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I wish to express warmest appreciation of your editorial on "The War Against Popular Rights." It sets forth the real gist of the war in a most able and illuminating manner. The issue is between militarism and civilianism. Should Germany win a triumphant victory, the whole world in due time will be turned

into a military camp. Her writers have revealed only too plainly in what contempt she holds the Monroe Doctrine. Let her get the mastery of the seas, and America will be driven to double her navy. It has been the English navy more than ours that has compelled outward respect for that Doctrine. any scouts the idea, let him observe how Germany trampled every principle of justice under foot and robbed China of one of her finest harbors-Tsingtau-with much territory besides one of the most high-handed political crimes that history records.

St. Paul, Minnesota.

JAMES WALLACE.

If

Why should England have the supremacy of the sea? Should it not be a highway where our ships or German ships or any other ships can go unmolested? In fact, I fear the time will come when we, too, like Germany, will find that to protect our commerce we will have to fight, because England's present attitude is doubtless due to her feeling that Germany is crowding her in the markets of the world. When she finds that we are crowding her, she will be ready to combine with Jap or Turk against us. HENRY VOS HOLL. Warrenton, Missouri.

...

I have just read the August 15 number of The Outlook, and was greatly interested in your article on "The War Against Popular Rights." Your views on the European war are the views of ninety-five per cent of the people of East Tennessee who appreciate the brave struggle of little Servia against her infinitely selfish and egotistical antagonist, Austria, and heartily sympathize with the small but liberty-loving nations south of the Danube... The almost inevitable result of this war will be the downfall of the Hohenzollern dynasty amidst the lamentations and execrations of the mothers left childless, the wives left husbandless, the children left fatherless, and a people humiliated, crushed, and defeated. L. C. FORD.

Harrogate, Tennessee.

I wish to commend very highly the spirit of your war editorials in your issue of August

One of the great facts in history has been the pressure of the semi-barbaric people of the East against the civilization of the West. Every school-boy knows this; but The Outlook makes no account in its editorial of the almost inevitable conflict between Slav and Teuton. If the fervent wish of your editor is gratified, and Germany is crushed, is it not probable that Russia will be the only permanent beneficiary of the war? After France has the lost provinces and England has destroyed the German fleet which has caused her so much hysteria, and recovered the markets which the Germans won in fair competition, then what? Why not Russia in possession of most of Austria and the Balkans, perhaps under the alias of "Greater Servia;" then a rest, then Turkey and Persia; then, after another rest, India; and, in the fullness of time, all of Europe she desires? Who can stop her on land with Germany crushed?

It may be in the providence of God the Slav will have so developed as to be worthy of the mastery of the world by that day; but it ill becomes Anglo-Saxons in this hour to uphold his hands and further his plan by sword or pen.

ROBERT M. E. SCHAUFFLER, M.D. Kansas City, Missouri.

Among the many problems suggested by the present war in Europe not the least interesting is the question of its final effect upon government. The opinion is often expressed that a costly and devastating war must have a blighting effect upon democratic institutions. At first sight this view seems plausible, but the course of history, I think, teaches us precisely the contrary.

Certainly for the defeated nation the postbellum period has more than once proved a period of political regeneration. Take Prussia. Utterly crushed beneath the heel of Napoleon, she emancipated her serfs. Not surely from motives of sweet Christian charity, but because a freeman is a better fighter than a slave. Take France. Her downfall in 1870 involved an abolition of the Empire and a return to the Republic. Take Russia.

It is assuredly no accident that she secured her first parliament after her repulse at the hands of the Japanese. Even in backward Turkey there are signs that the repeated losses of territory have fed a feeble but perfectly genuine movement toward reform.

Does the great moral law apply also to nations? He that loses his life shall find it. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. M. C. BURKE.

Your editorial "The War Against Popular Rights," in The Outlook for August 15, shows such a misunderstanding of the past and present conditions, such a twisting of historical facts and inconsequent reasoning, that I cannot help but criticise the same severely.

According to your version of the present European war, Emperor William is the "goat." If Germany wanted war, why did she not begin one while the English had their hands full in the Transvaal, or Russia in the Far East? If the German Emperor is such a brute as you describe him, why is the emigration from Germany so much less now than it was at the beginning of his reign? If it was not the German Emperor who kept the peace of Europe in the past twenty-five years, who has kept it? It would be absolute calumny to accuse him of wanting war.

The Germans love their Emperor. They like authority, and their country looks orderly. The American dislikes authority, and his country shows the dislike. Suppose the Chinese or Japanese should threaten to overwhelm the United States, as the Slavs do Austria and Germany, what a howl to arms would rise at once in the face of such danger! You speak of Germany violating Belgium's neutrality. How about Dr Jamieson's raid into the Transvaal? The occupation of the Transvaal, Egypt, Tibet, by the British ? Of China and Persia by Russia ? Of New Mexico and Arizona by the United States ? To-day England would be only too glad to grab the Panama Canal.

ger!

The talk of arbitration in this war shows that those who are talking entirely fail to grasp the situation. No doubt England would like to arbitrate and leave Germany and Austria in the statu quo. Arbitration would do about as much good as it would have done to arbitrate the Civil War. Bernard Shaw has let the cat out of the bag by declaring that " "the English do not want a Germany of Bismarck, but one of Beethoven and Goethe." Of course they do not want a

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It is not only fair, but also wise, to hear the other side! Germany would not consider this a fight for its very existence if it were not that England's envy of her commercial prosperity and France's spirit of revenge, frequently manifested, forced the sword into her unwilling hands after more than forty years of peace.

