"WE

E will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree." So our fathers sang, marching against the Confederate forces, but those who sang it most enthusiastically were the stay-at-homes, whose morale had to be kept up by the anticipated zest of "punitive justice." We were also going to hang Robert E. Lee, and all the other high Confederate officers, military and civil. But we didn't. Jeff Davis and the rest of the Confederate leaders went down to their graves in peace. That is one of the chief reasons why we are today a united country, powerful enough to defend ourselves and to redress the balance of Europe. It is well to remember this at a time when even men of advanced years and presumably sound judgment are declaring that German resistance must not be allowed to collapse before the shells of the Allies have had an opportunity to demolish the façade of the Cologne cathedral and spread a nightmare of terror among the civil population of the Rhine territory. We are all human, and there is no denying that revenge is sweet. But so also are many other things civilization was devised to deny us, that our children might not pay in the end.

L

IBRARY service could be, and should be, one of the most important of public utilities. It is a flexible service; it ought to be a part of the vital process of democracy; it is a condition precedent to the general diffusion of knowledge without which, will we nill we, the most important decisions in the state must be entrusted to minorities. It goes without saying that the library staff which is to perform this all important democratic service must be intelligent, skilful and enthusiastic. How do we go about procuring such qualities? By a system of scandalous underpayment. In New York City, which is served as efficiently as can be expected from an understaffed organization we have been paying librarians at rates ranging from $50 a month to a rare $150, and the Board of Estimate, though avowedly democratic in its programme and purposes, has left these figures unchanged. Other cities pay even worse: that is the only possible excuse. There are no manual trades in the city in such sorry case.

rights, safeguarded by proportional representation. The government shall be parliamentary in form and shall recognize the initiative and referendum. The standing army shall be replaced by militia. Social and economic reforms are promised; large estates are to be redeemed for home colonization. There are to be no patents of nobility. These are some of the salient points in one of the most remarkable political documents of the time. They are the more significant because everyone who knows the Czechs feels certain that they will remain binding after the nation has actually attained its independence. The Czechs are democrats by instinct. Education and economic efficiency are widely distributed among them. We believe that their liberation will come to rank in history as one of the most valuable and permanent results of the war.

The President's Responsibility

66

F the President answers this note and undertakes to agree with Germany on the basis of it before her army is conquered and disarmed, I should think he should be impeached." Thus Senator Poindexter. The loyal American can afford to overlook the arrogance and insolence of this disgruntled Junker's ragings. They are not without value as pointing a question we must seriously put to ourselves.

Are we a people capable of making solemn engagements and keeping them? Are we a people capable, not merely of winning a war of which a long series of nations, since extinguished in dishonor have proved themselves capable-but also of establishing on the basis of victory a peace so sane and so just that the seeds of future wars can find in it no soil in which to germinate? Then we will close our ranks behind the one man in our government who has been deliberately chosen by the whole people to direct our policy, to command our armies, to defend our interests.

Let every citizen endeavor honestly to realize in his imagination the kind of responsibility that rests upon the President. Sooner or later, we shall arrive at the point of time when the best possible peace can be made. If peace comes before that time millions will have died in vain. It is equally true that if the opportunity for peace when it arrives is not seized, millions will have died in vain. And what is more, in either event, a basis will have been laid for new wars, inflicting upon future generations costs like those our generation has borne, compounded by the intervening years. Such is the responsibility we have imposed upon Woodrow Wilson by our united voices. The manner in which he acquits himself of this responsi

bility will determine whether his name and that of our whole people shall be held in honor through the ages, or whether we shall wither together under the contempt of mankind.

The President is responsible not only to the people of America, but to the peoples of the Allied countries as well. They have suffered under the war as we have not. They are war weary in a measure that we do not conceive. They will fight on until the objects of fighting have been attained; they have no blood to spare for fighting's own sake. But their action is inextricably bound up with ours. In the final decision, our voice, expressed by President Wilson, is required to give validity to the decisions of their leaders. That is a responsibility that has fallen upon us not by peculiar merit of our national ideals, but by virtue of our unexhausted resources for war making and by virtue of the disinterested character of our aims in this war.

President Wilson is responsible for his decisions to the whole American people; to the peoples of the Allies; to the neutrals, whose future happiness depends upon a stable peace; even to the democratic fragments in the enemy peoples, who will be crushed or set on the road to power according to the wisdom of his decisions. That the President recognizes the tremendous weight of responsibility resting upon him there is not a shadow of doubt. There is not a shadow of doubt that he holds in his mind information as to the condition of our enemies and of our Allies in comparison with which the best knowledge of any other citizen is blank ignorance. There is not a shadow of doubt that the President is in closest communication with the governments of our Allies, that he is elaborating with those governments plans of action representing the interests of all the associated peoples. Nevertheless, he may err. But his judgment is the best that is available to us.

