The second great evil under which certain large nations of Europe—­notably Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary—­have long suffered and still suffer is the permanent national Executive, independent of popular control through representative bodies, holding strong views about rights of birth and religious sanctions of its authority, and really controlling the national forces through some small council and a strong bureaucracy.  So long as Executives of this sort endure, so long will civilization be liable to such explosions as have taken place this August, though not always on so vast a scale.

Americans now see these things more clearly than European lovers of liberty, because Americans are detached from the actual conflicts by the Atlantic, and because Americans have had no real contact with the feudal or the imperial system for nearly 300 years.  Pilgrim and Puritan, Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran and Catholic alike left the feudal system and autocratic government behind them when they crossed the Atlantic.  Americans, therefore, cannot help hoping that two results of the present war will be:  (1) The abolition of secret diplomacy and secret understandings, and the substitution therefor of treaties publicly discussed and sanctioned, and (2) the creation of national Executives—­Emperors, Sultans, Kings, or Presidents—­which cannot use the national forces in fight until a thoroughly informed national assembly, acting with deliberation, has agreed to that use.

Opposite Tendencies.

The American student of history since the middle of the seventeenth century sees clearly two strong though apparently opposite tendencies in Europe:  First, the tendency to the creation and maintenance of small States such as those which the Peace of Westphalia (1648) recognized and for two centuries secured in a fairly independent existence, and, secondly, a tendency from the middle of the nineteenth century toward larger national units, created by combining several kindred States under one executive.  This second tendency was illustrated strongly in the case of both Germany and Italy, although the Prussian domination in Germany has no parallel in Italy.  Somewhat earlier in the nineteenth century the doctrine of the neutralization of the territories of small States was established as firmly as solemn treaties could do it.  The larger national units had a more or less federative quality, the components yielding some of their functions to a central power, but retaining numerous independent functions.  This tendency to limited unification is one which Americans easily understand and appreciate.  We believe in the federative principle, and must therefore hope that out of the present European horror will come a new development of that principle, and new security for small States which are capable of guaranteeing to their citizens “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—­a security which no citizen of any European country seems today to possess.