example of a national consciousness perpetuated throughout the centuries. To deny it this right for the sole reason that it has to do only with a small community would be to admit that the criterion of justice toward nations varied according to their territorial expansion, and if to deny this right we fall back on the international character of this port must we not take into account Antwerp, Genoa, Rotterdam

all of them international ports which serve as outlets for a variety of nations and regions without their being obliged to pay dearly for this privilege by the suppression of consciousness?

And can one describe as excessive the Italian aspiration for the Dalmatian coast, this bulwark of Italy throughout the centuries, which Roman genius and Venetian activity have made noble and great, and whose Italian-ness, defying all manner of implacable persecution throughout an entire century, to-day shares with the Italian nation the same emotions of patriotism? The principle is being adduced with regard to Poland that denationalization obtained by violent and arbitrary methods should not constitute grounds for de jure claims. Why not apply the same principle to Dalmatia? And if we wish to support this rapid synthesis of our good international fights by cold statistical facts I believe I am able to state that among the various national reorganizations which the Peace Conference has already brought about, or may

The Italian Press Bureau, April 24

bring about in the future, none of these reorganized peoples will count within its new frontiers a number of people of a foreign race proportionately less than that which would be assigned to Italy. Why, therefore, is it especially the Italian aspirations that are to be suspected of imperialistic cupidity?

In spite of all these reasons, the history of these negotiations shall demonstrate that the firmness which was necessary to the Italian delegation was always associated with a great spirit of conciliation in the search for a general agreement that we all wished for fervently. The Presidential message ends by a warm declaration of friendship of America toward Italy. I answer in the name of the Italian people, and I acclaim with pride the right and the honor which is due me. as the man who, in the most tragic hour of this war, uttered to the Italian people the cry of resistance at all costs. This cry was listened to and answered with a courage and abnegation of which few examples can be found in the history of the world, and Italy, thanks to the most heroic sacrifices and the purest blood of her children, has been able to climb from an abyss of misfortune to the radiant summit of the most resounding victory. It is, therefore, in the name of Italy that I, in my turn, express the sentiment of admiration and deep sympathy that the Italian people has for the American people.

THE American people is a people of great energy. As soon as it had risen to the height of its great duty, it accepted it fully. In an address on January 22d, the President had already announced that the peace of the world would have to be guaranteed by sanctions, and that the League of Nations would have to repose upon the organized major force of mankind.' It was with practically one consent that the nation accepted the breaking off of diplomatic relations, and, shortly after, the declaration of war. The means were adapted to the ends with a decision and promptness in which the earnestness of the people anticipated the requests of the government. Conscription, tripled taxes, the huge loans issued in quick succession, the repeated subscriptions on behalf of charities of moral and social interest in America and the Allied countries, the food restrictions and the cutting down of expenses, everything was accepted with patriotic light-heartedness. The vigor of the individual efforts, the spontaneously offered services of eminent men, the readiness with which the great companies accepted the direction of the State, the willingness of women to take the places of men in trades and professions, the generous warm-heartedness of the crowds in encouraging the valor of the soldiers, the forgetting of the old quarrels with England, the enthusiastic sympathy for France - the the intensity of their feeling and their highly tensioned activity in a thousand forms, proved how deeply the moral signification of the conflict had pene

trated into their consciences and what support they all drew, in their determination to serve, from the great hope of human progress which glowed beyond the sacrifices.

Several times did the President give utterance to the thoughts of the nations. It is to his messages and speeches that we must turn to find the conception America had of the struggle, of the end it was to lead to, and the political and moral transformations that would result from it.

