British people went up a stripling David with five smooth stones against an armor-plated giant Goliath with a spear-shaft like a weaver's beam and de- mocracy turned not back until the veto power of the House of Lords over the deliberately ex- pressed will of the responsible House of Com- mons was destroyed, destroyed forever. That event, one of the most stupendous and most far- THE ANGLO-SAXON IMPULSE 23 reaching the English-speaking world has wit- nessed in three hundred years, gave a new lead to democracy the world over. Neither of the English-speaking nations in America has yet gone so far. In the United States there is an ap- pointed life-service Supreme Court and in Can- ada an appointed life-service Senate, with their checks and balances and constitutional vetoes on the people's representative will. But Britain has taken the risk, the supreme risk of democracy. The deliberate will of the people may for a time be delayed, but it cannot be defeated. And in the end of the day Britain's way of the larger Anglo- Saxon freedom will be justified to her children. In the crisis-time of 1914 that Anglo-Saxon impulse did not fail the British peoples. When Prussian despotism, having destroyed the origi- nal Teuton Idea of self-government out of its ancestral Teuton home, laid its heavy hand on the liberties of democratic Belgium, and lifted its mailed fist against the democratic world, a united Britain, in the name of Celt and Saxon, and for the freedom of the little peoples, blocked the way. And not Britain alone, but every free commonwealth of the British faith Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and even that mighty Empire of the Oriental faith and the alien blood, India all the Britannic forces of the world, because they are free to go or not to 24 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS go, took their stand at the battle's front, against the modern Teuton autocracy, in defence of the very idea of political freedom the Germanic peo- ple gave the world. That is indeed the supreme effort of the Anglo-Saxon impulse. On the wide field of the centuries the strug- gles of democracy have been many, but under the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes their im- pulse has been one. The struggle has been for government of all the people by all the people and for all the people, the struggle for equality of op- portunity, the democratic struggle for social jus- tice for all and special privilege for none. That struggle is the glory and the greatness of Eng- lish-speaking civilisation. Its impulse is the age- long impulse of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. That impulse stirred the heart of George Washington, himself an English gentleman to his finger tips. That centripetal impulse of the twentieth century is bringing the great Republic of the United States of America, by a wide compass, around to form with the British Empire the equipoised democratic entente of the Anglo-American unity. THE CELTIC STRAIN THE impulse to self-government we com- monly call Anglo-Saxon. The term is con- venient, but not accurate. In American democ- racy that Anglo-Saxon impulse was reinforced, if not dominated, by a distinctive Celtic strain. That Celtic strain came into ancient history through the annals of the Greek classics. The waves of Celtic life swelled up in the valleys of far eastern Europe, and moved westward long before Rome emerged, leaving landmarks here and there, in south and north, until in Gaul it founded a civilisation which the power of Im- perial Rome could not utterly destroy. In Britain it established a type of character and tempera- ment unconquered and potent until this day. The Gallic tribes of ancient Gaul and the Picts and Scots of ancient Britain, against whom Caesar carried on his great campaigns two thousand years ago, were the Celtic blood-forbears of the modern "sea-divided Gael." During the four centuries of Roman occupa- tion of Britain the native Celtic population was not exterminated. North of the Clyde and the Forth the Picts remained defiant in their High- 25 26 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS land strongholds. In Ireland the Scots were be- yond the reach of the Romans and their Teutonic mercenaries. After the legions were withdrawn the Jutes and Angles and Saxons took possession of the conquered country and called it England, but Ireland they did not touch. The Saxon in- vaders from the great country between the Rhine and the Elbe slaughtered most of the native Brit- ons and then married their wives and daughters, so that even into the blood of the English-born "Sassenach" there came the disturbing Celtic strain. But in Wales, in Ireland and in Scotland the Celtic strain kept its colour and its strength through the stress and storm of all the centuries. No matter what happened the speech of Cymric or of Erse or of Gaelic would not die out from the mountains and glens. And that which is deeper than speech, stronger than law, more per- sistent than custom, that mysterious life-strain which dominates accidents of birth and admix- tures of blood, and gives to the man or the na- tion a personality that never dies that Celtic strain binds to-day the many-blooded life of those British Islands into one United Kingdom, and in America, through three hundred years, from the Rio Grande to Hudson's Bay, it has been weav- ing the mystic but prevailing pattern in the An- glo-American unity. THE CELTIC STRAIN 27 In the seventeenth century tens upon tens of thousands of hot-blooded Celts came from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland and from the Scottish settlements in Ireland to make the ad- venture of life in the wilds of America. Even before the Cromwellian wars the forerunners came, guided only by that restless instinct that strains at the leash and yearns beyond the hori- zon-line of settled and conventional life. In the years of the civil wars in England and during the Commonwealth period many of the Celtic peo- ples, who, from the Saxon days on, never gladly suffered the language or religion of the alien, were made prisoners of war, some of them branded on the shoulder with the badge of en- forced servitude, and transported across the seas to America. Scottish names have been carried in honour to the White House by sons whose forefathers were deported from England in the revolutionary times of Cromwell and the Stuart Kings. When the American colonies, a century later, engendered feelings of their own against England and the House of Hanover, the scars of those earlier indignities flamed red in the Cel- tic-American memory, and into the Revolution a spirit was infused which the Anglo-Saxon blood of Washington and Franklin could not explain. It was the Celtic strain in American democracy. The British Celt who came to North America 28 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS had an inherited democracy of his own. That Celtic democracy was not derived from Teutonic sources in Europe. Neither was it imposed by the Anglo-Saxons of England. It was of the very life and essence of the historic clan system of the Celtic peoples. It was worlds away from the feudal system fastened on Anglo-Norman England. In the feudal system the liege lord was supreme, the source of authority, of power, and of reward; its government was from above, a graded and organised form of absolutism, and in the selection or appointment of their feudal su- perior the English yeomen had no say. Feudal- ism, in spirit and motive and power, was a des- potism. The clan system was at bottom a democ- racy. The power of the clan resided in the clan itself. It was exercised by the chief, not at all as a feudal despot, but solely as the approved representative of the clan. The heir-apparent to the chieftainship was required to make full proof of his qualities, both physical and moral, and only at his peril did he cherish personal ambitions at variance with the interests of his clansmen. The supreme devotion of the Highland clansmen to their Chief had in it the sense of blood-affinity and of democratic freedom which the feudal des- pot could not command. Even the Stuart Kings, who, to their own undoing, affected the pedantic pretensions of Divine Right, never quite lost the THE CELTIC STRAIN 29 democratic touch of kinship with the least among the men of the clans. And in the loyalty of the clansmen, often a loyalty of blood-sacrifice for a lost cause, there was all the pride and independ- ence of men who were conscious of their personal freedom. No people in America in the days of George Washington held a clearer title to his- toric democracy, or had behind them so long and so unbroken a record of civil freedom, as had the men of the Celtic strain who penetrated the At- lantic seaboard at wide intervals all the way from Nova Scotia to the Carolinas. The Celtic strain was distinct in each of the New England colonies except perhaps Connecti- cut. In New York, especially along the Hudson and in the Mohawk valleys, Celtic influence was still more marked. New Jersey, with Princeton as a centre, was in the front rank. In Pennsyl- vania, covering great groups of counties extend- ing from Philadelphia, round about Harrisburg and Pittsburg, and running through the wide in- tervales of Western Virginia into Tennessee, and over the great plantations of North Carolina and South Carolina into Georgia here the Scottish colonists from Scotland and the Scottish counties in Ireland established almost continuous settle- ments whose Celtic life-strain has prevailed alike in State and in Church. Very many of those settlers came to America 30 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS under the stress of political and ecclesiastical per- secutions for which feudal and prelatic influences from England were responsible. The ports of Scotland and Ireland witnessed such sacrifices for the sake of civil and religious liberty as en- riched American life, but left Britain poor in- deed. Through colonial days there were developed institutions of life and government partly mod- elled on those in the home lands, but more largely expressive of the political genuis and instincts of the people. Virginia, with its Royalist blood, favoured Episcopacy and the institutions becom- ing monarchy. New England, with its Puritan independency, was individualist and democratic. In Pennsylvania the Quakers and the Dutch gave a soberness to life that went to no extreme. But through all the colonies there ran the Celtic strain the fervent spirit of Scottish democracy and the organising power of the Scottish Church. It has been a question for dispute among Amer- ican partisans as to who started the movement that led to Independence. John Adams was pro- tagonist for James Otis of Boston. Thomas Jefferson gave the honour to Patrick Henry, the fiery young Scottish Celt who led Virginia, even with its English Cavaliers, into independence, and as war Governor held them there. Certain it is the declaration of Patrick Henry: "As for me, THE CELTIC STRAIN 31 give me liberty or give me death," quivered with true Celtic passion and became the watchword of young America for generations. The fact is that the instinct for self-govern- ment was in the blood of most of the colonists, Saxon and Celt, and when the occasion arose the spirit needed only the voice. A dozen currents and cross-currents confused the people. Those who counted the cost hung back, for revolution meant sacrifice and inevitable loss. Families were divided. Class stood against class. Blood spoke against blood. Hierarchical Episcopacy instinc- tively took one side and democratic Presbyterian- ism the other. In the main the Scottish people, remembering what they and their fathers in Scot- land and Ireland had suffered from arrogant autocracy, took their stand for self-government. Indeed, in some communities the dividing lines in the war were ecclesiastical as well as political, and for the most part Tories in the colonies sympa- thised with Tories in the mother country, and Whigs with Whigs. The histories on both sides make much, and rightly so, of the part played by the Scottish Highlanders in New York State, who fought so gallantly on the Loyalist side under Sir John Johnson, and the still larger numbers in North Carolina who also answered to the King's com- mand. The settlers on the great estate of Sir 32 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS William Johnson in the Mohawk Valley were from the Highland glens running down from Loch Ness to the western seacoast of Argyll, the ancestral home of Sir William. Many of them, like the Chisholms of Strathglass and the Mac- donells of Glengarry, had fought on the Stuart side at Culloden and were harried out of their homeland by the officers of the Duke of Cumber- land. The loyal devotion they had given to their chiefs among the Scottish hills they transferred to their new chieftain, under whose protection they came to America. In the histories Johnson is called "an Irishman." True, he came to Amer- ica a young man from Ireland, but in blood and temperament, if not indeed also in speech, he was a Scottish Gael from Ardnamurchan, on the Ar- gyllshire coast: a true Macdonald clansman of the Lord of the Isles, whose patronymic, Mac Ian "son of John" in its English form be- came famous in the colony and afterwards in Canada. The most instructive and illuminating story of the Celtic strain in American life is told in the history of the great Scottish colonies in the South. Hill men in Scotland, thousands of them, found congenial homes in the great mountain re- gions of Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Kentucky. North Carolina itself has a dozen counties as Celtic in their blood and background THE CELTIC STRAIN 33 as any district in Canada. It is said that more than forty thousand Highlanders, with the lan- guage and traditions of the ancient Scottish Church, settled on the great plantations and in the matchless pine forests of the Cape Fear River district of North Carolina before the days of the Revolution. When the crisis came their settle- ments were divided. Even family ties were bro- ken. Nearly all the earlier settlers sided with the Whigs and fought for self-government, while many of those who came after Culloden and the dark days of the 'Forty-five took up arms with the Tories for the King. To-day their descend- ants declare their independence in matters of pa- triotism over Boston and New England, and claim precedence over Philadelphia in their stand for liberty. Certain it is their "Liberty Point," in Fayetteville, in the very centre of that Highland Scottish colony, commemorates their public pro- test and declaration on June 4, 1775. But it is also true that on the very same spot, on Febru- ary 1 8, 1776, three thousand Highland soldiers were mustered for King George, some of them wearing the kilts and carrying the broadswords for the House of Hanover that had been hidden since their last struggle for the House of Stuart at fateful Culloden thirty years before. Students of Washington's times have been per- plexed as to the causes that divided those Scot- 34 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS tish Highlanders in the American struggle. Many of those who fought on the Tory side were as stoutly opposed to Tory principles as were the most radical of the Whigs. Some of them, in- deed, had been Anti-Burghers in Scotland, and, after righting on the Tory side against Washing- ton in America, were founders and pillars of the "Anti-Burgher" Church in Nova Scotia and in Upper Canada. Now the Anti-Burghers were those who, in Scottish political and religious struggles, stood against the interference of the civil officers of the Burgh in the administration of the affairs of the Church. They were the Radicals of their day. Why then did they side with the Tories in America, especially as in Scot- land, as supporters of the Stuart cause, they had suffered persecution and banishment at the hands of the Hanoverian partisans? There is one ex- planation: it was "for the oath's sake." Those clansmen did not love King George the Third in America any more than they loved him in Scotland, but after Culloden they had been compelled to take the hated Cumberland oath of allegiance, and that oath held : "I, A B , do swear, and as I shall an- swer to God at the great day of judgment, I have not, nor shall have, in my possession any gun, pistol or arm whatsoever, and never use tartan plaid, or any part of the THE CELTIC STRAIN 35 Highland garb, and if I do so may I be cursed in my undertakings, family and prop- erty; may I never see my wife and children, father, mother or relation; may I be killed in battle as a coward, and lie, without Chris- tian burial, in a strange land, far from the graves of my forefathers and kindred may all this come across me if I break my oath." That oath was a root of bitterness in the hearts of the clansmen in Scotland and in America. Their descendants to this day remember it. But the idealism of the Celtic nature saved them. And that same quality of mind long ago healed the Celtic wounds of the Revolutionary strife in America. The names of the Celtic Loyalists who kept their oath in the colonies, even though theirs was a lost cause, are honoured to-day by the de- scendants of the Celtic Patriots, who were not bound by the oath's outlawed obligations. In- deed in the very centre of those Scottish counties in North Carolina the name of the chief inspirer of the Loyalists, the world-famed Scottish hero- ine, Flora Macdonald, who lived there through five troublous years, will be honoured and perpet- uated in the "Flora Macdonald College." The American Celts whose forefathers fought for In- dependence under George Washington are proud to count themselves of the same blood as those who in Scotland swore to their own hurt and in 36 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS America changed not. It was "just for a scrap of paper," but it witnessed the Celts' deathless de- votion to a cause and loyalty to a trust. That, too, is an element in the Anglo-American unity. And those Loyalists of the Celtic strain who afterwards settled in Canada, even though they lost everything and suffered cruel injustice at the hands of the American authorities, were not in their day, nor are their descendants to-day, ele- ments of international discord. What Matthew Arnold says about the part played by the Celtic blood in British life has been justified in Ameri- can history. In both nations through these gen- erations the embitterment of petty jealousies and local strifes has been absorbed in the sense of the wider possibilities of national life and the world- wide significance of America's international achievement. The prophets and seers saved the nations from the leadership of the men with the muck-rake eyes. Neither the State nor the Church in either country has ever been without its succession of men who see visions and dream dreams. The cherished divination of the Celtic races of history, their "second sight," is in part but shrewd foresight allied to a wide-horizoned, practical imagination. It is that idealism, that imaginativeness, that pioneering spirit which the skyline always beck- ons forward, that readiness to risk seeming de- THE CELTIC STRAIN 37 feat to-day in the hope of larger achievement to- morrow it is that Celtic strain, allied with the steadier and less romantic impulse of the Anglo- Saxon, which give spiritual vitality as well as practical power to the Anglo-American unity. SELF-GOVERNMENT: NOT SEPARA- TION Anglo-Saxon impulse and the Celtic J. strain, blended in the blood of the Thirteen colonies, made inevitable one issue. That inev- itable and supreme issue was self-government. In raising that issue the colonies proved their British birthright. They did more. They pre- pared the way for the greatest contribution of the United States to the democracy of the world. Among themselves the colonies were excessively colonial, jealous each of all the others, and in the end all of them jealous of even the appearance of dictation or direction from without. But through all that jargon one note was struck, ringing and sustained. That dominant note made for colo- nial harmony in Washington's day: it has made for Anglo-American unity to-day: it will make for world concord to-morrow. What is that greatest contribution of the United States to the democracy of the world? It is the declaration of the right of a free people to govern themselves; the declaration before all the world that any people, anywhere and at any time, who desire self-government, and are fit 38 SELF-GOVERNMENT: NOT SEPARATION 89 for self-government, must be given the chance and the responsibility of governing themselves: the supreme declaration of democracy that the authority of all human government among a free people is based on the consent of the governed. And that declaration, made good in the history of the nation, and illustrated in the nation's dealings with little peoples and backward races, is the greatest achievement of the United States of America. That declaration was not altogether new in the political thinking of the world. Freedom has always been a disturbing spark in the human mind. The instinct for self-government in the history of every people marred the plans of auto- crats and despots. The declaration of the Amer- ican colonies was not a denial of their heritage from the British Isles and from Holland; it was an acknowledgment and confirmation. What they did was not a new thing : it was a large thing, a thing on a new scale, a thing of world propor- tions and of world significance. America's pro- test shook to their foundations the autocracies of Europe. Its full meaning will be made plain when the last autocracy falls. It was not indeed for independence the leaders among the Patriots in the colonies strove. In- dependence may be only the noisy clamour of the law-breaker and the libertine. But self -govern- 40 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS ment any free-minded people must have or be slaves. National autonomy is of the very essence of national freedom. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin proved themselves heirs of the Teuton idea and sons of the British blood when, in the supreme hour of crisis, they stood against an arrogant monarch and an aristocratic government for the rights of British freemen in the colonies of America. And it was not against monarchy Washington and his compatriots set out. It is quite probable that many of them, in their serious political think- ing, were monarchists. Washington himself was never greatly concerned with political theories except in their relations to some practical issue. In the perilous days of the new Union, after the decisive victory at Yorktown and before govern- ment was established on any secure basis, he might have become King. The proposal was made. "Let me conjure you," he replied, "if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to ban- ish these thoughts from your mind." And they banished them. The idea of an American monarchy was sug- gested not alone by the exigencies of the army after the war was over, and the utter incapacity of the Congress, ten years after the Declaration SELF-GOVERNMENT: NOT SEPARATION 41 of Independence, either to secure decent respect for law in the various States or to command re- spect for the nation abroad, but also by the love for Royalty and the things that pertain to Court, which not even yet has died out of the people of the great American democracy. The tradition still survives in Jacobite circles, and not without probability, that in the early days of the conflict with the British Ministry, when change was cer- tain, but before resentment broke into revolution, a delegation from the colonies visited Rome to present to the exiled Prince Charles Edward Stu- art the offer of a crown and throne in a new Kingdom of America. One may speculate as to what might have been in the twentieth century for America and for the world had "Bonnie Charlie" been worthy of a tithe of the love and devotion lavished on him by the Highland clans in Scotland, or deserved the confidence of men of his own Celtic strain in the American colonies of the eighteenth century. But it could not be. The House of Stuart had sinned away its last chance. America's future might not be with Hanover, but it could not be with Stuart. A new monarchy was not a solution. Inde- pendence was not seriously talked among the lead- ers of colonial thought because the idea of politi- cal independence was not seriously in their minds. With the utmost frankness and the strongest em- 42 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS phasis Washington repudiated the suggestion that separation was a solution of the difficulties. Armed resistance to the objectionable legislation in London he thought quite probable, but beyond such clear expression of the strong convictions of the people he was confident it would not be need- ful to go. In October, 1774, he wrote of the an- gry situation in Boston, as he says, "with a de- gree of confidence and boldness," and out of his own personal knowledge: "I think I can an- nounce it as a fact that it is not the wish or in- terest of that Government (of Massachusetts), or any other upon this continent, separately or collectively, to set up for independence." The Congress, in its address to the people of Britain, gave unreserved assurance that the suggestions that the colonies were "desirous of independency" were "not facts, but calumnies." It was not un- til the choice had to be made between uncondi- tional submission to what they believed to be ar- bitrary measures, or united resistance in vindica- tion of what to them were ancient rights, that the word "independence" was spoken aloud in the hearing of all the people. Self-government was indeed the end in view. Franklin believed in a closer Imperial union. "The British Empire," he said, "is not a single State ; it comprehends many ; and though the Par- liament of Great Britain has arrogated to itself SELF-GOVERNMENT: NOT SEPARATION 43 the power of taxing the colonies, it has no more right to do so than it has to tax Hanover. We have the same King, but not the same Legisla- tures." Freedom from government by a Legisla- ture they did not elect was the essence of the co- lonial grievance. Franklin believed in colonial representation in the British Parliament. Franklin's scheme was impossible. The Atlan- tic Ocean at that time was against it. And the other alternative of national status and national self-government within the Imperial circle, which in the nineteenth century created the British over- seas Dominions, the world of Washington's day did not know. The world knew of no way by which any colony of any empire could come from colonial dependence to national autonomy except the old way of separation. There seemed noth- ing for it but to cut the painter and to strike for complete political independence. The colonies took the risk. A thousand false cries may have been raised, raised on both sides, but the one su- preme thing that emerged and endured was the declaration of fundamental rights: the declara- tion of the right of a free people to govern them- selves, and the winning, in the experience of the nation, of that larger liberty of thought and of life which gives to each man a free man's chance. Despite the losses and wrongs which revolution 44. DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS always brings, that contribution to world democ- racy marked in itself a new epoch in the history of human government, and is the greatest achievement of the United States of America. DEMOCRACY AND UNITY DEMOCRACY and Liberty are of the very essence of the Anglo-American unity. That fundamental fact has been revealed in the fierce and sometimes lurid light of Europe's great war. In things on the surface, the things of com- merce and of industrial aspiration, Britain and the United States may sometimes be far apart. Indeed for ten years past there was growing up in the American Republic a body of opinion sym- pathetic with ideas and institutions in the Ger- man Empire rather than in Britain. What Amer- ican scholars called "German Method" had gained considerable influence over the American mind. For this reason it was difficult for the people of the United States to appreciate the real signifi- cance of Europe's war outbreak. The horror of it, the waste of it, the moral wickedness of it, the typical American grasped at first blush. But its deeper meaning, its meaning not for Belgium alone or for Britain, but for democracies every- where, and therefore its supreme meaning for America this did not come home to the Ameri- can mind in the first week of August, 1914. 