many to behave with absolute recklessness towards the United States, not more pointedly by her attacks on American ships and nationals than by the cool indifference to American opinion manifested in her impertinent answers when called to account for them? In arriving at a conclusion the guiding thread must be the immediate necessities forced upon Germany by the military situation. Germany, risking everything on the present encounter, cannot stop to consider what effect her attitude towards America may have on the political and commercial relations between the two countries five or ten years hence; "in the luckiest event," as the Hamburg lottery circulars used to phrase it, she calculates that the other party will not dare to be too unfriendly. What matters solely for her now is to employ all her resources, submarines included, so as to achieve that desired event. This seems to rule out the interesting speculation that, failing any more congenial result, she is prepared to arouse such an overwhelming mass of hostility against herself and her unfortunate partners as to admit of her seeking terms with honor, in which terms President Wilson's Government might be expected to exercise an alleviating and, to put it frankly, a non-European influence. It would be idle to attempt to prophesy what may be the outcome of the next few months, but as yet there are no signs that Germany has abandoned all hope of victory; so far from challenging hopeless odds to grace a dignified retreat, she recently bullied Austria into offering humiliating terms to keep Italy out of the struggle; and, in any case, she is perfectly well aware that the intervention of every Power between the Canadian border and Cape Horn would not restrain the hounds of Europe from the final worry. We have never departed from the view that while the supreme decision for peace or war rests entirely with the free judgment of the United States Executive and people, their entry into the field might be attended with important disadvantages for the Allied cause. Probably the supplies of munitions which American firms are quite justified in selling to us, and which we are in a position through our Fleet to secure, would be seriously interrupted, owing to the home Government's right of pre-emption. The ambassadorial and consular services daily performed for the Allies by American representatives in the hostile countries would come to an end, and there is good reason for thinking that their watchfulness curbs the excesses to which the hapless militants and civilians in German hands are exposed. The great work of relief which America is carrying on in the devastated provinces of Belgium, a work which no other nation possesses either the wealth or the authority to undertake, would be suspended. It would, however, be a profound mistake to believe that the United States will not go to war under any stress of irritation, or that the forces of civilization would not be materially strengthened in certain directions if the millions of American manhood and the American Navy were completely available to help in prosecuting the campaign. Now it is extremely likely, from what we know of Teutonic insight and the halftruths of which it lays hold, that Germany is dominated by both these ideas, and that in her elementary but very definite analysis a nation which will not fight and which cannot fight is not worth troubling about. Germany has made several equally gross errors of comprehension before and since the war began. But her conduct towards the States, if we bear in mind her military necessities, may be traced to something more positive than neglected risks. Whether or not the American Government objects to its merchant ships being sent to the bottom and its citizens murdered, the war policy of Germany must go on. The submarine raids or, as they may be called more truthfully, patrols have a twofold object. They are meant to scare neutrals from sending us supplies of war material and food, to push up freights so that the cost of living may be raised, and to check our large coastwise traffic. This movement the authorities are bound to combat with much greater resolution, not only in waging constant war upon enemy submarines, but in defeating their purpose by ensuring more abundant supplies and keeping the price of necessaries, home-produced as well as imported, at the lowest possible level. The second object of submarine activities is to bolster up the fiction, widely advertised and still implicitly credited in Germany, that Britain is cut off from the rest of the world, hemmed in by a ring of steel and so forth, and that scarcity, if it has not yet cowed the white-livered English, will so increase as to stir us to rebellion and quicken our desire for any sort of a peace. It may not be conceivable to our amateur strategists, but a methodical German War Staff devotes some share of its attention to studying with more or less success the temperament and bearing of the civil population in both countries. Despite the stringent terms of Presi The Outlook. dent Wilson's Note, to which Germany has at length replied, submarine warfare may be expected to continue; and a prolonged interchange of diplomatic communications, in which Germany would willingly engage, will not stop it. It is apparent from the evasive character of her reply that she relies on the first heat of indignation dying down as time passes, and hopes that by starting a discussion on secondary legal and ethical questions the memory of over a hundred American lives ruthlessly cut off will merge in a tendency to blame the war and all parties to it. Captain Persius exposes this forecast with uncommon frankness, but it is unthinkable that it should prove true. The President has