FINAL BLOW TO MEDIEVALISM. 



The fighting has ceased. It will not be resumed in the near future 

 perhaps on any scale whatever; and, if at all, in restricted fashion. 

 Do you realize what apparently has been accomplished or what is in 

 sight? In general terms, the most striking fact is the "giving of the 

 final blow to medievalism in the world, revealed in the downfall of 

 arbitrary power which has sustained itself through an imposing 

 military array. It is almost incredible that the Romanoff dynasty, 

 which a few years ago seemed to be one of the most firmly fixed facts 

 in the world, has disappeared; that the Hohenzollerns, in some 

 respects even more firmly planted, have gone; and that the Hapsburgs 

 have fallen and, with them, princes and potentates of varying degrees. 

 Think of the wrong done to France righted in tha probable restoration 

 of the territories taken from her by force, of a restored Polish state 

 which was broken up by conspiracy and arbitrary forceful aggression 

 more than a century ago, and of the appearance of other unified 

 nationalities based upon race, language, and community of purpose, 

 such as the Czecho-Slovaks and the Southern Slavs! Is it not interest- 

 ing to contemplate, too, the possibility of the elimination of the Turks 

 and of Turkish rule from Europe? What appeals to the imagination 

 more strongly than the final accomplishment of what has been sought 

 by crusaders through the ages — the recovery of the Holy Land by 

 Christendom? How impossible would it have seemed a few short 

 years ago that the allied nations of the world would assent to the 

 principle of dealing with peoples everywhere on the basis of the 

 interests of such peoples? And how foreign to the thinking of the 

 Central Powers the thought that small nations have as much right 

 to exist as the greatest and that it makes a difference not so much 

 how big a nation is as what kind of a nation it is? Who would have 

 dreamed that there would be community of purpose in the matter 

 of reducing armaments and of relieving the world, in fuller measure, 

 of the burdens of militarism and of the effective development of a 

 will to secure respect for the common purpose of decent peoples 

 through association backed by an adequate international police? 

 And above all things do we realize that we have saved for the world 

 "the rule of law" among nations, given international law a new sanc- 

 tion and validity, and made it impossible for any arrogant power 

 again to regard such law and treaties solemnly entered into as scraps 

 of paper. Has not the purpose of the nations, crystallized in the 

 phrase of the President "to make the world safe for democracy," been 

 secured? 