As free citizens of a free state, it is our right and duty to give voice to our opinions as to the justice and wisdom of any terms of peace before us. If we believe that Germany should be destroyed, let us by all means express our belief as emphatically as we can. If we believe that German sensibilities should be spared wherever possible, let us say it. Only by free expression of opinion can the President learn the temper of the country, one of the vital elements in the problem. But let us recognize that in the last instance we can speak as a nation only through the President. The engagements entered upon between the President and our Allies become binding upon us. And all talk of repudiating them, of impeaching the President for them, of inaugurating a revolution against them, is anarchy.

I

The End of Hapsburg Dominion

N announcing to the Austro-Hungarian government that Czecho-Slovaks and Jugo-Slavs are to be free, President Wilson speaks with an authority beyond that of the conqueror. It is the authority of the democracies of the world, at the opening of an era in which democracy is to be the only source of power. The ancient dominion of the House of Hapsburg has been condemned, as a perennial obstacle to the progress of the world toward its goal of freedom. Therefore that dominion must perish. If this determination must prolong the war, so be it.

But does not the President's sentence against Austria-Hungary involve punishment and humiliation, out of which the desire for revenge may later arise as a menace to peace? The Prussian Junker will do his best to convince the German people that in this action President Wilson has been actuated by a spirit of revenge. So will the advocates of war to extermination in America and the Allied countries. The enemies of President Wilson and of democracy, on both sides of the battle line, are desperately afraid that the war will break down through an understanding of the peoples. If they could bring the peoples to regard the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy as an act of "punitive justice " or of "revenge," they would win something for themselves, whoever wins or loses the war. For it is upon the mutual suspicions and hatreds of the peoples, subtly fomented, that the power of aristocratic minorities rests.

The peoples, however, will not be deceived in this matter. What single democratic interest of the peoples of Austria-Hungary is prejudiced by dissolution? The Germans of Upper and Lower Austria may be regarded as the backbone of the Austrian realm. They, if any nationality, profited from the empire. But never by any chance could they expect to get through the imperial government any legislation corresponding precisely to their interests. Always they had to submit to compromises, with the Magyars in all that pertained to Dual affairs, with Czechs and Poles in all that pertained to the affairs of the Austrian realm alone.

Next after the Germans, the Magyars had the most valid reason for desiring the maintenance of the status quo. They figured prominently in European affairs, for a nation of less than eight millions. Holding a strategic position, they could practically dictate the policies of the empire, and through the empire, could exert a powerful influence upon the course of general European politics. Such a position offered a dazzling career to great aristocrats like Tisza. What did it offer to the common Magyar, tilling his ancestral acres, or plying his trade in the towns? It offered him oppression instead of liberty. For in order that Magyar influence in the Dual Empire might be all powerful, the politics of the kingdom had to be controlled by the few. The non-Magyar races had to be kept in complete subjection; and in the circumstances neither could the Magyars of the nonprivileged classes be free.

To hold alien races in subjection is not an advantage to the common people of any nation. The Germans and Magyars of the Dual Empire are to be deprived of their power to oppress: that is all. They are thereby assured an opportunity of a wholesome political development of their own.

But was it not possible, under some form of federation, to secure the free development of the several national elements, and to preserve besides important advantages that are out of the question under independence? Might not Austria-Hungary, under a new constitution, have become a state analogous to Switzerland, where unity of economic life and of democratic spirit are maintained in spite of national diversity? These are questions that will be raised incessantly, if, as may be the outcome, the agonies of the war are greatly prolonged by the President's decision that AustriaHungary must be broken up.

Let us consider what functions could be performed by a federal state with such diverse interests as those of the Germans, the Magyars, the Jugo-Slavs, the Rumanians, the Poles and the Czecho-Slovaks. Could such a federal state be entrusted with the control of foreign affairs? With the common administration of the army? With the control of commercial policy? With the administration of railways and canals? With the defense of nationality interests?

So far as foreign affairs are concerned, the interests of the several parts of such a federation would be hopelessly diverse. The relation of the Poles of Galicia to the Poles of the new Polish state would be very different from the relation to the Polish state of the other elements in the federation. Similar conditions would obtain in the relations of a Jugo-Slav state within the federation and the Serbian state; in the relations of a Rumanian federal state and Rumania. It is not many years since the difficulties of a common administration of foreign affairs resulted in a dissolution of the union of Norway and Sweden. Yet there were in the case of that union no differences in interest to be compared with those that would obtain between the several members of the Dual Empire.

We need not linger over the question of the common administration of the army. This was

not feasible even when the members of the empire were only two. A unified army would be out of the question with the empire consisting of six autonomous nations. Besides, the Allied nations would never consent to a constitution that placed the whole man power of the six nations under the control of a single group of intriguers at Vienna or Buda-Pesth.