pledged the honor of the United States to hold Germany strictly accountable, and we may be sure that the enforcement of accountability does not mean for Dr. Wilson keeping a faithful tally of insults to the flag, torpedoed ships, and murdered citizens, and presenting a bill for heavy damages to be collected by other Powers; further than that we need not speculate on his line of action, which is not so limited as is usually supposed. What concerns us more nearly is the bankruptcy of conscience revealed in Germany's lying subterfuges and her despairing adherence to a form of warfare which is both crimi nal and ineffective. Germany, rulers and people alike, is dead to moral responsibility, and does not care who knows it. PRESIDENT WILSON'S REAL DIFFICULTY. The German reply to President Wilson's Note about the Lusitania outrage was the reply of a Government in a very difficult situation. Mr. Wilson had asked for a specific undertaking that the submarining of merchantmen should stop. The Germans attach importance to their submarine campaign, and probably do not intend under any circumstances to stop it. At the same time they have many reasons for not quarrelling abruptly with the United States. What struck the English reader of the Note were the points addressed to the American Government, the suggestions and allegations made solely to gain time; but these are not, in a sense, its most material features. It is to the American voter that Germany directs her main appeal, addressing him with scant regard for formal proprieties over his Government's head. Her diplomacy and her enormous Press propaganda work together to instil two broad ideas into the American mind. These are: (1) that Great Britain took the lead in breaking international sea-law, and that German breaches of it are only a reply to an illegal British attempt to starve the German civil population; (2) that the export of munitions by neutrals is unfair, and the rule allowing it is an anomaly consecrated by British sea-power for its own advantage. Neither contention is easy to argue, as one would have to argue it before a serious tribunal. But newspaper readers, and even newspaper writers, are not in general such a tribunal. Simple reiteration has more influence on them than subtle argument. By simple reiteration Germany has obtained a large amount of acceptance for both the views that she urges, even among Americans whose sympathies now run strongly against her. And this is a fact which may have to be increasingly reckoned with in the event of the United States' continued neutrality. Let us look briefly at the two points. Almost from the first week of war the German newspapers told their own public that the British were pursuing a "starving-out plan," and were stopping foodstuffs consigned to Germany for the civil population. The legend was soon transported to the United States. In point of fact it was base less. We had no "starving-out plan." It was not till the present year, after the German Government had seized all the corn-stuffs in Germany, and thereby abolished the possibility of distinguishing between a civil and a military destination, that we for the first time stopped a wheat-ship, the Wilhelmina. Long before this the Germans had sunk food-ships bound to England. The first case was in September of last year, and the ship was one bound for Dublin and Belfast ports that could only be called "military" in the sense that every port in Germany could. After the policy initiated over the Wilhelmina (and this, be it remembered, only affected the cereals, which the German Government had nationalized, not other importable foods, e.g. meat, sugar or potatoes) we did nothing further till our Order in Council in March. Now, whatever be thought of the Order, one thing is certain on the dates; it came after, not before, the submarine campaign, and was the answer to it, not the provocation for it. When that campaign began, our record regarding foodstuffs was clear in international law. The notion entertained by responsible newspapers in the United States, that in law-breaking, if not in inhumanity, we indulged as gratuitously as our enemy, entirely misrepresents the situation. So with the munitions question. President Wilson and Mr. Bryan, taking their stand on accepted international law, have officially opposed the German argument. But a great many Americans are accepting the suggestion that, although munition exports are legal, they are anomalous, and that the law was shaped by Great Britain for her own advantage. Was it? The exact opposite is the case. The export of arms and munitions by neutrals (which has never before been seriously objected to, and of which in modern times far more advantage has been taken by Krupps than by any other firm) is much oftener overland than oversea. It is the land Powers who have made the usage; and they could always continue it across their contiguous land frontiers, even if the law were altered to forbid it. In the only case where the export would necessarily be by water-viz., the export of ships-it is forbidden by international law already. The German grievance under this head disappears the instant one tries to reduce it to a serious theory. Flimsy as they are, these German cobwebs have a serious hold on the United States, which is a perpetual astonishment to the English reader of American journals, but must be a very real difficulty to Mr. Wilson's Administration. Compelled, as any Administration would be, to shape their course mainly by facts, not fictions, he The New Statesman. and his colleagues cannot easily satisfy the feeling to which such suggestions give rise. It is therefore none too difficult for German-Americans to impute partisanship to the President, and for