sparks from the conflagration started a smouldering fire on German soil which was never extinguished. Bolshevik pacifism seemed a ridiculous gesture in face of Prussian arms, but its moral effect was by no means contemptible. " Looking back," writes the archmilitarist Ludendorff, " I can see that our decline obviously began with the outbreak of the Revolution in Russia." After all, the original ground or pretence upon which the war had enlisted democratic support in Germany was its appearance as a war of defence against autocratic Pan-Slavism. When Russia had destroyed the Tsardom, repudiated its aims, and laid down its arms, Germans who were not militarists or capi- talists might well ask for what they were fighting; and on June 27 Hindenburg pointed out to the Kaiser the decline in German moral. So, while the elimination of Tsarism gave greater reality to the moral claims of the Entente, it deprived those of the Central Powers of their substance; and the war became more nakedly a struggle between militarist imperialism and democratic idealism. A practical illustration was afforded by the formation of a Polish army in Russia and a Polish legion in France at the moment when the Polish legion in Austria had to be disbanded.
Czernin seems to have been the first among Teutonic states- men to realize the change in the position and to seek to capitalize a situation in which the Habsburg Empire had nothing more to gain and everything to lose. Her soil was now rid of the Russian invader; Italy had made no serious impression, and Trieste was in no danger; Serbia only existed in exile, and Rumania trembled on its brink. On the other hand, the prolongation of war and Russian contagion might stir a series of domestic revolutions. Hence his conference with Bethmann Hollweg on March 27, his offer of peace to Russia in April, and his suggestion that Germany should cede Alsace-Lorraine to France while Austria handed over Galicia to Poland with a view to the subjection of both to German control; hence, too, the meeting of the Austrian Reichsrat on May 30 for the first time since the war began.
Ludendorff placed his heel on these proposals, and Czernin then turned his attention to the German Reichstag, where a complicated struggle was waged between Ludendorff 's militarists and Bethmann Hollweg's politicians, who were beginning to react to popular discontent and the effect of Russian develop- ments. " Bethmann Hollweg and Czernin," writes Ludendorff, " were both completely obsessed by the Russian Revolution. Both feared similar events in their own countries." On July 6 Erzberger, who was perhaps in Czernin's confidence, opened the attack with revelations about the non-fulfilment of official hopes from the submarine campaign and demanded a " peace of under- standing." On the nth the Kaiser was constrained to sign a rescript promising universal, direct, and secret suffrage for Prus- sia after the war; as a set-off to this Bethmann Hollweg was forced to resign on the I3th, being succeeded by Michaelis, a mere official who said what he was told and contradicted himself when occasion or his superiors required it. Then on the igth the Reichstag passed by 214 to 116 votes a resolution in favour of peace " without indemnities or annexations," which Michaelis accepted only " as he understood it." It was timed and tuned for the Stockholm conference, which German and Russian Social- ists were allowed to attend, while British and French were not, and probably also for the Peace Note which the Pope launched on Aug. i, and which France and England, being estopped by their secret agreement with Italy, left President Wilson to answer.
President Wilson's Policy. From that time onward for two years President Wilson became the principal spokesman of the Allied and Associated Powers; but it appears that the Russian revolution had exercised so far a more potent influence on the Central Empires than the intervention of the United States. Russia was their immediate neighbour on a frontier of a thousand miles. America was four thousand miles away, and it was long a German delusion that American troops would be kept out of Europe by the same submarines on which Germany relied to bring Great Britain to terms; and to arguments not backed by mailed fists Germany was indifferent. She had made up her mind to take what risk there was when in Feb. 1917 she resumed her .unrestricted submarine campaign; and that approaching
resolve had helped to determine her simultaneous refusal to state her war-aims in response to the President's invitation.
The coincidence seems to have been largely a matter of accn dent. Originally elected President in 1912 by a minority vote owing to the split in the Republican party between Roosevelt and Taft, Mr. Wilson was reelected in 1916 after a close contest in which neither of the opposing American parties had made war with Germany a plank in its platform; and without the prospect. of an unprecedented third presidential term, Mr. Wilson enjoyed in his second a freer hand than any other democratic statesman. But he was obviously tied by the traditions and public opinion of a community diverse in origin, in interests, and in outlook, spread over vast areas, separated by thousands of miles from the European conflict, and inured to the idea of splendid isolation. " We are," said President Wilson on March 5 1917, " a composite. and cosmopolitan people. We are of the blood of all the nations that are at war." Action was impossible until there was some common measure of agreement in a heterogeneous people, and: it was not easy to unite on a basis of intervention a Federal democracy whose one common principle in foreign policy was abstention from European quarrels. The Monroe Doctrine, as understood by modern interpreters, implied that the United States would resent and resist European intervention in a S.. American war, however gross might have been the aggression, and however much it might have shocked the European conscience. So far as the Western Hemisphere was concerned, the United States claimed to be the keeper of the conscience of the world,: and it thought that claim was only tenable so long as it washed its hands of conscience so far as Europe was concerned. Intervene tion on behalf of Belgian neutrality or even protest against its violation might open the door to retorts in kind and break down; the quarantine which the democratic republic had sought to impose upon Old World infection.
But the war put the finishing touch to the obsolescence of the schismatic doctrine of two worlds and two human consciences; It was only a practicable dogma provided either that the United' States kept not merely its conscience but its people, its capital; its commerce, and its shipping on its side of the Atlantic; or that the Old World observed those rules of international law and conscience which had commended themselves to the American people. In other words, so far from there being two worlds, the Old must accommodate itself to the New; and the most hardened believers in the Monroe Doctrine rebelled against the idea that Germany could indefinitely sink American ships and kill Ameri- can citizens without provoking a war, which America could j not wage without giving its conscience a passport to Europe. " As far as the United States is concerned," writes Dr. J. B. Scott, " the cause of its war with the Imperial German Govern-r ment is the submarine . . . for the law could not be changed to j suit the submarine." Nor was the Monroe Doctrine compatible i with the enforcement of the American conception of the freedom i of the seas or with the maintenance of neutral rights; and a long I series of incidents convinced the American public that its cause could not be isolated. " The challenge," said President Wils6n, " is to all mankind "; and when he intervened, it was not merely in defence of American rights but of a common humanity.
The outstanding episode in the slow and painful process by which the American people were brought to realize the dilemma between war arid the surrender of their principles must be briefly indicated. A series of events, which, in the despatch of Secretary Bryan, the Government of the United States had observed " with growing concern, distress, and amazement," culminated on May 7 1915 when the " Lusitania " was torpedoed without warning, and 114 American and nearly a thousand other lives were lost; and on the I3th he intimated that his Government would not " omit any word or act necessary to the I performance of its sacred duty of maintaining the rights of the ! United States and its citizens and of safeguarding their free exercise and enjoyment." But he resigned when acts seemed likely to follow words, and the President's second " Lusitania 1 note was signed on June 9 by Mr. Lansing. Bryan's resignation was not, however, without its effects; and the words continued
