THE MEANING OF THE WAR

LOUIS HOWLAND, LITT. D.

If America and her Allies are to win this war they will have to do a good deal more than defeat Germany. It will be necessary for them to root out of their life all those political and religious principles and ideals that have for many years flourished in Germany, and which, under the name of kultur, have appealed so strongly to certain people in other countries. The thought of the German people has expressed itself in this war, and the world has with horror recoiled from it. There is nothing that has been done by the Germans in Belgium, France and Poland that is not in complete accord with their life philosophy. Perhaps never before in history has a civilization so perfectly embodied itself in action. We have seen kultur at work. It has been praised and defended in its most extreme and cruel manifestations by German preachers, scientists and university professors. Whatever this kultur may be in peace, in war it is scientifically organized and applied cruelty and barbarism.

It is against this that the free nations of the world are fighting. Whether or not we are successful in eliminating it from German life, we can and must exclude it from our own life, and from the life of the world outside Germany. Humanity is at war against it because it fears and dreads it. There is not a nation anywhere outside the circle of the Teutonic allies that does not look on Germans trained in

this system and living by it, as bad and dangerous neighbors. Such men are bound by no moral law in their political action and do not pretend to be. International law simply does not exist. Indeed, it has been said that the Germans would recognize no international law till the time came for them to frame a code of their own, which they would impose on the world. Treaties are "scraps of paper." The weak have no rights as against the strong. If the population of occupied territory stands in the way of its Germanization, that population is deported or exterminated. Children of enemy countries are mutilated so that they may never be able to serve in the army. All this is "efficiency" applied to war and conquest. It is justified on the grounds of reasons of state. What is alarming is, not that thousands of people are tortured, maimed and murdered, but that such crimes are looked on by the government and men guilty of them as patriotic. It is all kultur.

As international law and treaties and Hague and Geneva agreements are swept aside when they conflict with the aims and ambitions of Germany, the law of humanity is abrogated. Herod was no crueller to the children of Judea than the German commanders have been to the children of Belgium and France, indeed, to the American children who were murdered on the Lusitania. The war, on the part of the Allies is, therefore, a war for humanity and civilization. No war ever fought was more so. President Wilson has said, with rare accuracy and felicity, that we are fighting a "Thing," and it is so. That thing is without heart or conscience-it is, in short, kultur. There is no place in a modern social order for such a system. Either it or civilization must disappear.

The American people are members of a race that has for

a thousand years been toiling and struggling for liberty. From Magna Charta down the movement toward liberty. has been steady and persistent. In Indiana to-day all the statutes of England enacted prior to the fourth year of James I, with certain specified exceptions, are the law of the state, as much so as they would have been if enacted by our own legislature. All our great institutions safeguarding liberty we get from England. No race or nation discovered liberty. All men have known something of it, and all have longed for it. But it is the glory of the English race that it wrote it into the law, upheld it against tyrants, built institutions to guard it, and applied it practically to life. No race has rendered a greater service to the world. It was for this liberty that our fathers fought in the Revolution. Their contention was that a German king of England denied to Americans the liberties of Englishmen. Such are our traditions, and they must be upheld against German kultur.

France, too, has rendered great service to the sacred cause of liberty. In the closing years of the eighteenth century her philosophers and soldiers spread the revolutionary gospel throughout Europe. Crowned heads trembled before the republican armies. Our own leaders were greatly influenced by such men as Rousseau, this being notably true of Jefferson. The French battle-cry, "liberty, equality and fraternity," stirred men to the depth of their souls. Wherever the republican armies went-and for years this was true of the Napoleonic armies-they were welcomed everywhere by the people as friends. In no country is the principle of equality as completely recognized as in France. To her, free men everywhere owe a debt they can never hope to repay. To turn for leadership from her to the kaiser and the crown

prince, and their hirelings in pulpit and university chair, would be an act of madness. America's contributions to the movement of the human spirit toward liberty have been great. We fought two wars with England for our own liberty, and one with Spain for the liberty of another people. Whenever men in any part of the world have turned their faces toward freedom, they have always had our sympathy, and such cooperation as we could give. Distressed though we all were by Russia's collapse, our president was quick to speak a word of encouragement, and our government refused to be a party to any plan that even seemed to be inspired with hostility to the Russian people. We have written the old freedom-amplified considerably-that we brought with us from England into our great charters, the Declaration of Independence and our national and state constitutions.

These three nations stand for humanity, law, national good faith, liberty, the dignity of manhood and womanhood, and democracy. In all of them the people are the rulers, with power to make and unmake governments. America, in particular, is the land of opportunity, and is eagerly sought by men from all lands, even by Germans who were unable to bear the yoke their fathers bore. This is the land of hope and aspiration. Many of our defects are simply the price we pay for liberty, individual independence and initiativegreat blessings all. It is not denied that slavery is a discipline-but so is freedom, which is also a good in itself.

The war is not one between two groups of nations, but between one nation and the rest of the world-really between the medieval and the modern worlds. The race has reached a turning point in its history. The crisis is the gravest that it has ever faced. Bulwer says in his novel, The Last of the

Barons, that the victory of Edward IV over Warwick was the victory of the modern man. The triumph of America, Great Britain and France, with their Allies, over Germany, will be the triumph of the modern spirit. We may hope that Germany will be "The Last of the Barons." Her system is like her own poisoned gas, deadly to liberty and to all the other great and lifting ideals by which the free nations are inspired. We can not consent to go through life wearing gas masks-we must get rid of the gas. The Germans themselves, if they are wise, and know "the things that belong unto their peace," will join in the work of emancipating. man's spirit.

But whatever course they may take, the duty of Americans is plain. They dare not turn from Runnymede, the Place de la Concorde, Bunker Hill and Independence Hall to the Mark of Brandenburg, which gave birth to the Hohenzollerns and their systems. The freedom, safety and happiness of the world depend on the decision. At the suggestion of a British prime minister we interposed the Monroe Doctrine between the free peoples of this hemisphere and a system only less vicious than that of Germany. Now it is suggested by Lord Bryce that there ought to be a Monroe Doctrine for the world. Certainly liberty must be made secure, and the independence of little peoples respected. There must be some effort to make right, rather than might, the law. States must be the servants of the people, and not their masters. The diplomacy of the bully, the spy, the briber and the dynamiter must be rooted out. There must be the fullest recognition of the truth that the earth belongs to the people who live on it, and not to self-selected shepherds of mankind claiming to hold their commissions directly from Almighty God.