AN AMERICAN ON PRESIDENT WILSON.* Ma. FULLERTON'S statement of the

case against President Wilson is distinctly one of tho most able we have come across. Now that Mr. Wilson has been re-elected it makes highly opportune reading. Some pro Ally Americans have indicted Germany directly ; others have con- demned her indirectly in the course of condemning Mr. Wilson. Mr. Fullerton in this short but pregnant book has succeeded in doing both. He writes bitterly as one who feels that the greatest opportunity in American history of doing a service to civilization has been lost. It is a point well deserving of notice that all the books written by Americans in support of our cause against Germany display an extraordinary passion.. It is obvious that the feeling which impels the writers to utter their thoughts, and lament their nationatdisillusionments, is the driving- force of a mighty conviction. They seem to tremble with emotion as they think how boldly their country might have stood forth for inter- national good faith—the basis on which the dreams for the future of all of us take shape—and how little of boldness there was in, the policy that failed to protest against the violation of the Hague Conventions when Belgium was invaded. It may be that most of these American writers intensify their regrets unduly by tacitly assuming that the United States oould have played a great part by land and sea if she had entered the war on the side of the Allies. We admire their noble and chivalrous sentiment, and are unspeakably proud that it should have been evoked by

* The American Crisis an4 the War. By Williamltorton Fullerton. London: Constable and Co. l2s. Od• net:l

the cause which we profess. But on this point we may be allowed to ex- press our detachment. We have never expected that the United States would fight on our side ; we have never asked her to do so ; and we have no desire that she should do so. In this country the Presidential Election was watched with great interest of course, but with no deep concern.

That is a proof of the truth of what we have just said as to the relation, as we see it, of the United States to the war. It was no great matter to us whom the American people elected. In noticing Mr. Fullerton's book we must remember that there may always be this difference of

view between a pro-Ally American writer and ourselves. He may feel—even without plainly saying so—that ho is out of a struggle which

plain duty required him to be in. Making whatever allowance should reasonably be made for an American who feels intensely and generously on this point, we desire simply to summarize Mr. Fullerton's statement. He says much that we should not wish to say, and which in any ease it would be improper for us to say. The words shall be his, not ours.

He gives much attention in the early part of his book to an analysis of the Monroe Doctrine. His purpose is to show that Mr. Wilson has been

false to the spirit of this instrument, and has therefore been false in an

interior sense to Americanism just as much as ho was false to it in an exterior sense when he failed to protest against the violation of the

Hague Conventions to which the United States was a party. Mr.

Fullerton sweeps aside the accretions of time—how many they are !- in order to take a clear look at the Monroe Doctrine in the circumstances of its creation and in its original intention. He shows how it was

originally not a cry of." Hands off ! " addressed by the New World to the Old, but was a repudiation and condemnation of the hateful auto-

cratic despotism practised by the Holy Alliance. He accepts the view that Great Britain was a participator in the doctrine equally with the United States. And as though to illustrate the feat that " Hands off ! " was not held to be the primary meaning of the doctrine, even in recent times tho Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and other consequential Treaties between Great Britain and America admitted the reasonable- ness of Great Britain having a say in the disposal of territory within the American Continent. The essence of the Monroe Doctrine, in fine, was to make a solemn protest against " the atrocious violation of the rights of nations by the interference of any one in the internal affairs of another." But ought not this essential spirit to have become engaged when Germany and Austria infamously bullied Serbia and violated the integrity of Luxemburg and Belgium ? Mr. Fullerton says :— " Thus, if the President of the United States had considered it con- venient in 1914, at the outbreak of the World War, he might even have taken his stand on the Monroe Doctrine to protest against the violation by Germany of the neutrality of Belgium and Luxembourg, and the shades of Jefferson and Madison and Monroe would have applauded.

By failing to protest, President Wilson suffered the grandest of the American traditions to lapse. Ho was an incompetent steward of the most sacred interests of the American people. Ho lacked statesmanlike presence of mind."

To some readers, not inflamed by the generous passion which wo have observed in pro-Ally American writers, tho argument above may seem a little forced. It is none the less remarkable as a sign of the funda- mental grievance of those Americans who take more or less Mr. Fullerton's point of view. No doubt Mr. Fullerton would himself admit that the failure to protest against the destruction of the painfully acquired principles of the Hague gives insurgent Americans a much stronger and more direct case. Of the responsibility of the United States for the Hague Convention he writes :—

" The ' Convention between the United States and other Powers respecting the rights and duties of neutral Powers and persons in case of

war on land,' which was signed at the Hague, October 18, 1907, which was ratified by the President of the United States, February 23, 190P, and proclaimed to the people of America by the President and Secretary of State, February 28, 1910, begins as follows :- ARTICLE I.—The territory of neutral Powers is inviolable. ARTICLE H.—Belligerents are forbidden to move across the territory of a neutral Power troops or convoys, either of munitions of war or supplies.