The idealistic enthusiasm with which the Americans threw themselves into the war gave its character to their conception of the war. The military and naval operations - great as was the vigor with which they were determined to carry them on were only the means for them, not the end. They wished for victory as the preliminary to the triumph of the moral cause, which was for them the real objective. Not only had they laid down the principle that no animosity, no spirit of reprisal, no intention of splitting up or annihilating Germany must enter into the conditions that would settle the conflict, but they also wished to save Germany from herself, open her eyes to the shameful deeds which she had allowed herself to be led into, bring her back.to the elevation of feeling and thought she had risen to in the time of her Kants and Goethes and Beethovens, save her virtues from the welter of low cupidities into which they had sunk. The victory was to affranchise the peoples, the German people as well as the others. It was to be under

stood that the declaration of war to which the United States had been driven despite herself was addressed to the imperial government—a criminal, perfidious, and rapacious institution, an organ of despotic power and barbarous feudalism - but not to the German nation. The President repeated it in nearly all his speeches: We are the sincere friends of the German people' (February 3d, 1917). We have no quarrel with the German people' (April 2d, 1917). "The object of this war is to deliver the free peoples of the world from the menace and the actual power of a vast military establishment controlled by a government which has secretly planned to dominate the world. . . . This power is not the German people. (Answer to the Pope, August 28th, 1917.)

If the people differs from the government, the difference must be evident, explicable, justifiable. It is undeniable that in affirming this difference the President has expressed rather a hope of the heart and the imagination than a fact grasped by cold thought. Democratic and humanitarian idealism required Germany to return sincerely, after her defeat, to Greco-Christian civilization, to take up her place in the progress of political institutions and moral ideas, and recognize international obligations as being the categorical imperative of the conscience of peoples. Idealism required it . . . it was taken for granted that hard experience would bring the Germans to resipiscence. The natural and traditional optimism of the Americans led them to this favorable interpretation. Was not the example of their history there to prove that the force of truth and justice acts on collectivities as on individuals? Had not kindliness and confidence, bequeathed by Lincoln before his tragic death as a moral legacy, succeeded in transforming the South

erners so thoroughly that, a few years after the war, the union of thought and feeling had been completely reëstablished within the reconciled nation? Were not the Germans of America seen, at the very time when the worldwide cataclysm of the Great War was at its height, to range themselves bodily on the side of right and humanity, as much out of sound common sense as American loyalism? Why should the same sincere conversion not take place among the Americans of the old country, under the lash of the ordeal and from the contagion of moral nobleness? Evangelical charity and humanitarian faith united taught the Americans that man returns to 'natural goodness' when the causes of mental error and corruption which momentarily held it in suspension had been removed. Were the confederacy of the Hohenzollern, Prussian imperialism and militarism and the iron garrote that was strangling Germany reduced to nothingness the country of discipline, labor, domestic virtues, poetry, and Gemütlichkeit would become capable once more of generous outbursts.

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Besides, were there not in Germany Liberals and Socialists who might play the part of a ferment, working upon the masses? Doubtless even these enlightened and advanced elements had been contaminated by the infection of PanGermanism. The President had recognized it in his speech of June 14th, 1917 (Flag-Day address): "They are employing Liberals in their enterprise. They are using men in Germany and without, as their spokesmen, whom they have hitherto despised and oppressed, using them for their own destruction, Socialists, the leaders of Labor, thinkers they have hitherto sought to silence. . . .' Let them succeed and these men, their instruments to-day, will then be reduced to dust under the weight of the great Empire.

But let light and pure air penetrate into that prison of minds and consciences, called Germany, and things will change. 'German rulers have been able to upset the peace of the world only because the German people were not suffered under their tutelage to share the comradeship of the other peoples of the world either in thought or in purpose' (speech of December 4th, 1917). This idealistic confidence in the final 'goodness' of the Teutons might have induced America to practise a disastrous policy of circumspection and abdication, if her robust realism, her strong common sense, her natural aversion to evil, had not urged her to energetic action. Chastisement first, clemency and pardon afterwards.