the German Government to appeal behind him in this sense to the masses of voters. If actual war broke out, the appeals would at once fail, and practically all Americans would stand together. But the maintenance of a perpetually challenged neutrality, in face of an ever-nearing Presidential election, and subject to the conditions of newspaper rule in questions of foreign policy, creates a very critical internal problem for the United States. To a considerable extent it is a democratic rather than an American difficulty-one which all great democracies under similar conditions may have to face in respect of foreign policy. THE BALANCE OF POWER IN THE PACIFIC. The strain of a world-war is testing every link in the chain of human activity. Amongst European nationalities the Spanish alone would appear to be placed geographically beyond the pale of its contagion, yet even in Spain the fierce tonic of fighting on the side of sane ideals begins to appeal to the best instinct, the ripest intellect of the nation. The world is in a blaze from end to end. The whole of the northern continent of America will probably be shortly involved, and the amorphous vastness of the Mongol race is now stretching its limbs, awakening to the stir of conflict. Thus it is that The tides of day and night It is better a thousand times that the issue be faced now than that the dire insanity of kultur should be permitted sullenly to gather its forces until these attain an overwhelming degree of virulence. Better than this, the ultimate dominance of the brute, would it be that human existence, with all its marshalled forces, all its potentialities, should be swept away and cease to be, for the triumph of German kultur involves a deification of bestiality, a dethronement of every attribute by which men have in the past risen above the level of the panther. How will the coming redistribution of power affect the balance of the Pacific? Many travellers from the Far East predict that the Japanese are developing an incipient Teutonism, that the degraded maxims of that accursed system are in Japan beginning to breed a fresh chimera of the familiar type. They tell us that the Chinese, in spite of the quaint topsy-turvydom of some of their ideas, are more amenable to the straightforward methods of the Britisher than are their yellow rivals. They say that Japan is but waiting her chance to spring at the throat of China, to drag her down as a cheetah, stalking some shy creature of the woods, brings him to the ground, huge as his comparative bulk may be. In spite of much that is profoundly disquieting, there is a good deal which inspires hope for the future. Japan is the ally of Great Britain, China our traditional friend. The whirligig of time has convinced the Chinese that we have no desire to see their territory in the melting-pot. Our relations with their Government are elementarily clear. We claim and desire equality for commercial enterprise, the opportunity to sow without hindrance the seeds to which we attribute national regeneration. In a word, we stand for the open trade door and Western ideals. The United States Government and France follow in these particulars in our track. Germany stands for the savagery of the mailed fist, a savagery naked and unashamed; Japan looks across the narrow seas and dreams of conquest or peaceful penetration. Will she seek a pretext for stirring a new struggle and perhaps winning her way by Eastern Crecys and Agincourts? Future history must say. Probably the restraining counsel of Great Britain and more potently still the new ideals of the West, which are permeating the East with astounding rapidity, will check this dangerous movement and in the issue prevent the ghastly spectacle of the Mongol races at deadly grapple one with the other. The leaven of Christian ideal is undoubtedly spreading like a forest fire throughout the East. That in many respects it will assume novel aspects is pretty certain. Those who confound in its teaching the fleeting and acci dental with the vital and elemental do harm to the cause they profess to serve. If a truly great prophet of idealism were to arise to-day in Japan, preaching scorn of materialism, probably he would sway the entire people into a new orbit. That the hour should bring the seer seems the best hope of the Eastern world, which has ever been dominated by abstract conceptions and occult philosophies. One thing is certain. The German flag is hauled down for good in China. The lavish expenditure in Shantung is one insignificant entry in the accounts of that well-nigh bottomless pit of débâcle which she has to face. A map of the islands of the Pacific resembles nothing so much as a scrap of the chart of the heavens. Islands, atolls, and ringed lagoons are scattered broadcast over the mysterious immensity of that region. To how many a man, weary with the puzzle of life as we see it under gray skies, has come the call of an untrammelled existence, lapped in by unfathomed blue around and overhead? Larger constellations burning, mellow moons and happy skies, Breadths of tropic shade and palms in cluster, knots of Paradise. So sang the neurotic hero of Locksley Hall. Thus too doubtless came the vision to Robert Louis Stevenson when, under the compelling force of illhealth, he retired like a hermit to make a home in Samoa. The International Commissioners appointed by Great Britain, Germany, and the United States under the Convention of 1900 allotted this group of islands to Germany. The United States, by the same Convention, secured the Island of Tutuila, with its great natural harbor as a prospective naval base. Great Britain acquired no fresh territory, but merely the right to hold undisturbed what already belonged to her. It is |