45 46 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS But when the thoughtful American caught his breath he asked this question : What is the Ger- man army doing in Belgium? And when he an- swered that question, answered it in the uncov- ered light of Germany's long-prepared and delib- erately carried out program of European mas- tership, the thoughtful American took his stand. That stand was not pro-British ; it was anti-Ger- man. It was anti-German because Germany, in the boldest and most flagrant way, had sinned against all that is worth while in democracy, as democracy is understood and exemplified in the United States of America. And that stand is anti-German to stay. Nothing could be more instructive, nothing more suggestive of the reflex influence of demo- cratic freedom on the psychology of a whole peo- ple than is a study of the instinctive rebound of the American mind from the despot-spirit of Prussian militarism as it touches Belgium and the rights of all the small nationalities. The spirit of the American people, more impulsive, more outspoken, more direct than the restrained and entirely proper words of their responsible leaders may suggest, went straight to its mark. It spoke instant condemnation. It would have supported immediate demand for restitution and expiation. And not even sober second thought, or the prudent considerations of self-interest, or DEMOCRACY AND UNITY 47 all the arguments and inducements of the apolo- gists from Germany and the pro-German profes- sors and editors in the United States, could or ever can move American democracy from its first instinctive stand against the military despotism that, in defiance of law and in the name of "cul- ture," violated the guaranteed neutrality of Bel- gium and desecrated the sanctuaries of Belgian life. That fact proves that in a democracy the moral instincts of the people may be trusted. That anti-German stand, taken without hesita- tion when once the situation was grasped, and held with growing tenacity and determination when what lay behind the Belgian situation was more clearly exposed that stand did not at all mean partiality in favour of Britain on the part of the great body of the American people. The untravelled American millions do not love the British, or, as they say, "the English." They have not wholly emerged from the thraldom of old-time school histories and popular fiction, in which "allegiance to England" was represented as an intolerable bondage, and the typical Eng- lishman as either a bully or a fool. Before the war broke out, in 1914, Britain, as compared with Germany, was heavily handicapped in the contest for American applause. The few who were stu- dents of history of both sides, and all who let old prejudices die and be forgotten, even though 48 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS they may have traced their lineage to the heroes of the Revolution, recognised the community of interests of all peoples who speak the English tongue and are loyal to the in- stitutions of democratic self-government. Americans who had learned to think inter- nationally knew that between the United States and Britain there was a tie that was deeper than speech and stronger than blood. But the million gods of the gallery knew nothing about Prussian political ideals, and somewhere in the back of their minds still lingered echoes of Eng- land and 1776. Those echoes, a snatch of song, or a phrase from a Fourth of July oration, were Britain's handicap in 1914. But a change came. Steadily, inevitably, as the breach widened between feeling in the United States and Germany's behaviour in Belgium, there was disclosed to the average American not only the fact of Anglo-American fraternity, but, what is much more important, the real character of that fact's enduring foundations. The basis of Anglo-American unity to-day is not in any Anglo-Saxon blood affinity. The blood that came to America from Britain, whether Sax- on or Celt, has been blended with bloods from every race of Europe, and to-day is undistin- guished either for its colour or for its strength. Besides, while blood is thicker than water, the DEMOCRACY AND UNITY 49 Teutonic blood-bond across the Channel, which gave Englishmen and Germans a common race heritage, snapped in 1914, just as the blood-bond across the Atlantic snapped in 1776. Not blood, but democracy, is the bond of the Anglo-Ameri- can international unity. Not common blood, but a common idea, a com- mon principle, a common purpose, holds together as in a common life the peoples of the English speech, the nations of the democratic tradition. And not democracy as an external form of gov- ernment, but democracy as a living spirit, as an instinctive attitude of mind, as a germinating idea incarnated in the political and social institutions of free peoples the true democracy of life astir in the public opinion of the two peoples is bring- ing Britain and the United States into closer fel- lowship to-day than, as nations, they have been at any time since the Declaration of Independ- ence. And this Anglo-American unity, which was in- deed the original and dominant desire of George Washington, and which will be a factor in world affairs after this world-war is over, is not a com- ing back home of the colonies that seceded in the eighteenth century. That pleasant conceit of some Englishmen is not at all what is taking place. The sons of the American Patriots are not denying the faith of their fathers. Rather 60 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS are they magnifying that faith, following its gleam, fulfilling its trust. Through the past cen- tury democracy has become the compelling cen- tripetal force in the life of Britain and in the life of the United States. Each has been moving to- wards the common democratic ideal. To-day they both lift up their eyes, sometimes in glad surprise, to find that as they have been loyal to that ideal and obedient to its call so have they approached near and still nearer to each other in all the things that make for peace and justice and the common weal. Democracy was the highway to unity for the English-speaking peoples. That way, and that way alone, lies unity for all the peoples of earth. Despotism means division and warfare. Democracy is the prelude to peace. World democracy based on personal liberty will make natural and sure the world commonwealth of nations. ABRAHAM LINCOLN AND THE ENDUR- ING DEMOCRACY II LINCOLN IF George Washington was a flower of the English aristocracy growing in the rich new soil of American life, Abraham Lincoln was America's incarnation of the soul and spirit of the world's democracy. He was a true democrat : he believed the power of government should be in the hands of the people. His democracy was not in name and outward appearance, or even in political forms and pledges. His was a democ- racy of the mind. In the thought and motive and purpose of his life he counted himself one of the people, of "the plain people." He neither looked down from the pinnacle of class superiority, nor up from the abasement of class subservience. His eyes were level with the point of view of the peo- ple. The very fibre of his own political thinking was expressed in the historic quotation at Get- tysburg, which he made current in American thought: "the government of the people by the people and for the people." In the searching light, in the lurid light, these days cast, not alone on the warring nations of Europe, but in America as well, the name of Lincoln stands out more strikingly, more impressively, than even when in 53 54 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS 1909 the whole civilised world celebrated with high acclaim the centennial of his birth. For among the men born of American women there has not arisen a greater than Abraham Lincoln. George Washington was the natural product of English heredity and American environment. As the Stars and Stripes was the development of the Washington family crest in England, so the Father of his Country was himself the law- ful son of his English sires. But no study of heredity explains Lincoln. His environment whether in birth in the rude Kentucky cabin, or in the sordid poverty of after years in Indiana and Illinois, or in the fierce lights and shadows of his four tragic years as President of the Repub- lic his environment offers no clue to the mystery of his life. The ordinary processes of analysis and appreciation do not reveal his secret. Blood may tell, and types may persist, but not with him. No one went before. No one followed after. He flourished alone, as a root out of a dry ground. In the mysterious laboratory of Nature he was touched with the magic wand. That touch gave him of "the fire of fires." In the murky night there glowed for him the invisible flame within. Through the silence that is in the starry sky there came to him that long, far call. He was not disobedient. He went out not knowing whither he went. LINCOLN 55 'A Hand is stretched to him from out the dark, Which grasping without question, he is led Where there is work that he must do for God." Lincoln went through life as one impelled, haunted by a sense of Destiny, shadowed by a Presence that would not be put by. Men did not know him who knew only his ready story and his ringing laugh. What they saw was but the phos- phorescence playing on the surface: the depths beneath were dark and touched with gloom. He was called to go by the sorrowful way, bearing the awful burden of his people's sin, the cry of the defenceless in his ears, the bitterness of their passion in his heart. Misunderstood, misjudged, he was the most solitary man of his time. He had to tread the winepress alone, and of the peo- ple none went with him. And he turned not back. He never faltered. As one upheld, sus- tained by the unseen Hand, he set his face stead- fastly, undaunted, unafraid, until in Death's black minute he paid glad Life's arrears: the slaves free! the Union saved! himself im- mortal ! Lincoln swept the whole gamut of life. Born in squalid obscurity, nurtured in neglected igno- rance, he grew to the full stature of national heroism, and stands out to-day a distinct figure on the wide sky-line of the world's history. He 56 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS wrote the decree of Emancipation for his own Republic the emancipation of the black man from enslavement to the white, the emancipation .of the white man from the blacker bondage of the mind to the guilty error that man can hold property in man. He changed from war to peace the royal message of the mightiest Empire of the world: in one dread hour of international peril he took his place alone in matters of high di- plomacy not beside Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, whose word might have meant Anglo- American war, but beside Victoria, the gracious but Imperial Queen, whose word did mean Anglo- American peace. Tennyson's lines in "In Memoriam" describing the master-statesman, written years before the name of Lincoln was known outside the confines of pioneer obscurity, read to-day like a prophetic vision of Abraham Lincoln. His life alone seems to answer as that great original : Dost thou look back on what has been, As some divinely gifted man, Whose life on low estate began, And on a simple village green ; Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And breasts the blows of circumstance, And grapples with his evil star; LINCOLN 57 Who makes by force his merit known, And lives to clutch the golden keys, To mould a mighty State's decrees, And shape the whisper of the throne; And, moving up from high to higher, Becomes on Fortune's crowning slope The pillar of a people's hope, The centre of a world's desire. THE LINCOLN POINT OF VIEW LINCOLN got his point of view when, a raw youth in his teens, he chanced to stand in the slave market at New Orleans. Penniless, un- known, unfriended, a deck-hand from a river boat on the Mississippi, he looked upon the hard and ugly fact of slavery, as human flesh and blood was sold at the auction-block. He knew nothing of the teaching of the schools on polit- ical economy, or on the social problem, or on the ethical standard ; but by unerring instinct, thirty years before he saw the White House, he made his choice: "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing, I'll hit it hard, by the Eternal God!" It was the voice of the new democracy. The same incurable sense of the human rights im- pelled him, in early manhood, to declare himself the champion of the common man's right to a man's chance, "until," as he foretold, "every- where in this broad land the sun shall shine, and the rain shall fall, and the wind shall blow upon no man that goes forth to unrequited toil." That protest against "unrequited toil" was the voice of the coming democracy raised in defence, not of negro labour alone, but also of the unprivi- 58 THE LINCOLN POINT OF VIEW 59 leged and the voiceless of every race and in every clime. Lincoln was not learned in the language of modern socialism, and he knew nothing of the theories of the industrial parasite, or of the aca- demic arguments for industrial justice; but, as the sinewy arrow goes straight to its mark, so his mind struck home to the heart of the age-long problem of capital and labor when he protested that "no man shall eat bread by the sweat of an- other man's brow." No university taught Lincoln the fundamen- tals of constitutional law, or traced for him the rise and fall of world kingdoms and common- wealths, but he put the essential wisdom of all the centuries of human government into one memorable saying in the senatorial campaign in Chicago in 1858: "A house divided against it- self cannot stand. This government cannot per- manently endure half slave and half free." In that dictum is set forth the eternal principle of democracy in all nations and for all the world. By such teaching Lincoln gave full proof of the spirit of democratic leadership long before the dream of the White House began to shape his way. Lincoln prepared the way for enduring democ- racy in the United States by his steadfastness in the cause of Union against the fallacies of Seces- 60 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS sion in the South and against the impatience of Abolition in the North. No man ever faced a task more tremendous at a time more critical than did Abraham Lincoln when he was nominated for the Presidency of the United States in Chicago in 1860. No man ever put his hand to an undertaking more fraught with peril so great to interests so vast than did Lincoln on the day of his inauguration at Wash- ington in 1 86 1. No man ever found the way of duty more beset with disappointment and seeming defeat than did Lincoln during those four awful years of power, with their cabal and conflict and unspeakable carnage. With the ruler of a nation it is not a question of monarchy or of democ- racy. Coronation by the Crowd secures no im- munity from the sorrows of the King. Lincoln, as surely and as sadly as any throned monarch, had to pay the price and drink the cup. He was called to be the chief executive of the nation, only to find the nation divided; to be President of the United States, only to find those States no longer united. Secession had already sown the seeds of disunion far and wide. State after State had broken away. Long before the first gun was fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln saw the foreshadow of coming events. Other men might deceive themselves and might deceive the people with cries of Peace! Peace! when there THE LINCOLN POINT OF VIEW 61 could be no peace. Other men, in the North as well as in the South, among the Abolitionists as well as among the planters, might be ready and even eager to let secession have its way, and to give to the slave States confederate autonomy as a new Republic. But with Lincoln it could not be so. He saw too deeply into the current of events to dream of peace for a nation half slave and half free. He took too seriously his own responsibili- ties as the constitutional President of the Ameri- can Republic to stand idly by while disunion and disintegration were destroying that Republic, and frustrating every pledge of freedom that Washington and Jefferson and Hamilton and Franklin had given to the world. In the midst of all those cross-currents of opinion, and that confusion of tongues, and that panic of public feeling, Lincoln alone stood erect, master of the situation, his nerve steady, his head clear, his heart unmoved. Lincoln did for democracy in the United States what needed to be done, what had not been done at the beginning, and what sooner or later had to be done, when he stood for that ideal of the Re- public which involved federal sovereignty over the uniting States and made secession mean treason and civil war. The limitation of State sovereignty was not settled by the Constitution. The question was obscured : it was evaded. Had 62 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS it been pressed to the forefront, some of the States might not have come in had they known they could not go out. There was, at least, an arguable case for secession in the equivocal lan- guage of the Constitution, as well as in the fact and the fortunes of the Revolution. Time might have solved the problem had the aggressions of slavery not raised the issue. But once raised, it had to be faced. Lincoln faced it. And in facing it and settling it, he established the fabric of de- mocracy in the United States on constitutional foundations that cannot be moved. And the statesmanship of Lincoln saved de- mocracy when he stood first of all for the Union, for its honour, for its integrity, for its supreme claim upon the loyalty of every citizen in every State. He refused, as surely as the Secessionists refused, to make slavery the issue of the war. Lincoln and his Cabinet and the leaders of the North said they fought to save the Union. Jef- ferson Davis and the leaders of the South said they fought for State rights. They all said it was not slavery. Both sides gave assurances to Britain that it was not slavery. Lincoln knew too well that, notwithstanding the fiery propa- grandism of the apostles of abolition, the time had not yet come when even the North would pay the awful and inescapable price that the slaves might be free. The shame and sin of the THE LINCOLN POINT OF VIEW 63 slave traffic had indeed entered as an iron into many a soul. The cup of its iniquity was indeed full. But there was a pause before the blow fell. There had to come a crisis and a challenge. Be- fore the war cloud had spent itself, the ultimatum of the South, making the rights of slavery the supreme and irreversible issue, flashed a reveal- ing light into the faces of the North. In that light the slave power showed its true visage, stripped, unmistakable, the relentless enemy not of the negro alone but of the nation as well. But Lincoln did more for democracy in the United States than to save the Union. Union was not enough. There must be freedom as well. And to be born free must mean more than the Declaration of Independence had as yet made it mean. It must mean freedom not for some of the people, not even for a majority of the people, but for all the people. Democracy and slavery cannot join hands. Between them there must be an "irrepressible conflict." It was the old story. That conflict belongs to all the ages of human progress. The struggle between South and North in the American Re- public was not an accident. Lincoln was not re- sponsible for it. Southern slavery was the occa- sion of it, not the cause. Its roots ran far back into that old-world civilisation from which North and South alike drew their ideals and their life. 64, DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS It was the struggle of the seventeenth century in England over again. It was the Cavalier against the Roundhead, as of old. The high-born Royal- ists of King Charles when they came to America left behind them the forms of monarchy, but they brought with them to Virginia the old aristocratic spirit and the social ideal that made negro servi- tude in the South seem not only a privilege, but a right. The men of the Mayflower brought to New England the Puritan impulse, and that in- extinguishable spark of democracy disturbed the soul of the North. Between these two, sooner or later, conflict had to come in America, as it came two centuries before in England. Slavery was the occasion: human rights against class privi- lege was the issue. When the time was ripe, Lincoln struck the blow. The men who signed the Declaration and who framed the Constitution blinked the slave question. Had it been possible to save the Union and to retain slavery, Lincoln might have blinked it too. But it could not be. The nature of things was against it. The democracy that declared all men to be "born free and equal" gave the lie to the defiant fallacy of the slave-holding aristoc- racy that one man can hold chattel rights on his fellow-man. The Puritan conscience of New England saved the ideals of the Republic until the rail-splitter from Illinois drove the wedge of THE LINCOLN POINT OF VIEW 65 truth into the heart of the problem and split off the planter oligarchy from the life-trunk of American democracy. The time had surely come when democracy in the United States must needs justify itself alike to its own children and to the world. It was not enough to point to an academic and speculative declaration that "all men are born free and equal," when, under the Stars and Stripes, three millions of human beings, as Lincoln said, "went out to unrequited toil." It was not enough to talk loftily of "the land of the free," and to echo Jef- ferson's tirades against monarchy, when, nearly a century after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the only land on all this conti- nent of North America in which in very truth all men were born free was under monarchial gov- ernment ; and the only flag that gave protection to all classes, without respect to race or colour, was the Union Jack. It cost treasure and it cost blood to wipe out that stain, but in wiping it out, Lin- coln justified American democracy before the na- tions of the world. But Lincoln was more than a leader of his peo- ple. He was their diplomat as well. One of his greatest services to democracy in the United States was in the strength and steadiness with which he withstood the clamant pressure of the crowd, even of the crowd that made him Presi- 66 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS dent. In matters of diplomacy he gave democ- racy worthy grounds for enduring self-respect at home, and he added permanently to its prestige abroad. In his relations with other nations he so conducted himself that the Crowd, almost in spite of itself, was given dignity in the presence of the Crown. This meant much for the credit of democracy; for it was in matters of diplomacy that its ene- mies said democracy would be disproved. It would not have been strange had Lincoln failed. He was himself a man of the crowd. The crowd is notoriously the victim of impulse and emotion : the crowd spirit knows no law and brooks no check. Again and again the tumult of the people surged about Lincoln on the slavery question, on the management of the war, on problems of polity, and on the delicate and critical affairs of foreign relations. It would not have been strange had he been stampeded; others have been, before his day and since. That he, a man of the people, the in- carnation of the powers and instincts and genius of the plain people that he stood erect, worthy of the nation's honour, commanding respect from foreign peoples and recognition from their mon- archs that he had done this thing was a service to Government by the People which the people themselves at first resented in anger, and even yet are slow to appreciate and understand. THE LINCOLN POINT OF VIEW 67 In the crisis-hour of Anglo-American diplo- macy because of Lincoln and the Lincoln point of view, the Republicanism of Abraham Lincoln and the Royalty of Queen Victoria, at their sum- mits, joined hands. Then indeed it was that de- mocracy was justified of her children. THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IDEA THIS government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free." So declared Lin- coln in Chicago in 1856. And why? Why could not democracy in the American Republic en- dure, as it had endured from the time of inde- pendence, half slave and half free? It was be- cause of the change in the American situation. The separate colonies had become one great com- monwealth. New England and the South were bound together in one self-governing community. Massachusetts and Virginia rubbed shoulders. Free States and slave States joined hands in com- mon trade, and felt the ebb and flow of a common life. Settlements from the east moved into the expanding territories of the west. Over the mountains and across the wilderness the cara- vans rolled like argosies on the high seas, and on neutral ground the conflict began. The Missouri compromise of 1854, like the temporising ex- pedient of Armed Peace between the nations, only delayed the hour: it could not avert it. It was the struggle of two antagonistic principles of gov- ernment: the struggle of privilege against justice, of autocracy against democracy, of despotism 68 THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IDEA 69 against freedom. When the real meaning of that struggle became plain in the heart of the American Commonwealth Abraham Lincoln spoke the everlasting judgment of the very Na- ture of Things for democracy everywhere, when he declared : "A house divided against itself can- not stand: this government cannot permanently endure half slave and half free." It was the fact of national neighbourhood that made the difference. The nation had become a house, a home for a vast family of peoples : un- less it stand together the pillars of its strength must fall. The nation had become a neighbour- hood: unless its whole community life were just and free its democracy was doomed, its govern- ment could not endure. That is the law of the neighbourhood. The dog-eat-dog maxim of the jungle might serve in the isolation of jungle life, but life in the national neighbourhood is possible only in obedience to social law. That law is law to-day for all nations through- out the expanding neighbourhood of interna- tional society. Life is either a neighbourhood or a jungle, or is the confused and half -civilised mid- dle-ground between. The rule of the jungle is the maxim of the brigand Rob Roy : "They should take who have the power And they should keep who can." 70 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS The law of the neighbourhood is the saying of Jesus: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy- self." The neighbourhood and the jungle through the ages are locked in struggle. The whole his- tory of civilisation might be written in terms of that struggle. The international area is as yet half jungle. America alone of all the continents can show the world an international boundary between two proud and high-strung peoples that, over its four thousand miles, is a civilised neigh- bourhood, swept clear of the jungle marks of forts and guns and warships and war. Other nations on other continents must learn America's more excellent way or it will mean hell for all the world. Many things have happened in America, in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, in the past twelve- month, but those happenings only add meaning and intensity to the struggle, the age-long strug- gle, between the neighbourhood and the jungle which marks the course of human history. If we never thought seriously of it before, the ex- periences of this war year have taught us that no man can live to himself, that no nation can stand alone, that no continent is big enough or self-sufficient enough to isolate itself from the life-and-death struggles and tragedies of the rest of the world. The most striking fact in life to-day is the sud- THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IDEA 71 den crowding together of all nations and races into one world community. They may still cher- ish the passions of the jungle, but the ends of the earth now stand face to .face in the world's front street. No nation ever again can either sorrow or rejoice alone. The continents and islands to- gether comprise the world-neighbourhood. Here stands America. The Fathers of Inde- pendence conceived their Republic untrammelled by the handicaps of Europe and untangled in its life. Canada on its -half -continent thought itself separate from the dread vortex of European mil- itarism by the safe leagues of the estranging sea. But what has happened? An old race feud be- tween Teuton and Slav, with which America had nothing to do, swept eastern Europe : Canada is caught in the deathful swirl of Europe's war: the United States holds formal neutrality, but most of its financial interests and all of its insti- tutions of political freedom are involved and at stake. There can be no real neutrality when war enters the world-neighbourhood. The world is too small, civilisation has gone too wide, life is too complex for the United States or Canada or any other civilised democracy to live apart and untouched by the barbaric rem- nants of the old world. The wheat-fields of Sas- katchewan, the corn-fields of Nebraska, the sheep-fields of New Zealand, the rice-fields of 72 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS China, the silver-fields of Peru, the diamond- fields of South Africa, all the fields of human in- dustry and human interest, every island in the lone Pacific, every shore in the Southern Seas, every whaling fleet in the frozen North they must all pay the toll of fear and pain and loss taken this year by the war-lords of Europe. There can never again be East nor West nor black nor white, nor bond nor free. The middle walls of nations and races are broken down. No man's citizenship is now in the United States alone or under the Stars and Stripes. No man lives in Canada alone or under the Union Jack. By the world-tragedy we are made citizens of all the world, brothers to the men of Nippon and Bengal, next-of-kin to the very men, to the twen- ty-five millions of men, of all the great nations of Europe, who have marched down to the world's Armageddon to die. Our citizenship is in the world-neighbourhood. The neighbourhood problem is our problem, yours, mine, every man's. What is the neighbourhood problem ? At bot- tom it is the individual problem of living, and the social problem of living together. The problem of living is the problem of a man's right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness. It claims the right of a man to enjoy the fruit of his labours. It affirms that no able-bodied man shall be allowed, as Lincoln said, to eat THE NEIGHBOURHOOD IDEA 73 bread by the sweat of another man's brow. It declares that difference in capacity, which yields difference in achievements and in rewards, must not interfere with democracy's equality of oppor- tunity for all and special privileges for none. It requires that as slavery is a dishonour and a deg- radation to humanity, every man shall be allowed to be master of his own life and be helped to make that self -master ship intelligent, just, and free. And the individual problem of living is in- volved in the social problem of living together. The social problem may be simple enough when the neighbourhood is small, the individuals few, their interests plain and their rights unassailed. But that problem becomes infinitely complex as life widens its horizons, deepens its needs, height- ens its aspirations and becomes more keenly sen- sitive to its own destiny and worth. That prob- lem is vast and staggering when all the world be- comes a world-community, when all nations are next-door neighbours one to another, and when the lawless individualism of the world-jungle must give place to the ordered socialism of the world-neighbourhood. And this is the world-neighbourhood problem to-day: the problem of the individual nation maintaining the strength and fulness and freedom of its own life in just relations with the rights of other nations in the same world-community: 74 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS the problem of one race preserving its identity and its ideals in the same world order with other races and their distinctions and ideals : the prob- lem of one people, strong and masterful, securing and enlarging their place in the sun without shut- ting the needed sunshine out of the life and his- tory of other peoples who also have aspirations and obligations in the same world-neighbourhood. That is to-day the problem of the world. And to the solving of that problem the call comes to every student, to every teacher, and to every true university mind. By that problem every political theory is tested and every social program. Philosophy is foolishness if it does not understand. Culture is dead dogma if it does not care. The churches have killed their Christ if their Christianity breaks down when the field is the world. A house divided against itself can- not stand. World government cannot endure half slave and half free, half barbaric and half civilised, half autocracy and half democracy, half war and half peace, half Caesar and half Christ. CANADA'S PART IN THE AMERICAN CONFLICT LINCOLN'S life and Lincoln's achievement were factors in the democracy of Canada. It is quite true Lincoln himself knew almost nothing about Canadian affairs. He never set foot on Canadian soil. He had no direct interest in Canadian problems. But a life so vital as his could not be lived to itself or to the people of his own country alone. Sovereignty stops at the Great Lakes and the international boundary line, but the masterful life overleaps all such limita- tions. The man is greater than the ruler. In Abraham Lincoln, Canada has had an inheritance that through a half -century has made for the enrichment of public life and the redemption of public service. The Canadian situation cannot be understood, and the meaning of Lincoln for Canadian democ- racy cannot be appreciated, unless there is kept in mind the Canadian struggle for government of the people by the people and for the people. That struggle, in Canada, was not an isolated case in history. It was only one of a long series of conflicts characteristic of Anglo-Saxon civi- 75 76 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS lisation. It bore the unmistakable marks of the Revolution in England under Cromwell, and of the Revolution in America under Washington. The conflict in the American Civil War between the oligarchy of the South and the democratic ideals of the North had its counterpart in Can- ada. Canada had the seed of the Cavalier of King Charles, and from the South, as well as from England, Canada received her share of the high-bred aristocracy. That seed grew into class privilege, and ripened into an autocracy as exclusive and as insolent as anything Southern aristocracy or old-world Toryism could show. And over against it in both countries there was set the restless, new-born democracy of the Puri- tan, and of the Nonconformist, and of the rugged Cameronian. Conflict was inevitable. In Canada, the conflict came a generation earlier than in the United States because the neighbourhood was smaller. It was in 1837, the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, that the seething discontent of the people against in- justice and tyranny found expression in the rebel- lion led by Louis Papineau in Lower Canada and by William Lyon Mackenzie in Upper Canada. That rebellion was suppressed with little blood- shed, but the power of the oligarchy began to be broken. The rights for which the people fought were abundantly granted in 1840, when CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT, 77 Canada was given, not merely representative government, but what Canadians prize far more, government directly and immediately responsible to the people's Parliament. What was won for, democracy in the United States on the battle- fields of the Revolution, and more truly in the Civil War, was secured for democracy in Canada in the Parliament of the nation. But at bottom the struggle was the same. Now, the fact of that Canadian struggle, the elements represented in it, and the issues of it, must be kept in mind by those who would under- stand the attitude of Canadians to Lincoln and the Civil War. Of course, Canada was not a unit on that question, even as England was not a unit, and the North itself not a unit. In all three countries there was, and still is, the con- tending of opposite types and tendencies. There were in Canada and among Canadians those who sympathised with the South, whose affinities were with the South, and who wished the South to win. There were those, too, who believed then, and still believe, that the logic of the Constitution was with the Secessionists of the South, but who for humanity's sake, desired, unreservedly and passionately desired, that the logic of war should make good the cause of fhe North. For the people of Canada, from the very beginning of the century, longed and prayed, and when the 78 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS time came not a few of them fought and died, that the accursed mountain of human slavery might be dug away forever from the face of this American continent. Canada once had a taste of negro slavery. When the Loyalists of the Revolution chose the old flag rather than the new, they were permitted to bring their "property" with them to Canada. That was before the days of Parliamentary in- stitutions in the Canadian colonies. By a special Act of the British Parliament slaves as slaves were brought to Canada from the slave States. But the "peculiar institution" of the South was short-lived in Canada. The first Parliament of Upper Canada was established in 1792, and in 1793, in the Navy Hall, Niagara, the first act of that first Parliament made for the total aboli- tion of slavery. That act was drawn by the newly appointed Chief Justice Osgoode, and was signed by Governor Simcoe, "with a grateful heart." It forbade the importation of slaves, and their sale under process of law. The relation between master and slave, a mild patriarchal re- lationship, was allowed to continue, to the slave's very great advantage But the children of the slave were free. From the passing of that Act in 1793 until Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Canada was the sanctuary for the hunted runa- CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT 79 ways from the slave States. It is a story full of pathos, of infinite tragedy, and of heroism forever honouring to human nature. At first Canada was far away from the plant- er's reach, and there was safety in the free States of the North. But in 1851, the slave power was enthroned at Washington, and enforced the Fugi- tive Slave Act From that time on there was no safe place, not in Chicago, not even in Boston itself, for the fugitive from slavery. It was on to Canada, or it was back to Legree and the lash. Between the Ohio River and the shores of Lake Erie there stretched a vast and trackless forest, but the thought of freedom was sweet even to the ignorant negro slave, and many a hunted refugee took the blazed trail that led to liberty. It is an American writer of the slave history who says: "Early in the century the rumour gradually spread among the negroes of the Southern States that there was, far away under the North Star, a land where the flag of the Union did not float; where the law declared all men free and equal; where the people respected the law, and the government, if need be, en- forced it." It is estimated that more than sixty thousand negro slaves found freedom when they touched Canadian soil. The celebrated "Underground Railroad" traversed the northern States with its 80 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS network of secret trails, its southern terminals far-flung from Kansas to the Atlantic along the Missouri, the Ohio, and the Chesapeake, its couriers in the cottonfields and the plantations of the South, and its northern terminals at Colling- wood and Sarnia and Windsor and Amherstburg and Pelee and Port Stanley and Port Burwell and Niagara and Hamilton and Toronto and Kingston and Montreal and Halifax. None of our modern railroad kings have so gridironed the land or shown greater enterprise or downright courage. John Brown, of immortal memory, con- structed his own branch line of that "Under- ground Railroad," from Missouri through Iowa and Illinois and Michigan to the Canadian bor- der, and he made many a trip to Canada before "he died at Harper's Ferry on the fourteenth day of June"; and though his body was left "mouldering in the grave," over those mysterious lines, by which the slave might be free, "his soul went marching on." To the slaves Canada was Goshen, not Canaan. Many of them grew to comfort and prospered. But Emancipation Day was the day of their de- liverance. From that day on they began to set their faces again to the warm southland. Canada never would have had the negro or a negro prob- lem had it not been for slavery. It is not a mat- ter of law, but of latitude. In the northern zone CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT 81 the thermometer is on the side of the white man. Until Lincoln broke the slave power in the United States slavery was a disturbing factor in Canadian life. The solid body of Canadian opinion was opposed to slavery. With the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1851, abolitionist feel- ing in Canada became intensely strong. This was due to one man and his work more than to all other influences excluding, perhaps, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." That man was the Hon. George Brown. No man knows anything of Canadian life and history who does not know of George Brown, the founder and first editor of The Globe. A giant Scot of the sturdiest type, from the day he arrived in Toronto in 1843 unt ^ the day in 1880 when in the Globe office he fell by the bullet of a frenzied assassin, George Brown, like Abraham Lincoln, was the great tribune of the people. He was the strong voice and the right arm of the common people. More than any other man, he left his impress on Ca- nadian democracy, and made immovable the foundations of responsible government. George Brown in politics was a Liberal of the genuine Scottish type. He could not but abhor slavery. He saw it at close range in the Slave States. He spoke against it, and he made The Globe ring out against it long before Lincoln's 83 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS voice was heard. He felt American slavery to be an international wrong, a Canadian burden. Here are some words of his from a speech against the Fugitive Slave Act, delivered in Toronto in March, 1852: "The question is asked: What have we in Canada to do with American slavery? We have everything to do with it. It is a question of humanity. It is a question of Christianity. We have to do with it on the score of self-protection. The leprosy of the atrocious system affects all around it; it leavens the thoughts, the feelings, the in- stitutions of the people who touch it. It is a barrier to liberal principles. We are along- side this great evil; our people mingle with it; we are affected by it now. In self -pro- tection we are bound to use every effort for its abolition. And there is another reason. We are in the habit of calling the people of the United States 'the Americans'; but we, too, are Americans. On us, as well as on them, lies the duty of preserving the honour of the continent. On us, as on them, rests the noble trust of shielding free institutions from the reproach of modern tyrants. Who that looks at Europe given over to the des- pots, and with but one little island yet left to uphold the flag of freedom, can reflect without emotion that the great Republic of this continent nurtures a despotism more de- basing than them all ? How crushingly the CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT 83 upholders of tyranny in other lands must turn on the friends of liberty. 'Behold your free institutions/ they must say. 'Look at the American Republic/ they must sneer, 'proclaiming all men to be born free and equal, and keeping nearly four millions of slaves in the most cruel bondage/ ' The man who spoke those words in 1852 was the dominant force in Canadian public opinion, the potent voice in the Canadian Parliament. His sentiments on slavery became the strong convic- tions of the Canadian people. With what eager- ness, therefore, was the rise of Lincoln, the new star on the western horizon, watched by the peo- ple of Canada. From the day of his nomination in 1860 until his tragic death, the name of Abra- ham Lincoln was as highly honoured, and his course was as intelligently and as anxiously fol- lowed, by the people of the Dominion as by those of his own Republic. His success was not only American; it was Canadian as well. When the war broke out feeling in Canada became acute. The original elements of strife were augmented by the inrush of Southerners. Many of the best families in Virginia and Ken- tucky came for safety to Toronto, while their men marched with Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The planter and the preacher came. Their runaway slaves had been there already. 84 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Then came the "skedaddler" from the South and the "bounty jumper" from the North. The agent of the Confederate Government at Richmond had his headquarters in Toronto, and many an esca- pade is told of how despatches and orders were carried to and fro through the Northern lines. There were also the recruiting sergeants of the North and the conspirators from the South. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Lincoln, and his allies developed their schemes in Montreal. Ben- nett Burleigh, afterwards famous as a British war correspondent, was then a daredevil young filibuster, operating between Montreal and De- troit in the Southern service, and was ringleader in an attempt to release twenty-five thousand prisoners from under the Northern guns on an island in Lake Erie. His trial for extradition in Toronto was equalled in public interest only by the great trial of William Anderson, the negro runaway, in 1860. At the close of the war many of the Southern leaders found in Toronto and about Niagara their temporary homes, and their dignity, cour- tesy, and fine culture made them welcome citizens. Mr. Jefferson Davis himself visited Toronto im- mediately after his release from prison, and his wife made her home on the Canadian shore of Lake Erie, and there she died in the new day of peace. CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT 85 All these conflicting forces, social as well as commercial, were at work in Canadian public opinion during the four years of the war. A small group remained stout supporters of the Southern cause, but the great body of Canadian sentiment was with the North. While the South- ern sympathisers were welcoming with cheers the poor old President of the overthrown Con- federacy at the wharf in Toronto in 1867, the children in the schools throughout the country were singing on their playgrounds: "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree, As we go marching on." In a book by a professor of Harvard Uni- versity, published at the time of the Lincoln cen- tennial, this statement is made: "Feeling in the United States was greatly incensed because of the sympathy of Canada with the South in the Civil War." The answer to that statement is that there were more than forty-eight thousand Canadian enlistments in the armies of the North, and eighteen thousand Canadian soldiers died for the Union cause. They were in the army of the Potpmac, in the Army of the James, in the Army af the Cumberland, in the Army of the Tennessee, and in the Army of the Rio Grande. They were with Grant at Vicksburg. They were with Thomas at Chickamauga. They were with 86 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Custer in the West. They were with Meade at Gettysburg. They burned through the Shenan- doah with Sheridan. They marched with Sher- man to the sea. On every great battlefield be- tween the Mississippi and the Potomac the sons of Canada stood shoulder to shoulder with the men of the Union. They languished in Libbey Prison. They rotted in the Andersonville Camp. They answered great Lincoln's call ; they fought under the Stars and Stripes; they died for America's honour, but in life and in death the flag of their hearts was the Union Jack. But Lincoln's life was significant for Canada in directions other than those suggested by slav- ery and the Civil War. His stand for Federal authority as against State sovereignty had its effect on political opinion in Canada. During the years of Lincoln's regime the question of the union of the Provinces of British North America was under discussion, and the Act of Confedera- tion was passed in 1867. The experience in the United States was influential in Canada. The uncertainty in the Constitution of the Republic, of which the Secessionists took advantage, was avowedly and deliberately guarded against by the Fathers of the Canadian Confederation. They left not a shadow of a doubt as to Federal sovereignty. And Lincoln's work in preserving the Union CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT 87 and determining that there should be but one Republic, even though he may have strained the terms of the Constitution, was approved by the best Canadian opinion. I quote again from the Hon. George Brown. In a speech of unreserved congratulations on Lincoln's Emancipation Proc- lamation, in Toronto in February, 1863, Mr. Brown said: "No man who loves human freedom and desires the elevation of mankind could con- template without the deepest regret a failure of that great experiment of self-government in the United States. Had Mr. Lincoln con- sented to the secession of the Southern States, had he admitted that each State could at any moment, and on any plea, take its departure from the Union, he would simply have given his consent to the complete rup- ture of the federation. The Southern States and the border States would have gone. The Western States might soon have followed. The States on the Pacific would not have been long behind. Where the practice of secession, once commenced, would have ended, would be difficult to say. Petty Re- publics would have covered the continent; each would have had its standing army and its standing feuds; and we, too, in Canada, were it only in self-defence, must have been compelled to arm. I for one cannot look back on the history of the American Re- 88 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS public without feeling that all this would have been a world-wide misfortune. How can we ever forget that the United States territory has, for nearly a century, been an ever-open asylum for the poor and persecuted from every land? Millions have fled from suffering and destitution in every corner of Europe to find happy homes and overflowing prosperity in the Republic. Is there a hu- man being could rejoice that all this should be ended? That was the view of the soundest and best- informed Canadian public opinion in Lincoln's own day. The years that have intervened have confirmed that opinion. Canadians of to-day rise up and bless the name of Abraham Lincoln, be- cause by him it was determined that the Canadian Dominion, now stretching from ocean to ocean, would have to do on this continent not with two Republics, as seemed inevitable, not with four as seemed possible, but with one great Nation, along the four thousand miles of international bound- ary, and holding sovereign sway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. For that great fact in international relation- ships Canada gives thanks at the mention of Lincoln's name. All that Lincoln did in the cause of human freedom and guarding the sacredness of human rights he did for every people. His CANADA'S PART IN AMERICAN CONFLICT 89 own great life is the inheritance of all the world. Under his strong hand democracy in the United States survived the utmost strain, and because of that triumph Canada has been heartened in its great task of laying the foundations and erecting the structure of another American democracy in which all men shall be born free and equal, and where government of the people by the people and for the people shall have an- other chance. CANADA AND THE WORLD PROBLEM Ill AN ADVENTURE IN WORLD POLITICS WHY mention Canada as a factor in World Politics? When the history of the world's great war comes to be written Canada will not be unnamed. Again and again, and for weeks together, in the United States as well as in Britain and in France, the courage, the heroism, the deeds of dauntless daring done by Canadian troops at the battle- front have been told with acclaim that went round the world. Names like Ypres and St. Julien and Festubert will have associated with them, in the war historian's record, the name of Canada. But that was world War, not world Politics. And yet the most notable thing in Canada's half -century of national history, the thing that will tell most enduringly in the life of the world, will not be any incident in any military campaign, be it never so splendid. For a thousand years and more the races whose bloods are mingled in Ca- nadian veins have played the courageous, the chivalric, the invincible in the fierce hour of des- tiny on the field of battle. Many of the shining pages of the world's black history of war were filled by the race-forbears of the men who made 93 94 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS the name of Ypres immortal, and saved the day for Britain at St. Julien. But what will tell most widely and most per- manently in history, not for Canada alone, but for Britain and for the world, will be the thing done in Canadian politics which made Canada a self-governing nation, which opened the way to nationhood for other colonies of the British Em- pire, and which ever since has been working the transformation of the spirit, the constitution and the world relations of the Empire itself. Can- ada's greatest achievement, like the greatest achievement of the United States, is in the realm of world politics. It had to do with democracy, not war. It helps to-day to a solving of the World Problem. Canada was a colony of Britain, subject in all things to British legislation and British ad- ministration. Canada is now a nation exercising the full powers of national self-government through the institutions of a free Parliament elected by Canadians from among Canadian citi- zens and responsible only to Canadian approval or censure. That change in political status and responsibility from colonial dependence to na- tional autonomy was made without secession, without revolution, without alienation from the mother country, and without any rupture in Can- ada's political development or any sacrifice of AN ADVENTURE IN WORLD POLITICS 95 Canada's national background in the thousand years of British history. A nation was born without the travail pangs of war. That achievement is without a precedent in all the world. Never before in the world's history did any colony of any empire come from colonial subjection to national self-government except by cutting the painter and striking for independence. Canada released a new idea in internationalism, and by its achievement made possible the world commonwealth of British nations. This change in Canada's standing, the change from a subject colony to a self-governing nation, was not done in a day, or even in a generation. It was a thing of evolution, of vital growth, and so gradual was it, so natural, so inevitable, that common opinion in other nations, even among the people and the public journals of Britain and of the United States, has not yet taken note either of the fact of that change or of its stupendous significance. It is still the habit to speak of Canada as a "colony" of Britain. Not in Ger- many alone, but in the United States also, and since the present war began, it has been common enough to have Canada's action in sending an army from North America to the war-front in Europe explained by the Imperial compulsion ex- ercised by Britain over her colonial possessions. In the eyes of Germany that compulsion by Brit- 96 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS ain extenuated Canada's crime, and to many otherwise intelligent Americans it minimised whatever of credit that action may have brought to Canada. If Canada's military service is com- pelled by any power outside of Canada the blame and the praise alike are lessened. Until the un- precedented fact in its full significance is brought home to the consciousness of outside peoples by the happenings of these frightful war months the world will not understand the range and the con- tent of that new thing in world politics, the de- mocracy of free peoples, the commonwealth of free nations, the world partnership of sovereign States, which is still named, or misnamed, the British Empire. But Canadians themselves have been slow to understand, slow to believe. Indeed the thing done in Canada's history was not a thing of measured purpose and deliberate choice. The end was not seen from the beginning. The pio- neers of Canadian nationhood went out not knowing whither they went. Their goal was not in sight. A Divinity shaped their ends, while they themselves saw but one step at a time, and were rough hewers of the way. The men of the farther vision were to their own generation rebels and traitors. From the days of William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis Papineau until now the prophets of the larger liberty were stoned AN ADVENTURE IN WORLD POLITICS 97 for disloyalty by their own generation, and the next generation of loyalists builded monuments to their memory. From the very beginning Canada's national interests suffered through the exigencies of po- litical parties and the prejudice and perversion which inflamed party passion always breeds. The unreasoning antipathy to Britain cultivated and organised in the United States, long after the Revolution, to serve the ends of ambitious Amer- ican politicians, has had its counterpart in Can- ada, in the periodical outbreaks of animosity towards the United States. The growth of Ca- nadian national feeling was often checked and sometimes perverted by appeals to loyalty and to Canada's debt to Britain, made in Parliament and on the hustings, to serve some party advan- tage which seemed for the moment to be im- portant. Every great Canadian Patriot, from the leaders of what was called the "Rebellion of 1837" on to the leaders of Reciprocity in 1911, and including Robert Baldwin and Louis Lafon- taine, Sir John Macdonald, the Tory statesman, as well as Hon. George Brown, the tribune of Canadian Liberalism, and Sir Charles Tupper, as well as Sir Wilfrid Laurier every genuine leader of Canadian thought toward the goal of true Canadian national sentiment has been, at some time, either suspected within his own party 98 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS or denounced by his political opponents as dis- loyal to British connection or an enemy of British Imperialism. History has justified, and will justify still more, the men whose clearer vision led them forward into untried paths when their fellows doubted and fell back. But history can- not recover to Canada the loss to national inter- ests which the nation always must suffer when reaction defeats reform, or when the lowest good to the party triumphs over the highest and the best for the State. But through all the ebbs and the eddies of political controversy the true Canadian national- ism moved forward. More than seventy years ago the British Secretary of State for the Col- onies exercised the right of dictation in matters affecting the trade and tariff policy of Canada, but exercised it for the last time. To-day the Government of Britain would no more think of interfering in any way whatsoever in any matter of Canadian policy, considered or adopted by any responsible Canadian Government and approved by a Canadian Parliament, even though that mat- ter was one of direct treaty agreement with a foreign nation or one that prejudiced the trade interests of the British people no more think of that than of interfering with proposals and decisions of the Government of Sweden or Brazil. Canada has come to national autonomy. AN ADVENTURE IN WORLD POLITICS 99 And this affirmation of Canada's trade and tariff independence in no way infringes on the prerogatives of what even acknowledged Im- perialists call British Imperialism, as witness the applauded declaration of the Right. Hon. Arthur J. Balfour as leader of his Majesty's loyal Oppo- sition in the British House of Commons in 1910. The Laurier Administration in Canada effected a trade agreement between Canada and France directly, and not through the British Colonial Office or by British Commissioners. On that point Mr. Balfour spoke these deliberate and very meaningful words : "The Dominion of Canada, technically, I suppose, it may be said, carried on their negotiations with the knowledge of his Majesty's representative, but it was a purely technical knowledge. I do not believe that his Majesty's Government was ever con- sulted at a single stage of those negotia- tions. I do not believe they ever informed themselves, or offered any opinion, as to what was the best policy for Canada under the circumstances. I think they were well advised. But how great is the change and how inevitable. It is a matter of common knowledge and, may I add, not a matter of regret, but a matter of pride and rejoic- ing that the great Dominions beyond the seas are becoming great nations in them- selves." 100 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Two years later, after negotiations had been carried on by the Canadian Government directly with Washington for larger reciprocity in trade between Canada and the United States, and after the Laurier Government had been succeeded in 1911 by the Government of Sir Robert Borden, the position taken up by Mr. Balfour in 1910 touching the national self-government of Canada was made even more unmistakable by Premier Asquith. Some criticism had been made of the British Ambassador at Washington, at that time the Right Hon. James Bryce, and speaking in reply in the British House of Commons in May, 1912, the Prime Minister said: "The question of what is most to the advantage of Canada is primarily one for the Canadian Government. Mr. Bryce had nothing to do with the views or policy of the Canadian Government. The negotia- tions were initiated and carried on by Can- ada. The British Ambassador in pursuance of his plain duty did not interfere with the conference, but if asked for advice gave it. For Mr. Bryce to have interfered with the negotiations going on at Washington upon matters which were within Canada's own competence would have been naturally re- sented by Canada. Generally there had been no difference of opinion in the Dominion about that, whatever may be the differences between Canadians themselves regarding AN ADVENTURE IN WORLD POLITICS 101 reciprocity. The manner in which Mr. Bryce has performed his duties has been of great advantage, inspiring Canada with confidence in the British Ambassador at Washington, who will always be prepared to support the present Canadian Government no less than its predecessors in any negotiations it may be engaged in with the United States." To be sure, such views as those expressed by Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith were not always the views either of Conservative leaders or of Liberal leaders in Britain. Gladstone, as well as Beaconsfield, while assenting to so much of self-government for Canada as was involved in the British North America Act of 1867, feared that the issue of the Confederation of Canada would be complete separation from Britain. They saw nothing for it the logic of events in the history of the American colonies the century earlier being their guide British leaders saw nothing for it in the event of the growth of na- tional sentiment in Canada but a demand for Canadian independence. And at that time inde- pendence meant separation. But had that de- mand been made by a united Canada it would have been granted without war and without feel- ings of bitterness and alienation. How vast and complete the change has been is indicated, not only by the declarations of the great successors of 102 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Beaconsfield and Gladstone a half -century later, but also by the events in Canada and in Britain in 1915. A far larger independence than the Fathers of Confederation ever dreamed has yielded a far more splendid loyalty than the bar- gainings of fear and the counsels of prudence ever could have secured. Nor was Canadian public opinion always clear as to the larger results that would follow Ca- nadian autonomy in matters of direct treaty ne- gotiations with foreign nations. Even so late as 1882 Sir John Macdonald himself, in answer to Hon. Edward Blake, said: "Disguise it as you will, this means separation and independ- ence." Ten years later Sir George Foster, while less dogmatic than his great chief, offered this alternative and asked this question: "There is only one thing, only a single power left, which would show the difference between Canada as she is to-day and a complete and absolute sover- eignty, and that is the power, the imperial and absolute power of making treaties with other countries, subject to no conditions and to no con- trol except her own interests as shown through her own Parliament and her own Government. Are we prepared to take that other step with all the consequences which inevitably follow it?" Canada has taken that step, and the "inevitable" consequences did not follow. It did not mean AN ADVENTURE IN WORLD POLITICS 103 "separation and independence." And no respon- sible Canadian statesman, Conservative or Lib- eral, would to-day argue that that step, or any later step towards full-grown Canadian nation- hood, should be retraced. Our fears of yester- day have been disproved. The movement of to-morrow will be forward and not back, up- ward and not down, to that partnership of equal national rights and of full national responsibili- ties towards which, through the ages, British freedom moves. And that consummation in a commonwealth of free nations was made possible through Can- ada's first adventure in world politics. TRANSFORMING THE EMPIRE THE trans forming of the British Empire, by which in its long struggle democracy was seen to triumph over despotism, and even the very term "Empire," as applied to British sov- ereignty over self-governing British Domin- ions, was made to appear both unjust and mis- leading that was the most far-reaching political achievement of the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century closed for Britain with the record of a revolution and a war : a regretta- ble revolution of over-seas British-bred peoples against the blinded autocracy of their British Government : a disastrous war that not only cost Britain her American colonies, but wounded her own pride of freedom, and left a stain on her escutcheon, which her subsequent splendid leader- ship in world democracy indeed wiped out, but the bitter memories of which her estranged col- onies did not soon forget. The twentieth cen- tury opened with a new Britain, her world pres- tige greater than ever before, her people at home happier in their steadily enlarging democratic freedom, and round the world her daughter na- 104 TRANSFORMING THE EMPIRE 105 tions rising up in their own freedom and strength to form with her a British partnership in which, as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman affirmed in 1907, "freedom and independence is the essence of the Imperial connection." The century be- tween was the time of travail and transforma- tion. In it there was a new birth of freedom among the British peoples. The nineteenth century was the time of con- flict the conflict of ideas. There were indeed commotions among the nations, disturbances of the unstable balance of power in Europe, con- flicts and convulsions over all the world, in which Britain and the British people were involved. But for Britain the real struggle was at home. The conflict of the nineteenth century was in the British mind. It was the agelong and irrepressi- ble conflict of right against privilege the com- mon rights of the many against the special privi- leges of the few the right of conscience, of private judgment, of social co-operation for the prosperity of each and the good of all the right of every man to exercise moral mastership over his own life and to join with his fellows in the re sponsibility of a free people to govern them- selves. At the back of all external manifestations of vitality and activity, throughout an era of which the nineteenth century was the centre, this deeper moral struggle for a free man's chance 106 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS in the whole realm of life, religious and political, social and industrial, disturbed the content of all grades of society and worked for the transforma- tion of the British nation. There was at work the primitive Anglo-Saxon idea of social democracy that kept the light burn- ing through all the darkest ages since Roman domination had been withdrawn from Britain. There was also the democratic strain in the Celtic blood that, despite recurrent betrayal and arro- gant despotism, was never quite lost out of the British heart. The ideas of democracy spread. The impulses of freedom gained in power. The antagonism between democratic rights and aris- tocratic privilege came to a head when Lord North, as Prime Minister, surrendered to the un- democratic George III., in the matter of taxing the American colonies that were without repre- sentation in the British Parliament, and impress- ing that taxation by force of arms. Democracy then found potent voice in Chatham and Burke and Fox. From that colossal and arrogant blun- der, the blunder of the Tory Junkers of that time, British political feeling reacted. Reaction from despotism carried the British people in the nine- teenth century into a political democracy more undisguised and unhampered than the revolting American colonies themselves had, at that time or for many a day, attained in their own Repub- TRANSFORMING THE EMPIRE 107 lie. Those political struggles reduced the au- thority and power of the Monarch within clearly- defined constitutional limits. The extension of the Parliamentary franchise lengthened the cords of democracy. The rise of responsible govern- ment gave Parliament control of the King's Min- isters, as well as of the King. And now, in the Britain of to-day, democracy means, and more and more will be made to mean, that the power of government, not in home affairs alone, but in the affairs of foreign policy as well, is in the hands of the people. The people of Britain are and in the day after the war must prove them- selves in very truth to be the Government of Great Britain. And this transformation, so far at least as it involves the outer Dominions of the Empire, belongs especially to the half -century distin- guished at one end by the coming to nationhood of Canada and at the other by the coming to nationhood of South Africa. Those two events, in their world significance epoch-making events the slow and hesitating acknowledgment of Canada's right to national self-government, and the ready, generous and unrestricted national constitution granted South Africa while as yet the war clouds of rebellion had scarcely vanished away signalise not only the growth of national- ism in the British Dominions overseas, but also, 108 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS and this is significant for the world, the