In 1916 the majority of the American people elected Mr. Wilson in the belief that he would keep them out of war.  In 1917 he entered the war with the nation behind him.  A recalcitrant Middle West was the first to fill its quota of volunteers, and we witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of the endorsement of conscription:  What had happened?  A very simple, but a very great thing Mr. Wilson had made the issue of the war a democratic issue, an American issue, in harmony with our national hopes and traditions.  But why could not this issue have been announced in 1914 or 1915?  The answer seems to be that peoples, as well as their leaders and interpreters, must grow to meet critical situations.  In 1861 the, moral idea of the Civil War was obscured and hidden by economic and material interests.  The Abraham Lincoln who entered the White House in 1881 was indeed the name man who signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863; and yet, in a sense, he was not the same man; events and responsibilities had effected a profound but logical growth in his personality.  And the people of the Union were not ready to endorse Emancipation in 1861.  In 1863, in the darkest hour of the war, the spirit of the North responded to the call, and, despite the vilification of the President, was true to him to victory.  More significant still, in view of the events of today, is what then occurred in England.  The British Government was unfriendly; the British people as a whole had looked upon our Civil War very much in the same light as the American people regarded the present war at its inception—­which is to say that the economic and materialistic issue seemed to overshadow the moral one.  When Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it to be a war for human freedom, the sentiment of the British people changed—­of the British people as distinct from the governing classes; and the textile workers of the northern counties, whose mills could not get cotton on account of the blockade, declared their willingness to suffer and starve if the slaves in America might be freed.

Abraham Lincoln at that time represented the American people as the British Government did not represent the British people.  We are concerned today with peoples rather than governments.

It remained for an American President to announce the moral issue of the present war, and thus to solidify behind him, not only the liberal mind of America, but the liberal elements within the nations of Europe.  He became the democratic leader of the world.  The issue, simply stated, is the advancement of democracy and peace.  They are inseparable.  Democracy, for progress, demands peace.  It had reached a stage, when, in a contracting world, it could no longer advance through isolation:  its very existence in every country was threatened, not only by the partisans of reaction from within, but by the menace from without of a militaristic and imperialistic nation determined to crush it, restore superimposed authority, and dominate