AMERICAN neutrality, American intervention --- on what are opinions more divided? Prophets of the past, expert revealers of foregone events, lovers of fine-drawn conclusions, have all done their utmost to becloud the truth. Those whose imagination pictured a pro-Ally America were put to it to explain thirty-one months of neutrality; the others, who saw the United States as pro-German, were nonplussed by America's entry into the war. Some declared that Wilson had held back the people; some that the people had not followed Wilson. Bitter rivalries of men, of parties, of interests were conjured up in explanation. May I be pardoned for thinking that what happened was much less complex? From 1914 to 1918, the United States remained faithful to its past. It was first anti-war, then pro-war. But, except for a few individuals, it was anti-war or pro-war almost unanimously. The game was played according to rule.

The first reaction which France felt was one of friendship. Early in August, 1914, a shipment was unloaded on the wharf at Havre, addressed: 'French Army, Havre, France'; --- it contained surgical dressings. At the same time the Americans in Paris were throwing in their lot with ours. They placed their hospital in Neuilly at the disposal of the French Government, and organized two others, one in the Lycée Pasteur, the other at Meaux. Around Ambassador Herrick, who refused to associate himself with the flight to Bordeaux and awaited the enemy at his post, the American colony rallied. Their cars and houses were gladly given to transport and nurse the wounded.(4) After the Marne, this volunteer transport service carried wounded to French and British hospitals at Paris-Plage, Hesdin, Abbeville, Saint-Fol, Beauvais, and Dunkirk. How could we look upon these friends of early days as neutrals?

Six weeks passed and the flood-tide of American aid began to submerge our ports. It came in such quantities that the wharves were too small and freight cars too few. To receive and distribute it, the American Clearing House was established in the late autumn of 1914. In the course of four years it received, cleared, and distributed thirty million dollars of American aid, in cash and kind, to French war bodies, official and unofficial. On the other side of the ocean the War Relief Clearing House, established by Mr. Myron T. Herrick and Mr. C. A. Coffin, acted as the American Corresponding Bureau.(5) It grouped hundreds of war relief bodies, most of them for France, others for the Allies. The Red Cross, which in 1917 and after did wonders, was still bound down by official neutrality. During the thirty-one months that neutrality lasted, the whole burden of relief was borne by unofficial bodies which made appeal after appeal, and drive after drive, to keep up the endless stream of every conceivable kind of succor.(6)

All of these various war relief bodies, working in such various ways for the same cause, were supported by hundreds of thousands of voluntary contributors, whose good will France was able to capitalize. These men and women who devoted themselves to the work had constantly before their eyes the picture of our great trial. They had clearly defined aims. They were not trying to help the Allies in the abstract, but their efforts were directed towards helping given nations for specific purposes. Between them there grew up a rivalry of generosity. Their centres were scattered all over the United States, and although Frenchmen did not even know of their existence, far less their names, each radiated pro-Ally enthusiasm. Every day in every city in America this light grew brighter. In June, 1916, the Allied Bazaar at the Grand Central Palace in New York sold nearly 600,000 tickets on its opening day, and when at its close Muratore sang the 'Marseillaise,' those present, standing amid trophies of war brought from the fields of battle, lifted up their hearts in fervent exaltation.

Millions of Americans were silent; but there were others who spoke. Some reported facts without comment; their stories cleared the air. Others took sides and lent their names to our cause: Richard Harding Davis, Frederick Palmer, Owen Johnson, Alexander Powell, Wythe Williams, Arthur Ruhl, Will Irvin, Walter Hale, Robert McCormick, Irvin Cobb, Joseph Patterson, Robert Herrick, Roland Usher, H. A. Gibbons, created a war literature. Mrs. Wharton, Owen Wister, J. J. Chapman, James Beck, Morton Fullerton, Morton Prince, Wayne MacVeagh, Mark Baldwin, but above all Charles W. Eliot and Walter H. Page, came out unreservedly against Germany. 'If Lincoln lived,' asked Prince, 'would he be silent?' Another wrote, 'When Americans were only ten million, they protested in favor of Greece; now that they are a hundred million, they have nothing to say for Belgium.' President Eliot, in his letters to the 'Times' --- relentless demonstrations of German premeditation --- concluded: 'The Allies must win, and they will.' When his secretary enlisted in the British army, Ambassador Page said: 'If I were your age, I would do the same thing.'

The enlistment depots of our Foreign Legion were besieged by Americans. Their motives? In some cases, the love of adventure; in others, the passion of sacrifice; in all, a curious impulse of head and heart that prompted them to fight in the cause of justice. And it was not life's disinherited, thrown by misfortune into danger. Youths like William Thaw of Pittsburgh, Stewart Castairs of Philadelphia, Kenneth Weeks, Victor Chapman, the two Princes of Boston, E. Mandell Stone, Kiffen Rockwell, left behind them a life of ease to face Alan Seeger's 'rendezvous with death.' Others gave up their life-work and exchanged the scalpel, the pen, or the compass for a rifle. Doctors, like Wheeler of Buffalo, went from the ambulances to the infantry; as did writers, like Seeger and Sweeney; engineers like F. W. Zinn. With them in the ranks were American students from our schools --- painters, musicians, architects rallying to defend 'the sacred hill' which had illumined their youth.

Among them, not a few already discerned what the future held in store for their country. Weeks wrote to his people at home: 'I am fighting for you.' Alan Seeger, in the 'New Republic,' opened the great debate on the duty of America. His letters, at first passed from hand to hand, then printed in local papers, finally published in the great press, aroused public opinion. German-Americans protested against such 'violations of neutrality.' But others were proud of the volunteers who upheld American honour. The deeds of those soldiers of fortune crystallized pro-Ally feeling. Their families and their friends became centres of attraction. Their death set the seal to unwavering loyalties. 'I was hungry,' wrote the father of Victor Chapman, after the loss of his son, 'to see America, for the good of its soul, take part in this awful struggle between light and darkness.' The apparition of the Lafayette Squadron in the skies of France, its citation in the official communiqué of August 12, 1916, raised towards the future eyes that had been riveted to the ground. The hot-heads made cool heads think.