wide and virile growth of British democracy at home, and the emergence of the true idea of internationalism as displacing the old notion of imperialism in the British mind. Canada's adventure into world politics is of capital importance, both politically and histor- ically, because it was an experiment. It blazed a new trail. It might have failed, but, perchance, another following after might succeed. But in that it did succeed it gave assurance of success to every colony of free-minded people who had the instinct for self-government, who desired self- government, and who, uniting in a common na- tional sentiment, were ready to take the risks and to accept the responsibilities which nationhood in- volves. The case of South Africa is of no less importance. It illustrates how complete has been the abandonment of the old policy of imperialism, how justified the new policy of freedom and in- dependence, and how inviting and ennobling the prospect for the still larger policy of partnership among the free nations of the British democ- racy. There is indeed nowhere in all literature a life- drama politically more inspiriting, or a nation's history more profoundly suggestive of how em- pire may be lost and empire may be won, than is the simple but romantic story of Louis Botha, TRANSFORMING THE EMPIRE 109 the soldier, the patriot and the statesman, and the brief but thrilling record of the newest Brit- ish nation, the Union of South Africa, of which he is the most honoured son and the first Prime Minister. Fifteen years ago Mr. Botha, still a young man, was Commander-in-Chief of the Boer forces that, under President Paul Kruger's po- litical leadership, took up arms against British 1 suzerainty, and for three years defied the mil- itary power and genius of the British Empire. He was personally opposed to Kruger's policy of war, but when the Boer leader declared for armed attack he gave his support and never faltered. In many of the battles most disastrous to the Brit- ish troops the Boers were led by Botha. In 1901 the decree of perpetual banishment from South Africa was proclaimed against him and his fol- lowers by the British Government, the order be- ing issued by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain as Colonial Secretary in the Unionist Administration. When the Unionists were defeated in 1905 and the Liberals came into power, the war being over, the policy of distrust and coercion was aban- doned. Under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman patience and generosity took the place of restric- tion and force. A constitution was granted the Transvaal, uniting British and Boer populations under free Parliamentary institutions. In 1910 110 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS the several South African States were confed- erated in the Union of South Africa, and of this new national unit among the British Dominions the first Prime Minister is Louis Botha, who, fourteen years ago, was decreed an outlaw for- ever from the land in which to-day he is ac- claimed the most honoured citizen and the most trusted statesman. In London in 1911, on the great occasion of the coronation of King George, the two per- sonages, next to Royalty, to whom was accorded, everywhere and always, by the courtiers and by the populace, the utmost measure of honour, were the two statesmen who represented the oldest and the youngest of the self-governing overseas Do- minions of which George V. was crowned king: Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of the Do- minion of Canada, and the Right Hon. Louis Botha, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa. It touched the world's imagination to see in the front rank of British statesmen, two men of a blood that was not British blood, the one a French-Canadian, the other a South African Boer. And they both are loyal to British insti- tutions of freedom and justice, made unabashedly and unswervingly loyal, they and their peoples with them, not by the force of British arms, but by the more compelling and constraining love of British freedom, which Britain's generosity en- TRANSFORMING THE EMPIRE 111 kindled in the hearts of the French in Canada and of the Dutch in South Africa. And when the day of testing came, the fiery testing of war, British generosity was rewarded by Dutch fidelity, as it had been rewarded more than a hundred years before in the war of 1812 by the fidelity of the French-Canadian. It was the confident expectation of the Kaiser and the war lords of Germany, that when they made war against Britain, Botha and all the Boers in South Africa would be their allies. By every influence known to Prussian diplomacy of intrigue and deceit, the Boers under the British flag were pressed into rebellion. That rebellion was short- lived. British interests in South Africa were then menaced by German power through German Southwest Africa. Botha took the field. He marshalled the loyalist forces and defended the Union by attacking the enemy on their own ground. One of the greatest victories in all Brit- ish history was the result. Germany's oldest African possession surrendered, and, with but little bloodshed, through the leadership of Gen- eral Botha there was added to the King's Do- minion in South Africa an area of 320,000 square miles, in extent almost equal to the entire home- land of Germany and the entire homeland of Britain combined. And so it came about that on July 14, 1915, in the same House of Commons 112 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS where he was proclaimed a banished outlaw, at the word of Prime Minister Asquith and with the ringing huzzas of every member of every political party there was passed this remarkable resolu- tion: "That this House desires to place on record its grateful appreciation of the distinguished skill and ability with which General the Right Hon. Louis Botha planned and conducted the recent military operations in Southwest Africa, and of the eminent services rendered by him and by General Smuts, and by the officers and the forces of the Union of South Africa under their com- mand." The story of that romantic episode in Britain's history ought to be told in every part of Britain's world-dominions forever. It needs to be told in plainest terms whenever the arid Imperialism that sought the banishment of men like Louis Botha again asserts itself. The children's chil- dren of the British citizens of to-day ought to teach its deep and eternal truths to their children after them, lest the real source of Britain's en- during power should ever be forgotten, or the secret of her survival, when the proud empires of despotism have passed away, should ever be lost. And this is the life-process that transforms the Empire. Canada's rise to nationhood marked the TRANSFORMING THE EMPIRE 113 first adventure. Australia and New Zealand made the bounds of national freedom wider yet. To-day South Africa plays a still more splendid part in the great world-drama. And the end is not yet. AFTER THE WAR WAR is the world's great crucible. Into it have been cast all the organising ideas of civilisation and all the established institutions of international politics. The world will never again be the same for any nation. The changes will be great for neutrals as for belligerents. Within the national boundaries and the imperial circles changes will be as radical as in the wider international relations. What those changes will be, how far they will reach in this direction or that, and what may be the war's far-off event, no one can foretell. The changes will be vital rather than mechanical. In the end a vital change is radical. It goes to the root. War or no war, a change was coming in the political relations, both national and interna- tional, of that marvellous fact in history, that ap- parently accidental but really purposeful aggre- gation of nations and colonies and dependencies, which before the war began the world geogra- phies called the British Empire. For it a change was long on the way. But the fierceness and the ferment of the crucible of war are producing in AFTER THE WAR 115 in a year what in the slow-moving evolutions of peace a generation or perhaps even a century might not have yielded. For one thing, not only will the self-governing British Dominions, Canada, Australia, New Zea- land and South Africa, accept each for itself the fact of full national status and cherish feelings and aspirations appropriate to nationhood, but also, as among themselves in the British com- monwealth, and by the other nations over all the world, they will be recognised as nations. Al- ready they each present the national requisites : a national territory, a national government, and a national spirit. In their self-government they do the things nations do: they exercise national rights, they accept national obligations, they dis- charge national duties. They are nations, not colonies; nations, not dependencies. Years ago, while he was Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier declared Canada's national status on many notable occasions, and in terms such as these: "Canada is a nation. We feel that we are a nation. Our country is the finest under the sun. We have a population of over seven millions. We have practical control of our foreign relations. We have command of our own forces. We bow the heart and the knee to the King, God bless him. We 116 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS are his loyal subjects. He is our King, but he has no more rights over us than are al- lowed him by our own Canadian Parliament. If this does not mean nationhood, what, then, constitutes a nation? And if there is a nation under the sun that can say more than this, where is it to be found?" The Canadian people even at that time had be- gun to think in terms of nationhood and to breathe the spirit of a nation's life. They re- fused the terms "colony" and "colonial." Some- times they resented them. The thing represented by such terms had been outgrown and left be- hind. But the fact of nationhood claimed for Canada by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in accordance with the growing sentiment of the Canadian people, had been recognised, or at least it had begun to be recognised, by leaders and exponents of political thought in Britain long before the events of the war in 1914 made it plain to all the world. The following quotations from British political lead- ers made by Mr. John S. Ewart, K.C., of Ot- tawa, in an address on "Canadian Sovereignty," delivered before various Canadian Clubs in 1913, are not only pertinent to this discussion but ex- tremely illuminating and significant He quotes the great British jurist, Sir Frederick Pollock, as saying : AFTER THE WAR 117 "Leave the conventions alone and look at the facts, and we find that the 'self-govern- ing colonies' are, in fact, separate kingdoms having the same King as the parent group. . . . The House of Commons could no more venture to pass a bill altering the Aus- tralian marriage laws or the Canadian tariff than the Dominion Parliament could legis- late on London tramways. The sovereignty is a figment. . . . Here, then, we have the first of our Imperial anomalies. It is dif- ficult to define what the realm is. We call it an Empire, for convenience; but the im- perium, the power of sovereignty, the right residing in some quarter to issue a command which should be obeyed, resides nowhere." Almost quoting these authoritative words, in affirming the same ideas, the Standard of Empire, itself established in order to help all British peo- ples to "think Imperially," declared: "Leaving theory and legal figments alone, an overseas State of the British Dominions is an autonomous nation. The King is King of the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Ireland, and of the Dominions beyond the sea. That is to say, in Australia he is King of Australia, and in Canada he is King of Canada." Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, who is given credit for making "Think Imperially" a current phrase, is quoted as saying in 1906: 118 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS "The time has gone by when we could treat with indifference these States which have voluntarily accepted one Crown and one Flag, when we could speak of them as though they were subject to our dictation. They are self-governing nations. They are sister States. They are our equals in every- thing except population and wealth; and very quickly you will find that they will equal and surpass us in these respects." And Mr. Chamberlain's successor as Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Right Hon. Alfred Lyttleton, expressed his view on the question in this language: "Action should be organised in the clear appreciation of the fact that, as between the parent country and the Dominions, there is now a practical equality of status. Mr. Bal- four in the House of Commons was under- stood to say that his Majesty's Government were well advised, in the changed relations, to recognise the legitimacy of the Canadian claim, and cordially expressed his pleasure at the growth of the Dominions to the stature of nationality. For a long time the politi- cal relations of this country to the Domin- ions were obscured in wise silence, but the period during which silence could be main- tained has now ceased. The consciousness of the great Dominions has rapidly matured, and the recurring Imperial Conferences AFTER THE WAR 119 have of necessity brought about a clearer definition of their national aspirations." Declarations such as these are the more signifi- cant of modern British opinion because they are made, not by the exponents of political radical- ism, but by statesmen of conservative mind and of conservative political affiliations and tradi- tions. Mr. Balfour spoke as the foremost states- man in the Unionist party, and as chief among the leaders of conservative political thinking, when he affirmed that the United Kingdom "is simply first among equals, so far as the great self- governing parts of the Empire are concerned"; and that it is the business of the men of this new day "to frame the British Empire upon the co-operation of absolutely independent Parlia- ments." One more pronouncement may suffice. It is from the stoutest Imperialist of them all, the scholarly-minded Lord Milner. It is not only very pointed, very definite, very unmistakable in its language, but it has a far reach and a wide application : "One thing is certain. It is only on these lines, on the lines of the greatest develop- ment of the several states and their coales- cence, as fully developed units, into a greater union, that the Empire can continue to exist 120 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS at all. The failure of the past attempts at Imperial organisation is due to our imperfect grasp of the idea of the wider patriotism. In practice we are slipping back to the anti- quated conception of the mother country as the centre of a political system, with the younger states revolving round it as satel- lites. Against that conception the growing pride and sense of independence of the younger states revolts." Nothing could be more explicit. Nothing could give more emphatic denial to everything funda- mental in the political theory and practice of the Toryism that held sway in the blundering and reactionary times of Lord North and George III. It sounds more like the progressive Liberalism of Campbell-Bannerman, whose dictum was that "freedom and independence are the essence of the Imperial connection," and whose active apprecia- tion of that true secret of what made the British Empire strong and keeps it one, secured self- government for Britons and Boers in South Africa, and that, too, in the very teeth of Lord Milner's own determined opposition. And one other statement by Lord Milner is deserving of repetition because of its still more emphatic re- jection of the term "empire" and its strangely self -contradictory use of the correlated term "self-governing colonies" : AFTER THE WAR 121 "The word empire has, in some respects, an unfortunate effect. It no doubt fairly de- scribes the position as between the United Kingdom and subject countries such as India or our Central African possessions. But for the relations existing between the United Kingdom and the self-governing colonies it is a misnomer, and, with the idea of ascen- dency, of domination, inevitably associated with it, a very unfortunate misnomer." Were it not that Lord Milner is an Oxford man, one of the most scholarly among living British statesmen, one whose thinking and whose speech are most distinctly marked by the preci- sion of what is called "German method," one would not boggle over his frank rejection of "empire" and his seeming acceptance of "col- onies" in the same paragraph. But, all petty criticism of mere phrases aside, it is plain that, whatever confusion in language may survive, the fact of "colony" as applied to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa has passed, and that the idea of "im- perium," the idea of ascendency or of sover- eignty, and even of "empire," as regards these sister nations in the British family, is fast pass- ing. That is to say, Canada is not a part of the British "empire," inasmuch as it is a free self-governing nation with no "empire" sover- DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS eignty exercised over it by the United Kingdom, and itself exercising no "empire" sovereignty over any other subject state or inferior race. And that is to say that, although King George is Emperor of India, he is not Emperor of Can- ada. He is King of Canada. God bless him! And his Kingship of Canada, of Australia, of New Zealand, and of South Africa is not a secondary sequence of any "empire" relation- ship, but is of the very essence of the au- thoritative proclamation made in Westminster Abbey on June 22, 1911. Canada is one of the King's Dominions. He is its King. It is to him a King-dom. And in that kingdom his kingly rights and prerogatives are such, and only such, as the people and Parliament and responsible Government of Canada approve and allow. All this of "freedom and independence" was true, at least in theory, and was asserted before the war in Europe broke out in August, 1914. What shall be after the war? For one thing: whatever new conditions may arise, whatever changes impend, it must not be overlooked or forgotten that the British Empire was not made : it grew. It is a thing not of logic, but of life. It is the result, not of German meth- od, but of British experiment. Nothing the war may do can change the genius of the British peo- ples, or force a living organism within the dog- AFTER THE WAR 128 matic terms of a dead formula. The empire- builder with a measuring rod and a drill-sergeant rule might, indeed, make an "empire" with its "imperium," its "imperator" and its shoddy "im- perialism," but, if omnipotent and if given a chance, he would wreck the British Empire. Be- cause it is British, not Roman and not German, "freedom and independence are the essence of the Imperial connection/' its fundamental doc- trine of personal liberty is the glory of its citizen- ship, and its social democracy is the corner-stone of its enduring fabric of free government. Free- dom and Independence! Liberty and Democ- racy! These remain. All else may change and pass. NORTH AMERICA'S WORLD IDEA IV THE WORLD IDEA INDEPENDENCE was the great idea in the North America of Washington's day; Inter- dependence is coming to be the greater idea in the North America of our day. Nationalism was the note of the world of Yesterday; Inter-nation- alism will be the keynote of the world of To- morrow. It is not that old ideas are repudiated: it is rather that they are being outgrown. It is not that national life is decaying; it is rather that world life is beginning to emerge. When the world was a jungle, each tribe counted every other tribe its enemy, each race lived at the ex- pense of other races, each nation thought to come to power by the overthrow of other nations : but as the world becomes a neighbourhood the fact of mutual dependence overcomes the impulses to tribal war, the law of social love casts out the bondage of racial fear, and the ideal of interna- tional service sets a new standard of national greatness in the neighbourhood life of world na- tions. Nationalism is not rebuked, rather it is justified, and comes to its own in the broader international life. The best seeds of national life 127 128 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS come to flower and fruit in the world achieve- ments of international service. These essential principles of world life and world progress are set forth and illustrated in the history of the two great English-speaking groups of nations, the British Empire and the Republic of the United States of America.' The unmatched illustration is in North America. The great fraternity of the English-speaking world has made an experiment on the North American con- tinent which is at once the marvel and the in- spiration of all the world. This international experiment is the embodiment of North Ameri- ca's World Idea. North America is more than a continent of Geography. It is also a World Idea. Four hundred and fifty years ago, with the fall of Constantinople, the nations of western Europe were turned back upon themselves. Their whole history, for more than two thousand years, had been bound up with the commerce, the ideas and the life of the people of Asia Minor and the great nations of the Far East. The closing of the Dardanelles five hundred years ago shut off that eastward look of Europe. The fall of Con- stantinople and .the rise of the Ottoman Empire compelled the right-about-face of western Euro- pean nations. That change of front changed the outlook for Italy, for Spain, for Portugal, for THE WORLD IDEA 129 France, for Britain. The nations that had been in the rear were henceforth to stand in the world's front street. To break new pathways to the treasures of the fabled East the Portuguese went round the Cape, adventurers from Britain broke into the misty and frozen north, and far beyond the western seas Columbus and Cortez, the Cabots and Cartier, saw a new continent heave high above the horizon line. That was Europe's first vision of America. America was a new world. To the old world, broken and defeated at the Dardanelles, America meant a new beginning. For the restless life of the Europe of the fifteenth century, shut in by the eastward blockade in the basin of the ^Egean and eager to burst its bonds, the discovery of America meant a new opportunity. To-day America looks back to Europe. After four centuries of stagnation along the one hund- red and fifty miles of narrow waters that sep- arate Europe from Asia, conditions again meet for another stupendous world change. It would seem as though thirty centuries were blotted out. The world is back again in the romance land of the Iliad. The shores where once anchored the long-oared boats of the Achaeans, and that echoed to the tread of the hosts of Xerxes, now answer to the heaven-splitting boom of artillery shells, forged some of them in Pittsburgh and 180 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS some in Toronto, while soldiers of the Allies, not from Britain and France and Russia alone, but from Australia and New Zealand under the Southern Cross, press on, as did Ulysses thirty centuries ago, to win death and glory "Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." In these uncommon days in which we live, con- ditions now meet on that battleground of world history, that under our very eyes will issue in epoch-making events of world significance. The age-long horror of the Near East is about to lift, like a night-pall at dawn. Once again Constanti- nople is doomed to fall, and when it falls, no mat- ter what happens in Brussels or Berlin, the map of the world must be re-drawn. In the fifteenth century Constantinople fell, and in its fall the West was split off from the East, as though never again the twain would meet. In the twentieth century, when Constan- tinople falls again, the middle wall of partition will be taken away, and in the new world of the new day there shall be neither East nor West. One more of the world's autocracies, the blackest and cruellest of them all, crumbles into ruin. The democratic life of the western world will break down the institutions of half-barbaric Turkish despotism, as the Dreadnoughts of Britain and THE WORLD IDEA 181 France smash their way through the forts of the Dardanelles. History is about to take a fresh start. Civilisation is shot through with the birth-pangs of a new age. A new world throbs in the womb of time, struggling to be born. Into that new world of new beginnings and new ideals and new resolves North America, with its world idea, must make its way. And America to-day means more, immeasur- ably more, than that first shadowy vision Europe caught of the western hemisphere. America means more than opportunity. Into the new world of a new time North America comes, meaning not opportunity alone, but achievement as well. North America represents an achieve- ment, an international achievement in the politics of the nations, absolutely without precedent in any century, without parallel on any continent. North America has achieved a world idea. Indeed the real distinction of North America is not so much in great things done as in great ideas set free. Among what are called the wonders of the world other nations on other continents may have a pre-eminence. Things done elsewhere mere things, eccentricities of nature, triumphs of invention, applications of science, achieve- ments in art and architecture things done else- where may be more widely advertised and may fill larger space in the world's records. And it 132 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS may be the things about which Americans them- selves make their loudest boasts are but replicas of old-world creations. Other races and other nations laboured through the ages, and America entered into their labours. But in one thing North America blazed a new trail, staked a new claim. In one achievement North America stands alone. In the greatest achievement of the United States, in the greatest achievement of Canada, and in the joint international achievement of the United States and Canada, North America gives voice and accent to a world idea, an idea which will yet reconstruct Europe and touch to finer issues the civilisation of the world. Recall the greatest thing done by the United States. It was not a railway system spanning the continent. It was not a canal uniting the oceans. It was not any of the big things done by the Republic in the great day of its pride and world power. It was rather the achievement of the day of small things. It was the idea set free in Colo- nial days, at Fayetteville and at Mecklenburg, in Massachusetts and in Virginia, the idea of free- dom and self-government that at Philadelphia in 1776, issued in the Declaration of Independ- ence and in the setting up of the new Republic. That thing, to be sure, was not all great. It had its taint of selfish ambition posing in the garb of patriotism. It had its spirit of lawlessness talk- THE WORLD IDEA 133 ing the language of liberty. But the distinctive thing in that great adventure, the supreme thing of all American effort, the thing which makes the names of Washington and Jefferson immortal, was the declaration before all the world of the inalienable right of a free people to govern them- selves, and the working out of democratic self- government in the growing history of the nation. That is the organising idea of the United States and its greatest contribution to the democracy of the world. Over against that thing done by the United States set the thing done by Canada, the unique achievement embodied in Canada's national his- tory. Canada represents in North America the first successful effort of any colony of any Em- pire in the world's history to attain national self- government without revolution and without the sacrifice of the historic background of the nation. The thing done by the American colonies through revolution and war in the eighteenth century might easily have been done by the remaining colonies of British North America in the nine- teenth century. Canada could have had separa- tion from Britain without striking a blow. Inde- pendence would have been hers for the asking. But between 1776 and 1867 the political think- ing of the English-speaking world was broadened. The idea of independence in North America took 134 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS a wider sweep and a higher ranged Canada came to nationhood, not by the old way of independence and separation, but by the new way of inter- dependence and the larger alliance. With its national roots struck far back in the thousand years of Britain's history, Canada stands to-day in the world's battle array of free Dominions Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, with self-governing Newfoundland from the North Atlantic and mighty India holding the mystery of the Far East and back of them all that mother of free nations, never greater than when, with her loyal children from the ends of the earth, and all of them free, she throws her- self across the battle- front in Flanders, for the cause of the little people whose only crime was innocence. And that marvel of the world alli- ance of the British nations is the vital outcome of what was done in North America in the nine- teenth century when the colonies of Canada achieved democratic nationhood without aliena- tion from the motherland, and made possible the international commonwealth the world calls the British Empire. But North America's world idea is greater than the achievement of either of the North American nations alone. It is the product and the expression of the combined and unified life of the United States and Canada through their THE WORLD IDEA 185 marvellous century of international history. That world idea which North America offers to all the continents is a boundary line between these two proud, high-strung, aggressive nations, four thousand miles from ocean to ocean, but across which in more than a hundred years neither na- tion ever once launched a menacing army or fired a hostile gun. Grasp that idea. Measure that achievement. A thousand miles up the mighty St. Lawrence! A thousand miles along the Great Lakes! A thousand miles across the open prairie ! A thou- sand miles over the world's mightiest mountain ranges ! Four thousand miles where nation meets nation, where sovereignty greets sovereignty, where flag salutes flag, but never a fortress, never a battle-ship, never a gun, never a sentry on guard. Four thousand miles of civilised and Christianised internationalism! That is North America's supreme achievement. That is North America's world idea. A YEAR OF CONTRASTS THE year 1915 will be marked in history by two unique and meaningful features : One is the success of North America's international disarmament; the other is the failure of Europe's armed peace. The failure of Europe! Civilisation stands stunned and aghast at the utter collapse of European internationalism. The world presents no spectacle so piteous as the unspeakable tragedy of Belgium and the age-long tragedy of Poland, unless it be the even more unthinkable tragedy of Germany. All the achievements of Europe, all the things that make for human progress and freedom and justice, the work of a thousand years and the hopes of a thousand more all have been crowded back into the melting pot of hideous and brutal war. No matter who is responsible for it, the lining up for mutual slaughter of mil- lions upon millions of the best breeds in the great- est nations of Europe, the wanton destruction of the treasures of all the ages, the wholesale squan- dering of the wealth of half the nations of the world and the sowing of seeds of international hate for generations yet unborn all this, for the 136 A YEAR OF CONTRASTS 137 alleged purpose of settling some inter-racial feud or some international dispute, is a blank denial of civilisation, a crime against humanity, an apos- tasy from Christ. Over against that colossal failure of Europe, as if to speak its condemnation, is presented at the very same time the celebration of a full cen- tury of unbroken peace between the greatest Empire the world has ever seen and the world's greatest Republic. This is indeed the sublimest wonder of all the world: this gigantic human spectacle of more than 400,000,000 of peoples of all races and colours and languages, covering nearly one-quarter of the land area of the globe, living at peace under one flag ; under another flag 100,000,000 of as enterprising and progressive peoples as civilisation has produced, and these two flags of the "Red, White and Blue" for a hundred years entwined, fold in fold and from sea to sea, for a common purpose and in devotion to a common ideal, to promote the freedom and progress and peace of all humanity earth sees nothing more marvellous or more splendid than that. And in these days, these days of staggering and bitterness, when the war cloud of Europe looms blackest, the sad eyes of Europe may turn again to America, and, in the afterglow of an unparalleled century of Anglo-American civilisa- 138 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS tion, the heart of humanity can yet praise God and take courage for all the world. And why America's achievement ? Why North America's alone ? Let there be no mistake. This achievement of international civilisation