“The world will be better when the nations invite the judgment of their neighbors and are influenced by it.

“When John Hay said that the Golden Rule and the open door should guide our new diplomacy he said something which should be applicable to the new diplomacy of the whole world.  The Golden Rule and a free chance are all that any man ought to want or ought to have, and they are all that any nation ought to want or ought to have.

“One of the controlling principles of a democratic State is that its military and naval establishments must be completely subservient to the civil power.  They should form the police, and not be the dominant factor of any national life.

“As soon as they go beyond this simple function in any nation, then that nation is afflicted with militarism.

“It is difficult to make predictions of the war’s effect on us.  As I see it, our position will depend a good deal upon the outcome of the conflict, and what that will be no one at present knows.

“If a new map of Europe follows the war, its permanence will depend upon whether or not the changes are such as will permit nationalities to organize as nations.

“The world should have learned through the lessons of the past that it is impossible permanently and peacefully to submerge large bodies of aliens if they are treated as aliens.  That is the opposite of the mixing process which is so successfully building a nation out of varied nationalities in the United States.

“The old Romans understood this.  They permitted their outlying vassal nations to speak any language they chose and to worship whatever god they chose, so long as they recognized the sovereignty of Rome.  When a conquering nation goes beyond that, and begins to suppress religions, languages, and customs, it begins at that very moment to sow the seeds of insurrection and revolution.

“My old teacher and colleague, Prof.  Burgess, once defined a nation as an ethnographic unit inhabiting a geographic unit.  That is an illuminating definition.  If a nation is not an ethnographic unit, it tries to become one by oppressing or amalgamating the weaker portions of its people.  If it is not a geographic unit, it tries to become one by reaching out to a mountain chain or to the sea—­to something which will serve as a real dividing line between it and its next neighbors.

“The accuracy of this definition can hardly be denied, and we all know what the violations of this principle have been in Europe.  It is unnecessary for me to point them out.

“Races rarely have been successfully mixed by conquest.  The military winner of a war is not always the real conqueror in the long run.  The Normans conquered Saxon England, but Saxon law and Saxon institutions worked up through the new power and have dominated England’s later history.  The Teutonic tribes conquered Rome, but Roman civilization, by a sort of capillary attraction, went up into the mass above and presently dominated the Teutons.