Volunteers, going back to the States on leave, were eagerly listened to, but not always understood. When, despite the protests of the pro-German press, they set forth anew, their return to the front was cheered. Every one felt that theirs was the moral greatness of pioneers. The words of Alan Seeger were on the lips of all. 'They sought neither reward nor glory, nor did they wish to be distinguished from their comrades in blue whose days it was their pride to share until death.' The individual actions of these volunteers prepared the way for collective action. Unknowing, unwilling to know, whether their country would follow them, they threw an imponderable force into the scales of destiny.

Magnificent as was their personal sacrifice and great as the interest it created, what American volunteers did for France involved only individuals. To the American Field Service belongs the honour of having incorporated into the ranks of the French army an American unit commanded by Americans, composed exclusively of American citizens, equipped and paid for by American gold.(7) This again had its inception with a few young men, overtaken in France by the war, who placed themselves and their cars at the service of the wounded. But before long A. Piatt Andrew welded the system into an organic whole. Throughout the United States a wide campaign was launched to create, recruit, and maintain motor ambulances on the French front, as specific units of the French army. Meetings were organized everywhere, Pro-German opposition roared its disapproval. At Butte, Montana, the speakers were hissed. Elsewhere it was necessary to change the place or the time of meetings. The campaign went on. Lawyers cried their scruples; American units, even hospital units, in the French army, were a violation of neutrality. The campaign continued.

In September, 1915, $8000 had been collected, $16,000 in April, 1916, $96,000 in January, 1917. In America, success was assured. But in France? France was an invaded country, full of righteous suspicion. 'Be silent ---be cautious.' The military command imposed drastic regulations in the zone of the army. To admit into this zone, closed even to French citizens, not only alongside of the French army, but as part of it, the citizens of a neutral country, of a country divided into two camps where nearly a fifth of the inhabitants were of enemy extraction, where the Government proclaimed its desire not to choose between the belligerents, what a hazard! Even this danger overcome, wiseacres thought it pure folly to risk, with these American units subjected to French discipline, the conflict of their military duties and their national allegiance, a conflict which might lead to appeals from military authority to a foreign embassy. The wiseacres were wrong, and on April 15, 1915, Andrew signed at French General Headquarters a contract of enlistment under which the ambulance personnel, stretcher-bearers and drivers, the outward and visible sign of American support, received a fixed status in the French army in the war zone and became an integral part of that army!

In 1915, there were four sections of twenty cars each. In 1917, there were thirty-four sections with a personnel of two thousand men. As distinct from the volunteers of the Foreign Legion, heroes lost in the mass, these American units attached to French divisions retained their national individuality. They were everywhere on the field of battle, in the valleys of Verdun, on the crest of the Vosges, at the depths of the ravines at Saloniki. In each of these sectors our poilus became accustomed to the men in khaki, the forerunners of Pershing's army. They accustomed French minds to the idea of distant reënforcements which some day would arrive and add themselves to the splendid hospital units, cited for valour nineteen times in two years, while two hundred and fifty of their members won decorations.

Truly a personnel of surpassing merit! 'The very flower of American youth,' as John Masefield, the English poet, called them. Graduates of universities and colleges, heirs of the most famous names in American politics, and letters, and business; united in the determination to assert themselves as Americans in the service of the great cause; determined not to remain idle spectators of the struggle; ambassadors to the front of every State in the Union --- their fervour gradually enthused America through and through.

This enthusiasm was so real that the movement kept on growing till it reached its final development. After a trip to the French front, members of one of the most powerful relief bodies, the American Fund for French Wounded, which in 1916 had 150,000 subscribers, and since 1914 had distributed millions of surgical dressings and hospital clothing, asked: 'We work for the army and our work is good, but is it enough? There is the civil population in the war zone, millions of women, of children, of cripples, and of old people, some of whom have found refuge elsewhere in France, others living under the domination of the enemy, who all, when the war is over, will find their homes in ruins. None will need assistance more than they. For this assistance to be efficient and a useful contribution to that most difficult of reconstructions, social reconstruction, we must without further delay and by our actual presence make a new American effort for the devastated regions, an effort of peace volunteers.’

The idea seemed extravagant. And it was. The war was not over, not anywhere near over. What more dangerous than an anticipation of victory? What more improbable than any long-continued coöperation on French soil between official agencies and a foreign organization? What more dangerous, in the midst of war, than to disperse the forces of a work, already immense, by complicating its task with an additional mission? The French Government opposed the idea. Discussions ensued. But in November, 1916, it was accepted in principle. By January, 1917, a preliminary survey had been made. In the spring it was decided to send out a first unit to break with the routine of impersonally distributed aid, to follow up the armies and by its presence to encourage the civilians delivered from the enemy. It was 'to follow the line of trenches, which, moving towards the French frontier, would gradually liberate invaded territory.’(8)

Nothing needed to alleviate the woes of France escaped our American well-wishers. Sentiments that had stirred the great forefathers at Yorktown revived with all the strength of youth. Aid for the soldiers and aid for the civilians: aid not only for individuals but also for communities; aid against social ills as well as against physical ills. The plans of friendship embraced them all. Volunteers were fighting in our trenches. The Lafayette Squadron was flying overhead. American ambulances were being driven over shelled roads. Gifts were pouring into our hospitals. The reconstruction unit was on its way to France. In our heart of hearts we often asked ourselves whether, had the rôles been reversed, had France been neutral and the United States invaded, we should have done as much for them as they were doing for us. Appreciation of their generosity raised our hopes.

