T

HE eminent advocate of world-wide peace and international understanding, Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, has had to submit to many rude shocks during the last year. He lost his only son, a most lovable young man and promising engineer, and his wife has been seriously ill. Then came the assassination of his friend M. Jean Jaurès, leader of the French Parliamentarian group to promote universal arbitration. Baron d'Estournelles was called upon to deliver the funeral oration. Many looked forward to this occasion to hear what effect impending war had had upon the leaders of the Peace Movement. He said in part:

"The Committee of Parliament on Arbitration, of which Jaurès had been VicePresident for eleven years, has never taken any important action without his presence and aid. . . . He realized thoroughly that France, by making its aims and mission better understood throughout the world, was really fortifying herself morally and materially. Every service he rendered was that of a patriot and of a great Frenchman. Never were his prèsence, his counsel, and his speech more needed than in the tragic hour just now commencing, and it should be remembered that he gave unstintingly and passionately of his great powers and influence for the defense of our country when the time came to prepare for defense. Had he lived a little longer, we may be sure that he would have done his utmost as a man to assist in repelling the brutal attack on peace and right and treaties, and would have been found among the organizers of the world-wide revolt against the abuse of power."

But the people of France were eager to learn how Baron d'Estournelles, the advocate of peace, thought and felt when actual war began. He yielded to the demand and sent a message to the French press, which we translate as follows:

without provocation the territory of Belgium, the neutrality of which she has nevertheless guaranteed. Hence the present war cannot very well be anything else than war without pity. There are people who sincerely imagine that they see in this war the collapse of the pacific policy of France. There are others who, having always condemned this policy, are profiting by this occasion to attack it more violently and more venomously than ever. As far as I am concerned, my sorrow is very great; to see the patient efforts of so many men for international conciliation brought to naught-men who had been chosen from among the élite of every land; who had seemed to make real progress during the last ten years in Berlin, Berne, Bâle, Brussels, Munich, Geneva, The Hague, London, Paris, Heidelberg, Frankfort, Nuremberg, Buda-Pest, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Moscow, in Scandinavia, in the United States, and elsewhere. We were not able to succeed in making the German Government understand that its interests also were to come to an understanding with France through mutual concessions; that both countries might live in peace and that humanity might be spared the sacrifice of hecatombs ; we could not make the German Government understand that its real interest lay-like that of others--not in disarmament, of which we never spoke, but in reasonable and concerted limitation of armaments. We could not succeed in making the German Government understand that it itself would be the first victim of these cumulative armaments purporting to be necessary to safeguard peace, but which have resulted in bringing on the We could not succeed in Germany, as we have succeeded elsewhere; but wasn't it worth while to have tried? In any case, my conscience has at least the satisfaction of realizing these facts:

war.

"(1) If we have not succeeded in prevent ing war, we have at least retarded for years its advent. Compare the forty-three years of peace-fertile and fruitful-with the periods preceding them and consider the difference. The French Empire survived only eighteen years, from 1852 to 1870. Founded on violence, it could maintain itself only by violence. Hardly was it born when it went to war. It made war on Russia, and Aus

merating the rest. In this very month of September (1870), when the war had hardly begun, it had lost at Sedan the last of our armies. It itself had been dethroned and driven out. To-day the Germans have invaded our country, but have not disturbed our national unity nor affected our vital force. Our armies are fighting day and night to wear them out and then to seize a favorable moment to repulse and to overwhelm them. Is there any sign in all this that our country has grown weak? Our mobilization has been effected with the regularity of a chronometer. The Government has withdrawn to Bordeaux to be freer to direct the defense without the risk of seeing its lines of communication cut off. The war has already lasted six weeks; it may last for months. But are the people demoralized? Have they hesitated to withdraw, to retire and to abandon everything that they hold dear in the north, or even to destroy it, that the enemy might find but a waste ahead of it? In the west, in the center, and in the south are they not exhausting themselves spontaneously to care for the wounded and refugees, both Belgian and French? Have they aban; doned the harvests where men are lacking in those parts not occupied by the enemies? Nowhere! They are working prodigiously without one single complaint. Not a single mother, anxiously awaiting for weeks the news of her son or her husband or her brother, would consent to hasten their return, if possible to do so, at the risk of retarding the final victory of our armies. France is united as she never has been before, and the Government is united-Conservatives, Republicans, Socialists-by one single thought: to conquer imperialistic Germany, to defend liberty and peace. Is not this a splendid advance and improvement upon the past? But that is not all:

