different effect. But in fact its object is quite contrary to those alliances. They are designed to protect their members against outside powers. This is intended to insure peace among the members themselves. If it grew strong enough, by including all the great powers, it might well insist on universal peace by compelling the outsiders to come in. But that is not its primary object, which is simply to prevent its members from going to war with one another. No doubt if several great nations, and some of the smaller ones, joined it, and if it succeeded in preserving constant friendly relations among its members, there would grow up among them a sense of solidarity which would make any outside power chary of attacking one of them; and, what is more valuable, would make outsiders want to join it. But there is little use in speculating about probabilities. It is enough if such a league were a source of enduring peace among its own members. How about our own position in the United States? The proposal is a radical and subversive departure from the traditional policy of our country. Would it be wise for us to be parties to such an agreement? At the threshold of such a discusson one thing is clear. If we are not willing to urge our own government to join a movement for peace, we have no business to discuss any plan for the purpose. It is worse than futile, it is an impertinence, for Americans to advise the people of Europe how they ought to conduct their affairs if we have nothing in common with them; to suggest to them conventions with burdens which are well enough for them, but which we are not willing to share. If our peace organizations are not prepared to have us take part in the plans they devise, they had better disband, or confine their discussions to Pan-American questions. be wise for the United States to make so great a departure from its traditional policy? The wisdom of consistency lies in adherence to a principle so long as the conditions upon which it is based remain unchanged. But the conditions that affect the relations of America to Europe have changed greatly in the last hundred and twenty years. At that time it took about a month to cross the ocean to our shores. Ships were small and could carry few troops. Their guns had a short range. No country had what would now be called more than a very small army; and it was virtually impossible for any foreign nation to make more than a raid upon our territory before we could organize and equip a sufficient force to resist, however unprepared we might be at the outset. But now, by the improvements in machinery, the Atlantic has shrunk to a lake, and before long will shrink to a river. Except for the protection of the navy, and perhaps in spite of it, a foreign nation could land on our coast an army of such a size, and armed with such weapons, that unless we maintain forces several times larger than at present, we should be quite unable to oppose an attack before we had suffered incalculable damage. It is all very well to assert that we have no desire to quarrel with any one, or any one with us; but good intentions in the abstract, even if accompanied by long-suffering and a disposition to overlook affronts, will not always keep us out of strife. When a number of great nations are locked in a death-grapple, they are a trifle careless of the rights of the bystander. Within fifteen years of Washington's Farewell Address we were drawn into the wars of Napoleon, and a sorry figure we made for the most part of the fighting on land. A hundred years later our relations with the rest of the world are far closer, our To return to the question: would it ability to maintain a complete isolation far less. Except by colossal self-deception we cannot believe that the convulsions of Europe do not affect us profoundly, that wars there need not disturb us, that we are not in danger of being drawn into them; or even that we may not some day find ourselves in the direct path of the storm. If our interest in the maintenance of peace is not quite so strong as that of some other nations, it is certainly strong enough to warrant our taking steps to preserve it, even to the point of joining a league to enforce it. The cost of the insurance is well worth the security to us. If mere material self-interest would indicate such a course, there are other reasons to confirm it. Civilization is to some extent a common heritage which it is worth while for all nations to defend, and war is a scourge which all peoples should use every rational means to reduce. If the family of nations can by standing together make wars less frequent, it is clearly their duty to do so, and in such a body we do not want the place of our own country to be vacant. To join such a league would mean, no doubt, a larger force of men trained for arms in this country, more munitions of war on hand, and better means of producing them rapidly; for although it may be assumed that the members of the league would never be actually called upon to carry out their promise to fight, they ought to have a potential force for the purpose. But in any case this country ought not to be so little prepared for an emergency as it is today; and it would require to be less fully armed if it joined a league pledged to protect its members against attack, than if it stood alone and unprotected. In fact the tendency of such a league, by procuring at least delay before the outbreak of hostilities, would be to lessen the need of preparation for immediate war, and