MR. ROOSEVELT AND THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY.* Tan uppermost feeling of
every Englishman who reads Mr. Roosevelt's speeches and letters in The Progressive Party' ought to be, and we are sure will be, one of deep gratitude. Mr. Roo sevelt has said for us with groat force and very obvious sincerity all that we should wish to have said about our motive for going to war—the necessity and righteousness of fighting for the sanctity of international pledges. Mr. Roosevelt's mind works in the manner characteristic of most men who have become great in polities ; he sees what ho wants with a sharpness of vision that admits of no obscurities, and ho expresses his opinions with a simplicity that excludes all misunderstanding. Ho says in effect that the whole edifice of international life is founded on good faith, and that if good faith be renounced the palace of the dreams of civilize(' mon is dashed in ruins to the ground. Therefore (so runs the sense of his argument) it is the duty of civilized men to insist—by force if it cannot be done in any other way—on the highest standard of international good faith. To ignore this duty is not merely an omission, it is a definite act of wickedness. The more one loves peace, the greater is one's obligation to insist on international good faith. A man who ls not a pacificist may hope at the worst to save a situation by force of arms ; but to those who refuse to fight in any circumstances the preservation of good faith is everything.
Taking this argument—which we have only paraphrased—as his premiss, Mr. Roosevelt asks himself how President Wilson can have allowed himself to declare that the United States had no concern in the war. It seems to him almost incredible that Mr. Wilson—a man of peace, a man for whom the foundations of international lifo moan absolutely everything—should have said that the tearing up of treaties by Germany had nothing to do with America. We do not forget that Mr. Wilson's suppartara have explained that he never intended to profess unconcern, and that he appears to have done so only when certain passages in his speeches are quoted out of their context. But to our mind the crucial test came when he might have protested against the invasion of Belgium and the giving up of Louvain, Dinant, and the rest to military execution. Ho made no protest then. Of course, he protested vehemently afterwards against German crimes at sea, but he had let slip his first and greatest opportunity, and therefore used the next with proportionately weakened effect. It would not be proper for .us to express in detail our opinion of the gravity of Mr. Wilson's omission. We prefer to quote what Mr. Roosevelt says of his own countryman :-
" War has been waged on a more colossal scale than ever before in the world's history ; and cynical indifference to international morality and willingness to trample on inoffensive peace-loving peoples who are also helpless or timid have been shown on a greater scale than since the close of the Napoleonic Wars over a century ago. Alone of the groat powers, we have not been drawn into this struggle. A two-fold du y was imposed upon us by the fact of our prosperity and by the fact of our momentary immunity from danger. This two-fold duty was, first, to make our voice felt for the weak who had been wronged by the strong,
• (1) The Progressive Pasty: ifs Record front January to July, 1916 ; inch ding Statements and Speeches of Theodore Roosevelt. Complied by the Executive Com- mittee of the Progressive National Committee. New York : Press of Malden as Express Job Print Stoddard-Sutherland Press, 9-16 Murray Street.—(2i Theodora Roosevelt : the Logic of his Career. By Charles Cl. Washburn. Loudon: W Heinemann. Pls. net-4
End for international humanity and honour, and for peace on terms of justice for all concerned ; and, second, immediately and in thorough- going fashion to prepare ourselves so that there might not befall us on an even greater scale such a disaster as befell Belgium. We have signally failed in both duties. Incredible to relate, we are not in any substantial respect stronger at this moment in soldiers or rifles, in seamen or ships, because of any Governmental action taken in conse- quence of this war ; and moreover we have seen every device and provision designed by humanitarians to protect international right against international wrongdoings torn into shreds, and have not so much as ventured to speak effectively one word of protest. The result is that every nation in the world now realizes our weakness, and that no nation in the world believes in either. our disinterestedness or our manliness. The effort to placate outside nations by being neutral between right and wrong, and to gain good will along professional pacifist lines by remaining helpless for self-defence, has resulted, after two fatuous years, in so shaping affairs that the nations either already feel, or are rapidly growing to feel, for us, not only dislike but contempt. This is not a pleasant truth ; but it is the truth ; and as a people we will do well to remember Emerson's saying that in the long run the most unpleasant truth is a safer travelling companion than the pleasantest falsehood."