It was these solid qualities of a healthy, strong people, that not only maintained and accelerated the American effort, but also closed the ears of the President to every insidious proposition of premature peace. Neither the indirect offers of Germany, nor the Pope's request (which might have been thought to have been suggested by the Chancellor himself) shook him. The Pope he answered with the breadth of sentiment and the vigor of thought which characterized his policy throughout the war, repeating that he desired a just peace, equitable for the conquered as well as for the conqueror, but a durable one, too, and that that peace could not be signed except by a German Government sprung from the people, and expressing the will of the people. Four months later (December 4th, 1917) he pronounced the memorable words: "This intolerable thing of which the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly face, this menace of combined intrigue and force, . . . a thing without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed, and if it be not ut

...

terly brought to an end, at least shut out from the friendly intercourse of the nations. . . . Finally, in April, 1918 (after the German offensive of March 21st), the President, who had already taken the necessary steps for the transportation of 250,000 American soldiers to France every month, declared: 'For myself, I am ready, ready still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just and honest peace. But the answer, when I proposed such a peace, came from the German commanders in Russia. . . . I accept the challenge. I know that you accept it. All the world shall know that you accept it. . . . There is, therefore, but one response possible for us: Force, force to the utmost, without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force, which shall make right the law of the world. . . .'

There is no trace of weakness of design or of feebleness of will in these words, which, however, at the very moment when they let loose in all its tragic horror the might of war, make the word peace ring full and clear above the uproar. War is the only realistic means of action

the only one whose echo in the thick

shock can have its skull of the Teuton; peace is the ideal purpose, the final objective, which alone the American conscience can accept to shed blood and inflict suffering. Not once has the President announced any aggravation of the policy -necessary and salutary-of force. without referring to the elevated motives and the wish for justice of America. His war-speeches have been peacespeeches as well.

Now, said the President one day, according to the course of human things, what is just is also what is expedient. By solemnly saying that America entered the war on the condition only that the victorious Allies should not make a wrong use of their victory, the President exercised a

moral influence on the elements of the German and Austrian populations which had not been completely barbarized by the militarist régime and Pan-German education. education. Over the trenches, across the electrified barbed-wire entanglements along the frontiers, there came to the liberal bourgeoisie and the Socialist workmen of Germany echoes of the words of the President. American propaganda was careful that the Central Empires should know the very texts of the pledge of honor taken by the President.

'We shall be willing to pay the full price of peace. We know what that price will be. It will be full, impartial justice, justice done at every point and to every nation, our enemies as well as our friends' (speech of December 4th). But they read also the irrevocable conditions upon which alone America agreed to keep that pledge: 'When this thing and its power are indeed defeated, when the German people have spokesmen whose word we can believe, and when those spokesmen are ready in the name of those people to accept the common judgment of the nations as to what shall henceforth be the bases of law and of covenant for the life of the world. . . .'

The opinion of the Allied countries is divided as regards the opportunity and the efficaciousness of this policy of President Wilson's. The Allied governments, without opposing his methods, have refrained from practising them themselves. President Wilson, supported by the large majority of his fellow citizens, has patiently persevered in his employment of 'political strategy' following out at the same time, with great rapidity and energy, the plans of military strategy. It

has been his wish that none of the purposes of the American government (which is the same thing as the American people) should remain secret: the

ends America was aiming at in war, and the principles she wished to found peace on, were frequently laid before the world, explained alike to the friends and enemies of the Great Republic. It has not to distinguish between them, its policy being that of absolute justice and loyalty. Its 'open diplomacy' kept nothing back, demands and promises, the submission required and the securities offered, inflexible sentences and decisions prompted by equity, the injunctions addressed to the conquered and the engagements entered into by the conquerors — everything was submitted to the inspection of the people. At the same time as the armies of the Entente closed in tighter and tighter around the German armies, the imponderables projected across the frontiers exercised their influence continually on the intelligences and the wills.

The use of the political arm

as

a secondary means, doubtless — has not turned out to be so bad after all. Is it not often found that in one's relations with individuals, one makes them honest by treating them like honest people? One must, of course, be on one's guard, and not let one's self be duped. But, it being understood that the pression of force was in no wise relaxed, could not an attempt be made to bring the Germans back to some conception of right and humanity, by showing them that the nations who were doing justice on them were capable, in spite of provocations and insults, of acting rightfully and humanely? Even if it were granted that these kindly proceedings would have been fruitless in 1914 (and that had to be admitted), had not the situation undergone modification in 1917 and 1918? Might not suffering, hunger, and defeat become aids to repentance? Would it always be possible for the junkers and the military clan to de