thus it would have a more potent effect in reducing armaments than any formal treaties could have, whether made voluntarily or under compulsion. The proposal for a league to enforce peace does not conflict with plans to go further, to enforce justice among nations by compelling compliance with the decisions of a tribunal by diplomatic, economic, or military pressure. Nor, on the other hand, does it imply any such action, or interfere with the independence or sovereignty of states except in this one respect, that it would prohibit any member, before submitting its claims to arbitration, from making war upon another on pain of finding itself at war with all the rest. The proposal is only a suggestion, defective probably, crude certainly; but if, in spite of that, it is the most promising plan for maintaining peace now brought forward, it merits sympathetic consideration both here and abroad. WAR NOTES FROM A NEWSPAPER DESK BY SIMEON STRUNSKY I TO-DAY, June 18, forty-six weeks after the Kaiser's declaration of war, Bernhardi is selling at five cents a copy on Broadway. He was a dime only a week ago, and I cannot say whether the price has been forced down by the pressure of competition or by the approach of peace. I have read somewhere that great calamities like the presentwar, plague, famine, earthquake-frequently usher in a revolt against ordinary methods of reason and in the direction of mysticism. In some such mystic yearning for relief, for escape from the monotony of forty-six weeks of casualty lists and seven-column headlines, I find myself turning to Bernhardi for a sign, fancying his decline on the Broadway curb as bound up in some way with the weariness, the longing for peace,, which now rises out of the official dispatches, the notes and counter-notes, the billion-dollar credits in Parliament, and out of the very speeches of chancellors and prime ministers when they express their utter conviction of the justice of their cause and their confidence in ultimate victory. Forty-six weeks do not measure the length of this war to me. Nor am I much better off when I think of the landmarks of the months, back through Lemberg and Przemysl to the Carpathians, to the Lusitania, to the second battle of Ypres, to the first battle of Ypres, to the Aisne, to the Marne, to Liége. The long horror comes home VOL. 116-NO. 3 closest when measured in terms of Bernhardi, who was 75 cents in cloth before the outbreak of hostilities, who was 50 cents in paper when Louvain gave us our first taste of the Will to Conquer, who came down to 25 cents on the bookstands, along with 'Poultry-Raising at a Profit' and '300 Easy Parlor Tricks,' as the theory of modern war seeped into the popular consciousness, and who, is now offered at 5 cents a copy to a world familiarized with war on three fronts, with francs-tireurs and operations on inside lines, with air bombardments and asphyxiating gas. How long this frightful nightmare has been upon us you can realize only when you pronounce 'Bernhardi' and the name stirs old, vague memories. Bernhardi belongs in the dim past with such half-forgotten names as Von Kluck, the Crown Prince, King Albert, Nicholas Nicholaievitch, Sir John French-even Hindenburg has faded into the background, even Joffre, even the Kaiser, who began the war as a very vivid personality and has petrified into a symbol, a phrase. Von Kluck, of the two-inch scare heads, for whom no task was too great and no task too small-'Von Kluck Threatens Paris,' 'Von Kluck Captures Machine Guns,' 'Von Kluck Advances on Forty-Mile Front,' 'Von Kluck Wins Bridge Head' — his name is a shadow. All names are now shadows, for the romance of great leaders, the magic of personal combat, has long vanished out of this war which has resolved itself into a slow grinding of 401 anonymous masses against each other. For that matter, we have even given up thinking of masses and nations. The hearts of half the world, the minds of the rest of humanity are fixed upon one thing-shells. Neither strategy, nor tactics, nor fanaticism, nor courage, nor hate, enter into the dispatches, the special correspondence, the war expert's speculations, the editorials, the forecasts of chancellors and prime ministers, but shrapnel only and high explosive, barbed-wire and incendiary bombs. These are the protagonists, who have seized not merely the centre of the stage, but the entire proscenium, ousting men, issues, passions, ideals, principles. After thousands of years of speculation regarding the nature and purpose of the state, we know to-day. The state exists for the production of shells, government is for the regulation of shells. Not progress, not happiness, not virtue, not efficiency, is the purpose of society, but shells; and if not shells, then shrapnel. Civilization has reached the point where we have a Minister of Munitions. Civilization moves on, and future wars, or perhaps this war before it ends, will see a higher specialization, a Minister of High Explosives, a Minister of Low Explosives, a Lord Chancellor of Shrapnel, Secretary of State for Lyddite, for Melinite, for Shimose Powder, with Under Secretaries for Picric Acid, for Hydrochloric Acid, for Saltpetre, and — who knows? if the war goes on, if the Will to Conquer persists a Minister of Dum-dum Bullets and Arsenic. II A little before nine o'clock in the morning, six days in the week, a slim, thin-haired man, with an iron-gray moustache and humorous eyes of a light blue, sits down at a desk in our office, adjusts his pince-nez