There is something extraordinarily bracing in Mr. Roosevelt's reiter- ation of his theme that pacific:sm is a positive moral fault. We are rather too apt to regard pacificism as a sort of intense amiability which merely happens to be misapplied. Our tendency is to think of the pacificist as morally on a high plane—a man who means very well, and whose only fault is that his heart has run away with his head. But Mr. Roosevelt will have nothing to do with such extenuations. The man who holds that international good faith is essential—as of course every pacificist must—and then refuses to support his opinion, whether through cowardice, or laziness, or muddle-headed thinking, is to Mr. Roosevelt a definite figure of evil in the world. He is a bad man ; a man who has made a great moral refusal ; a man who has debased the standards of civilization, and has been guilty of condoning what is - criminal even while his lips do service to what is of fair report. We do not know of any one who writes and speaks the English tongue who has expressed this view so powerfully as Mr. Roosevelt. We should be profoundly grateful to him if he had said nothing else but this in these speeches and letters, for we feel that in this matter he has not gone an inch too far or said a word too much. It is time that we deprived the pacificists of the credit, which has been conceded to them much too leniently, of being good people whose only fault is that they are a little too idealistic for a coarse world. By refusing to face the ultimate issue they cause the suffering which they begin by deploring.
The chief purpose of The Progressive Party, which contains, besides Yr. Roosevelt's speeches and letters, the programme of the party, is to show that the party has not by any means stultified itself, but has definitely followed the course which it set for itself in particular circum- stances, in giving its support to Mr. Hughes, the Republican candidate kr the Presidency. The Progressive Party, under Mr. Roosevelt's inspiration, stands in the present election campaign for Americanism and Preparedness. The party since the first few weeks of the war considered these things to be of such imperative importance that it abandoned all idea of running its own candidate if by so doing it would lessen the chance of the nation paying attention to them. Directly it became plain that the Republicans would not support Mr. Roosevelt as candidate of the combined Republican and Progressive Parties, and that Mr. Hughes adequately represented the views of the Progressive Party, Mr. Roosevelt declared for Mr. Hughes and absolutely refused to allow himself to be nominated. His disinterestedness has been above reproach. The other points of the Progressive creed—the State issues, such as the short ballot, initiative, referendum, and recall of judicial decisions--do not matter for the time being beside the greater objects. These objects aro to persuade Americans to insist on their rights wherever American rights are indistinguishable from human rights ; to play their part manfully in the world in the interests of good faith; to put away the monstrous doctrine that Americans can be partly Americans and partly Germans, Italians, Irishmen, or Englishmen; and finally, to pre- pare their Navy and Army so that they shall not be in the humiliating position of trying to insist on something—the Monroe Doctrine, for instance-- without an ounce of power to enforce their will. Mr. Roose- velt says, and we agree with him, that the United States has to take to day as critical a decision as in the days of Washington and Lincoln.
Some of Mr. Roosevelt's phrases are delightfully fresh. He speaks et the United States under the conception of " hyphened " American rationalism as " a polyglot boarding-house " ; the doctrine that Ameri- cans must never resist is the " Chinafication " of the United States ; under Mr. Wilson's method of treating Mexico, so that an indefinite bumber of Americans have been murdered, "peace continues to rage with the utmost ferocity." By the way, it is a most remarkable fact that dcring the recent anarchy in Mexico more Americans have been tiled than in the whole of the Spanish-American War ! The phrases we have quoted stand out the more strikingly for the very reason that Mr. Roosevelt's rush of sincere protest does not allow him normally to wait to turn his phrases. Some of the arguments are also wonderfully vivid. Take, for example, the historical reminder that the pacificists of their day denounced Washington as an anarchical militarist, and Lincoln as an unscrupulous dictator. Yet there is not an American pacificist to-day who is not willing to boast of what has been handed down to America by Washington and Lincoln. Equally good is the denunciation of the German-Americans, who, with a
cynical perversity that passes all limits, praise German militarism and support American pacificism in the same breath.
English readers will be interested to see how great a political question has been made in America of " industrial preparedness." It is recog- nized that no country can afford to let essential industries, industries necessary for national security in war, pass from its own control. As for naval and military preparedness, Mr. Roosevelt demands that the American Navy shall be second only to the British Navy, that tho American Mercantile Marine shall bo developed, that a Naval Reserve shall be created, that ships shall be run with a view to fighting and not as " ambulatory school houses," that there shall be a highly trained mobile Army of two hundred and fifty thousand men, and that universal military training on the Swiss or Australian model shall be introduced.
With this Progressive confession of faith Englishmen may profitably read Mr. Washburn's book.2 Mr. Washburn is an old College friend of Mr. Roosevelt, and from his intimate knowledge of him he produces many reminiscences to prove his disinterestedness. He is convinced that Mr. Roosevelt has no political ambition in the ordinary sense. Ho is a man of ideas, held with intense feeling, and to get his ideas accepted he would invariably sacrifice any merely personal interest. Mr. Roose- velt's conduct in the present Presidential campaign proves as much, even if it had not been proved already by such incidents as his asking Mr. Booker Washington to lunch at White House, and his unpopular insistence on the policy of recall.
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