And yet politics continued uninfluenced by sentiment. Thousands of American hearts were flocking to our standard. But the United States remained neutral.

AMERICA remained neutral ---neutral by tradition and neutral by instinct. Tradition harked back for a century and a half. Instinct was prompted by geography, by history, by religion, by interest.

From its very birth the United States was predestined to isolation and neutrality. Morally predestined, because emigration is the result of a desire for isolation, and an evidence that the immigrant takes pride in that desire. Geographically predestined, because, after having been the battlefield of the mother countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Colonies were determined that the first advantage of their independence should be to relieve them of this rôle. Politically predestined, because in the difficult days of its youth, when the constitutional issue was being fought out between the English party of Hamilton and the French party of Jefferson, any entanglement in European alliance would have split the new-born nation. Economically predestined, because for a century and a half international isolation had spelled prosperity.

From its very birth the United States displayed an almost cynical love of solitude. In 1783, thirsting for liberty, it negotiated with England behind Vergennes's back, despite the great services France had rendered. In 1788, John Jay notified Montmorin that the alliance was at an end, 'its objects,' he said, 'having been attained.' In 1793, George Washington pro claimed the neutrality of the United States. Then, as in 1914, France had no lack of friends in America. But non-intervention triumphed none the less. Even in those days the horror of war was a dominant feeling. Madison admitted it, in 1812, when he broke with England; and Lincoln, when he undertook to save the Union. Meanwhile, the expedition which took coveted Texas from Mexico met with inflammatory opposition from Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. The only exception that I know to this horror of war was the conflict with Spain; and even this was regretted by many. To keep out of war at all costs was the essential law, the constant fact. Roosevelt once said, 'A speech in favour of a bigger navy nearly always costs the speaker his seat.'

This rooted horror never lacked protagonists anxious to make it an article of faith. David Trumbull in 1782 said: 'The spirit of the age is against the European system.' Fear of war was added to horror of war; to keep out of war, it was necessary to avoid contact with Europe, where war was chronic and contagious. George Washington, as was his wont, indulged in generalities: 'A nation which gives way to feelings of love or hatred for another nation becomes the slave of its love or hatred.' John Adams was more to the point: 'America has been long enough involved in the wars of Europe. She has been a football between contending nations from the beginning, and it is easy to foresee that France and Great Britain will both endeavour to involve us in their future wars.' Drawing the same conclusions, Thomas Jefferson summed it up, and in so doing deprived his successors of all claim to originality. 'No country, perhaps,' said Jefferson, 'was ever so thoroughly against war as ours .... We shall be more useful as neutrals than as parties'; and on another occasion, 'Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations --- entangling alliances with none.'

Unanimous from the very first on the righteousness of isolation, Americans were equally unanimous a hundred years later. Listen to Grant, the Republican: 'The time is not far off when in the natural course of events all political ties between Europe and the continent will have ceased to exist.' And to Richard Olney, the Democrat --- whose words William Jennings Bryan repeated in 1915: 'Distance, and three thousand miles of ocean, make all permanent political union between a European and an American state, as impractical as it is unnatural.' Indeed, since 1814, the United States had carefully avoided placing its signature to political treaties, and when concluding any legal or commercial convention, was always careful to insert the formula which appears in the Hague Convention of 1900: 'Nothing contained in this Convention shall be interpreted in a manner to oblige the United States to depart from its traditional policy.' Horror of war, the cause. Horror of entangling alliances, the effect. Neutrality, the result.

This international aloofness asserted itself steadfastly throughout the nineteenth century. Neither the Crimean War, nor the Italian War, nor the Schleswig-Holstein War, nor the Prusso-Austrian War, nor the Franco-Prussian War, nor the Boer War ruffled its majesty. Proximity to California lent greater interest to the Russo-Japanese War. But Roosevelt did no more than let down the curtain. More recent conflicts in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean left the American people as indifferent as had previous wars. What could be more natural? Think of the life the United States has lived for a hundred years: a life as self-sufficient as self-centred. What mattered the quarrels of other nations to a nation which had built its destiny on a virgin soil? Its business was to continue its wonderful development; to reclaim forest lands; to settle open spaces; its battles were for the winning of the West, which led to the Civil War; for the building of railroads, of industry, of trusts. A single exception, never again attempted, Theodore Roosevelt's intervention in the Algeciras Conference.(9) The United States, like the old men in Faust, looked on at the passing show. The wars of others were none of its concern.

The wars of others were of no concern to the United States, but they made it rich. By keeping out of war, America prospered, and the European conflicts from which she held aloof brought in royal dividends. Thus in the days of the Boulogne camp she bought Louisiana from Bonaparte; Louisiana which was to be the cradle of her greatness. A little later the Continental blockade created the foreign trade of the United States: without it American exports would not have risen from $20,000,000 to $60,000,000 nor its cotton trade have grown from 200,000 pounds to 50,000,000; nor the pay of its sailors have risen from $8 to $24. During the whole nineteenth century, at each Old-World war, the New World scored a point. The Schleswig-Holstein War freed Mexico from the dreams of Napoleon III. The Boer War relieved Venezuela of British attentions. The Moroccan conflict lessened German-American tension. The war with Russia turned Japan away from thoughts of California. These are facts that count, that are of more weight than any hero-worship of Washington or regard for Monroe. As Roosevelt admitted, there is nothing imperative about such regard; the question is merely political. The aim of America: to guarantee to each citizen his life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. And that liberty has remained untouched.