in America is not because these two nations are spent and wasted forces, degenerate sons of cow- ard sires, weak to defend a national right, slow to resent a national insult. No redder, prouder, hotter blood ever beat in British veins than the Pilgrim blood of New England, the Cavalier blood of Virginia, the Celtic blood of North Caro- lina, or the blood of the Ulster Scot in Kentucky and Tennessee. That same blood, red, proud, hot, throbs through Canadian veins all the way from Cape Breton to Vancouver. Not blood from Britain alone, but blood from France, blood from Germany, blood from Aus- tria, blood from Italy, blood from Russia. All the great war nations of Europe, the nations whose veins are now slit on the battle-fronts of the world, through the past century poured that same blood, their best war blood, into the heart of America. If blood tells, that blood should tell in us. And that blood has told. The men of North America, in the United States and Canada, have never belied their breed. The blood of the lion, the blood of the eagle, the blood of the bear, the A YEAR OF CONTRASTS 189 fiery bloods of all the beasts of Europe's war jungle have mingled in the veins of America. Sons of such bloods, the men of America's Eng- lish-speaking nations, like their sires, have been little used to lie down at the bidding of any man. On the battlefields of the Revolution the young American Republic justified its breed; and in the deadlier Civil War, with more prodigal hand, South and North alike paid the full measure of devotion to causes they deemed to be great. Can- ada's half -century of national history has as yet no war page, and no Canadian battlefields conse- crated by the blood of her sons, but not once or twice in Britain's blood-writ story soldiers from Canada, by their heroism and valour in the Em- pire's wars, proved to the world their British heritage. And Canada proves it once again. Before the mother called the sons made answer. From the university and from the church they spoke ; from the factory and from the forest, from the shop and from the mine, from the farm and from the foothills, veterans who fought on the South Afri- can veldt and recruits in the bloom of youth. With their Saxon blood and their Celtic blood, with their French blood and their Teuton blood, they came and are coming, and into a war that was not Canada's war, or even Britain's war, soldiers from all the Provinces, as many as are 140 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS called, will go, an army at a time, uncompelled and free, and under alien skies on the awful altar of the world's redemption the blood-sacrifice from Canada is being offered up for the war-sin of the nations. The politics of the nations and the fortunes of war make the United States neutral in this strug- gle and Canada belligerent, but were the places changed Americans would do what Canadians are doing. They are two nations, but their breed is one. Their flags are different, but their im- pulses are the same. Their Governments are sep- arate, but the same democratic faith and the same international hope and the same world purpose hold sway from the Arctic to the Gulf. And whatever else the war lords of Europe may say, it cannot be said that North America's civilised internationalism was wrought by nations of the lesser breeds or the craven heart. Nor can it be said that North America has been without excuse for war. If excuse there was for war anywhere in the past hundred years, its duplicate might have been found here. If any nation accepts responsibility for the present war in Europe, causes as important and reasons as valid might have been presented by the United States or by Canada for more than one war since the century of peace began. Again and again questions arose, situations were created, tempers A YEAR OF CONTRASTS 141 were aroused, which in any other century and be- tween any other nations would have involved the excuse of national honour and the pretext of vital interest, the gauntlet would have been thrown down and war would have been on. Neither can the war lords argue that the United States and Canada have kept the peace because of the power of each to withstand attack from the other. These two nations divide almost equally the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole; but in numbers, in developed resources and in war equipment there is no equal- ity. On the one side are one hundred millions of people ; on the other side are eight millions. One has for long maintained a seasoned standing army; the other, until the war in Europe broke out, had only a volunteer militia. One has built up a navy which claimed to be third, if not second, on the high seas ; the other, even with open coast- lines on both oceans, has not so much as a naval program accepted by Parliament. To all the de- clared defence policies of the war nations of Eu- rope the disarmed internationalism of North America offers straight contradiction, and through a hundred years of peace these two civil- ised nations have given the pretensions of Eu- rope's war lords the unflinching and triumphant lie. Why, then, this achievement of North America 142 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS in international civilisation, while on other con- tinents the nations crouched under the burdens of their wars and lingered in the half barbarism of their armed peace until their civilisations col- lapsed into war's inevitable hell? Why North America's internationalism ? For one thing, the United States and Canada have each developed into a national unity of its own, self-contained, purposeful, free. The Great Lakes are not barbarized by the black menace of forts and warships, because the two nations they divide desire supremely international peace, are fit for peace between themselves, and are mak- ing ready to lead the world along the interna- tional way of North America's great experiment. Another element in North America's interna- tionalism is the virile democracy of these two nations. In each nation the people are free. They govern themselves. Their institutions of law and order are not imposed from without, but are developed from within. Their schools and their universities, their churches and their courts of justice, the taxes borne by their citizens, and the customs duties imposed on their indus- tries and their trade these all are of the people's own creation, and may be regulated or changed when the people so desire. Each nation is a democracy, but each is untrammelled in the pur- suit of its own democratic ideal, living its own A YEAR OF CONTRASTS 143 life, loyal to its own history, cherishing its own culture. And yet each is conscious of contribut- ing a worthy and a necessary quota to the com- mon life and higher civilisation of the continent. Each is coming to regard the other, not as a com- petitor, but as a partner, not as an enemy, but as an ally, and what is noblest in the nationalism of each finds its fruition in the internationalism of both. But more potent than international self-inter- est, more unifying than international trade, more hopeful than international blood-affinities is the development in North America of the interna- tional mind. Throughout its first century of his- tory the American Republic was intensely na- tional in its political thought and feeling. In large measure it followed Europe's discredited example, and it taught its children to regard 1776 as the beginning of national freedom in the world, the Declaration of Independence as the first char- ter of civil liberty, and George Washington not only as the Father of his own Country, but as the father of all free countries everywhere. Simi- larly in Canada there have been those who deemed it good political strategy to fan antipa- thies toward the United States, as American demagogues had inflamed the memories of the Revolution into national sentiment against Bri- tain. In both countries, heritors together of the 144 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Anglo-Saxon impulse and of the Celtic strain, there was exercised whenever the occasion arose the licensed frankness of blood relations. But deeper than all these shallow frettings on the surface, stronger than the local currents of party passions, more enduring than recollections of wrongs received or wrongs inflicted, there is being developed and made controlling, between the United States and Canada, indeed among all the democracies of the English-speaking nations the world over, the international mind. We have all been taught to think nationally. The nations of the British Empire have been exhorted to "think imperially." But our think- ing must take a wider sweep. Events have proved that no empire can live to itself and that no nation can stand alone. Now all the nations of the democratic tradition are beginning to think internationally. International thinking means international good-will, international partner- ship, international peace. The two free nations of North America, with their civilised interna- tional boundary and their century of peace, lead the way. As nowhere else in all the world they can face, for their continent, the now vexed problems of the world situation with the equi- poise and soberness of the international mind. THE PARTNERSHIP OF NATIONS NORTH AMERICA, in its hundred years of international peace, illustrates for all the continents the world idea of the partnership of nations. The partnership of nations! That is a great new world-idea. Yesterday that idea would have been mocked at as a dream of the prophets, a vision of the poets, an aspiration of the pacifists. And so it was. To-morrow it will be accepted as a counsel of reason, a fundament of civilization, an axiom of statesmanship. So utterly have the dogmas of the war lords been disproved : so disas- trously have the war-nations paid the price of their unbelief: so irreparably has the whole world suffered in the collapse of Europe's armed peace that never again in this generation will shining armour and the rattling sabre find ad- vocates, except in the mocking cells of the world's madhouse. The idea of armed peace is doomed to the rubbish heap of the world's barbarism. Another idea must be set free, a world idea, the idea not of international strife, but of interna- tional partnership. 145 146 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS That idea of the partnership of nations the United States and Canada illustrate for the world in the history of North America. For Europe that idea, and the eager hope of it, was given voice in the early months of the war by the Prime Minister of Britain, when, in a memorable ad- dress in Dublin, he adopted and expounded Glad- stone's great dictum uttered in the midst of the war- tumults of 1870. "The greatest triumph of our time," said Gladstone, "will be the enthrone- ment of the idea of public right as the governing idea of European politics." "The idea of public right what does it mean?" asks Gladstone's great successor. This is his answer an answer which cannot be too often repeated or too deeply pondered, not by the com- batants alone, but by all who care for the progress of the world: "The idea of public right means, first and foremost, the clearing of the ground by the definite repudiation of militarism as the governing factor in the relation of States and in the future moulding of the European world. "It means, next, that room must be found and kept for the independent existence and the free development of the smaller nation- alities, each with a composite consciousness of its own. Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, Greece and the THE PARTNERSHIP OF NATIONS 147 Balkan States they must be recognised as having exactly as good a title as their more powerful neighbours more powerful in strength and in wealth to a place in the sun. "And it means, finally, or it ought to mean, perhaps, by a slow and gradual pro- cess, the substitution for force, for the clash of competing ambitions, for groupings and alliances and a precarious equipoise the substitution for all of these of a real Euro- pean partnership based on the recognition of equal rights, and established and en- forced by the common will." No saner, stronger, more statesmanlike words have been uttered in any country or at any time than those three sentences on the essentials of European peace by one of the greatest of all the Prime Ministers in Britain's history. And the words which immediately followed add point and emphasis to his forecast of "a real European part- nership" : "A year ago that would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably one that may not or will not be realised either to-day or to-morrow, but if and when this war is de- cided in favour of the allies it will at once come within the range and before long within the grasp of European statesman- ship." 148 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS What Europe will come to by a waste of the wealth of all her nations, through a year of the slaughter of millions of her innocents, and after an irrecoverable impoverishment of the breed of all her great races, North America has attained, through the Divinity that for a hundred years has shaped the farther ends of the two nations com- posing the North American civilisation. A real partnership of the nations! That North American partnership has been evolving almost unawares, gathering strength by every courtesy from either side, becoming more potent by every co-operation in a common cause, until, when Europe's frightful catastrophe broke, all good citizens in the United States and in Can- ada awoke to the deep consciousness that their common-rooted democracy is one in the sources of its life, one in the institutions of its freedom, one in the power and in the motive of its world- purpose. While Europe was whetting the teeth of its jungle, North America was making vital the bonds of its neighbourhood. Europe stands to-day one group of nations an Ishmael against the other group of nations; North America, even in the day of stress and the night of storm, stands four-square, a real partnership of nations. Partnership ! That is the word a real part- nership of the nations! The British nations among themselves, and the world over, have ex- THE PARTNERSHIP OF NATIONS 149 pressed that idea, and in days to come will express it more and more adequately in the great com- monwealth of free and self-governing peoples liv- ing at peace under one flag, the nations of the Seven Seas that, in the awful days of war, join hands and hearts in defence of the democratic freedom which has made them one. Already the British Empire has cast off its old imperium and has become a commonwealth, a real partnership of nations. Partnership ! That is North America's word, too. Here, not under one flag, but under two, not with one sovereign Government, but with two, and almost of itself, the idea of international partnership expresses itself with growing dis- tinctness and emphasis. In spite of the noisy jin- goes on both sides, the United States and Canada have come to think and to act in terms of North American partnership. When we rid our minds of the cant phrases of a false, narrow and out- grown patriotism, even the jingoes will waken up in the morning to a larger life of partnership and peace. Partnership ! That is the word of the coming Pan- Americanism. Not a thing of force and com- pulsion, either among themselves or for the world, but a thing of freedom for each and of co-opera- tion for all, the real Pan- Americanism will make a place in the sun for each self-governing repub- 150 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS lie of the western hemisphere, North and South alike, and with them will stand, with equal rights and responsibilities, the half -continent of Canada, itself a partner at once in Pan- America and in Pan-Britannia. Partnership ! World partnership ! That is the objective, the motive, the hope that never fails. The life of Britain, as Asquith says, must be lived in the real European partnership; the life of the United States and of Canada, as North American partners, belongs in the democracy of the whole American hemisphere; the life of all free nation- alities the world over, each sovereign in its own realm, each co-operant with all the others for the prosperity of each and for the freedom of all that is North America's vision; that is North America's World Idea. MESSAGES TO THE PEOPLE V AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS * ONE hundred years ago to-day, within sight of the spot where we now stand, and at this very hour, was being fought the battle of Lake Erie. In the light of modern naval warfare, judged by the standard of the super-dreadnought and the submarine, of the airship and the fourteen-inch gun, that battle was a small affair. Nine small sailing vessels on one side, six on the other, not more than three out of the fifteen being of any account even in that day, and not a thousand men all told, of whom the major part were not seamen at all such were the forces that met in the battle of Lake Erie. One gun from a modern man-of-war would throw more metal in one charge than their entire broadsides, and would shatter both fleets in the twinkling of an eye. As a struggle between man and man, and as an incident in the war of which it formed a part, the battle of Lake Erie has its own interest, and its own importance. It deserves to be remem- * Address at the International Celebration of One Hundred Years of Peace, Putin Bay, Ohio, September, 1912. 153 bered. In the heroism displayed, heroism on both sides, heroism in the seasoned sailors, heroism among the raw men from the shore, it is worthy of a place of high honour in these centennial cele- brations. Like the equally decisive battles in which the Canadians were victorious, the battles of Chrysler's Farm and of Chateauguay, this battle of Lake Erie, which gave victory to the Americans, had in it incidents of valour and en- durance on both sides of which neither country needs to be ashamed. In the light of the hundred years through which we of to-day read the story of that one battle, and of that whole war, the lesson, the supreme and abiding lesson, for the United States and for Canada is this: the utter futility and inconsequence of war as a means for the just settlement of disputes between these two nations. That lesson we both have learned. That war was our last war. It will remain our last Never again will the armed troops of the United States and Canada meet except in friendly review, or, if the day ever comes, to stand side by side and shoulder to shoulder in the Armageddon of the nations. Witness these great lakes for nigh a hundred years swept clean of every battleship, and this transcontinental boundary line for four thousand miles undefended save by the civilised instincts and the intelligent good-will of both na- AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 155 tions. And having learned that great lesson, having proved its worth through a hundred years, the United States and Canada, these two English- speaking peoples of America, have earned the right to stand up and teach the nations. Inter- national peace and good-will is America's mes- sage to all the world. WHAT I,AY BEHIND l8l2 Go back to the battle of Lake Erie. Read the impartial story of that war. Mark how futile it was, how inconsequent, even how inglorious. See how it left unsettled the points alleged to be . in dispute between Britain and the United States rights of neutrals in war, the right of search, the unfixed boundary points which were settled after the war was over by agreement and treaty, and not by brute force. What lay behind the War of 1812? That war was declared by the United States against Britain. Its primal cause, however, was not American at all, but European. The United States was in- volved in European quarrels only indirectly, and Canada not at all. The vital issue lay rather in the struggle, in the age-long European struggle, of free nationhood against the barbaric notion of world-empire. Great Britain stood for the rights of free nationhood. The dream of world-empire 156 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS found its tragic expression in the vaulting ambi- tion and matchless brain of the great Napoleon. In that struggle Britain stood alone. Italy, Holland, Austria, Prussia, Spain, one after an- other all bowed low to Bonaparte's masterful will on bloody fields of war. Even Russia, apart and impregnable among her snows, came to terms. All the nations of Europe yielded up their strength for the service of Napoleon, and, obedi- ent to his decree, at Berlin and Milan they re- fused commercial relations with the one nation which defied the Colossus that bestrode the world. Had he won, had his despot's dream come true, then the glory of free nationhood, not for Europe alone, but for Britain and perhaps for the world, had passed, and, it may be, had passed forever. That struggle meant life or death for Britain. Had Napoleon succeeded in throwing all of Brit- ain's foreign trade into neutral hands it could mean only death. In that struggle, as the states- men of Britain then saw it, there was no room for neutral trading nations. Neutral rights, as manipulated by Napoleon, meant the immediate destruction of Britain's commercial independ- ence. In the end it meant, not the prosperity of the neutrals, but Napoleon's domination of the world. The War of 1812 was declared by the United States for the purpose of asserting her trading AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 157 rights as a neutral in the war that involved Eu- rope. When the European situation was solved by the overthrow of Napoleon and his banishment to Elba, the alleged causes of the war between Britain and the United States became purely aca- demic, and in the treaty of peace, signed in 1814, those points in dispute were not even mentioned. Indeed it was not until 1856, in the Declaration of Paris, that the rights, the just rights, of neu- trals were established among the nations. This last war between the two great English-speaking world-powers was proved, proved in itself, proved by the history of its issues, to be fruitless for good to either nation, unless it be taken as con- vincing evidence of war's incurable futility. UNDESIGNED REACTIONS OF WAR Not only is war ineffectual as a means for the just settlement of disputes between civilised na- tions, but, by the very irony of fate, most wars have reactions quite the opposite of their original intention. The undesigned reactions of war are the surprises of history. In the thirteenth century and after, the Dukes of Austria tried, by sheer brute power, to tighten their feudal grasp on the free peasantry of the Alpine valleys. The result of their wars was Austria's humiliation and shame. Out of the 158 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS struggle for liberty was born a new Switzerland, united, free, invincible. The Battle of Bannockburn, in the fourteenth century, tells the same story. England's feudal King sought to lord it as Sovereign over what had hitherto been the wild and divided North. In that war Scotland was united. Proud Edward's power was broken. Out of "oppression's woes and pains" comes a new and sturdy nation with its deathless slogan, "Scots wha hae." In the eighteenth century the aggressive war party in Britain, against the better judgment and the finer instincts of the nation, and in the teeth of the eloquent protests of Pitt and Burke, in the blindness of the mere bureaucrat determined, by the sword if needs be, to coerce to their own policy the free-born colonies in America. Their folly went wide of the mark. They failed, as they were bound to fail. Instead of a larger domain and more efficient power, Britain lost her first empire. Out of the storm and stress, the American Colonies, North and South, just be- cause they were sons of the British breed, arose, a welded nation, holding on high their Declara- tion of Independence. Similarly in 1812 the dominant war-party in this new-born Republic, blind to the real genius of the nation, deaf to the warnings of its highest instincts, and in defiance of the recorded protests AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 159 of some of the greatest of its States, cherished the hope of shifting its northern boundary from the Great Lakes to the Arctic and making the Repub- lic co-terminous with the continent. They also failed. The fates were against them, too. The Canadian pioneers, they, too, were men of British blood. The undesigned reaction of the war of 1812 is the Canada of to-day. Let there be no mistake. The readings of his- tory are plain. In the pangs of 1812 the soul of Canadian nationality began to be born. That war was indeed Canada's national war. In it the United States was divided, Britain was reluctant, but Canada was in grim and deadly earnest. All Canadians the French-Canadians in the valley of the St. Lawrence, the colonists from Britain, and the Loyalists from New England and the South all these for the first time made com- mon cause. To the French-Canadian, who cared nothing about the cry, "Free trade and sailors' rights," the American appeared as an invader, the despoiler of his home, the enemy of his people, and under de Salaberry at the battle of Chateau- guay the French-Canadian militiamen, fighting under the British flag, defeated the most exten- sive strategic movement of the whole war. From the St. Lawrence to the St. Clair, the Canadian pioneers were in large part the Loyalists of 1776. For them the War of 1812 meant a fight for their 160 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS new homes against their oldtime enemies. The impact of that war drove into one camp French- speaking and English-speaking, and out of that community of sympathies and interests emerged in due time Canadian nationality. That war did more. It not only welded to- gether French-speaking and English-speaking, but it bound all Canada with ties stronger than steel to the motherland of Britain. Within one generation Canadians, having defended their country side by side with British regulars against invasion from without, demanded from Britain self-government within: and they won not only representative institutions, such as the United States inherited, but Britain's latest achieve- ment, responsible government as well. When the scattered Provinces of Canada gathered them- selves together under one responsible Canadian Government there appeared an absolutely new thing in the political achievements of the world; a new nation that had not severed its historic ties or sacrificed its historic background. That new nation, loyal to the old flag, awakened in Brit- ain a new conception of Empire, and led the way for Newfoundland and Australia and New Zea- land and South Africa into that civilised "im- perium" which is indeed not an "imperium" but a commonwealth, the British Empire of to-day. AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 161 A HUNDRED YEARS AFTER Come back now to the War of 1812. Come back to the battle of Lake Erie. Call up the men whose blood reddened these waters and whose valour gave that struggle all it has of glory. Let them all look up and see what we now behold. Let the Canadians of that day arise, the men in whose hearts the fires of hate and fear burned hot. Let them look southward across the lake, far as the Gulf and wide as from sea to sea. Let them multiply the eight million Americans of that day into the hundred millions of to-day, and count every man a friend. Let them see this great nation, greatest among the world's Repub- lics, with power to achieve what it has greatly planned, let them see it standing four-square among the nations, pledged, irretrievably pledged, to the world's freedom, good-will and peace. What a glad surprise for the Canadians of a hun- dred years ago ! Let the Americans rise, too. Let them come, officers and men, from Ohio, from Rhode Island, from Kentucky, who in the hour of victory, for them the hour of death, saw in eager vision their Republic stretch far as the northern sea. Let them look up and behold the boundary line where it was a hundred years ago, but north of it a new nation, filling half a continent with people 162 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS of proud resolve, self-dependent, resolute, free. Let them understand how that through this cen- tury of peace there have arisen in America two English-speaking nations, both sovereign, self- respecting, unafraid, and each with the other forming that marvellous unity of North Ameri- can civilisation, and standing for its integrity, prestige and power. What a surprise, what a glad surprise, to the Americans of a hundred years ago! Greatest surprise of all to those men from Britain, from Canada and from the United States, who here greatly fought and bravely died, would it be were they to see that fights like theirs are now not only deemed impolitic, but are abso- lutely impossible between these nations. That impossibility is not merely a matter of policy, but is a fundamental principle. That principle is the rights of nationhood. All responsible states- men in Britain, in the United States and in Canada agree in this, that, not for themselves alone, but for all peoples, the rights of nationality are sacred and inviolate. Any and every people that desires to be free, and is fit to be free, ought to be free, and must be free. AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 163 CANNING AND MONROE Britain learned that principle, the principle of the rights of nationality, out of the war of American independence. The United States and Canada learned it in the struggle of 1812. In loyalty to that principle Britain withstood the despotic aggressions of Napoleon, and after him the not less despotic schemes of the concerted monarchs of Europe against the rising democra- cies of the world. When the Concert of Europe planned war against the new Spanish democracy, Canning, the Foreign Secretary of Britain, as- serted that principle in these words : "Our busi- ness is to preserve the peace of the world, and therefore the independence of the several nations that compose it;" and, again, in these words: "Every nation for itself and God for us all." When those plans of the autocratic monarchs of Europe threatened the Spanish colonies in Ameri- ca Canning proposed to American Ambassador. Rush that Britain and the United States issue a joint declaration that "while neither power de- sired the colonies of Spain for herself, it was im- possible to look with indifference on European intervention in their affairs." Immediately after that proposal, President Monroe, giving voice to the instinct and true policy of the United States, used these historic words to Congress: 164. DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS "With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and main- tained it ... we could not view any interposi- tion for the purpose of oppressing them, or con- trolling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power in any other light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." That sovereign principle has been the guiding star to the nations of Britain and America over many a troubled sea. It has changed for Britain the old centralised notion of empire into the new idea of a world commonwealth of free nations, in which loyalty is not of compulsion, but of love, and the ties, stronger than selfish bonds, are im- perceptible and light as air. That principle has ranged the public opinion of Britain on the side of the struggling democracies of the world of Greece, of Italy, of Belgium, of Hungary, and even of the nations of the Orient. It civilised the boundary line between the United States and Canada, and inspires life in North America with a new ideal of internationalism. It determines the policy of the United States in its relations with the Philippines, with Cuba, with Mexico and the Republics of South America, with Japan of AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 165 a generation ago and with the awakening democ- racy of China to-day. NOT YESTERDAY, BUT TO-MORROW All this growth of nationhood, this sanctity of national aspiration, the commonplace among us to-day, had its beginning when through the smoke of battle Britain and America began to see eye to eye. The distance that vision has brought these two nations, the revolution it has wrought, may be measured by the difference between what happened on Lake Erie in 1813 and what hap- pened in 1898 on Manila Bay. The significance of the change is expressed in to-day's celebration. At this place and on this day, under the guidance of His Honour the Governor of Ohio, and with Hon. William H. Taft, the ex-President of the United States, and myself, joint spokesmen for the nations that here contended a hundred years ago, our deepest concern is not with the wars of the past, but with the peace of the future; not with the triumphs or the defeats of yesterday, but with the responsibilities and obligations of to- morrow; not with the glory that either nation achieved a hundred years ago, but with the mes- sage which both nations, speaking in the name of our common North American civilisation, shall 166 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS give to the world through the hundred years to come. Our message here to-day, spoken by two voices, one from the United States, the other from Can- ada, is one message. It is America's message that on this continent, between two proud peo- ples, the barbarism of brute force has long yield- ed to civilised internationalism. It is the assur- ance that Canada's national standing on this con- tinent binds the British Empire and the American Republic in one world-spanning English-speak- ing fraternity. On all continents and on all seas the power of America is the combined power of the United States and Canada, plus the power of Britain and of the British dominions on the South Atlantic and beyond the Pacific. These all are bound together, each with all the others, for the maintenance of that principle of nationhood: any people that desires to be free and is fit to be free ought to be free and must be free. That principle means peace and freedom in the English-speak- ing world. More than that. What this principle of nation- hood has done for America and for the English- speaking fraternity it yet will do for the world. In the light of North America's experience the international boundary lines of Europe are bar- baric. They cannot long endure. In our own day war has begun to be seen not merely as cruel, AMERICA'S MESSAGE TO THE NATIONS 167 burdensome, brutal, but as too futile and too fool- ish for sane and civilised peoples. The nations of civilisation will yet leave war behind, as civi- lised men have left behind the street fight and the duel. As individual citizens have found the only sure vindication of personal honour, and the only true protection of vital interests, to be in respecting the personality and the personal inter- ests of others and in trusting for justice to the law of their land, so are the nations learning, and so the nations must learn, that the only sure vin- dication of national honour and the only certain protection of vital interests is in respecting the nationality of others, and in trusting for justice to the growing conscience of the race codified in international law and expressing itself through international arbitration. On that, as on a sure foundation, rests the hope of the world's peace. Once men dreamed of peace through the world sovereignty of some master mind like Alexander or some ruling race like the Romans. But that dream of peace, the peace not of freemen but of weaklings and slaves, was doomed forever when Napoleon and his army staggered back through the snows of Russia un- der the curse of God. But a new day has dawned, dawned for the statesmen, dawned for the nations. It is the day of national rights and national responsibilities. 