i6 
LAND & W^ A T E R 
May i8, 1916 
All but the purblind in tliis rountry know that wc must 
liave a strong army and a stronger navy. \\'e shall need 
them, especially if we elect to continue our traditional 
but now obsolete and impractical policy of isolation and 
try to stand alone ; but we shall also need them even if 
(as so many of us are working and hoping for) we endea- 
vour to enter an after-the-war alliance with I-'rance and 
Great Britain to keep the world's peace. But only our 
actual entry into the war will awaken the country to the 
necessity of, and force Congress to provide for, sufficiently 
powerful fighting arms. If we continue to temporise with 
the situation — if we just manage to ' save our face ' 
and keep out of the war— we shall never get an army ami 
a' navy sufficiently strong either to make us unassailable 
standing alone, or to qualify us to hold up our end in an 
alliance with I'rance and Britain. 
" Another incalculable benefit incidental to our par- 
ticipation in the war would be the cleaning up of the 
Augean Stable in Congress. 1 feel rather too strongly 
on that subject quite to tru.5t myself to words ; but you 
were in Washington during the ' armed ship warning ' 
debate and vote and know what a miserably misrepre- 
sentative lot so many of our ' professional jioliticians' are. 
For the Cause of Humanity 
•" Finally, a war fought for the cause of humanity and 
entered into only at the end of a year and a half or two 
years of unparalleled provocation would arrest the 
denationalisation that has been eating deeper and deeper 
toward the heart of this country ever since the Civil War. 
The size and the diversity of the United States, en- 
couraging the tendency to "put sectional above national 
issues, has been an important contributing cause of this 
trouble ; but the main one has been the increasingly 
rapid ' dilution ' of our original population with not 
readily assimilable Europeans. How deep this canker 
liad eaten no one suspected until the ramifications of the 
endless chain of Teutonic plots began to be uncovered. 
Our entry into the war would put an end to this insidious 
menace once and for all ; it would re-nationalise us ; 
' Aniericanism ' would begin to have some meaning 
again." 
I have set down this conversation at some length for 
two reasons : First, because of the diagnosis it furnishes 
of the American situation by a keen and impartial student, 
and secondly, because of the insight it gives of the view- 
point of such leaders of American thought and action as 
Colonel Roosevelt, Joseph Choate, .Major Putman, Dr. 
Elliott, Lyman Abbott and many others, who have 
discerned the fundamental issues in the European war 
from the outset and have endeavoured to awaken the 
minds of their countrymen as to their responsibility 
regarding them. 
It will probably be difficult to make Englishmen believe 
that President Wilson, had he still been the head of 
Princeton University during the present crisis, or any- 
thmg else save an official of the Government of the United 
States, would almost certainly have stood and worked 
for the same good ends. Yet there is little doubt that 
such would have been the case. As President he has 
felt that his action was limited to putting the will of the 
peoi>le, as he interptetcd it, into effect. And because 
the American mind was not a thing to be pinned down 
and charted with square and compass, because, like all 
national minds, it is a variable and uncertain quantity, 
his course has been a difficult, not to say an impossible 
one. 
A President of the United States has two alternatives 
—he may lead the people, or he may elect to be led by 
them. In tackling the knotty domestic problems which 
confronted him previous to the war— Panama Tolls Repeal 
and currency and tariff reform— President Wilson led, 
and led successfully, even brilliantly. But with .Mexico 
his policy of " watchful waiting, " "corresponding to the 
linglish " wait and see," only piled Pclion of hopes 
deferred on Ossa of failure. His liandling of the sub- 
marine contro\esy with Germany was foredoomed to 
partial if not complete failure from" the moment he began 
to steer by the variable planet of pojjular opinion instead 
of the fixed star of his country's and of his own higher 
ideals. He tried to follow (where he might far better 
have led), and the flickering of his guiding lights has 
lured him into endless pitfalls. 
The President's lack of firmness in dealing with Mexico 
and (iermany has undoubtedly seriously undermined his 
jiower to lead. Once, and only once (just after the sinking 
of the Lusitania), he could have taken the country with 
him in anything he might have decided to do. Indeed, 
such was the state of popular feeling in May of a year ago, 
that Bryan with his peace dove, or a shepherd with his 
crook, could have led the country into battle. Since 
then the position of the President in this connection; is 
probably about as I heard a New York policeman^ 
epitomise it a few weeks ago. 
"If Wilson takes the country into the war now," he 
said, " he will have to drag it by the scruff of the neck 
where old ' Teddy R.' could lead it a prancing. And let 
m:- tell you one thing more," he added. " If the country 
didn't prance along after Teddy, he'd swing it around in a 
couple of circles iDy the tail and chuck it into the war. 
And then it would pick itself up, thank him for it, and 
begin to fight." 
No people in the world more dearly love a leader than 
does the American, and it is probably true, as a trenchant 
French traveller once observed, that they would rather 
take the chance of being misled than not led at all. 
President Wilson, in spite of his technical diplomatic 
victories, has steadily lost prestige with the very people 
wliose wishes he has so scnipulcnisly endeavoured to follow 
by his failure to take advantage of this fact. 
Colonel Roosevelt 
It is impossible to overlook Colonel Roosevelt in any 
survey of the American situation, for " What would 
' Teddy ' have done if he had been in Wilson's place ?" 
is a theme of never-ending interest froni Maine to Cali- 
fornia. This is really not a hard question to answer 
with a considerable degree of certainty, for we have both 
the spoken word and the past record of the unflinchingly 
courageous ex-President to go by. He would have pro- 
tested strongly against the invasion of Belgium, but 
would hardly have ventured to go further if Ger- 
many — as would doubtless have been the case — 
disregarded that protest. On the initiation of Germany's 
submarine war in February of 1915, there would have 
been another protest from Washington, this one short, 
sharp, to the point, and that controversy would have been 
threshed out to a finish — a diplomatic finish, I mean — in 
fewer days than it was destined to drag months. Either 
(iermany would have been forced to a complete and un- 
equivocal surrender, and there would have been no sink- 
ing of the Lusitania, Arabic, Ancona and the rest, or 
Roosevelt would have led America " in." Vigorously 
led, there is no reason to believe that it would not have 
gone in " a-prancing " without forcing the doughty 
Colonel to resort to the ignominious alternative suggested 
by my policeman friend. 
Just previous to my departure from New York a 
popular musical hall comedian was raising nightly laughs 
with a joke which ran something like this : " If Roosevelt 
had been President the war would have been over by this 
time — over here." 
" More truth than poetry in that," I heard a man next 
me observe, and most of the audience seemed to agree 
with him. Personally, I feel certain that a " Roose- 
veltian " handling of the trouble at the outset— a firm 
grasping of the German nettle— would have at no time 
brought the United States so near to a break with Ger- 
many as they are to-day. But if that break had come, 
a far more united America would have bfen thrown 
into the struggle than President Wilson — in spite of the 
imi>eccability of his intentions, and no matter how much 
he may " stiffen " at the end — can possibly have with 
him wlien or if his earnest efforts to avoid a rupture come 
to nought. 
This should not, however, be taken to mean that. 
With the country once in the war America would not 
" orientate " very quickly. Thanks to the work already 
done by such leaders as the one whose words I have 
quoted, public opinion, in spite of its diverse elements 
and the fluid state in which it is at present, would harden 
very rai)idly. The (German-American, in spite of his 
numbers, would be troublesome rather than dangerous. 
His bread is buttered on the American, not the (ierman 
side, and the very large majority of him is too canny to do 
anythme to cause it to fall with the fatty side downwards. 