New reasons for safeguarding it were added to the old. Craving for internal peace was added to craving for external peace. Since the Civil War, millions and millions of immigrants had come to swell the American melting-pot. No matter how proud of their new allegiance, they could not but feel, rising unconsciously within them, the moral heritage of their races. The problem which George Washington had solved by neutrality, when he saw an English party and a French party at odds, was a thousand times more pressing when every race in Europe was represented in the inner life of the United States. In every city, in every village, were sons of Ireland, of Germany, of Italy, of Norway, of Sweden, of Denmark, of Russia, of Poland, of the Levant, and of Asia; to have taken part in the quarrels of the countries of their birth would have been to throw them at each other's throats. Who could deny that the strength of the Union depended upon the casting-off of all ties with Europe? 'The foreign vote,' said a Senator, 'makes it impossible for us to have anything to do with Europe.' After neutrality by economic interest, neutrality by political necessity. The second was as compelling as the first.

To crystallize this conviction it needed only the seal of idealism, that seal which Anglo-Saxons love to set upon what they leave undone as upon what they do. Religious faith supplied it: for does not the Gospel teach, 'Thou shalt not kill'? Their social philosophy, the common effort they had made towards higher standards, the proud optimism of the uprooted, everything that went to make up the American spirit, confirmed the teachings of faith. War hampered human progress! War arrested individual growth! War strengthened despotisms and favoured centralization! War was the lot of old and corrupt nations, with which Americans were proud of having parted. Neither war nor ties with Europe whence wars came: such was the fundamental creed of 120,000,000 human beings. Croly defined it exactly in 1912: 'The notion of American intervention in a European conflict, carrying with it either the chance or the necessity of war, would at present be received with pious horror by the great majority of Americans. Non-interference in European affairs is conceived, not as a policy dependent upon certain conditions, but as absolute law derived from the Sacred Writings.' The law of neutrality was the fundamental axiom of Americanism.

Turn to the leaders, turn to the people; nowhere from 1914 to 1917 will you find any departure from that tradition. Woodrow Wilson, an American who kept his ear to the ground and was quick to act on what he heard. Nothing could be more American, more thoroughly American, than his neutral preachments. Faced by the risk of war, faced by the responsibility of drawing in his country, he felt the historic hesitation of Washington, of Jefferson, of Madison, of Lincoln. It is a mistake to believe that Wilson was pro-German. Of English extraction, he liked neither Germany, nor its philosophy, nor its morals. His works show that he was a great American, as scornful as Theodore Roosevelt of political mediocrity. From the very first he believed that a German victory would condemn the United States to the militarism it hates. In December, 1915, he said to Brand Whitlock: 'I am heart and soul for the Allies. No decent man, knowing the situation and Germany, could be anything else.' But George Washington also was at heart with the French Revolution and against the coalition of kings, and yet he refused to intervene. Like Washington, Wilson sacrificed his private preferences to his public duty. Lead a peaceful people into war, never --- any more than expose to its results national unity as yet unstable.

All through the story of America, I have shown how fragile is the instinct of nationality. From 1914 to 1917, the minds of public men were constantly obsessed by this problem. After having professed his moral allegiance to the cause of the Allies, Woodrow Wilson adds:

But this is only my own personal opinion and there are many others in this country who do not hold that opinion. In the Middle West and in the West frequently there is no opinion at all. I am not justified in forcing my opinion upon the people of the United States, bringing them into a war which they do not understand.

Not justified. Perhaps also not the strength. For the American people is composite and divided. What would Americans of German birth do, and the Irishborn, the Hungarians, Bulgarians, Turks, etc., if America went in on the side of the Allies?

Hence for thirty-one months the sameness of all official pronouncements. Not to act, not to choose, not to conclude, was a duty towards America and towards mankind. It was the same old policy of Jefferson: 'Effendi,' said the caidji of the Bosphorus, 'if we are to avoid being swamped, we must not move, we must not talk, we must not think.' Such a conception of neutrality was something more than a mere expression of negative policy; it was in the nature of a constructive and reasoned course of action.

No nation [said Wilson] is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation. The basis of neutrality is not indifference; it is not self-interest. The basis of neutrality is sympathy for mankind .... Neutrality is something so much greater to do than fight.(10)

Against this deep-rooted conviction, facts were of no avail. Germany sunk the Lusitania. There were men 'too proud to fight.' Germany asserted her will to brutal imperialism: America was not concerned 'with the obscure causes of this war.' In September, 1916, as in August, 1914, was asserted the higher moral virtue of the spirit of neutrality.

We have been neutral, not only because it was the fixed and traditional policy of the United States to stand aloof from the politics of Europe; but also to serve mankind.(11)

Again in the following December, the last note of the President laid haughty stress upon America's indifference to the war aims of the belligerents; which found a fitting climax in the President's address to the Congress of January 22, 1917, on 'Peace without Victory':

It must be a peace without victory .... Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.(12)

Deeds were made to conform to this doctrine; a deaf ear was turned to all warnings; military preparedness rejected for months because it might lead to some suspicion of hidden purpose; notes in which the blame was nicely apportioned, calling Germany to account for her submarine blockade; calling the Allies to account for their surface blockade. The private man, as revealed by his talks and in his letters, was in unison with the public man. September, 1914: 'We have nothing to do with war. With its causes and objects we are not concerned'; August, 1915: 'The people rely on me to keep them out of war. Our entry into the war would be a calamity for the whole world. For we should be deprived of all unselfish interest in the final settlement'; January, 1917, less than a month before the breaking-off of diplomatic relations: 'There will be no war .... We are the only one of the great white nations that is free from war today and it would be a crime against civilization for us to go in.' Finally, at the very last minute, on the verge of decision, after four sleepless nights, this cry of anguish from his Presbyterian conscience: 'What else can I do? Is there anything else I can do?'

