THE STORY OF THE NONPARTISAN LEAGUE 



did not know the importance or significance 

 of the Great War, but that was the very 

 thing they should have known. It is to know 

 such things that men are made leaders. They 

 had never lifted their eyes from their environ- 

 ment to look at the great world abroad and 

 understand its relationship to their own prob- 

 lems, but exactly such understanding is what 

 is required of leadership. The sheer existence 

 in this world of the principle for which they 

 contended, the principle of democratic control, 

 was at stake in that war; the basis and cor- 

 ner-stone of their entire movement. If the 

 autocratic principle had won on the European 

 battle-field it would have won for all the rest 

 of the world, and the first of all the fruits of 

 its victory would have been a tightening of 

 the power of concentrated wealth everywhere — 

 North Dakota and everywhere else. No peo- 

 ple, therefore, had a more vital interest in 

 *.hat war than the people of North Dakota, 

 whose only hope of rescue from the autocracy 

 that oppressed them lay in the survival and 

 extension of the principle of democracy. The 

 leaders of the League did not at first see these 

 things, but exactly these things it was their 

 duty to see, and whatever trouble followed 

 they brought upon themselves; innocently, of 

 course, there is no doubt of that, but still by 

 their own dense blundering. 



On the other hand, it is not possible to deny 



234 



