Toward this end America may help tremendously, and herein lies, it seems to me, the greatest opportunity ever offered by events to the American press.

Let the newspapers of America stop futile philosophizing upon the merits and demerits of each case, let them measurably cease their comment upon what each side has accomplished or failed to accomplish during the tragic four months which have traced their bloody mark on history.

Let them begin to stimulate public opinion in favor of a rational adjustment of the points at issue—­such an adjustment as will leave each contestant unhumiliated and intact, such an adjustment as will avoid, as far as may be possible, the complete defeat of any one, such an adjustment as will do what can be done toward righting wrongs already wrought, and such an adjustment as will let the world return as soon as may be to the paths of peace, productiveness, prosperity, and happiness.

In suggesting that America should regard this effort as an obligation I am assuming for this country no rights which are not properly hers.  We, a nation of a hundred million people, laboring constantly for peace and human progress, have a right to make our voice heard, and if we raise it properly it will find listeners among those who can help toward the accomplishment of what we seek.  But if we would make it heard we must be earnest, be honest, and be ceaseless in the reiteration of our demand.

Have we not the right to insist that the interests of neutral nations, of whom, with our South American cousins, (for the better intercourse with whom we have just spent several hundred millions upon the construction of the Panama Canal,) we form so large a percentage, shall before long be given some consideration by the nations whose great quarrel is harming us incalculably?

Americans Should Speak Out.

The interruption of our economic development already has become marked and the war’s baneful influence upon moral conditions in our midst shows itself through constantly increasing unemployment and, as a logical consequence of that, the rapid filling of our eleemosynary and penal institutions.  May we not reasonably demand that this shall speedily be brought to an end?

It probably is true that under the rules of the game the President of the United States cannot offer his good offices again to the belligerents without first being invited by one or the other side to do this, but the people of the United States have a voice even more powerful than his; if that of the people of South America should be joined with it, and if the combined sound should be made unquestionably apparent to the warring nations, it could not pass unheeded.

Public opinion in the United States should firmly seek to impress upon the warring nations the conviction that nothing can secure a lasting peace except assurance of conditions under which not mighty armies and tremendous navies are held to be the factors through which trade expansion and the conquest of the markets of the world are to be obtained, but that this can be accomplished better and more lastingly through rigid adherence to the qualities and methods which generally make for success in commercial or any other peaceful competition—­fairness, thorough efficiency, and hard work.