Were the reactions of this man in any way exceptional? No! When, in 1914, Wilson urged 'perfect balance, impartiality of judgment, the most noble self-control,' that is to say, thoroughgoing neutrality in thought and deed, what was the attitude of his great fellow citizen, always hailed by mistaken Europe as the original interventionist? Open the 'Outlook.' It was Theodore Roosevelt who wrote:

I am sure I am stating your feeling when I say that we will act primarily as Americans; and will work hand in hand with any public man who does all that is possible to see that the United States comes through this crisis unharmed.

Fifteen days passed, and on September 16, 1914, at the White House the President received the Belgian Mission under Carton de Wiart, sent by King Albert to submit the just appeal of his country to the conscience of America. Woodrow Wilson was courteous and friendly, but excused himself from expressing any opinion on violations of international law. On September 23d, another article by Theodore Roosevelt appeared in the 'Outlook,' approving the official reserve:

The sympathy we feel (for Belgium) is compatible with full acknowledgment of the unwisdom of our uttering any single word of protest unless we are prepared to make that protest effective; and only the clearest and most urgent national duty would ever justify us in deviating from our rule of neutrality and non-interference.

Even those whose fervent support of the Allies' cause I have praised agreed at first with the President and Roosevelt, despite the attack on Belgium. Walter H. Page, on August 28, 1914:

What a magnificent spectacle our country presents! We escape murder. We escape brutalization. We will have to settle it. We gain in every way.

And at the same time, Charles W. Eliot, in a letter to Wilson, expressed himself thus:

Your address to your countrymen on the condition of real neutrality is altogether admirable in both substance and form.

So at the beginning of the war --- a beginning which abundantly revealed the nature of the struggle ---there was no diversity of opinion. Political America was neutral, proud of being neutral, determined to remain neutral.

Turn to the Senate and House of Representatives where sat the elect of the people: to neutral President, more neutral Congress. A pacifist and anti-Allied meeting organized by William Randolph Hearst was attended by both Vice-President Marshall and Speaker Champ Clark. The Congress, which took no interest in the war, its causes nor its aims, gave heed only to the harm the war was doing to American shipping. Congress put forward the extraordinary proposal to place German shipping, interned in American ports, under the American flag; Congress clamoured continually against the British blockade; Congress demanded an embargo which, had the President consented, would have been the death-warrant of the Allies; Congress suggested forbidding American citizens to sail on armed merchantmen;(13) Congress, in March, 1917, obstructed the plan to arm all merchant vessels; Congress, from 1914 to 1917, resisted every effort, no matter how timid, made by the Government in favour of military preparedness.

It follows that this unanimous desire for neutrality, far from betraying any leaning towards the Allies, was often directed against them.(14) No one said: 'If war breaks out, it will be against Germany.' What people asked was: 'If war breaks out, whom will it be against?' Again and again the question was raised, whether Wilsonian neutrality was not too favourable to the Allies. From Berlin, James G. Gerard wrote: 'There is no doubt that a real neutrality would stop the sale.' Read the comminatory Notes dispatched from Washington. They were more often addressed to Great Britain than to Germany. Every day the State Department lawyers were furbishing arguments against the British Admiralty. The Declaration of London, the seizures, the prizes, the visits, cotton, copper, ship coal, the blacklists, and censorship of mails furnished the basis of a daily indictment. Each ship stopped on the high seas elicited as many protests as did the sinking of the Lusitania. In more than a hundred cables, Walter H. Page complained that England was treated as the guilty party. 'Our note is not discourteous, but wholly uncourteous, which is far worse. There is nothing in its tone to show that it came from an American to an Englishman; it might have been from a Hottentot to a Fiji-Islander. . .'(15) The quick-tempered representative of Great Britain, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, burst out in reproaches against a policy which permitted the murder of passengers and attached importance only to cargoes. In moving-picture theatres in London the picture of the President was hissed.

Official circles in Washington made no attempt to hide their irritation. The honest and charming Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior, wrote in May, 1915:

The English are not behaving very well .... Of course the sympathy of the greater part of this country is with them .... Their success manifestly depends upon the continuance of the strictest neutrality on our part and yet they are not willing to let us have the rights of a neutral .... The most of us are Scotch in our ancestry and yet each day that we meet we boil over somewhat at the foolish manner in which England acts.

In 1916, Wilson said:

I am near the end of my patience .... I have at last reached the point where I consider asking Congress to authorize me to prohibit loans and restrict exportations to the Allies .... I am concocting a very sharp note to Germany on the submarine.

And to Page, who defended the British Government, the President replied: 'Everybody has lost patience with British stubbornness.' A few weeks later, in November, the Federal Reserve Board, in accordance with the wishes of the Government, asked the banks not to make any further advances to belligerents. The only loans then being negotiated were a French loan with Kuhn, Loeb & Company and an English loan with the Morgans. If this decision had been maintained, the defeat of the Allies would have been merely a question of months, as they could neither have supplied their armies nor have fed their peoples.