How about the control of commercial policy? In spite of all that German economists have written, nobody can be under the delusion that the Austro-Hungarian lands are a natural economic unit, with a common commercial policy indicated for them. The Czecho-Slovak territories represent a fairly well balanced industrial-agrarian state, with a prospect of a marked development of the finer industries, seeking a market principally in Germany, and, through Germany, in northern Europe and over-seas. For such a state a liberal commercial policy is natural. German Austria is overdeveloped industrially and underdeveloped agriculturally. The Magyar state is very backward industrially, but well developed agriculturally. Manifestly the Germans and Magyars would disagree bitterly on every point of commercial policy-as they have indeed in the past. The Jugo-Slav territories are by economic geography attached to the Adriatic and Aegean commercial spheres; Galicia, to the German and Polish. What statesman would undertake to devise a tariff that would be even fairly acceptable to all these contending interests?

A common transportation administration would encounter fewer difficulties, perhaps; yet it is easy to forecast quarrels over rates that would seriously disturb the harmony of the federation. Rates on manufactures from Bohemia into Hungary, for example: if too low, they would keep Hungarian industry from developing. Rates on Jugo-Slav animal products into German-Austria: if too low, they would enrage the Magyar stock raiser. We in America realize that once our railways become public property, we shall be confronted by serious sectional strivings in the matter of rates. But we can work the problem out on the basis of a real national unity. That is exactly what an Austrian federation would lack.

There remains the matter of nationalities. It is admitted that no demarcations of national boundaries can be wholly satisfactory. Wherever the boundary lines are drawn, there will be minority nationalities on either side. And these will run the risk of oppression. But a federation parliament with the power to interfere persistently in the matter would be likely to produce more friction than it would remove. The solution appears rather to lie in the adoption by the several states of constitutions assuring fair treatment to national minorities. The Czecho-Slovak declaration, with its plan of equal treatment of nationalities and proportional representation, offers as satisfactory a solution as is likely to be devised.

The conclusion appears inevitable that there is no adequate field of competence for a federal government uniting the nationalities of Austria-Hungary. All those nationalities have in common is a common history of oppression under the Hapsburg crown. There is no inherent reason why they could not continue to live in a purely personal union under that crown. But why, in the name of democracy, should they?

An Election in a Fog

N Tuesday, November 5th, the American voters will exercise their rights under the Constitution and elect a new Congress which will sit from March 4th, 1919, to March 4th, 1921. They will elect this Congress, without, except in a few instances, any discussion of the specific issues which their new representatives will subsequently

debate and decide. Before the term of the next

Congress begins, the war will have come to an end, and the country will be confronted by the more prosaic but not less difficult and inexorable problems of peace. It will be the business of the representatives elected on November 5th to settle whether or not and how far the American people will participate in a League of Nations, whether and how far it will consent to those changes in domestic policy which its obligations under a League of Nations will demand, and by what means it will deal with the unprecedented dislocation of the domestic balance of economic and social power which has occurred during the war. Yet with a few exceptions the voters will elect rep

resentatives who neither as individuals nor as mem

bers of a party have expressed any opinions, given any pledges or received any instruction as to their future course. The American democracy is confiding the most important and contentious legislative task with which it has had to deal since the adoption of the Constitution to a body of men pledged only to carry on a fight which will come to an end before they are seated.

The excuse for this complete and disquieting failure of democracy in government is the truce between the two national parties. The only effective means which we Americans use of obtaining an illuminating and searching popular understanding and discussion of political issues is that of making them the occasion of a party contest. When the war began, the Republicans and the

Democrats agreed to a temporary armistice which practically put an end to effective political discussion for the duration of the war. The armistice was, no doubt, a desirable and a public-spirited method of preventing merely factious opposition to the government and of obtaining concentration of national effort upon military success, but unfortunately it brought with it an almost complete and a wholly unnecessary discouragement of any public discussion, even of the political meaning and consequences of the war itself. The party politicians, having agreed among themselves to put partisan controversies aside, did their best to suppress all educational agitation and to fasten the stigma of disloyalty upon those who insisted upon associating the winning of the war with the discussion of controversial political purposes. In this they were aided and abetted by the public press and by the prevailing attitude of American public opinion. an educational agitation about political and economic issues relevant to the war could have been carried on without any infirmity of military policy as the British have proved for the benefit of their American allies. They have continued throughout the war a spirited and illuminating political debate which has prepared public opinion for an intelligent handling of the problem of domestic and international reconstruction.