I read your editorial in the last Outlook in re the war in Europe. It was all that I could have wished to have The Outlook say on the subject. It was in the line of my thought, but much better expressed than I could have put it. The one thing I am deeply interested in is that those three criminal war lords shall be put in the pillory of universal reprobation, so that they will all be forced by the public sentiment of the world to agree to such amendments to their respective Constitutions as will make it impossible that any one of them can repeat the iniquity of which they have been guilty in precipitating this accursed war on those. poor working-people, who are the ones to pay the price in their blood. I hope The Outlook won't let up on them. Kerrville, Texas.

J. F. JOHNSTON.

withdrew their savings during the first panicky days are putting them back, and a general feeling of confidence seems to prevail.

The news comes from London that, in the fear that Germany may lose her trade with the United States, German merchants have published a booklet in English called "The Truth about Germany. Facts about the War." This pamphlet, which praises Americans and praises German commerce, is being distributed among Americans in Germany.

Aeroplanes have taken the part of carrier pigeons, and the English people have been asked to be on the lookout for messages dropped from the sky by England's aviators, for forwarding to the proper authorities.

According to an interview with the Minister of Agriculture and Industry of Holland, published in a Dutch newspaper, the supply of wheat and flour in Holland is sufficient to last only two or three weeks, and it is feared that unless traffic becomes easier in the North Sea

the Dutch may soon be in a precarious condition.

Among the passengers on the White Star liner Celtic, which sailed from New York for Liverpool on August 20, was Dr. Dorothy V. Smiley, surgeon in the Royal Medical Corps, and one of the few women in the British army. Dr. Smiley had been ordered to report for duty. New developments and applications of international and maritime law are expected from the unique libel suit which the Guaranty Trust Company of New York has begun against the North German Lloyd Steamship Company, asking for damages of more than a million dollars because the liner Kronprinzessin Cecilie recently landed $5,000,000 gold of the trust company at Bar Harbor, Maine, instead of at London. It is alleged that it was altogether unnecessary for the Cecilie to turn back as she did when within about 900 miles of the coast of England.

The Hamburg-American Steamship Company has offered to lend the steamship Prinz Joachim to the American Red Cross for sixty days for the cost of operation of the vessel. The liner is now in New York.

One effect of Japan's ultimatum to Germany was to lead Lloyds to increase the war risk on Japanese vessels to 6.3 per cent, the highest quoted up to the time it was done-August 20.

Scotch woolen manufacturers fear that the war will drive them into bankruptcy, as a large part of their business has been done with Germany.

According to the London "Daily Mail," since the war began nearly fifty English trade and sporting papers have gone out of business, some permanently.

Dr. Alexis Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research of New York, is now at the head of a large hospital where wounded French soldiers are cared for. In a letter to a friend Dr. Carrel is reported as saying: "I am seeking men ready literally to give their blood for transfusions to wounded soldiers. Already I have found a doctor and an attorney and hope soon to have several others."

The effect of the war on American opera remains problematical. If newspaper reports can be trusted, nearly all the great male Wagnerian singers have taken the field for Germany. The usual summer preparations for the season are going on at the Metropolitan Opera-House in New York, however, and directors of the house seem to be hopeful that their staff of singers will not be greatly depleted by the call to arms.

Automobile manufacturers in America do not seem to be greatly disturbed by general busi

ness depression. They express the belief that the enforced cessation of automobile building abroad will create a large foreign demand for machines made in America.

To aid our overworked ambassadors abroad through the crisis which they are now facing, the State Department has asked for Congressional authorization of the temporary appointment of diplomatic secretaries-at-large.

Assistant Secretary of War Henry S. Breckinridge is traveling through Europe at high speed distributing among Americans the gold taken over in the cruiser Tennessee. A despatch to the New York "World" from Berlin says that Mr. Breckinridge made the trip to that city from Holland on a special train in thirteen hours, the usual time being thirty-three hours. His car, it is said, was attached to the special train of a high German official.

As an emergency measure Germany has ordered that all her male subjects between the ages of sixteen and nineteen shall be put through a course of musketry and military training under the instruction of retired officers. If they are called upon to fight, particularly in defense of their homes, these youthful legions may prove to be as formidable as the "minute boys" of '76 or as the cadets of Chapultepec.

At the request of the German Socialist Federation the Socialist party in America has appealed to the Government to seize all abattoirs, storage warehouses, grain elevators," and other sources of supply of the necessaries of life, in order that the war in Europe may be stopped through lack of supplies to the warring nations." Shipments of food from the United States to countries engaged in the international conflict, by the way, apparently are being made already on a large scale. In beginning an investigation into the activities of agents of Chicago packers, United States District Attorney Wilkerson expressed the belief that Chicagoans alone have shipped 10,000,000 pounds of meat into Canada since the war began, Recently 36,000,000 cold-storage eggs went to Liverpool on the steamship New York, of the American Line, and it is reported that France has asked quotations on 25,000,000 pockets of Louisiana rice.

The American Red Cross has sent a telegram to the Mayors of twenty-seven large cities in the United States appealing for funds. Among other things the telegram states: "Personnel and equipment ready, but funds desperately needed to secure ship and purchase additional supplies."

Lord Kitchener has forbidden the use of all wine and spirits by the British troops at the front.