In the United States, more than anywhere else, the representatives of the people are attentive to the will of the electors. The attitude of the representatives was, therefore, a primary indication of the will of the people. But there were other indications. The people were neutral, neutral to the very marrow of their bones, and they had their reasons for being so, just as the leaders had theirs. Not only did the people take no interest in distant events which did not affect them, but they were ignorant of those events and incapable of judging them. In the European turmoil, which side was to be believed? Some papers were full of German atrocities; others denied them. Where was the truth? Here German militarism was denounced; there British navalism. The Lusitania was sunk with its innocent passengers; the pro-German press declared that, under cover of these women and children, the great liner was carrying guns and ammunition to England. People remembered the sinking of the Maine, which had been wrongly blamed on Spain and had led to war. They feared a repetition of error. What an excuse for those who were reluctant to decide! And to decide on what? Intervention, mobilization, conscription, everything for which Americans, from childhood, learn to upbraid Europe, and to reject themselves. The diplomatic controversy on the blockade and the submarines irritated the people. But as a whole, as House remarked in June, 1915, 'they desire the President to be firm in his treatment of Germany, but they do not wish to go to such length that war will follow.'(16)

Besides, here, after analysis which explains, is the fact that proves. I refer to the Presidential election of 1916, an election by which the decision was placed in the hands of the people. Were they divided, at this solemn moment, into adverse camps: one for neutrality, the other for war? No. On one side the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, whose party's slogan was, 'He kept us out of war;' on the other, the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, who boasted that he was a man of peace and accused his opponent of leading America into war; between the two, Theodore Roosevelt, Progressive candidate, who declined to run and issued an appeal in favour of Hughes, in which there was not a single word about the eventual entry of the United States into the war. The matter is so important that I may be excused for dwelling on it.

Let us look at the Democratic platform. The only direct reference to the war is this sentence:

The Democratic Administration has throughout the present war scrupulously and successfully held to the old paths of neutrality.

Let us turn to the Republican platform --- it is even more pacifist:

We desire peace, the peace of justice and right, and believe in maintaining a straight and honest neutrality. The Republican Party believes that a firm, consistent, and courageous foreign policy is the best as it is the only true way to preserve our peace .... In order to maintain our peace, the country must have not only adequate, but thorough and complete national defense, ready for any emergency.

Even prior to this wholesale profession of neutrality, Charles Evans Hughes, in his speech accepting the nomination, had asserted his determination to seek nothing but the maintenance of peace, that is to say, neutrality:

It is a great mistake to say that resoluteness in protecting American rights would have led to war. Rather in that course lay the best assurance of peace .... The only danger of war has lain in the weak course of the Administration. . . . We are a peace-loving people .... We must safeguard our rights and conserve our peace.

Senator Harding, speaking in the name of the Republican Party, asserted: 'Justice points the way through the safe channel of neutrality.' And Theodore Roosevelt, whatever may have been his private feelings, did not, directly or indirectly, urge the entrance of the United States into the war, in his renunciation of June 22, 1916. He confined himself to regretting that no diplomatic protest had been made against the invasion of Belgium.

So the issue was not, as people in Europe wrongly imagined, between Democratic partisans of nonintervention and Republican partisians of intervention.(17) The issue was between two political parties, each outbidding the other when it came to neutrality. The great debate that Europe believed was going on never took place. There was no such thing as a neutrality candidate opposed to a war candidate. Both parties were in favour of neutrality from the first. They differed only on how best to keep America out of the war. Neither of the candidates discussed the only thing that really mattered. I have in my possession a cartoon printed just before the election. It represents a Democrat asking Charles Evans Hughes: 'Would you have declared war after the invasion of Belgium? Would you have declared war after the Lusitania?' and the caption is: 'Hughes cleared his throat.' No one of the eighteen million electors who voted for Wilson or for Hughes voted for war. Democrats and Republicans had been promised the same thing: a continuation of peace. Democrats and Republicans had answered with a single voice: 'Keep us out of war.'

It may even be added that this decision and the great drama on which it bore occupied an entirely secondary place in the presidential campaign. Our pride-stricken Europe, incurably prone to look upon itself as the centre of the world, believed that the American people had voted for or against it. Nothing could be more false. The problem of neutrality was really a quite insignificant issue. A few lines in the three hundred pages of the Republican campaign book, a few pages in the Democratic campaign book, were the only references to it. The only foreign questions dealt with at length in either of these documents were the Mexican problem and the landing of American forces at Vera Cruz in July, 1914. The duty of America in the World War was only cursorily examined, and was lost in the flood of home affairs. Not only did the two great parties profess exactly similar beliefs as to what was the right thing for America to do, but they deliberately placed in the background the great moral issue with which European ignorance conceived them to be engrossed.

But why insist? The legend of a United States revolting against neutrality imposed upon it by its Government, or even of a United States profoundly divided within itself, is utterly disproved by the facts. By tradition, by instinct, by interest, the people as a whole wanted to remain neutral. With the exception of two minorities, one of which prayed for the triumph of Germany, the other for the victory of the Allies, the American people neither desired nor foresaw the great decision of April 2, 1917. For more than two years, the American people and its Government believed that they would be able to keep out of war. They did everything they possibly could to do so.

AND yet America entered the war. She did what she had not wished to do, and after a few months she did it whole-heartedly. A reversal of policy? Reversals of policy, for nations as for men, are the very fabric of life. A day came when the United States, from humblest citizen to the President, recognized the impossibility of shaping events to its wishes, so it shaped its wishes to events. Of all that has been written to becloud the issue, this one fact only need be retained.

Up to the very last moment, neutrality remained the aim. But, since the autumn of 1916, it had been abundantly clear that neutrality would some day become impossible. Neutrality rested upon the play of diplomatic notes, and diplomatic notes never settled anything. After more than two years of this game, the White House and the State Department found themselves in a blind alley, with only one way out. More or less substantial successes had been obtained by American diplomacy; more or less lasting concessions wrenched at times from England, at times from Germany. But always the necessities of war --necessities of life and death, as Walter H. Page rightly said --- had replaced the belligerents in their initial positions: blockade against blockade; cannon against torpedo. In January, 1917, both sides were utterly determined to concede nothing that could interfere with maximum efficiency. The British Admiralty was determined that nothing should get through. The German Admiralty was determined on unrestricted submarine warfare. The tottering tower of American diplomacy was about to collapse.

