AMERICA AND THE WAR.
[To Tali EDITOR or TRI " senor...eon:el Sru,—The more deeply thoughtful people on this side of the ocean know that the United States should be aiding the Allies to preserve the liberties of the world. They know that the Allies are fighting the battle of America; that it is inglorious, stupid, and base for America to permit this to be done without rendering help ; that German conquest of Europe is German conquest of the United States ; and that Germany has long entertained the design of subjugating and enriching herself with both American continents. The policy of neutrality is therefore wholly shameful, because we have no right to permit other nations to make all the immense sacrifices required to save us. It is also a policy of the grossest unintelligence,
because it accepts whatever risks there are that the Allies may lose.
The American mind has been drugged into this comatose condition by the false stand taken by the Washington Government. In so critical a time the more earnest and far-sighted element of the nation has hesitated to criticize the President, in order to give him full opportunity to broaden to the issues. He has not done so. He does not understand them, and after this long period of waiting we are justified in the conviction that he is incapable of understanding them. He has groped and is groping. He has worried himself and the nation with entirely secondary, and, in the circum- stances, thoroughly foolish questions, while it is doubtful whether he has ever even discerned the main one sufficiently clearly earnestly to study it.
If this is true, and certainly there are ample proofs that it is true, the United States is directed by a weak and incom- petent President at a time when, beyond all others in its history, a man of great intelligence and strength is needed at the helm. That Mr. Wilson showed a seeming strength in his debate with Germany on the submarine problem has spread an illusory conception of his power. Germany did not yield to Wilson or the United States : she bowed to the most elementary common-sense. Aside from the failure of her sub- marine warfare, it was supreme folly for her to add the United States to her fighting enemies at present. Only an unmitigated lunatic would assume a new enemy when he needed his entire force to cope with the enemies already created.
The American Administration was fighting a windmill, and of course it gloriously won. Then it accepted public con- gratulations and honours for having won—nothing. It failed to see that it had been lashing the empty sky. For if Germany emerges from the war as victor all that Washington gained in its tedious, long-drawn-out parley will be brushed aside by a stroke of the Teuton pen. Germany will write the law of the seas to suit herself, and the United States can laugh or weep as it pleases.
While President Wilson was wasting time on these trivialities, the tremendous question whether the world's liberty was to go down to its death was being fought out in Europe. This small matter did not concern the American President at all. It does not concern him to-day. And this is because his mind does not think in large terms, and, while shrewd in technicalities, is not deeply penetrating. Plainly stated, the problems of this war have been too much for him.
This is the real explanation of the American paralysis toward the war. The President is fifteen months behind the world, and is acting as a ball and chain on the American mind to keep it stationary. His extreme slowness and inability to deal with the large principles are mistaken by the rank-and- file for the wisdom of masterful caution. While Europe has been making enormous strides of enlightenment and disoovery through the impetus of the war, and has utterly altered its ideas, fundamentally Wilson has not moved forward mentally a single step.
President Wilson's prime blunder is that of supposing that when the war is over, no matter how it ends, the world will go on substantially as it did before. If Germany conquers Europe, he expects America to be able to proceed on her peaceful path of superlatively passive virtue precisely as if the conquered Powers were undefeated and still able to hold Germany in cheek. It has never entered his benignant mind that if Germany should overthrow England, France, anti Russia, the Tonton Powers would swell to Pan-European magnitude, before which the United States would be a pitiful pygmy, and that the relentless Teuton tentacles would soon reach across the Atlantic despite the godlike pride of American non-resistance. This primitive mentality fits Mr. Wilson for the Presidency of the Garden of Eden, but wholly unfits him for any Presidency on a globe containing the mad world-lust of piratical Prussianized Germany. Mr. Wilson's neutrality is the product of this Edenie, once defensible, but now antiquated and fossilized state of mind.
To be duped by Germany because an unsophisticated and deficient President is duped by Germany is nevertheless no
exculpation for the American people. We shall certainly pay an enormous price for our stupidity. We have already deservedly lost the world's respect Under the blessed reign of Wilson we have become a sapless nonentity nation, actually more ready to fight Great Britain to increase the profits of our pork-packers, who are already gorged with wealth taken by monopoly from the American people, than to fight Germany to save the world's democracy, to save our own Republic, and to avert the future militarizing of America on a colossal scale, and a single-banded war with Germany on our own continent as vast and terrific as that now consuming Europe.—T am, Sir, N.,
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