then overrun the whole world or drench it in blood, or they must through stages of Liberalism work their way toward some approach to a democracy; and there is no doubt which event is impending.  The Liberal idea will win this struggle, and Europe will be out of danger of a general assault on free institutions till some other autocracy which has a military caste try the same Napoleonic game.  The defeat of Germany, therefore, will make for the spread of the doctrine of our Fathers and our doctrine yet.

An interesting book might be made of concrete evidences of the natural antipathy that the present German autocracy has for successful democracy and hence for us.  A new instance has just come to me.  My son, Arthur, who succeeded to most of my activities at home, has been over here for a month and he has just come from a visit to France.  In Paris he had a long conversation with Delcasse, who told him that the Kaiser himself once made a proposal to him to join in producing “the complete isolation” of the United States.  What the Kaiser meant was that if the great Powers of Europe would hold off, he would put the Monroe Doctrine to the test and smash it.

The great tide of the world will, by reason of the war, now flow toward democracy—­at present, alas! a tide of blood.  For a century democracies and Liberal governments have kept themselves too much isolated, trusting prematurely and too simply to international law and treaties and Hague conventions.  These things have never been respected, except as springs to catch woodcock, where the Divine Right held sway.  The outgrowing or the overthrow of the Divine Right is a condition precedent to the effectiveness of international law and treaties.

It has seemed to me, looking at the subject only with reference to our country’s duty and safety, that somehow and at some early time our championship of democracy must lead us to redeclare our faith and to show that we believe in our historic creed.  Then we may escape falling away from the Liberal forces of the Old World and escape the suspicion of indifference to the great scheme of government which was set up by our fathers’ giving their blood for it.  I see no other way for us to take the best and biggest opportunity that has ever come to prove true to our faith as well as to secure our own safety and the safety of the world.  Only some sort of active and open identification with the Allies can put us in effective protest against the assassins of the Armenians and the assassins of Belgium, Poland, and Serbia, and in a friendly attitude to the German people themselves, as distinguished from their military rulers.  This is the attitude surely that our fathers would have wished us to take—­and would have expected us to take—­and that our children will be proud of us for taking; for it is our proper historic attitude, whether looked at from the past or looked back at from the future.  There can be no historic approval of neutrality