House had vainly tried to make the belligerents understand the American refusal to 'distinguish between violations of international law.' Neither London nor Berlin admitted this alleged fairness. And if an attempt had been made to force both sides to admit it, a break with both sides would have been the result. To break with every one because unwilling to break with any, such was the paradox to which Wilsonian diplomacy led. To remain logical with itself, it would have had to declare two wars instead of one, as some people jump into the river to keep out of the rain. Robert Lansing frankly admitted it on December 23, 1916, when he told the Washington correspondents: 'Our rights are more and more traversed by the belligerents on both sides. We are getting nearer and nearer the brink of war.' Which war? That was now the only question. Unless the United States wanted two enemies, it had to choose one. Neutrality was admittedly a failure.

Mediation also had been a failure. Unless neutrality could be maintained, an imposed peace was the only way of keeping America out of the war. From the very first Wilson had in mind the rôle that Roosevelt had played in the Russo-Japanese War. It began, in August, 1914, with the Bernstorff-Oscar Straus conversations. It went on right up to the end of 1916 with Colonel House's visits to Europe and the unending series of Wilson Notes. The policy was linked up with House's pre-war inquiry into the organization of European peace. At the end of 1914, House wrote to Walter H. Page: 'There is a growing impatience in this country and a constant pressure upon the President to use his influence to bring about normal conditions.' In the early months of 1915 and 1916, the President's trusted adviser was busy probing the situation in Europe. After conversations on the freedom of the seas, interrupted by the sinking of the Lusitania, a long exchange of views took place as to the possibility of a conference from which, had failure been due to Germany, the United States would have emerged a belligerent. The second attempt miscarried as had the first.(18) The circular by which the President asked the belligerents to communicate their war aims met with no better success.

It could not have been otherwise, and the unswerving trend of events had made mediation as impossible as neutrality. Mediation was rendered impossible first, because the actions of America, more concerned with results than with methods, more concerned about the conclusion of peace than about the terms of peace, inspired only limited confidence in Europe, and secondly, because the advantage of the proposed bargain, America's entry into the war, was only hypothetical after all. In the margin of the Note outlining the plan for a conference, the President had added the word 'probably' in two places of the phrase relating to American intervention. None of the Allied Governments could venture on to such shifting ground. For the very reason that he had introduced a supreme reservation in favour of exhausted neutrality into his mediation plan, Woodrow Wilson had killed mediation just as by his notes on the blockade he had killed neutrality. In London and Paris, many accused the President of pro-German leanings. He was simply caught in the logic of his determination to keep out of war. But once again, events more powerful than his will forced him to choose.

Reasons of interest, of security, of psychology, all combined in 1917 to place this choice beyond the realm of doubt. In its earlier phases the war had opposed the economic interests of the Allies and of the United States. The first effect of the war was to deprive America of the great market of Central Europe. The result was a series of crises, stocks falling heavily, copper falling from 16 to 12, pig iron from 17 to 14, oil from 13 to 11. In the second phase, the United States had adjusted itself to conditions and was selling direct to the Allies and indirectly to Central Europe through neutrals. In a third phase, the British blockade had restricted trade with neutrals. But the increasing volume of Allied needs afforded the Americans almost unlimited trade possibilities. Prices had risen enormously. Profits had swollen tenfold. The Allies had become the sole customer of the United States. Loans the Allies had obtained from New York banks swept the gold of Europe into American coffers.

From that time on, whether desired or not, the victory of the Allies became essential to the United States. The vacillations of Wilson's policy only made this necessity more apparent. The note of the Federal Reserve Board forbidding further loans to the Allies jeopardized American financial interests as much as it did the fate of the Allies. This note, coming too late or too soon, placed buyers and sellers, borrowers and lenders, in equal peril. If, deprived of resources, the Allies lost the war, how could their debts be paid and what would their signature be worth? The carefully weighed policy of the President, permitting sales and stopping credits, worked against neutrality and in favour of a break; it worked against Germany and in favour of the Allies. Between the Allies and the American market a common bond of interest had been created.

To this bond of interest Germany, under the lash of its war aims, added reasons of security no less compelling. Germany managed to bring the war home to America, which had done everything it possibly could to keep as far from the fighting as possible. The great tragedies of the sea, discussed in the President's notes, had not given the Middle West and West the faintest realization of any direct threat of immediate danger. The peaceful voyage of the submarine Deutschland aroused more emotion. And this emotion grew when Germany, by one outrage after another, carried the war on to American soil in a series of attempts, by agents of the German Embassy, against American ports, American railroads, American factories.

Protest had followed protest, all on the same lines and without effect, till the Imperial Government had grown to believe that words would never be supported by deeds. Speculating on the professional warp in the mind of an intellectual dealing with facts, it had never realized that a day would come when acts would take the place of notes. It had noticed how the long-drawn-out discussion had satiated public interest. But it had failed to see that there was one man who was as much interested as ever, and that man was Woodrow Wilson. Giving ground inch by inch, the President, whether he foresaw it or not, was bound to reach a limit beyond which he could retreat no farther. The announcement that unrestricted submarine warfare was to be resumed, the repudiation of the promises made and the undertakings given less than a year before, left Wilson no choice. Hemmed in by Germany with his own arguments, the prisoner of his conditional threats, Wilson was forced to break instead of to talk. Germany furnished him with the rope which was to hang her.

The failure of neutrality, the failure of mediation, meant war. Under the triple impulse of interest, prudence, and logic, it meant war against Germany. These causes were to work slowly on the haughty apostle of divine neutrality. And yet, as early as 1915, he had admitted possibilities which he had at first refused to consider. 'I should be ashamed,' he said, 'if I had learned nothing in fourteen months.' In 1916, he began his campaign for military preparedness:

The Country must be fully prepared to care for its own security .... There is something more precious than peace; it is the principles on which our political life is founded .... At all times the American people is ready to fight to defend them .... There may at any moment come a time when I cannot preserve both the honour and the peace of the United States.