Yet

Badly prepared as the American nation was a year and a half ago to deal with the exigencies of war, it is worse prepared now to deal with the more contentious exigencies of peace. War aroused national feeling and brought with it unity and concentration of effort upon the task of beating the enemy, whereas when peace comes this very intensity of national feeling, operating as it will on the contentious material of domestic reconstruction, will impair the moral unity of the nation. The natural pugnacity of the American character, now being so freely expressed, will transfer its attention from Germans to Americans; and it will not be moderated by any previously prepared basis of agreement. In debating problems of reconstruction, our specific national traditions in foreign and domestic policy will distract and confuse American opinion rather than guide it and pull it together. Our deepest tradition in foreign policy is one of national isolation, which if a political victory is to reward the labors of the American army must be transformed into one of international cooperation. Our deepest tradition in domestic policy is one of legalistic and fatalistic individualism which will act as a barrier to any constructive handling of the post-war social and economic problems. Unless the traditions are profoundly modified, the nation will either be torn to pieces by the intensity of its internal dissensions and will be unable to reach any decision, or it will decide hastily, inadequately and, in all probability, mischievously. The existing popular state of mind is at once intemperate and befuddled. It is traveling fast, but it does not know either in what direction the port lies or what course must be steered in order to

arrive.

The behavior up to date of the two old parties prophesies their inability to pilot the American people through the rough and dangerous waters ahead. Last March President Wilson tried to arouse his partisan associates to a lively sense of the serious nature of their task. "Every sign," he said, in his letter to the New Jersey Democrats, "of these terrible days of war and revolutionary change, when economic and social forces are being released upon the world whose effect no political seer dare venture to conjecture, bids us search our hearts through and through and make them ready for the birth of a new day." The way in which the Republican and Democratic parties have searched their hearts and made themselves ready for the birth of a new day was to nominate for Congress a list of candidates who are chiefly remarkable for their loyalty to the party machines and their absence of ideas. These Republican and Democratic footmen have no political stock in trade but the old party slogans which, according to President Wilson, "have lost their significance and will mean nothing to the voter in the future." When the time comes to discuss the reasons for reaching imperative and momentous decisions they will still further confuse the mind of the nation by using these slogans to prevent the voters from facing the essential facts and accepting the salutary principles. They have abandoned any shreds of party conviction which they have inherited from the past. They have not acquired any understanding or conviction which will equip them to deal with the future. If they possessed the will and the mind to meet the coming needs of the country, they would at least have braced themselves to nominate an exceptionally able and well informed list of congressional candidates this fall rather than a list of party hacks. The breath of life is not in them. There is in this respect little or nothing to choose between the two parties. Democracy is as bankrupt as Republicanism. Nevertheless a pro-war liberal can find a good reason for supporting Democratic rather than Republican candidates for Congress. The Democrats, divided and impoverished as they are, have as their leader the American statesman who is bringing to the issues of the future insight into their revolutionary meaning. President Wilson understands clearly the necessary reaction upon the social basis of western democratic politics of the victorious consummation at such a huge cost

of a war to safeguard democracy. He understands the impossibility of forming a League of Nations which will endure to work impartial justice, without socializing the democratic state. As President and leader of his party he can, as he did in 1915, force the Democrats to enact social legislation which if they were left to their own devices they would timidly reject. Quite apart from his relation to his party, he has earned the allegiance of every American voter who proposes to fight to the bitter end against any restoration of the status quo ante, either in national and international politics, and who is sick of bargaining with predatory interests, no matter whether they are German or American.

President Wilson will need the support of liberal voters. In our opinion there is a good chance of the election of a Republican majority in the lower House. The party truce will work in favor of the Republicans. For Democratic candidates as representatives of the party in power will fail to get the votes of many citizens who cherish petty personal grievances because of some real or imaginary mistake or injustice in the administration of the war, and these malcontents for personal reasons may well be sufficiently numerous to wipe out the slender Democratic preponderance in the present House. The Democrats will not be able to capitalize their success in fighting a victorious war because if they tried to do so they would break the truce. An armistice usually works against a belligerent who can win only by being aggressive, which is precisely the situation of the Democrats. The party truce prevents the President from appealing to the country for the maintenance of a Democratic majority in Congress. Yet if the voters deprive him of a majority, his prestige throughout the world will suffer and the measure of national and international reconstruction proposed by the administration during the rest of the President's term will probably be imperilled.

The actual defeat of the President and his party at a congressional election, held just at the moment of the winning of one of the greatest personal victories ever achieved by a statesman, would be another symptom of the enfeebled and unwholesome condition of American public opinion which results from the suppression during the war of living political discussion. The President's victory consists not merely in beating Germany but in associating American present participation in the war with her future participation in a League of Nations, organized to consummate and perpetuate the victory of justice. The average voter does not understand the meaning of what Mr. Wilson has done, because his programme instead of being debated and candidly explained has been accepted