gently but firmly, and draws to his ear, figuratively speaking this time, a knotted mass of wires that stretch out to the six continents and the seven seas. Several million puppets dance at the further ends of the wires, some of them are called Joffre, Asquith, Mackensen, Hindenburg, Bethmann-Hollweg, Nicholas Nicholaievitch, — and at the near end of the wires is he, our Telegraph Editor. You have read in magazine stories of the heaven-born newspaper man who unerringly rips out the heart of a 'story' and so rises to fame and fortune. Ripping out the heart of a 'story' calls up the picture of a vast mass of detail into which the great newspaper man reaches his hand and grasps the essentials. Our telegraph editor has found comparatively little opportunity in the war news for such major operations. His business has been rather to build muscles and flesh around the bare skeleton of the official dispatches which the cables bring him. His work is constructive engineering of a high kind. He must find in the curt summary of a hundred words sufficient material for an honest narrative that shall not be crushed under the weight of the ornamental cornice which is the headline. His task is infinitely harder than the problems that Joffre and Hindenburg must deal with. For the time is past when commanders in the field must make instant decisions on the basis of fragmentary reports brought in by sweating aides-de-camp. A skirmish nowadays lasts three days and a battle two months, and the deliberations of the General Staff are like the papers read at the Philadelphia Academy of Political Science. But our telegraph editor must frame his decisions between 10:15 and 11:15 for the first edition; he must rectify his lines between 11:45 and 12:45 for the second edition; he must reshape his strategy for Wall Street, and see to it that mat ters are definitely pointed to victory or defeat for the Final, at 3:35. For this purpose the telegraph editor makes no use of textbooks, which are all in the Military Expert's office. Behind his desk, it is true, hangs a large map of Central Europe, but it is largely interior decoration. He has a simpler method for the geography of Europe and the chronology of the war. He carries them in his head. He recalls automatically the A. P. story of a Zeppelin flying over Denmark, which came on October 4 via Amsterdam, and identifies it as an early version of the story of a Zeppelin in distress over the North Sea, which came to him via Paris on October 15. Long experience of human fallibility in times of peace has given him an instinct for piercing to the truth behind the reticencies, the paraphrases, and the afterthoughts of the war dispatches. Just as before the war he had his comparative scale of veracity completely worked out, knowing just how far you could believe the A. P. correspondent at Peking and the United Press representative at Los Angeles, so now he has Paris, Berlin, London, Petrograd, Stockholm, and Geneva classified in the scale of authenticity, not formally, but by instinct, as I have said. Automatically the spluttered lines of the 'flimsy' shape themselves to him as a double-column head, a single 51, or a mere stickful somewhere in the inside pages near the realestate news. He has his difficult moments. There have been weeks in this war when the telegraph editor was in the same position as Field-Marshal French, a nation behind him crying for heavy results in the shape of fat headlines, and no ammunition with which to get his results; only two lines from Paris saying that the situation shows no change from the statement of last night; only a remark from Berlin that operations are pro gressing quite as foreseen. For the yellow editor there is a way out. He can always pick up a story of Francis Joseph berating his defeated generals, with a faithful paraphrase of the imperial scolding, and put a seven-column head over that. He can always print a story of the imminent fall of the Dardanelles as reported by a Greek merchant from Sophia who reaches Rome via Salonica, Lesbos, Venice, and Alexandria, and put a scare head over that. The most conservative of telegraph editors have been compelled to write double-column heads on the capture of very small trenches; but sometimes even the necessary fifty yards of trenches have not been forthcoming. On such occasions, while the Russian lines on the Bzura are holding firm under Hindenburg's fire, while General Foch is countercharging north of Arras, our telegraph editor bites at an apple and wishes the horrible slaughter were over. Among the victims of the slow-grinding deadlock in the trenches of northern France you must not forget our telegraph editor. His sufferings are acutest perhaps at 10:30 in the morning. This war, as you have read, has been emphatically an afternoon paper's war. The official war bulletins at Paris, Berlin, Petrograd, London, are given out some time in the afternoon, which means five to six hours earlier in New York and so beyond the reach of the morning papers. It is we of the afternoon press that have scored the most important victories. Only during the first months of the war, when there were important occurrences in the Pacific, did the morning papers have a chance. If I were the proprietor of a great morning daily in New York I wonder if I could resist the temptation to have the war spread to China and eastern Siberia. The greatest 'story' of the war, so far as we of neutral America are concerned, the destruction of the Lusitania, was entirely |