Then another step forward. In the Presidential campaign he had taken the offensive --- and he was the only candidate who did --- against 'those hyphenated Americans who show more loyalty to a foreign power than to the United States, and pour the poison of felony into the veins of our national life.' To one of them he wrote: 'I would feel deeply mortified to have you or anybody like you vote for me. Since you have access to many disloyal Americans and I have not, I will ask you to convey this message to them.' He was still anxious to remain neutral, but he no longer knew whether he would be able to do so. He confessed: 'My chief puzzle is to determine where patience ceases to be a virtue.' The repeated misgivings of German provocation forced him, in the midst of conscientious throes, to make the great decision. He broke off diplomatic relations.(19) He asked Congress to arm merchantmen. He declared war.

Others before him had trod the same path and conversion torn by scruples is classical in American history. Read the correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1812: you will find the same questions and the same answers as in the correspondence between Woodrow Wilson and Edward Mandell House in 1916. Change the dates, change the names---the situations and feelings are identical, and Wilson on the very eve of making his decision had the right to say that, one hundred and five years later, he was going into war just as his Princeton predecessor had. It seems to be a strange law of American history that all wars should break out under pacifist presidents; that the necessities of foreign policy should be in contradiction to the principles of the nation. After Jefferson, who violated his principles in purchasing Louisiana, after Madison, who went to war after sixteen years of out and out Jeffersonism, Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, appears in the guise of 'happy warrior,' leading his country to battle after he had sworn to keep it out of war.

From a study of the man, let us turn to the people. At Armageddon, how would these hundred million neutrals take the call to arms and the draft? Their acceptance of both was whole-hearted, less because of circumstances than because of the character of the American people. Doubtless the reasons that had led the President to act were not without influencing a certain number of his fellow citizens: the Middle West suffered from the impossibility of exporting after the breaking-off of diplomatic relations; the South was alarmed by the Mexican danger. But essentially, the masses were once again impelled by their love of doing things, shoulder to shoulder, by their passion for unanimity, which was all the more spontaneous that it was least expected. The extent to which the people for months had agreed with the President's policy of avoiding war at all costs was the measure of their conviction that a war declared by their President was inevitable. Wilson was followed not from enthusiasm, but by reason. A man of study, too distant ever to be popular, he never swayed the masses. But by the very reason of his slowness to act, which many criticized, his decision to do so inspired confidence. The credit given him for acting was all the greater because this ability to act had been doubted.

Two other causes, connected with the foregoing, hastened the change of front. First, the minority without real political influence which, since 1914, had been working for the Allies, became the moral leaders of the nation in arms. What yesterday was a cause of weakness now became its strength. The volunteers were the vanguard of the army in formation. The relief bodies became lawful centres of attraction, with the unexpected support of Government authority. They were the animators of the new spirit that was rising. For the same reason, the pro-German minority was placed in the repellent position of a negative pole. The immense majority of German-Americans were thus led to give positive proofs of loyalty, which soon was to be tested under fire. The others, whose number was exceedingly small, knew that they were exposed to the penalties of the law. A double displacement of influence had resulted automatically from the declaration of war.

Thus, from one day to the next, with very rare exceptions which could neither be counted nor weighed, a united people rose up to fight. The shortcomings of Wilson's policy, military unpreparedness, for which he had been rightly blamed --- its consequences seen only too late --- all made for unity, just as in 1914 the risky withdrawal of our troops ten kilometres behind the frontier had made for unity in France. Public opinion crystallized. Ford closed his peace bureau at The Hague. The masses rushed to war from which for two years they had shrunk. Cabinet Ministers wanted to resign in order to enlist. National cohesion was strengthened by the very shock which might have shattered it. No one challenged Wilson's words: 'Let us act in all matters of general concern as a nation which has a national character to support.' The seven words, 'To make the world safe for democracy,' marvelously adapted to the idealistic impulses of American energy, gave the Nation its slogan. For a few months, its leader was certain of unanimity, the joy of which had been refused to the most illustrious of his predecessors.

In the camp of the Allies, of the Allies who for twenty-four months had been able to carry on the war only by their purchases in the United States, but who since November, 1916, had felt doomed by the impossibility of further borrowing, France was the special object of American fervour --- France awoke all the old historical memories so long dulled. On the day of the declaration of war, the British Embassy in Washington received a gentle hint not to put out the British flag for fear of provoking an Irish incident. On the contrary, our Republic, admirably served by the prudent diplomacy of its representative, M. J. J. Jusserand, gathered a rich harvest of affection. Everywhere Marshal Joffre was greeted with enthusiastic cheers. Pro-French societies were honoured, after their long struggles. America was at war.

America was at war. But what war? Alliance? From the first day the United States insisted that it was not an ally, that it would act only as an associate; that the war aims of the others would not be its war aims; that it would have its own war aims from which nothing should turn it. The United States declared its war, not the Allies' war. 'After all,' House and Walter Lippman had said a few months previously, 'We are not going to get mixed up in the future of Alsace-Lorraine and Constantinople.' This state of mind remained unchanged. In the height of military enthusiasm there was always distrust of European politics. Crusade? Many have believed it in good faith. But facts are against them. Had it been a crusade it would have begun in August, 1914, not in April, 1917. No, the war President Wilson declared on Germany was an American war, American in inception, American in spirit. No, Wilson declared a narrowly national war which, although rivalling the selfishness of Salandra, deserves, for the same reasons, the respect and gratitude of France.

Henceforth the United States and France were engaged in the same task. How would they work together and for how long? That was the question. For more than two years the forces tending to unite them had been underestimated. Now in the day of union were contrary forces to be too lightly held?