These articles received the sanction of the civilized world, China and Nicaragua alone excepted. The German Chancellor, in his famous

speech of August 4 in the Reichstag, acknowledged that Germany was

infringing international law when she invaded Luxembourg and Belgium. By paragraph 2, Article VI. of the Constitution of the United States all treaties made or which shall be made under the authority of the United States shall be the Supreme Law of the land.' The President, to be sure, can make treaties only by and with the advice of the Senate.'

But ratification of this particular treaty had been advised' by the Senate, March 10, 1908. The Treaty of the Hague of 1907 was, therefore, a part of the Supreme Law of the land, and even if it appeared Moon- venient to apply it, its application was obligatory. That it should not

have been applied on such an astounding provocation as Germany's action when she bludgeoned Belgium, in order to deal a knock-out blow

at France, and to browbeat the great British Liberal Party into cowardly neutrality—that, in fact, it should not have been waved in air by the knight-errant champions of all the American idealisms, the Bryanitea, the pacificists and other humanitarians ; that it should not, at all event., have been calmly submitted to one of its co-signatories, Germany, with a grave and stinging rebuke by the Chief Magistrate of the United States, the Constitutional High Priest charged with the safeguard of the Ark of the Covenant which contained that famous message of Monroe, worm-eaten in its coffer, but now again offered the chance of glorious

resuscitation that, at such an hour, the American ship-of-State should have been left abandoned by the gods, with a bewildered "pilot in the

chart-room, is one of those ironic—though from the point of view of American interests, one of those tragic—facts of history which history must nevertheless record with as little emotion as possible, fully content if it eventually succeed in determining the causes and divining some of the consequences."

No American, we suppose, has carried the responsibility of Mr. Wilson

• to a higher pitch than to say that the duty of protest was not merely required by wisdom, foresight, and statesmanship, but was an obligation laid on the President by the Supreme Law of his country. It will be seen that Mr. Fullerton dates the concern of the United States in the principles governing Europe right back to the days of the Holy Alliance. 'He will have nothing to do with the popular opinion that America's " manifest destiny " emerged for the first time in 1898, when the United States went to war with Spain over the management of the Spanish colonies. He has the highest possible ambitions as to how the United States should play her part, consciously and resolutely, in the conduct of civilization wherever men declare themselves civilized. It is in the light of these ambitions that he deplores in particular the neglect of Americans to unite themselves in a great and good service to the world. " What could not such a nation do," he cries in effect, "if only it were a nation ! " But he finds that the recent fissiparous tendencies of American life have been emphasized instead of being abated by Mr. Wilson's policy. The country which is a congeries of races has been allowed to feel that after all it is only a congeries. No common cause has been put before the American people to bind and unify them.

We have followed in outline the main part of Mr. Fullerton's argument. A few incidental statements may be mentioned in conclusion. Mr. Fullerton evidently has no doubt that the German Emperor when he theatrically descended upon Tangier some time after the conclusion of the Anglo-French Convention was in a very hesitating frame of mind, and hoped that some stroke of luck would rescue him from the compulsion being put upon him by the war party at Berlin. His total surrender to the war party belongs, according to this record, to a later date. Mr. Fullerton reproduces some notes, placed at his disposal, which were jotted down by a French visitor to the Emperor when the latter was in a very talkative mood. Here is the note on the Emperor's opinion of the relations of Germany and America :-

" The Americans. The vital question for the future of Europe and the world. It takes precedence of all others, leaving in the shadow divergencies that are merely European. Their (the Americans') inter- ference (immixtion) in European affairs is nearer at hand, more menacing, than is generally supposed. The idea of a European Zollverein will become imperative ; it is to be hoped that this will take place as soon as possible. This is an opinion which the Emperor declares he has had for some considerable time, and he says that the only man who had looked at the matter in the same way in advance was Jules Ferry."

We also note Mr. Fullerton's insistence on the importance of Mr. Roose- velt's intervention at the time of the Algeciras Conference :- " At this juncture, when the international situation was most tense, in June, 1905, it was the personal intervention of Mr. Roosevelt with the Emperor which led directly to the Agreement for the Algeciras Con- ference. At one moment, as everybody knows, the Conference reached a deadlock. It was then, and as a last resort, that the Emperor's attention was called to a letter which he had written the President in the preceding June—and suddenly the deadlock was broken. I need not. give further details, but I may add that though in Paris, in the summer of 1905, the people at large did not know precisely what had been done, they did know in an instinctive way that it was owing to Mr. Roosevelt that the matter had passed off without bringing war."