'(2) While Germany has been terrorizing or disturbing the world France has been reassuring it; Germany has become a menace, France a guarantee for general peace. Every one understood that peace went hand in hand with our principles, while the German Empire could not maintain an equilibrium with peace on one hand and the spirit of conquest on the other. As a consequence of this, and through an instinct of preservation, the whole world sides now with France and not with Germany. We have seen the alliance with Russia, born out of the victories of 1870, and strengthened by German menaces in 1875 and in 1887-to cite only two of them; we

have seen the understanding with England. Those who reproach us for our efforts for Franco-German conciliation reproached us also previously for our efforts toward FrancoEnglish conciliation, the day after Fashoda. They have even reproached us for our efforts at good understanding with the United States; but is it not, after all, because of these efforts that we see Russia allied with France, England and Belgium allied with France, without counting Japan in the Far East or the Balkan States, without counting Italy, already detached from the Triple Alliance and observing a neutrality more ominous for Austria than for France.

"To summarize: Through her pacific policies France has been able to marshal on her side the recognition that she has been in the right, whereas all the wrong is recognized as being on the side of the Austro-German aggression. To-day she can count as many friends, or at least neutrals, as before she could count enemies. The Russian army is mobilized to bring to our aid its innumerable battalions; the Belgian army has built for us a rampart out of the very bodies of its men ; the British army is one with our own. The whole world is divided into two camps: one properly belonging to the past, the camp of violence and arbitrary war, execrated by everybody, suspected by all; on the other side, the camp of the future-that is, the camp of peace. The issue of this terrible combat cannot be doubtful. Civilization, it seems to me, is fighting, once for all, to overcome the violence which menaces it. It must overthrow it or war will always be ready to commence again. The civilization of the twentieth century cannot be overthrown, and it will triumph; and then the world will do justice to men of good will who, not turned aside by obstacles or calumny, will also have aided in the defense and borne their share of the battles without reproach and with no evidence of weakness.'

The self-restraint and temperate spirit of the French people has been very marked since the outbreak of the war. They have said little in the American public press. We are therefore especially glad to present the foregoing views of an eminent Frenchman of high international ideals. It is interesting to observe that the war has not disheartened him either in his belief in the possibility of international peace or in his determination to carry on its propaganda.

H

AVING just returned from Germany, where military ideals dominate all others, I have been impressed as never before by the peace-loving attitude of the American people. We love peace, and still desire, as in the days of Jefferson, an honest friendship with all nationsentangling alliances with none." But there can be no disloyalty to the neutral idea which the President has reasserted in attempting to point out the deeper issues involved in the conflict now devastating Europe. One of the saddest features of this war of the world is the fact that the German people are dying by thousands in an effort to check the spread of the grandest political idea ever produced --and one which they themselves originated. The idea of representative government, so far as its history can be traced, first appeared in the forests of Germany, and has long been known among political theorists as the Teutonic Idea. Wherever we find Teutons in the earliest days of European history we find not only the primary assembly which had been familiar to the people of ancient Greece and Rome, but also rough attempts at representative assemblies. Rome had known nothing of the idea of representative government except the military representation of a govern

ment above, and independent of, the people. With the coming of the Germans into history, however, there appears a new idea-namely, that the people have a right to be heard in affairs of state, the common people as well as the nobles, and this through representatives whom they have selected.

This idea, as the philosopher-historian John Fiske has pointed out, is the secret of successful empire-building on a large scale. The ancient Oriental empires were the result of conquest without incorporation. The inhabitants of the conquered regions were held in unstable equilibrium by force, and by force alone. They served the empire from fear, and never from love. The Roman Empire advanced one step further. Her world state, like all that had gone before it, was built up by military conquest, but conquest with incorporation. The conquered regions became an organic part of the nation. The conquered peoples were given the rights of Roman citizenship, which meant equality before the law; but, lacking the Teutonic idea of representative government, Rome proved unequal to the task of holding together the world empire which she had reared. The precise difference between a modern and an (Continued on page following illustrations)