168 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS The two nations of America have seen the com- ing of that day, have seen it through these gen- erations of peace, have seen it and are glad. We of to-day, standing on this historic boundary line, a boundary no longer of separation, but of union, are pledged, we and our nations with us, pledged to preach this gospel of freedom, good- will and peace. This is America's vision; this America's message; this America's obligation to all the world. INTERNATIONALISM AND THE UNIVERSITY * A UNIVERSITY is a place where a world of men and women come together as a corpo- rate body to teach and to learn a world of sub- jects. A modern university, like the "studium gen- erale" of the Middle Ages, knows no limitation of race or of language or of country. Its inter- ests are world interests. Its range sweeps not one world alone, but all worlds. As a university its citizenship is universal. Its local habitation may be in one State or in one nation, but its spirit is international and its home is in all the earth. All the great American universities, whether maintained by the State or established on private foundations, draw their life from every great world nation and send back their quickening pow- er into all lands. In the United States and in Canada alike, many of the universities represent, in their Faculties and among their students, the bloods and the languages and the traditions of all the warring nations of Europe. When their uni- versity day is done those graduates, who afore- * Commencement Address, Syracuse University, 1915. 169 170 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS time were aliens and enemies, turn again, as streams from a fountain head, to vitalise and fructify the world. The university is indeed, in its ideas and in its spirit, a microcosm, a little universe. You came to this university place boasting your citi- zenship in one State or in one Nation : if the uni- versity has done for you anything worth while you have been led into the world of universal ideas: to you has come the vision of world life. The badge of the university means that while you may hold the rights of national citizenship in your native land, your intellectual citizenship, the enfranchisement of your spirit, shall be in every nation, every fatherland to you a native country and every foreign country to you a fatherland. It is from the watchtower of the university, and with the intellectual insight and the moral sympathy of the university mind, we of to-day and in the universities of North America, must survey the world situation. And what a sight! A world wrecked on the reefs of barbarism: order turned again into chaos : civilisation belied, its faith disproved, its hope shattered, its charity mocked in the chant of hate. Since last Commencement day a year ago the civilisation of the centuries has collapsed. The internationalism of Europe has reverted to tribal- ism at its worst. The Armed Peace of the world INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 171 has broken into world war. Not an ocean but has been tracked by war-craft. Not a nation but has been turned from domestic politics to foreign policy. Not a university in all the world that keeps to-day the serenity of an undivided and neutral mind. With every international boun- dary line on all the continents trembling as in an earthquake shock, it seems like cruel trifling to talk of Internationalism and the University. No, not all the continents. Not every interna- tional line. The invisible boundary between the two English-speaking nations of North America, the longest dividing line on the map of all the world, has not been threatened. That ancient landmark has not been moved. It alone stands firm, guarded only by the people's will. Its rec- ord of a hundred years points the world to a thousand years of peace. The civilised interna- tionalism of the United States and Canada bears witness to the Anglo-American unity and is the Darien peak of the university mind. AMERICA'S NATIONALISM The unique internationalism of the United States and Canada can be understoqd, and the secret of it discovered, only by a study of na- tionality and nationalism in the life and history of these two North American nations. Interna- 172 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS tionalism depends on the quality of your nation- alism : and nationalism is determined by the ele- ments and factors in what you call your nation- alities. Nationality. Nationalism. Internation- alism. These three terms as applied to North American life, have a far richer meaning than eleswhere in all the world, because the facts they represent have been enriched by contributions from the treasures of life in all the great nations of the world. In the United States the nation is that con- crete unity of all the elements of race and lan- guage and national antecedent blended together under a common government, inspired by a com- mon sentiment, and directed towards a common purpose. The American nationality is not so much a thing of birth or of blood, as it is the legal standing enjoyed by those whose allegiance is to American institutions and whose symbol is the American flag. American nationalism is that conscious sense of oneness with all whose adher- ence is to the American nation and whose strong- est national sentiments gather about the symbol of America's national life. What I mean is illustrated in the experiences of peoples of different races who came to America from nations in Europe and whose descendants are now citizens of the United States or of Can- ada. For instance, in North Carolina, and other INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 173 States both in the South and in the North, are many thousands of citizens whose forefathers came from the Highlands of Scotland, bringing with them characteristics of their nationality as pronounced as any pioneers who ever crossed the Atlantic. Their clan names carried the his- tory of the Scottish nation. In their blood and temperament was everything distinctive of the Celtic race. They spoke only the Gaelic lan- guage. For their religious faith and for their political principles they were ready to fight and if needs be to die. In the struggles of the Revo- lution they were divided in their allegiance, some following George Washington and the Stars and Stripes, others abiding with the old flag and join- ing their compatriots in Canada. On the one side they helped to make strong the foundations of the new Republic: on the other side they gave strength and steadiness to the new Dominion. To-day the descendants of those Scottish Gaels, alike in the United States and in Canada, prize their strain of Celtic blood and cherish with growing fervour their inheritance from the Scot- tish nationality, but they speak the English lan- guage, and, with a devotion as passionate as that of their sires to Scotland's King and law, they pledge their troth to their nation's flag and are as ready to defend their country's honour. In the United States they are not Scottish- Americans : 174 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS they are Americans. In Canada they are not Scottish-Canadians : they are Canadians. In both nations they reverence the traditions of their fathers, and count their historic background in the Scottish nationality an honourable birthright, but in their own lives they blend with the ele- ments contributed by other races, by the English, by the Irish, by the various races of Europe, to form that new-world composite: in the United States the American nationality and the Ameri- can nation, and in Canada the Canadian nation- ality and the Canadian nation. And what is true of that one race in America is true also for all others who have earned the right to freedom and fellowship in North Ameri- can citizenship. NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM It is the fact of this new democratic nationality in these two nations that explains the fact and the power of America's internationalism. The United States and Canada each has its own forms and institutions of government, but in both the authority of government is the people's will. An autocrat may endure for a night, but democ- racy returns in the morning. Some privileged class or favoured interest may prove to a demon- stration its ability to legislate and administer for INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 175 the people better than the people would for themselves, but Woodrow Wilson put the invinci- ble democracy of his own country and of Canada into a nutshell when he declared: "I care not how benevolent a master is going to be; I will not live under a master. It was not for that America was made." It is this inborn and incurable passion for lib- erty, refusing alike mastership for oneself and servitude for another, that gives distinction to nationalism in these two nations, and makes the internationalism of North America the inspira- tion for all the continents. Were there on this continent a despot's throne, and were the power of the State a thing apart from the will of the people, some tyrant's vaulting ambition might some day stretch from Panama to the Pole, and North America repeat the sorrows and the slav- eries of Europe. But it shall not be: it cannot be. All over this continent the fires have been kindled that shall never go out: the flags are afloat that shall never be furled : the fires of truth and the flags of liberty. But in Canada nationalism and international- ism have a deeper meaning and a still wider sig- nificance. The people of Canada are sovereign in their own domain, mistress in their own house, but they share also in the sovereignty of that world democracy of British nations miscalled 176 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS the Empire. The old names survive, the old forms endure, but the spirit is new and the life is free. There is no Imperium. There is no Imperator. Soldiers from Canada in Flanders and in France sing to-day "God Save the King," but they sing and they serve of their own free choice and by commission of their own national government, the servant, not the master, of the democracy of Canada. The political fact of Canada's nationalism within the circle of the British Empire and the geographical fact of Canada's internationalism on the North American continent, give to the Canadian Dominion a place of serious importance and of high strategy among the nations. It is at once the half-way house of the world-empire of Britain and the vital bond of the Anglo-American unity. Think what that fact means: what it means for America : and in Europe's lurid light, what it may yet mean for all the world. TWO NATIONS : ONE PEOPLE Years ago, in the City of Toronto, that great historian and literary man, whose name gives lustre to this whole continent, the late Dr. Goldwin Smith, was in the habit of saying that the time had come for wiping out the interna- tional dividing line between the United States INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 177 and Canada. Other men, sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other, have said that a freer trade policy would work for political union on this continent. They who so speak think only for the moment and see only on the surface. Tariff or no tariff, reciprocity or no reciprocity, free trade or no free trade, the United States and Canada are two national units, and in their flags and forms of government, two they shall remain. But our English-speaking nations are one people : one in the thousand years of their historic back- ground, one in their ancient passion for liberty, one in the genius of their laws, one in the wealth of their literature, one in the foundations of their faith, one in the eternal purpose of the God of nations. What God has joined together let not the petty policies of men put asunder. Does some one ask, Why not unite these two nations and two Governments in one Parliament or Congress of the Continent? This is my an- swer : There are wider horizons and * more splendid visions than the political unity of North America. In the defence of North American civilisation and in the mission of North America to the world, these two nations are more impres- sive and more impregnable under two flags than they would be under one. This is, indeed, quite the most impressive thing on the map of the world : this international bound- 178 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS ary between the United States and Canada, which, across this continent and for four thou- sand miles, unites these two peoples more truly than it divides. It is not at all an imaginary line. It is the most real and most divisive politi- cal fact on this continent. The flags are two. The sovereignties are two. The administrations are two. But the people are not so divided. They cross and re-cross. Their interests, their ideals, their purposes, and the vitalities of their lives are all interwoven. From the Rio Grande to Hud- son's Bay, from Cape Breton to California, there is being created one vast international community. In fronting the supreme moral problems of lib- erty and justice and peace, and in facing North America's supreme obligation to the world, the United States and Canada are united together, by every league of their common boundary, in one indissoluble bundle of their international life, the pledge and the foretaste of that civilised interna- tionalism in which North America is yet to lead the world. ANGI,O-AMRICAN UNITY This internationalism of North America even now is something more than North American alone. It involves the spiritual unity of all the nations and peoples of the English speech. This INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 179 is indeed the international distinction and the high purpose of Canada on this continent: the unity in spirit and purpose of this American Re- public in the freedom of its own democracy with the democratic nations that make up the world- empire of Britain. It is the high ambition of Canadians, as being themselves at once citizens of North America and citizens of the British Em- pire, to hold both together in one invincible unity of the international mind, not for any proud Anglo-Saxon domination, not for any world do- minion of form or force, but for the larger lib- erty of all peoples and for the larger unity of all nations in the peaceful democracy of the world. There are still those, under both flags, who regret and deplore the division which separated the American colonies from the parent stock of Britain. They dream of what might now be if Britain and America were one. They think not of conquest; for neither nation desires the force- ful possession of the territory of any other. Nor even of defence : though for the moment the hori- zons are heavy with grief and sometimes black with fear. They think rather of the Anglo- American idea, and of how it might be pushed over all the earth. But that dream of political unity passed more than a century ago. It will not come back. It 180 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS need not come back. Another vision gilds the horizon of this new century. It is the vision of national integrities within a free international unity. Beyond the storm-cloud of Europe Pre- mier Asquith sees emerge "a real European part- nership" in which a place shall be kept for all the little kingdoms, room for each of the unified na- tionalities, where there shall be equal rights for all, and a common security enforced by the com- mon will. In the English-speaking world there has al- ready come to pass what in Europe's wild dis- traction is scarcely even fitfully dreamed. It is a real Anglo-American unity. It is the nation- alism of all the nations of the Empire, and the nationalism of all the sovereign States of the Re- public, coming together almost unconsciously in a spiritual affinity. It is not an uncertain balanc- ing of the powers that make for war. It is not an alliance based on brute force. There is in it a touch of life: a oneness of ideals: a sympathy of the things of the mind. This is the new world vision of the English- speaking peoples. Canada cherishes it. The American Republic is not disobedient to it. In Britain the wearied watchers on the hilltops greet it as those who long have watched for the morn- ing. Under the Southern Cross the young na- tions of Australia and New Zealand rise up in INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 181 eager salute. South Africa, too, latest born of the British breed, and justified in her democracy by the heroism of her children, sees in it the ful- filment of a great hope. And out of the Far East, the mighty Empire of India, ancient before the Anglo-Saxon was born, looms mysterious and majestic as if to find a standing place. It is the world-dream of internationalism. And the two nations of North America rise up to make that dream come true. THE FUNCTION OF THE UNIVERSITY In this world-wide movement of international- ism what is the function of the university ? If the maxim holds, which was asserted at the begin- ning, that a university is a place where a world of men and women come together as a corporate body to teach and to learn a world of subjects, then it follows, by intellectual necessity, that the university stands in the very forefront of inter- nationalism. The university is the home of the world mind. Education breeds the world idea: breeds it, nurtures it, widens its horizon, liberates it into the free atmosphere of world ideas. Schol- arship is debtor to every nation, to every race and to every age. Science is the cumulative resultant of the world's experiment and achievement. Lit- erature is the expression of world ideas. The 182 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS university itself is indeed the watch tower of the international mind. If a university is indeed a world of ideas, the university point of view must take a world sweep. University ideas must smash the crusted bigotries of local prejudice, of national arrogance, and of racial pride. The idea of the solidarity of the race and of its unity in biological fundamentals; the idea of the interdependence of all peoples in their economic, financial and political interests, as illustrated in the history of civilisation; the idea of one world-neighbourhood into which are being incessantly crowded all races and nations; the emergence of a common law for that world neighbourhood as imperative as any law known in municipal or national life; the idea of inexorable sanctions of that world law which make viola- tions, even a seemingly local violation, like the feud between Austria and Servia, an offence of world consequence, entailing catastrophe for all the world those world ideas, which are the coin current in any university and in any circle of educated people, make it forever impossible for a poised university mind to take any but a world point of view. The university is the chief guardian of the soul of the nation. The man in the street may suppose that mere things constitute the nation : extent of territory, resources of material wealth, a large INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 183 population, with all the signs of outward pros- perity and physical greatness. But the man in the university knows that not by these things can the soul of the nation live. The university man has read history to no good purpose if he has not learned that the great nations have rarely been the big nations, the na- tions of vast territory, of exhaustless wealth or of resistless power. From the days of little Judea to the days of little Belgium the little peoples have been the Suffering Servant of Jehovah. The lit- tle nations have saved the ideals of civilisa- tion. "You've lost everything," mocked the Accuser. "No, not everything," came back the answer. "Not everything. Not my Soul." And the Soul of Belgium, saved so as by fire, shall yet by its example redeem, not Europe alone, but crucified humanity, from the decay of honour and justice and truth. It is not by the sword of war alone, it is for us much more by the lust of the full dinner-pail and the big dividend, that the soul of the nation is threatened. "Jeshurun waxed fat and he kicked." The universities of to-day and of to-morrow, in the United States and in Canada, must rise to the high and stern discipline of the mind and heart and spirit if our young nations are not to lose the passion for righteousness, the love of truth and the consecra- 184 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS tion to service which alone can save a nation's soul. Fronting the unimaginable tragedy of Europe's civilisation, the collapse and condemnation of its university culture, there is not in all America to- day, or there ought not to be, one university that has not been filled with fear for itself lest it, too, betray its nation's soul. The question raised to- day goes far back of the academic contentions of literary criticism, or the disputes of the philo- sophic cults, or the experiments of the scientific laboratory. It is back to the fundaments, not of Christianity alone, but of morality as well. Is there a difference between right and wrong? Is there an immovable obligation to do the right and to shun the wrong? Is this a moral world in which the Nature of Things is on the side of the right, and inexorable retribution tracks the heels of wrong? Do the moral distinctions, the moral obligations and the moral retributions obtain for the State as absolutely and as inevitably as for the individual? Is Law a reality for the strong or only a makeshift for the weak, and is Force the ultimate arbiter of justice? Is greatness for the citizen or for the nation the embodiment of the Roman's Will-to-Power or of the Nazarene's Will-to-Serve ? Who is to be chosen, Barabbas or Jesus? Who is to be crowned, the Caesar or the Christ? INTERNATIONALISM AND UNIVERSITY 185 These are the pro founder questions which the university must face, and face with the resolute- ness of a moral crisis, if it would save either its own sense of ethical distinctions or the imperilled soul of the nation. The denial of the fundamen- tal affirmations of morality as they affect the State, through teachers like Treitschke and his percursors and imitators in the great universities and schools of Germany, perverted the German mind through two generations, until the nation's inherited sense of moral values was at length completely destroyed, its moral perspective re- versed, and all the ideals and chivalries and gen- erosities of its civilisation crumbled back into the hell of its hate. And the moral world is one. The law of moral degeneration is no respecter of nations. The per- version of the university mind perverts not Ger- man thinking alone, and not the Teuton race only, but the British and the American as well. And the law of the harvest holds: wheat yields wheat and tares tares. And the increase is thirty, or sixty or an hundred fold. What the universities teach to-day the schools will teach to-morrow, and on the third day the harvest of the nation must be reaped: wheat from wheat and tares from tares. And the harvest of one nation's sowing will be reaped not by that nation alone. The winds 18(5 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS from all the seas carry the seed of national truth and of national error to the ends of all the earth. No student can think only for himself. No uni- versity can go right or can go wrong alone. An idea, vitalising a personality, and caught up on the winged winds of the university mind, defies your State limitations or your nation's bounds: its home is the boundless air of the world life. Think, men and women of the university, only think, think with your souls aflame ; speak, only speak, speak as with tongues of fire; and the world is yours, every man's fatherland to you a native country, and every man's native country to you a fatherland. Think, speak, serve, and do all by the dynamic of the international mind, and your life and your university will count for the common weal, and bring nearer the day of the World's Commonwealth. LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS * LEADERSHIP and the World Crisis! The theme is yours yours and your commit- tee's. It suggests concern on your part and on the part of the Presbyterian Church in the United States this great Church that in wealth and numbers leads all the Reformed Churches in Christendom concern for Christianity itself, and for civilisation, and for the opportunities and obligations of this American Republic in this hour of crisis in the world's history. You have invited to speak on this significant theme at this critical hour a Canadian, the editor of a Canadian daily newspaper, whose first con- cern is for the public opinion and public life of Canada at a time when the Canadian' people are involved, with all their wealth and all their serv- ice and all their sons, in the most stupendous and most staggering conflict of civilisation in all the centuries, waged on the battle- fronts of all the world. This invitation in itself suggests the truth too *An Address at the Presbyterian General Assembly, Roches- ter, N. Y., 1915. 187 188 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS often ignored, that in the real life of North American democracy the pulpit and the press have much in common; that each is a throne of power, and may become an instrument of peril in the life of the people; that each has a share in the trade and commerce of world ideas, and that in the day when American democracy comes to judgment the pulpit and the press will both be held to high account. And your invitation still further suggests, or it takes for granted, that, separated though our two nations are by the longest international boundary in all the world, and different the parts our two nations play in the great world tragedy of the ages, yet, standing aghast and solemnised in the dread presence of the world crisis, these two American nations of the English speech and of the Christian faith are one people; one in the tradition and background of their freedom; one in the supreme problem of their Governments; one in their responsibility for civilisation in this western hemisphere; one in their consecration to the justice and liberty and peace of all the world. TH WORLD CRISIS The story needs no telling : in all the languages of men it tells itself. The picture needs no paint- ing : on the blackened sky it is etched in the flashes LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS 189 of death. All the great nations of Europe, with twenty-two millions of their choicest sons, are lined up in war's most ghastly array. They are not all equally guilty, but in the spirit of their diplomacy and in the arrogance of their ambition no one of them is wholly innocent. Their peoples profess to worship in the sanctuaries of the God of Love, but most of their weapons were shaped in the laboratories of Hate, and some of their anthems belong to the temples of Odin and Thor. At the heart of the crisis is the wonder and the fear if, at the end of the day, Europe's boasted civilisations, butchered in the name of culture, may not collapse irrevocably into the ooze and chaos of barbarism whence they sprang. And not Europe alone, but all the continents. Not the belligerents alone, but all the nations. There are non-combatants, but they too are victims. There are still a few neutrals, but their neutrality is in name and in form, and not in the judgments of the mind or in the sentiments of the heart. All the world is indeed a war zone. No sea is safe. No shore is secure. No flag is sacred. Law is declared a makeshift for weaklings. Brute- force is glorified as the only reality. International agreements are torn up as scraps of paper. The sanctioned conventions of civilisation are made conveniences for pirates and brigands. Under our own eyes the stays have been cut and the bolts 190 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS have been drawn that hold world society together. The emerging neighbourhood of the nations has been crowded back into the dank and death ful jungle. Christianity itself has been mocked at by the dominant voice in the land of Luther : the Sermon on the Mount has been parodied in terms of the philosophy of hate : and the foundations of the Kingdom of God are being dug away by the uniformed lords of Hell. To call this thing, in the midst of which we stand, "the world crisis," is to play with words that in this presence have lost their meaning. World crisis, forsooth ! It is rather a world cata- clysm. AND WHY THE CRISIS? Is this thing an accident? Is it an effect that had no cause to match ? No, a thousand times no ! It is the inevitable consequent of a very definite and historical antecedent. It is the lawful in- ternational harvest of the lawless seed planted in the minds and hearts of the nations. It is the ill-favoured but natural progeny of high-praised but pagan parentage. Like father, like son; like seed, like harvest. Be not deceived: God is not mocked; whatsoever the nations sow, that shall they also reap. An American Consul, who has worthily repre- sented this Republic in many lands, a man of LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS 191 serious life and reverent mind, said to me not long ago that the question which haunted him like a spectre of unbelief was this: How can there be a God, all-powerful, all-wise and all- loving, and this thing happen? My answer was another question: How could there be such a God and this thing not happen? If there is a moral order in the universe, if there is an essen- tial difference between right and wrong, if na- tions as well as men have a consciousness of moral distinctions among their responsible actions, if national retribution, slow-footed but sure, fol- lows in the track of national crime, and if nations in the great family of mankind are bound to- gether so that if one member sins all the mem- bers suffer with it that is to say, if there is a God of nations whose decrees are immutable and whose warnings are not mocked, then a harvest of bitterness and slaughter must be reaped from forty years' sowing of international envy and hate and preparation for war. The real conflict is not between brute force and brute force. It is between mind and mind, between principles and principles, between mo- tives and motives, between ideas and ideas. If there is nothing great on earth but man, and nothing great in man but mind, then the reality of the world's conflict is not the horrid thing on the battle- fronts of Flanders or Poland or the 192 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Dardanelles, but the spectral clash in the mind of the nations; and the real weapons of our war- fare are not submarines and long-range guns, but ideas and purposes and spiritual forces. Paul knew that the seen things are not the real things ; that the visible enemies are not the real enemies ; that the struggle, hand to hand, gun to gun, bat- talion to battalion, army to army, is not the real struggle; our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness. And the real weapons of our warfare are not carnal but spiritual. The physical