THE AM ERICA N-SCA N DIN A V IAN RE VIEJV 
533 
tlie future will look upon the years we have just lived through as a 
period of destruction and retrogression only. The germs of regenera¬ 
tion are too numerous and too promising for such judgment. It is 
true that in all history, from primeval times with their constant war¬ 
fare between savage tribes, down through the ages to our own day, 
filled though it is with records of destruction and wars broken only 
by brief seasons of peace and reconstruction, our race has never 
experienced a period of such concentrated destruction visited upon so 
large an area of the world as that which had its beginning in 1914. 
But while we stand aghast at the extent of the calamity, we must not 
forget that from these painful birth-throes destruction of another 
kind was born. Three great military monarchies which were still built 
largely on feudal principles have collapsed and have been followed by 
new states in the foundation of which the principle of nationality and 
the doctrine of the self-determination of peoples have certainly, in 
spite of all aberrations, been maintained to an infinitely greater degree 
than before. We must realize that the people who have hereby gained 
their freedom, and who now see a new and brighter future opening 
up before them, will dwell on other things than the sufferings, heavy 
though these have been, through which their liberty has been achieved. 
From our own boundaries in the east, where we have all rejoiced in 
seeing a free Finland born, down along the shores of the Baltic with 
its three new Baltic states, through a resurrected Poland and 
Czecho-Slovakia, down through the more or less reorganized states 
of southeastern Europe—what a wealth of possibilities for new de¬ 
velopments on a national basis for the profit of our whole continent! 
I am by no means oblivious of the fact that the entrance of these 
new free nations into the European concourse of nations has not 
been all a festive return of homecoming brethren, but that it has raised 
new causes of friction. Yet this is an added reason for underscoring 
emphatically the second great asset which, besides the liberation of so 
many oppressed peoples, has sprung from the dark years that are 
just past: the beginning of a League of Nations where the disputes 
between members can be settled by law and not through the military 
agression of the stronger. 
It is a banal fact that the League of Nations has not yet become 
what its warmest advocates hoped it would be. The absence of Presi¬ 
dent Wilson’s own country as well as of the two great defeated na¬ 
tions, Germany and Russia, curtail its efficiency so materially that 
scoffers may with some reason speak of it as the League of Victors, 
but with all the imperfections and limitations which must be remedied 
if our civilization shall live, the League of Nations nevertheless opens, 
for the first time after a great war catastrophe, perspectives of peace, 
understanding, and justice between the free, self-governing nations 
of the world, great as well as small. 