is only the seeming and the outward semblance; the spiritual alone is the real. Back of all this hideousness and hor- ror at the battle-front is that unseen clashing of the hosts of the mind. Because it was a conflict of ideas before it be- came a conflict of armed forces, responsibility for the crisis lies far back of August, 1914. Machia- velli shaped its ethics. Napoleon had a say in its philosophy. Bismarck determined its state- craft. And in all our nations, in America as well as in Europe, among the diplomats of democ- racy as well as in the dynasts of despotism, the ideas were current through the century, the false ideas of national greatness, the brute-force ideas of national power, the perverted ideas of national honour. In some countries these ideas were kept in check, in others they became all-powerful, but in all they played their baneful part, and all are now involved in the issue. And because the currency of ideas is not regu- lated by any customs tariff the evil mind has crossed the boundaries and the seas. The ideas of militarism have assailed civilianism in every country. The national prophets of the Will-to- Power have been heard in every land, answering back the Christian prophets of the Will-to-Serve. The ideas are too big, too persistent, and the world is too small, for this thing to be done in a corner. When the crash came it ruptured to the foundations the ideas that seemed to stand as the sure bulwarks of civilisation. It made a chasm deep and wide between things as they were and things as henceforth they must be. TH BREACH WITH THE PAST The man who does not grasp the world signifi- cance of this revolution in ideas, this cataclysm, this breach the world has made with its own past, cannot begin to understand the problems of the future. In the three great institutions of civi- lisation, in Society, in the State, and in the Church, there has come a revolution of ideas. Old things are passed away: old formulas are 194. DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS meaningless, old classifications are broken, old shibboleths have lost their power. There is needed a fresh start and a new lead. Society needs a new socialism. Already the old social ranking is transposed. The capitalist of last year with a thousand hands subservient at his word lines up to-day as a private in the ranks, with No. 862 on his pay-roll as his officer in command. If Society is to recover there must come a socialism in which individual selfishness and class antagonisms and the fierce competitions of wild beasts in the jungle shall not prevail; a socialism in which the Haves shall not ride on the backs of the Have-nots ; a socialism of socialized society in which there is neither arrogant master- ship nor envious servitude, in which no man eats bread by the sweat of some other man's brow, and in which in justice and in love there is dis- tributed to each according to his need and re- quired from each according to his power; a so- cialism that makes the strength of the strong the stay of the weak, and the wisdom of the wise the guide of the foolish ; a socialism in whose realised social order men and women and little children live together and work together as neighbours in a world-neighbourhood, as brothers in a recon- structed and regenerated brotherhood of man. The State needs a new politic. Old political theories, as illustrated in prevailing political in- LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS 195 stitutions, must be reconceived. The discredited Prussian idea of the State as a thing of Divine Right, above conscience, free from law, and inde- pendent of the people, is less dangerous to the world than is the everyday practice under free government where Democracy is shouted from the housetops at election time, but denied in the offices of administration and in the bossism of parties all the year round. It is not enough that the political theory of Democracy should be proved sound: power for the people must mean something more than the right to vote. It is not enough for the integrity of the State in North America that south of the Great Lakes are heard historic quotations from the Fathers of American Independence, and north of the line great words from the Fathers of Canadian Confederation, if under both flags the maxim of the Scottish brig- and Rob Roy is tolerated : "That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can," and if the sacred words at Gettysburg are in political experience changed to mean "govern- ment of the people by the rascals for the rich." Government must work out to mean something worthier than mis-government by proxy, or Democracy is only a more vulgar form of Des- 196 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS potism. Party government itself must be recon- ceived. It must be made everlastingly plain that the whole duty of all political parties is to the People, and not at all to the grafters, the office- seekers, and the party heelers. "His Majesty's Loyal Opposition" has a duty second in respon- sibility, and in dignity not even second, to the duty resting upon "His Majesty's Government" : the duty of criticism and co-operation, that the rights of the people may be secure, their laws just, and their lives free. And the State itself must be lifted in its thinking to take its rightful place of citizenship and service in the newborn democracy of the internationalized world. The old politic of national exclusion is outgrown. In political ideas there must come a new lead. And the Church needs a new ecclesiasticism. The old ecclesiastical order is out of joint. De- nominationalism has run to seed. The mint and the anise and the cumin, Europe being witness, have taken the place of the weightier matters of the law, and a pagan philosophy, an unspiritual ethic and a sociology that knows no Christ have drugged the nerve of the Gospel. The Church must reconceive itself, not as the echo of State policies, but as the embodiment and spokesman of Christianity. It must up again to the hilltops, to Calvary and to Olivet, and renew its vision of the world. The Church was not meant to be the cult LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS 197 of an outworn creed, but the fountain of world ideas ; not the conservator of things as they were, but the irrepressible campaigner for things as they ought to be ; not the dealer in dull narcotics that numb the pains of new thinking and soothe the nation with Peace, peace, when there is no peace, but the resistless dynamic of a new life that will smash through the Dardanelles of dead dogma and stir the wilderness of arid formalism into the glad fragrance of a new heaven and a new earth. Because of the world's breach with its own past, and because of the urgent needs in So- ciety, in the State and in the Church, the call of humanity is direct and piercing for another chance and a new leadership. That call is loud- est and most compelling in North America. And that leadership must be inspired by the Church of Jesus Christ. WHY NORTH AMERICA'S I^AD^RSHIP. The call for leadership comes to North Ameri- ca, because, among the leader-nations of the world, this Republic alone even calls itself neutral. The United States is not undisturbed, but your ears have not been filled with the noise of actual battle, your heart has not been held in the hard grip of actual war, and the best of your sons 198 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS have not gone out to die by the tens of thousands for your nation's life. Neutrality has its advantages, and isolation from the conflict has its immunities. But no theory of neutrality, be it never so just, and no experience of national isolation, be it never so remunerative, can secure for the United States of America immunity from the pains and penalties of Europe's anguish, or can make the struggle of other nations only a harvest time for Ameri- can manufacturers of munitions of war. When humanity goes up to its Golgotha, it means the blood-sweat of Gethsemane for every nation. The United States owes too much to Europe to Britain, to France, to Germany, to all the war- ring nations, and to the imperilled causes of free- dom and justice and peace the United States owes too much to civilisation to be neutral in its ideas when the whole fabric of civilised thinking is tottering into ruin. "Noblesse oblige" makes it impossible for this Republic to be uncommit- ted in its services and sacrifices when human- ity, robbed to-day of the blood of a whole gen- eration of its coming patriots and heroes, calls aloud for to-morrow's leaders. Humanity will need another Washington, and another Jeffer- son, another Franklin and another Hamilton to make good a new Declaration of Independence for all the world; and many another Lincoln to LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS 199 emancipate the minds of the nations from the thraldom of hate, and to make possible a United States, not of Europe alone, but of the world, so that government of the people by the people and for the people may not perish from the earth. And in its distress humanity has the right to turn to this American democracy, this "the heir of all the ages" ; has the right to make appeal to you and your Churches, to your homes and your schools, to your universities and your seminaries ; the commanding right to send out its Macedonian cry for leaders from America to take the places of the millions who are falling in Europe's war. And what is the answer ? Does North America to-day breed the leaders for the world of to- morrow ? LEADERSHIP OF jEsus In the clamour and confusion of this world- crisis one call strikes with the note of hope. That call is "Back to Christ/' When the great nations of Europe, the nations that are called Christian, broke into this most anti-Christian war in Au- gust last, the cry went up: "Christianity has failed." The tone of that cry sometimes was of exultation, sometimes of despair, sometimes of sad surprise. Now that a year has well nigh gone, and month by month the war circle widens and the war tragedy darkens, leaving only here and there a little people not swept into the vortex or skirting the edge, the cry of August has be- come an earnest question: "Has Christianity failed?" And as the clouds hang heavier, as the sorrow comes nearer still, as one by one all other hopes vanish and all other schemes break down, the heart of humanity rises to a higher key and utters an urgent note of hope : "Back to Christ." Christianity has not failed. In the realm of international life Christianity has in reality never yet been honestly tried. As between Britain and America the Christian temper has never for long been wholly absent. Through the hundred years of Anglo-American peace the qualities of Chris- tian feeling grew into our diplomacy. But this has been the result of the personal equation in Christian character among the individuals deal- ing with international affairs the British Sov- ereigns and the American Presidents, the succes- sion of Ambassadors in London and in Washing- ton, the high quality of statesmanship on 'one side and on the other rather than the result of defi- nite Christian principles and purposes deliberately inwrought in international policy and impel- ling to international action. Our nations as na- tions are only beginning to think internationally. Even in our Anglo-American civilisation there will not be any real international Christianity un- LEADERSHIP AND THE WORLD CRISIS 201 til into our international thought and feeling and life there comes a more definite sense of interna- tional Christian brotherhood, a brotherhood high- er and deeper than any brotherhood of blood. That Christian brotherhood of the nations means not only personal Christian faith and fidelity in individual citizens, but it means also in the na- tional life and consciousness a national allegiance and devotion to the international Christ. Humanity's surprising discovery in the black- ness and grief of this international war will be the person and leadership of the International Christ. The Man of Nazareth was the world's first in- ternationalist, the product of no narrow racial- ism. He was the Son of Man. Up to Calvary He went, the Saviour of the world. From Olivet He commissioned His apostles to all nations with the herald proclamation of the Kingdom of God. The premier spokesman for His world program saw Christ cross all chasms of race, of social conditions and of sex : the platform of Christian- ity bridges the abyss between Jew and Gentile, be- tween male and female, between bond and free. The leaders of the Protestant Reformation caught a glimmer of the larger truth when they met the pretensions of the Papacy with the estab- lishment of a National Church. And Scotland, little Scotland, through all the dark years of Se- 202 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS cession and Covenant, sealed for the world with the blood of her martyrs the oath of her testi- mony to the Headship of Christ over the nations of the world. And when, in this twentieth cen- tury, the Church catches the radiant vision on the international horizon line, there, in all His Messianic glory and with all His kingly power, the Church will see, and will make the nations see, the Christ stand. The International Christ ! CANADA : ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL* WHY should Canada be involved in this war of Europe ? By what tether are our sym- pathies and our sons drawn to the battle-fronts of France and of Flanders? What toll must be paid by this peaceful, young democracy of the new world before the despotic frightfulness of the old world is done ? Questions such as these were suggested to me ten days ago by two addresses at the Annual Com- mencement of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Both speakers were Americans of national eminence. One was David Starr Jor- dan, the Chancellor of Leland Stanford Univer- sity. The other was John G. White, a Cleveland lawyer of distinction as a jurist. Their words were addressed specially to a great body of uni- versity alumni. The atmosphere of their thinking and the point of their argument was the great war in Europe, and the tests and responsibilities it pre- sented to the two English-speaking nations of America. *An Address at Priceville, Ontario, 1915. 203 204 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Dr. Jordan, speaking as an expert in biology and a student of the Social Problem of the na- tions, condemned war, both just and unjust war, because of the toll it takes and the trail it leaves. The toll of war is not in money alone, or in ter- ritory, or in social happiness, but in the best of the human breed, in the choicest of the nation's sons, in the "men of the finer strain" through whom nature would preserve and reproduce the rare spark of genius that gives the world its poets, its artists, its philosophers, its statesmen, its men who are the measure and the glory of the race. He argued that in war the fittest do not survive, that the bravest and best are first to enlist and first to fall, and that this "reversed selection" in the biology of war means for the nation the sur- vival of the unfit. Its end is national decay. As a veteran of the Civil War and as spokes- man for his university class of 1865, Mr. White seemed to justify the wars of history that called men to heroic death for their country's sake, and that urged them to self-sacrifice without concern for "the finer strain." He rang the changes on Thermopylae and Marathon, on Waterloo and Lucknow, on Quebec and Valley Forge, on the Wilderness and Gettysburg, on the Marne and Ypres. He made appeal to "the glory that was Greece" and to the greatness that is Belgium. It is with these thoughts in mind the thoughts CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 205 of the patriot who is also a man of science and a student of history, and the thoughts of the other patriot whose blood stirs at the bugle call and thrills again at the story of the battle charge it is with these thoughts and feelings and restless questions that bear on our Canadian situation to-day, I come to share in your patriotic dem- onstration, and to do honour to the young men of this district who have joined the colours and are on their way to the front. The questions of Canada's tether and its toll are real questions. They are our questions. They will not down. They cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. They are worlds away from the shallow clamour of political partisan- ship. They deal with the content and quality of Canada's nationalism. They involve the eternal laws by which the future of a nation grows out of its past. They ask what part Canada is to play, not for itself alone, but in that wider family of nations of which in days to come Canada must count for one, and which, after the war, must live together or die together within the four corners of the world-neighbourhood. These are ques- tions which Canadians must face with open eyes and steady hearts : Why should Canada be involved in this war of Europe? By what tether are our sympathies and our 206 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS sons drawn to the battle- fronts of Flanders and of France? What toll must Canada pay before this fright- fulness of Europe is done? WHY CANADA WAS MADS It was not for war that Canada was made. Forty-eight years ago this very week this new nation began its national history. Dominion Day commemorates the birth of the Canadian Domin- ion. Our forefathers, the pioneers of those vast Canadian wildernesses, blazed trails west and north from the sea. They came from Britain, from mid-Europe and from the older American Colonies to make homes for themselves and their families and to establish a homeland for their children's children. But it was not for war they came. I am not unmindful of the distinction which marked the early settlement of this very com- munity and the towns and townships in these counties roundabout. The pioneers whose memo- ries you cherish, whose names many of you bear, and whose Gaelic mother-tongue many of you still speak, came to Canada from the Highlands and islands of Scotland. Your family names, scattered wide over Grey and Bruce and Huron and Middlesex and Perth and Oxford, are the his- CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 207 toric clan names of Scotland. Your family rec- ords, like my own, go back to the dark days when the glens and the moors were drained of their bravest men to fill up the ranks of the kilted regi- ments that fought for Britain's glory from Cullo- den to Cathay : and to the still darker days when what of blood and brawn left in the glens by the recruiting sergeant was swept off the lands for which their fathers died to make room for the landlord's sheep and for the Duke's pheasants and big-horned stag. If our ancestral blood answers to the pibroch of war, it answers also to the two centuries of injustice which made our forefathers exiles from the lands that ought to have been theirs, and begot in us the deep conviction that landlordism has been as cruel and as devastating to Britain as Prussian militarism has been to Ger- many. In those days of the sailing vessels on the sea and long before the day of railways on the land, through the last half of the seventeenth century and on through the eighteenth, those hardy High- landers by the thousand came in shiploads from the ports of the Clyde and the Argyllshire coast, yearning westward across the trackless ocean for a new land where they might make a fresh start and create a free life in a new civilisation. The trails of those migrations run westward across Canada from Cape Breton, from Prince Edward 208 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS Island, from Nova Scotia, from New Brunswick, up the St. Lawrence, up the Ottawa, along the Great Lakes, and then north and west through the primeval forests where now smiles this great Province of Ontario. What heroes those pioneers must have been! What strength in their men! What courage in their women! What proud ambition! What heroic endurance ! What hope that conquered the invincible ! What faith that removed the impos- sible mountains ! With hearts that never fainted, with wills that never were daunted, with a love that never failed, those men and women of the early days were the real discoverers of Canada, the true makers of the nation, and when the jew- els are made up their lives will not be lost. CANADA NOT FOR WAR But it was not for war the adventurous pio- neers came to Canada. It was not for war they cleared the forests and drained the swamps. It was not for war they changed the jungle into a neighbourhood. It was not for war their women brought forth children in all the sorrows of pio- neer life. It was not as food for the cannon of war they trained their sons in the arts and indus- tries of peace. Many of us have in our veins no other blood than the wild and fiery blood of the CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 209 fighting clans of Scotland, blood that has not been cooled or tamed by the half-dozen genera- tions that separate us from the dark glens and the heathery hills. But it was not to make ready for another "killing time" men of the Scottish Cove- nant crossed the seas and sired a new generation on the virgin soil of Canada. The tartan plaid was no cover for a coward heart, but men of the tartan learned that serving men is nobler work than killing men, and that peace means courage greater than war. Here in Canada the broad- swords were sheathed. The clan feuds were for- gotten. The war of races was outgrown. The hot-blooded Celt came to trust the Sassenach whom once he hated. When Canada became a self-governing Dominion the hope was cherished that on this half -continent a new nation should grow to greatness and world-service with no bat- tlefield on its map, no war page in its history, and with its finest strain and its fittest sons preserved from the wanton waste of war to beget a finer and a fitter race. That was indeed a noble ambition, and nobly Canada might have achieved it. And Canada led the way. It was a great ad- venture, that peaceful break for nationhood made by the Fathers of the Canadian Confedera- tion a half -century ago. The explorers of that day who went out looking for a nation in a wil- derness were men of genius, of courage, of vision, 210 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS of faith: Mackenzie and Papineau, Baldwin and Lafontaine, George Brown and John A. Mac- donald, Joseph Howe and Charles Tupper. Not with fire and sword, but with the power of a great idea, they came, they saw, they conquered. An apron-strings colony became a self-governing na- tion. And not Canada alone, but Australia as well, and New Zealand, and then across the veldt of South Africa, each a free nation, the shackles of colonialism all struck off. The tether of love and of liberty proved stronger than all the man- dates of fear and all the compulsions of force. When the colonies became free nations autocratic Imperialism in Britain was cast off like a thing disproved, and the old Empire, with its roots among the shattered Empires of the past, became a new Commonwealth, with its fruits in the world-democracy of the future. That transfor- mation from world-Empire to world-Common- wealth is the greatest achievement of modern British history, and is the vital outgrowth of the new idea which started Canada in the way of na- tionhood without war and without separation eight and forty years ago. For Canada had a great start. Never in all history did any young nation set out with so many good stars in its horoscope. French and British, at strife in Europe, joined hands on the St. Law- rence. The finest strains of the best races of the CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL old world went into Canadian veins. The experi- ences of the American colonies, the earlier experi- ments of the Republic in State sovereignty and in Federal unity, their failures and their suc- cesses, all were plain as warnings and as examples for the colonies of Canada. Canada's start came as a new day was dawning in Britain. The arrogance of British autocracy in the half-Junker days of George III. was left behind in the larger democratic days of Queen Victoria. Canada came to nationhood after aris- tocratic rule had given way to responsible govern- ment, and the Liberal ideas of Chatham and Burke had triumphed over the reactionary notions of Lord North and the King. There was no revolution in Canada, and in Britain nothing worse than doubts and fears, forty-eight years ago when Dominion Day was given a place in the Canadian calendar. For the first time in the world's history a colony grew into a nation with- out the bitterness of revolution and without the loss of that heritage of history which gives rich- ness and dignity to the life of the nation. THE COMING OF WAR But war has come our way. It was not our war. At first it was not even Britain's war. Canada was the enemy of no one of the nations DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS of Europe. The people of Germany, the people of Austria, even the people of Turkey, if they knew us at all, knew us only as friends. The oppressed and persecuted of their lands came to our shores and were made welcome. Escaping from bond- age there they found liberty here. An aristocrat among the peoples the Anglo-Saxon always may have been, but in Canada he gave a second chance, an equal chance, to the crowded-out Teuton and Slav and Turk, crowded out of their ancestral homes in Europe. We wished them well, and we wished no harm to their homelands, but only peace and the larger freedom which we ourselves enjoyed. Even now, though they are all our alien ene- mies, it is with something of a sense of tragedy we think of the mess Europe has made of its life. It is an unspeakable tragedy that the Teutons of Germany, who are of the same race-family as the Anglo-Saxons of England, the world's lead- ers in political freedom, should be the political pawns of an arrogant half-Slavic Prussian bu- reaucracy, the bewildered victims of a false phil- osophy, the intellectual slaves of a brute-force notion of national greatness, led captive by a dy- nasty gone mad in its lust for world domination. To Englishmen what is now a hideous tragedy was at first a gruesome farce. They could not believe that their Teuton half-brothers had sur- CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 213 rendered to the Divine Right mania of the House of Hohenzollern and had in very truth started out to impose their culture on the world. That is indeed the mocking tragedy of modern life. But when the war came in August last, so far as Britain was concerned, there was nothing for it but war. Had Britain done other than she did, had she allowed the brutal and infamous invasion of Belgium, had she stood idly by while the giant murderer of innocence worked his fiendish way in Europe, British honour would have been betrayed, the trust of the over-seas Dominions would have been put to shame, and had the Prussian tri- umphed, Britain's own day of sorrow would have followed speedily, when there would have been none to pity and few to help. That tether holds when self-interest gives way, when prudence yields, and even when the pledges of honour are but a scrap of paper. All the ties of common language and common blood and com- mon history were involved in the relation of the American colonies to the British Crown when Junker autocracy was on the throne. But those ties did not hold. The King and his Government, in defiance of the appeals of the great commoners and leaders of the people, did violence to the deep sense of justice and freedom inherited by the colonies from the mother country, and the threefold cord of language, blood and history DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS snapped like a rope of straw. But to-day, a cen- tury and a half after the alienation that led to revolution, and after the seeds of strife and mis- understanding have grown to their full harvest of suspicion and fear, the great heart of the Ameri- can Republic beats again in unison with the heart of Britain. The sympathy of the United States, neutral though its Government may be, is with the Allies. The typical American, north or south, east or west, again and again during recent months, and despite all that war would mean, has been like a blood-hound straining at the leash and eager for the fray. And why ? Why do you hear British war melo- dies in American theatres ? Why, in holiday time around the camp-fire, in the Maine woods, by the Jersey shore or among the Virginia hills where every man is an American, perhaps boasting Rev- olutionary blood, may you hear night after night "My Country, Tis of Thee" and "God Save the King"? No, it is not blood: English blood in American veins is thin and greatly mixed. It is not business : during the past decade the Ameri- can people developed almost more community of interest in science and industry with the people of Germany than with the people of Britain. It is not even the English language, although a com- mon speech is a prime channel of exchange for common ideas. CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 215 The reason goes deeper. The editor of one of the foremost American newspapers told me why some months ago. "Every drop of my blood/' he said, "is Teuton, but all the passion of my heart and all the effort of my life is with Britain, be- cause I see all our American institutions of free- dom and self-government assailed by Germany and defended by Britain." An American college professor of German name and birth and educa- tion said to me only the other day: "If I knew of any process by which all that is German in my blood could be extracted from my veins right gladly would I use that process, because of Ger- many's treason to freedom and justice and hu- manity during the past twelve months." But there is no such process. Nor is any needed. Blood heredities may persist, but it is the mind, not the blood, that makes the man. Freedom is the strongest tether of life. It is the steadiest impulse of the heart. It is the surest social bond. Freedom and justice and truth ! By that tether the free Dominions are held loyal to Britain. By that magnet the men of Canada are drawn to the deadly war trenches of Europe. That impulse makes us one with the Belgians and the French, with the restless people of Italy and the vast moving hosts of Russia, with the op- pressed nationalities in the Balkan States and with struggling peoples of every race and land 216 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS eager to be free. Freedom is the bond of union. Freedom is Canada's tether. That tether holds. THE Tou, OF WAR But war always takes its toll. That toll always must be paid. And it must be paid by Canada, and paid now. It is not a thing of chance or a matter of choice. Every nation that goes to war, whether aggressor or defender, must pay that inexorable toll. It is not a question of the justness of the cause or of the patriotism and courage of the men. War is a game in which one may be right and one wrong, but the war god mockingly takes toll from both. Let us not deceive ourselves. David Starr Jor- dan is right. Professor J. Arthur Thompson, the great British biologist, is right. Charles Darwin was right. Speaking in the measured terms of biological science, they have all warned us that if war kills off an undue proportion of the physi- cally fit, of the morally courageous, of the youths of chivalric spirit, of the men of the finer strain, then, as sure as the harvest follows the seed, de- generation will come to the nation's breed. What biology warns history affirms. For the moment some nation may seem to have escaped, but in the long run the law has its way : like seed like harvest, like father like son, the nation that CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 317 sacrifices its men of fitness and courage who go to the war, and breeds its next generation from weaklings and cowards who are left behind, will tend to weakness and cowardice in its national life. There are checks and balances and correct- ing factors: but, be not deceived, biology is not mocked; whatsoever a nation soweth that shall it also reap. Let history answer. What became of "the glory that was Greece"? What befel the im- perium that was Rome? What destroyed the empire that was France? It was the law of life. Heroes and patriots bred heroes and patriots. Cowards and weaklings bred cowards and weak- lings. When the fit were slain and the unfit sur- vived, the race degenerated and the empire fell. Biology was not mocked. And what about the toll from Britain? Did ever Empire pay with wider sweep or more lav- ish hand! Mistress of the Seas? Yes, and with a mistress-ship that means freedom for all except the pirates and buccaneers. But at what a cost ! "If blood be the price of Admiralty, Lord God, we ha* paid in full." And as never before in all her thousand years Britain pays in full to-day. Three million men under arms, so a despatch tells, means more than half of all the men in the whole United Kingdom 218 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. They are the best that Britain can breed. To make up Kitchener's army the best have come from the cottage and from the castle, from the glen and from the city, from behind the counter and from the university classroom. The rake of war gath- ered in the best, not the weaklings, not the cowards, not the dissipated wastrels they are not taken. The slums alone have not been drained. London is full as ever, and Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield, and the Black Country, and Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and Dub- lin and Belfast. Their down-and-out still shuffle about the streets. The toothless degenerate with the loosened jaw is not enlisted. The coward quota and the submerged tenth neither line the trenches in Belgium nor man the munition fac- tories in Britain. All of their ilk may breed after their kind the next generation of the Brit- ish race, but the valorous, the strong-hearted, the men of the finer strain, must take the risks with the bursting shells and the blowing poison and the death ful vigil that makes them old be- fore their time. This is the pride and the glory of Empire, but for England, for Wales, for Ireland, for Scotland, it is the age-long and mer- ciless toll of war. What that toll meant in the past for Britain and how terrible its meaning in the days at hand, CANADA: ITS TETHER AND ITS TOLL 219 those of you may understand who have seen the waste and desolation of the Scottish moors and glens. I have made the rounds from west to east and from east around again to the west. I have gone through the Perthshire Highlands when the war pipes sounded, but there were none to answer where once the hills re-echoed the tramp of armed men. I traversed the length of Glenurquhart that sent eight hundred kilted clansmen to battle for the Prince at Culloden, but when the call came from Kitchener for the King there were few to answer for the Frasers of Beauly, for the Grants of Corrimony, for the Chisholms of Strathglass, or for the Macdonalds of Glengarry. I stood on Craigellachie in Strathspey, and in fancy could see Clan Grant march out as they marched to Lucknow in the day of the Mutiny, but the clan has paid its toll in full. Lochiel of to-day is worthy the noblest of his sires, but the clansmen are few to answer his "Cameron's Gathering" through the snows of Lochaber. The Mackenzies are gone from Lochbroom. The Macleans are few on the Island of Mull, and fewer still are the Macleods of Assynt or Harris. The Mackinnons of Skye have gone out to the ends of the earth, for 22,000 Skye-men wore the tartan in the armies of Brit- ain. In the glens of Argyll and the West High- lands there is silence deep as death where once 820 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS a thousand Campbells would start up in a night, at the call of their chief. No Lord of the Isles who sleeps in lona could again gather a clan worthy his tartan though he blew all night on the pibroch of Donald. The clans have paid the toll of war. To-day in Belgium they pay in even fuller measure than a hundred years ago their unreturning brave paid with Wellington at Waterloo. And to-day and to-morrow Canada, too, must pay, must pay in full. Already before the Ca- nadian regiments have done more than a fair start, the Canadian toll is heavier than all the losses the entire British army suffered in all the campaigns of the Crimean War. But whatever the toll, it must be yielded. Canada will not draw back. For freedom's sake, and for justice, and for the rights of the little peoples, all Canadians are pledged: pledged for our last dollar, for our utmost service, for our dearest son: pledged to Britain and pledged to Belgium. The tether holds. "We may drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free." CHRISTIANITY : THE WAR : THE SOCIAL PROBLEM * TWO years ago, at the Los Angeles Interna- tional Convention, I gave an address on "Jesus and the Social Problem." In that address the social problem was defined as the human prob- lem of living together, the living of one man with another, the problem of men and women and children living together and loving, working together and playing, in the same social order, and making their individual lives worthy and their community life happy and just and free. In the face of the bitterness in society, and as a cure for the wrongs and the strife at that time disturbing industrial life all over America, I urged the social teaching of Jesus, the idea of a Christian social order, in which social service is the mark of individual greatness, and social love the impulse and motive to all service. The argu- ment took a wider sweep than any local commu- nity, any State, or any nation. The social prob- lem was seen to be a world problem : the problem of a world neighbourhood of all nations: an *An Address at the World's Convention of Christian En- deavor, The Coliseum, Chicago, 1915. 221 222 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS international brotherhood of peoples in which war and the arbitrament of armies and navies and military force would be as unthinkable in Europe as they now are between the United States and Canada within the international com- monwealth of North America. That was only two years ago. Now comes this World Convention of Christian Endeavour. And what a change! We meet under the world's blackest horror, a world war. The mad clash of the nations fills the sky. The fumes of their burning hate poison the air. All Europe is one vast slaughter-house. All its great races, Saxon and Celt, Teuton and Slav, have drawn the sword, and stained it beyond all cleansing, each in another's blood. More than twenty millions of the best of their men are uniformed and armed for war; and their women are denied even the cruel comfort of mourning for their dead, because the anguish of their wounded is in their hearts, and the on-coming tramp of their youngest sons doomed to die is in their ears. And not Europe alone. Not Britain and Bel- gium, not France and Italy, not Russia and the Balkans, whose wounds from other wars and massacres are still unhealed not these alone. And not alone Germany and Austria and Turkey. Over Asia the blood-red sword has swept, and through Egypt and the heart of Africa, and CHRISTIANITY: WAR: SOCIAL PROBLEM round by the island continent of the sea. And America, too. In spite of all the promises of independence, all our boasts of international civi- lisation, all our achievements of a hundred years of Anglo-American peace, and all our pride in the peaceful leadership of the world yes, North America, too. Canada is plunged into the very thick of Europe's carnage, and the United States, neutral in form and voice, is fearful every day lest the fateful mine be sprung. And in the midst of this Armageddon of Chris- tendom we meet in this World Convention of Christian Endeavour! Christian, indeed! And Christendom! What a mockery it all seems. What wonder if the ringer points to France and to Flanders, to crucified Poland and to Galicia," to the English Channel and to the Dardanelles. Christian, forsooth ! What wonder if the accuser sneers at your Christian Endeavour and mocks your Christianity: "Great God! I'd rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn." And yet and yet! The foundations of God stand sure. The social gospel of Jesus is vindi- cated by the very war-agony of the world. Out DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS of the mouth of the brute- force paganism of war that has failed comes terrible testimony for the brotherhood socialism of Christ that has not yet been tried. It is with this conviction, and with an emphasis peace never could give, I present again the social program of Christ, and appeal for a world endeavour to make dominant in world politics the undisproved socialism of Jesus. THE SOCIALISM OP JESUS The Socialism of Jesus ! Let there be no mis- take. If the power of socialism has been dis- proved by the fact of war it was not the Socialism of Jesus. If Christianity has collapsed it was not the Christianity of Christ. If democracy has been destroyed it was not the democracy of the kingdom of God. Names and forms and false philosophies may have gone into the fire and been consumed. But the realities are unscathed : they stand purified, ennobled, invincible. The Socialism of Jesus is something more, far more, than any philosophy of wealth, any theory of the hours of work or of the rate of wages. It is something more than any conflict between the Haves and the Have-nots, any assault on the in- stitutions of society, or any drawing of a gun on the multi-millionaire. The Socialism of Jesus has to do, not so much CHRISTIANITY: WAR: SOCIAL PROBLEM 225 with the outward conditions and external forms of life, as with its inward spirit, its conscious aim, and its impelling motive. It stands against the selfish individualism that says : "Every man for himself and the deil tak' the hindermost." It rebukes the ambition of Cain for a place in the sun for himself alone, and it refuses his mur- derous self-defence, "Am I my brother's keeper?" It condemns the social parasites, both the idle rich and the vagrant poor, and it insists that no man shall eat bread by the sweat of another man's face. It makes a place in the social order for every one who serves, and gives to each according to his need, and requires from each according to his power. It asserts on the one side that the labourer is worthy of his hire, and it demands, on the other side, that servants obey their mas- ters, not with eye-service, but in the obedience of loyalty to their Divine Master. When em- ployers of labour arrange to make the wages rea- sonably adequate to meet the cost of honest living they are observing the Socialism of Jesus as illustrated in the case of the handicapped elev- enth-hour labourer in the vineyard, who, in spite of his restricted opportunity for service, was paid at the close of the day the minimum living wage. In dealing with the social problem, the prob- lem of living together and working together, the teachings of Jesus not only justify the funda- 826 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS mental principles of modern social democracy, but they suggest a radicalism far more penetrat- ing, far more revolutionary, than is urged in the political economy and worked out in the reform programs of the social philosophers and econo- mists of Germany or France, of Britain or America. Jesus goes their way, but He goes very much farther. His teaching would reconstruct the so- cial order and revolutionise the industrial world. His goal includes not only juster rewards for work and humaner conditions for the worker, but also a higher type of personal character and a nobler motive in social service; not only a full dinner-pail, but a fuller and richer life. To Him men are not dead cogs in the grinding machine of industry, but spiritual units in the social democ- racy of the brotherhood of service. To Him the great ones are not those who lord it over the help- less or the undefended, but those who, because they are strong, bear the burdens of the weak, and because they are free make themselves the very servants and saviours of those who are bound. For self-interest He substitutes social interest, and in the place of selfishness or com- pulsion or even hard duty He makes love the com- pelling motive in all service. In the reconstructed State this is the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt love." The CHRISTIANITY: WAR: SOCIAL PROBLEM distinction and badge of the Christian society and of the Christian nation is the same the world over and for all the ages : "All men shall know that ye are my disciples if ye love one another." In the days when peace it may be "armed peace" holds the nations in check the Christian com- mandment is: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And when war bids defiance to in- ternational law, and makes treaties only scraps of paper, and does violence to all the instincts of humanity, the Socialism of Jesus still stands : "I say unto you, love your enemies." IS IT UTOPIAN? This idea of social justice and social service and social love, whether in the local community or among the nations, is declared to be Utopian, a fine fancy but nothing more, a pleasant dream, but doomed to disappointment. We are told it would involve a transformation of human na- ture. And we are assured, as with the finality of scientific law, that human nature never changes. But Jesus is no unpractical day dreamer. He looked with unwinking eyes into the deep recesses of human nature. He was blind to no essential fact. He misjudged no social obstacle. He knew the human mind was perverted from truth, 228 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS and the human heart poisoned against love. He recognised the impossibility of selfishness and carnalism inheriting the kingdom of God. His biological imperative is absolute: "Ye must be born again. Except a man be born anew he can- not see the kingdom of God." No maxim of science is more unflinching, more uncompromis- ing, than is that "must" of the new birth. But to the shallow thinker, to the hopeless fa- talist, the attested verdict of spiritual biology, at- tested not by the dogmatic ipse dixit of some theorist, but proved a million times over in the white heat and white light of the great laboratory of life the demonstrated verdict of life's great experiment is this: "If any man is in Christ he is a new creation ; old things are passed away, and all things are become new." A new creation ! A new man! New ideals! New loves! New am- bitions! New motives! Human nature does change. It changes in its innermost impulses and instincts, and hopes, and fears, and loves, and hates. Men are born again. All history attests that races do rise, that civilisations are changed, and, when this black night of anguish is lifted, out of the birth-pangs of the world a nation shall be born in a day. Every pessimist sneers "Utopia !" Every un- believer cries "Idealist!" But such mocking does not come from the truly great men, the men great CHRISTIANITY: WAR: SOCIAL PROBLEM 229 in the world's affairs. Again and again, during the past awful twelvemonth, the Prime Minister of Britain and for such a time as this Britain never had a greater than Premier Asquith laid down three requisites for peace in Europe. First is the renunciation of militarism and brute force as a factor in the relations of European nations ; the second is the integrity and freedom of the little nationalities and the weaker States, Bel- gium, and Holland, and Denmark, and the Scan- dinavian countries, and Greece, and the Balkan States ; the third is the abandonment of all threat- ening alliances and all menacing Balance of Power, and in their place the establishment of a "real European partnership," based on the equal rights of all and secured and maintained by the common will. In Canada and in the United States such con- ditions of peace, such a proposal for a real Euro- pean partnership based on the equal rights of all the peoples and secured by the common will of all the nations such a peace is derided as Utopian by the jingoes and the militarists in America to- day. But what says Premier Asquith, himself the foremost British statesman of this genera- tion ? Here are his very words : "A year ago that proposal would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably 230 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS one that may not or will not be realised to- day or to-morrow; but if and when this war is decided in favour of the allies it will at once come within the range and before long within the grasp of European statesman- ship." "Utopia!" sneers your unbelieving pessimist. "European statesmanship!" answers Mr. As- quith. THE AI/TERNATIVES The world after the war shall have to face again its age-long social problem : the problem of living together and working together the war- ring classes in a common industrial order, the warring nations in a common world. And what are the alternatives? If it is not to be what Mr. Asquith calls a "real partnership," what shall it be? Shall the spirit be the Christ spirit of social love and cooperation, or the Devil spirit of hate and cut-throat competition? One thing is cer- tain : Not again in this generation, not again in this century, shall the world deceive itself with the self-contradiction called "armed peace." That fallacy at least has had its day. Armed peace has proved itself inevitable war. But if not Christ, then whom? If not Chris- tianity, then what? The only alternatives are Caesar and Caesarism. Caesarism the world has CHRISTIANITY: WAR: SOCIAL PROBLEM tried again and again. In ancient Rome, and the Empire fell. In Napoleonic France, and the Empire fell. Is it a success in Europe to-day? Let the world answer. And would it save the world were Corsica to triumph over Galilee ? Would peace return after the war, and would the world be blessed, were Csesarism to wield the sceptre of the new Russia, or were Japan to lead the awakening Orient in the worship of "Will-to-Power" and not of "Will- to-Serve"? Or were Britain and France and Italy to turn again to the Divine Right despotism from which they escaped? Or were America to renounce its Christianised internationalism, and to exchange its four thousand miles of North American disarmament for the fortified and blood-soaked boundaries of Europe? These are the world's alternatives. Choose you this day whom you will serve. Choose for yourselves; choose for your workshops and offices and places of business; choose for your nations and for the world your convention rep- resents. If Baal be God, serve him; the only al- ternative is Jehovah. If Caesar be God, serve him; the only alternative is Christ. But if Chris- tian brotherhood is worth while, work for it; its only alternative is strife and social war. If what the war lord calls "Utopia" is good, fight for it; its only alternative is Hell. NORTH AMERICA'S INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENT * NORTH AMERICA, like ancient Gaul, is di- vided into three parts. The centre is held by the greatest republic on the map of all the world, covering, with Alaska included, 3,560,922 square miles and numbering a hundred millions of people: the United States of America. To the south lies a country of 767,- 005 square miles, claiming fifteen millions of people, ruled over at one time by an Emperor, at another time by a President, but always by a dictator, and never long without a rebellion, rev- olution or war : the so-called Republic of Mexico. On the north stands the youngest of the three, stretching from the Great Lakes to the North Pole, and from Labrador to Vancouver Island, comprising 3,729,665 square miles and holding eight millions of people: the Dominion of Can- ada. These three, each with its own flag, its own political heritage and its own national ideal, con- stitute the unique trinity of North America. The * An Address at the World Congress on Internationalism, San Francisco, 1915. 232 NORTH AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT 883 national history of the oldest is less than a cen- tury and a half, and of the youngest less than a half century. As compared with European his- tory North America is but of yesterday; and yet North America presents an international experi- ment without parallel elsewhere in all the world : an international achievement that gives war- stricken Europe of to-day a chance and a hope for a better to-morrow. In this great Exposition, that has gathered so much of the wonder and wealth of the world, there is no object of greater historical interest or of profounder international veneration than that focal point of attraction in the Pennsylvania Building, where the flowers are always fresh and the crowds are always large the Liberty Bell. On its journey across the continent from In- dependence Hall in Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell of this American Republic was greeted, at every point, with the high and reverent acclaim of all the people. It was as when in the days of Israel's renaissance the Ark of the Covenant was brought up, with sacrificial hand and grate- ful praise, from the house of Obed-edom to the sanctuary and meeting place of the tribes. So 234 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS now at this place of convocation for all the world, on the shore of the western sea, fronting the Golden Gate, the Liberty Bell is again set up. Around it press, day after day, unnumbered citi- zens not of this nation alone but of all nations. They stand with uncovered heads as in the pres- ence of this nation's history. They read its date, 1776, and hear again the Declaration of Inde- pendence. The Liberty Bell is in very truth the Ark of the Covenant: the symbol and the seal of Amer- ica's covenant with the God of Nations: the pledge, America's graven pledge to all the world, that this Republic, from sea to sea, for all time, and over all the world, shall stand for liberty, not for itself alone, but for the liberty of every people, the defender of the innocent weak against the arrogant strong, the advocate and guardian of Liberty and Justice and Honour for all humanity. So long as the people of this Republic keep inviolate the pledge of Liberty, so long will the Liberty Bell represent without re- buke the Ark of the Covenant for this American nation. And not for Americans alone. The Liberty Bell means too much, its history runs too far back, its message rings too wide, for its mean- ing to be closed in by any national boundaries or under any national flag. I stand here, in this NORTH AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT 235 "Court of the Universe," under the Stars and Stripes, a citizen of Canada. The flag of my allegiance is of an Empire that belts the world. And, in the name of all who speak the language Shakespeare spoke, I claim a share in the ven- eration paid the Liberty Bell. The metal of that bell was brought from far beyond the sea. Into it was burned the molten history of London for more than a thousand years. The note of its liberty was struck more than fifteen centuries ago by the primitive An- glo-Saxons in the dark forests of northern Ger- many and around the mouth of the Elbe. The voice of the Liberty Bell is the strong voice of Anglo-American democracy. Through all the centuries of the English speech that voice of liberty and democracy has sounded over all the hard cries of despotism and mastership. It was heard at Runnymede. It ordered the crown from the head of more than one King. It spoke through Hampden and Pym long before it touched the lips of Washington and Jefferson. In America, it spoke the free- dom of three million slaves in Lincoln's day, and in Britain it took democracy's most splendid risk when in our day it annulled the veto power of the House of Lords. As in the day when the Liberty Bell first rang out the Declaration of Independence, so to-day 236 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS the voice of Anglo-American democracy, through the two English-speaking nations of North America, declares again and to all the world, that any people anywhere who desire to be free and are fit to be free shall be given free- dom's unfettered chance. MEXICO'S BEW, AND DECLARATION But Mexico also has her Liberty Bell and her Declaration of Independence. Five years ago, from the balcony of the Na- tional Palace in Mexico City, I looked out over half a million madly patriotic Mexicans crowd- ing the Zocalo from the Treasury to the Cathe- dral, overflowing into all the avenues, and filling all the sky with their jubilating vivas. It was the night of the i6th of September, the one hun- dredth anniversary of the Declaration of Mex- ican Independence. On the balcony, surveying the multitudes who cried their vivas in his hon- our that night, but would soon cry their anathe- mas, stood the aged President whose dictator throne was tottering to a fall. As the historic hour of eleven struck, Diaz rang the very same bell that a hundred years before, at that very moment, the priest Hidalgo rang from the church tower at Dolores, and repeated Hidalgo's his- toric grito: NORTH AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT 237 Viva la Independencia ! Viva Mexico ! That was Mexico's Liberty Bell. That was Mexico's Declaration of Independence. If bells and declarations and flags and vivas mean free- dom, then Mexico is free. If independence means a fair chance for a country to make or to mar itself, then Mexico is independent. No other flag has threatened the "Red, White and Green" of Mexico. Neither of the other na- tions of North America has interfered. And yet from that night when Diaz rang the Liberty Bell five years ago until this very hour there has been no peace anywhere in all the land, property has not been secure in any of its Provinces, life has not been safe in any of its cities. Mexico has a name to be free but is bound. It makes pretence at independence, but is en- slaved. It calls itself a Republic, but is a Chaos. It holds the place of a nation but it has no na- tional ideal, no national consciousness, no na- tional unity, no national life. By geography it belongs to North America and by chronology to the twentieth century, but its life is European and its political era is still the Middle Ages. Its Liberty Bell rings no liberty and its independ- ence is still to be won. Mexico, as yet, has no part or lot in North America's experiment. 238 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS NO BEU<: NO DECLARATION Canada came third in North America's march to nationalism and self-government. But Can- ada has no Liberty Bell and no Declaration of Independence. This is indeed one of the marvels of the nine- teenth century, one of the unique and unprece- dented achievements in North America's his- tory : a country coming up from colonial depend- ence to national self-government, not by revolu- tion, but by evolution ; not by war and estrange- ment, but by development and co-operation: a nation growing up out of a colony, as an oak grows out of an acorn: a nation that had no occasion for a Liberty Bell, and that, developing into self-government, as a youth developes into mature manhood, had no need to make formal declaration of its independence. That is Can- ada's contribution to the higher politics of North America. The American colonies in the eighteenth cen- tury declared to the world the right of a free people to govern themselves; and this free American Republic is the fulfilment of that dec- laration. In the nineteenth century the remain- ing colonies and territories of North America achieved self-government without revolution and without sacrificing the historic background of NORTH AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT 239 the nation; and the free, self-governing Domin- ion of Canada is the evidence of that achieve- ment. Canada's national achievement led the way to national freedom and self-government for Aus- tralia and for New Zealand and for South Africa; and out of that new nationalism there grew the establishment of the British Empire on a new basis, the basis not of imperialism, but of democracy : not an empire with its centralized imperium, but a commonwealth with its free States: free States, glorying not alone in their independence, but in their interdependence: self- governing nations, boasting not their nationalism alone, but their internationalism. And out of it all there has emerged a world commonwealth, comprising more than one-quarter of the land area of all the world, over which floats one flag. On that one flag each free nation inscribes its own emblem. Each of those national emblems means national sovereignty. The combined sov- ereignty of all those national emblems means good-will and peace among more than four hun- dred millions of the human race, building their democracies on all the continents, floating their commerce on all the seas, and out of every color and class and race and creed vitalising one brotherhood of nations wherever the British en- sign floats. That is the international achieve- 240 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS ment on a world scale which Canada represents on this North American continent. And the United States has on its hands a colonial experiment, which, by the logic of events, may evolve an illustration in internation- alism under the Stars and Stripes not unlike that which Canada represents under the Union Jack. Fortune, whether the good fortune of peace or the bad fortune of war, has given the United States responsibility in the administration and government of the Philippines. I make no com- ments. I pass no judgment. But if and when the United States has led the Filipinos along the path of liberty and democracy to the goal of re- sponsible self-government, as the people of Can- ada, of Australia, of New Zealand and of South Africa have been led, I as a Canadian shall not regret, rather shall I greatly rejoice, if over a free nation of Filipinos there waves the Stars and Stripes, as over the free overseas Dominions of Britain there waves the Union Jack. AN INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENT But the greatest thing North America has done, the thing which puts into visible and con- crete form the spirit and purpose of this Inter- national Congress, is the joint achievement of these two nations, the United States and Can- NORTH AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT ada. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Pacific across to the Arctic, there stretches an international boundary line of 4,000 miles, where territory touches territory, where sover- eignty meets sovereignty, where nation salutes nation, but for a hundred years the international waters of those Great Lakes have been unfretted by any ship of war, those rolling prairies have been unmarked by any hostile fort, those majes- tic mountains have never echoed to the roar of any alien gun. Four thousand miles ! For one hundred years ! Tell me, you men from other continents, where in all the world is there a match for this that North America has done ? Where is there a civ- ilisation so undishonoured? Where is there a boundary so free? Where is there a history so worthy of record? Let Europe answer. Europe ! from whom we inherited our civilisa- tion, whose two thousand years is our back- ground, whose achievements were our inspira- tion. Europe! whose Christianity is in our creeds, whose culture is in our colleges, whose heart's blood is in our veins ! Europe ! bristling with guns from the Hebrides to the Dardanelles, bleeding at every boundary with death-wounds none can stanch O Europe! how often would America have come to you with the gospel of international good-will, teaching you the secret DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS of Anglo-American peace, proving to you the power of international disarmament, and helping to gather your shattered nationalities into a United States of Europe! How often! But ye would not. Now, no matter who among you is to blame, we, too, must suffer in your agony. The national peace of this American Republic is threatened by your madness. The best red blood of the Canadian Dominion is being soaked into your battlefields because of the blood-guilti- ness of your sin. AFTER THE WORLD-STORM But when this world-storm of Europe is past, when this red rain has enriched the roots of Europe's next verdure, the United States and Canada, their common democracy made stronger by their common experiences, shall come again into the council chamber of the nations, and, with the released democracies of the warring peoples of Europe, shall speak the doom of the autocrats and the despots and the war lords and all that damning system of militarism that has cursed Europe for two thousand years. Before this world-war is over these two free democracies of North America shall have paid the price of war ; it may be they shall have paid it in full, and it may be the United States as NORTH AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT 243 well as Canada shall have paid it in blood. And then, not the United States and Canada alone, but all the democratic nations the world over, shall have something to say to the war lords. And they will insist that the world is too small for war lords or for war; that in the world neighbourhood of civilised nations there shall be no longer any room for the wild beasts of Eu- rope's war jungle, and that the broken-down war-nationalisms of Europe shall give place to North America's international experiment. And this is North America's prophetic voca- tion; this is the high calling wherewith North America is called: not any proud boasting that America is better than Europe, that "I am holier than thou," that our hand-breadth of political history has nothing to learn from Europe's strug- gle through the ages. Not that. North America at best is only Europe's sec- ond chance. The seeds of our harvests of lib- erty and peace were carried to our shores from the historic fields of Britain, from France, too, and the Netherlands, from the sunny slopes of Italy and the Alpine glens, from the shadows of Bohemia and the valley of the Rhine. We are the heirs of all the ages. The faggots of Eu- rope's martyrdoms kindled the fires of liberty for us. It is not for us to boast. Rather must we heed the prophet call, and share with Europe, 244 DEMOCRACY AND THE NATIONS man with man and nation with nation, the in- finite tragedy of this time. North America's international experiment had not been possible but for the age-long heroisms of Europe that seemed to fail. And our great experiment in civilised internationalism would even yet fail of its full achievement were there in Europe to-day no heroes ready to suffer, no million martyrs ready to die, that Law shall reign among all the nations, that Justice shall come to all the world, and that any people any- where who desire to be free and are fit to be free shall be given Freedom's unfettered chance. li